Changing The Industry Podcast

Rick White [00:00:00]:
And he says, do you want to send me my. The questions you want me to ask? No.

Mike Himes [00:00:06]:
He thought you were Kamala Harris.

Rick White [00:00:10]:
Don't. See ya.

Lucas Underwood [00:00:13]:
Okay. Somebody asked me a question. You gotta lean up on the mic when you answer. I would like to discuss a recent situation involving a customer. Now, just so you know, exactly like that. I'm sure we can hear what you're thinking. I've not read this message yet, so we're just. We're reading this together.

Rick White [00:00:31]:
So say it again.

Lucas Underwood [00:00:32]:
I wasn't ready to get bad somewhere.

David Roman [00:00:34]:
I don't know.

Lucas Underwood [00:00:35]:
I would like to discuss a recent situation involving a customer who brought in a truck experiencing a multi system failure specifically related to the fuel system. During our intake and inspection process, we determined that we needed to replace the batteries and perform diagnostics which should have been testing. I already told him that. Multiple times the past month, which required approximately five hours of work. The customer approved the diagnostics which should have been testing, resulting in a proposed repair cost of $18,000, which he ultimately declined. As a result, the customer now has a bill for $1,800, which includes the cost of the batteries and the diagnostic hours. In this scenario, would it be advisable to reduce the charge to a minimum amount to assist the customer, or should we proceed with billing him for the full $1,800? Your guidance on how to handle this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Rick White [00:01:32]:
I'm not sure why I should answer the question. Because if he's not listening to you, why is he gonna listen to me?

Lucas Underwood [00:01:37]:
That's a pretty damn valid point. What's your take?

Rick White [00:01:43]:
What's my take? My take is if the process was proper and communicated and authorized upfront, you get paid for the whole damn thing. Yeah, because a couple of different things, if you discount it, it can be.

Lucas Underwood [00:02:02]:
Seen as you didn't actually do it.

Rick White [00:02:04]:
You either didn't actually do it, you didn't know what you were doing, or you're not sure of what your testing is.

Lucas Underwood [00:02:09]:
Yep.

Rick White [00:02:10]:
And it could also become a liability if something ever happened. Right. What happened with that brake job? Remember that brake job that you did with the truck that went off the side of the mountain?

Rick White [00:02:20]:
Yep.

Lucas Underwood [00:02:20]:
Almost killed the dude, almost killed his cat, who rides in a truck with cats. But. And I think about that from time to time, that freaked me out.

Rick White [00:02:27]:
Yeah, but if you had discounted the bill, what would have happened?

Lucas Underwood [00:02:30]:
Yeah, if I discounted the bill or if I hadn't written it down, if I hadn't had the pictures, if I hadn't documented that he declined finishing the road.

Rick White [00:02:38]:
Could have been that could have been seen. That discount could have been seen as we didn't do the job. Right.

Rick White [00:02:43]:
Yeah, yeah.

Rick White [00:02:44]:
And you don't want that to happen. You, if you did it, get paid for it.

Lucas Underwood [00:02:49]:
Well, and you know, here's the thing is if, like in that case with me, if he had passed away. Right. If the driver of the truck had passed away and the insurance company came after me. Right. So in other words, like, I've even seen cases where life insurance companies are coming after people. And like, so the insurance company says, hey, we lost uninsured because of you. We think this is your fault. If I had not charged them.

Lucas Underwood [00:03:17]:
Right. How would they see that? How would they view that? I mean, I'm with you. I think you charge them.

Rick White [00:03:22]:
You charge them. And here's the thing. Let's say you have a technician and you're discounting the laboratory. What does that say to the tech?

Lucas Underwood [00:03:31]:
It means your time's not worth anything.

Rick White [00:03:33]:
You know that. I don't value what you do.

Lucas Underwood [00:03:35]:
Yeah.

Rick White [00:03:36]:
Why would I go out and work harder to get better at what I'm doing if you keep giving it away?

Rick White [00:03:44]:
Yeah.

Rick White [00:03:45]:
We've got to learn to understand that a big part of what we do today is testing, and we've got to be able to do it in a profitable manner to make sure that our guards are taken care of. And guys, I'm from the northeast. Guys is a non gender specific term. So if there's any female text listening, please. Sorry, forgive me.

Lucas Underwood [00:04:05]:
It's better than what their owner. You kept going around telling everybody they were their owner.

Rick White [00:04:11]:
Your owner. Yeah, the shop owner is what we say now. We've corrected that. Don't listen to my words. Listen to what I'm saying. Uh, you know, it's one of those things where. Yeah, you don't, you don't give it away.

Lucas Underwood [00:04:25]:
Well, and, and you know, you bring up a good point. Testing is the majority of what we do now in a lot of cases. And so let's say that he had done this testing and he came up and he found a broken wire that was 50 cents to fix. Well, it took him the same amount of time to do the testing. Right. And yeah, I mean, if he didn't take that much time to do the testing, I don't have a problem with him backing it down. Right. I don't necessarily have.

Rick White [00:04:48]:
That's different. If I got an authorization up to a certain amount.

Rick White [00:04:51]:
Yeah.

Rick White [00:04:52]:
And I end up charging less because we didn't have to do all the tests that we got authorization for. That's fine. Yeah, Right. And you know the guy with the broken wire, that's kind of the old story with the old time, you know, janitor that took care of this insurance company. Yeah, Right. And the building. And they had this old boiler in there, and it would have cost them, like, $23 million to replace it.

Rick White [00:05:17]:
Yeah.

Rick White [00:05:18]:
And he was. It was very finicky, but he could keep it running. Well, after he retired, it stopped working. Right, right. This is that old story where, you know, he comes in, he feels the furnace around and grabs a hammer and hits it.

David Roman [00:05:30]:
Right.

Rick White [00:05:31]:
And it starts working. And they're like, oh, my gosh, thanks so much. So, you know, we'll pay anything. We'll pay anything. So he finishes it up, and he sends him a bill for 10 grand. Right, right. And the guy says that the owner of the building says, I want you to itemize it, you know, hitting furnace. Five bucks.

David Roman [00:05:47]:
Right.

Rick White [00:05:48]:
Knowing where to hit the furnace. $9,995. Stop giving away your knowledge. Stop giving away your expertise.

Lucas Underwood [00:05:56]:
Right.

Rick White [00:05:57]:
It doesn't work.

Lucas Underwood [00:05:59]:
Hi, Fluffles. You're fine.

David Roman [00:06:01]:
Come on.

Rick White [00:06:04]:
It is hard to walk anywhere, David, and not get stopped.

Lucas Underwood [00:06:09]:
I know David. What? You know what David loves about it?

David Roman [00:06:12]:
I actively avoid these conversations with people, though. I don't.

Lucas Underwood [00:06:16]:
David loves it when they just stop and give him hugs. That's what he really goes for.

Rick White [00:06:20]:
Everybody should hug David when they see him at a show.

Lucas Underwood [00:06:23]:
Yeah.

Rick White [00:06:23]:
At Apex. We want a line of people at the booth to give David a hug. Hey, you know, we will judge the hug based on length of eye roll.

David Roman [00:06:31]:
Yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:06:31]:
Or. Or better yet. Or better yet. Hey, we're going to start. David. A kissing booth.

David Roman [00:06:38]:
I'm very tonguey in a kiss. I'm like. It's just nothing but tongue.

Rick White [00:06:45]:
And there it went.

Lucas Underwood [00:06:47]:
Right.

Rick White [00:06:48]:
And we went there.

Lucas Underwood [00:06:50]:
I. I guess I need to enter. Everybody knows Rick. I don't have to introduce Rick, do I? Do you want me to introduce rick?

David Roman [00:06:56]:
That's Rick White, 180 biz.

Rick White [00:06:58]:
Yeah.

David Roman [00:06:58]:
Everybody knows Rick.

Lucas Underwood [00:06:59]:
Mike, introduce yourself.

Mike Himes [00:07:01]:
Mike Himes from Brookville, Pennsylvania. I own a shop, and for a long time. 29 years.

David Roman [00:07:11]:
Oh, holy crap. I can see the pain in your eyes. 29 years.

Rick White [00:07:18]:
Should have seen him when I met him.

David Roman [00:07:20]:
Oh, this is better. Yeah, this is better. Less pain. Slightly less pain.

Mike Himes [00:07:25]:
Yeah, yeah. It's. I'm only two months in with Rick, and it's less pain. Already a little uncomfortable right now, but.

Rick White [00:07:35]:
It'S a lot uncomfortable. He just doesn't want to say it. It's a lot uncomfortable.

Lucas Underwood [00:07:39]:
It's a man. When you first hire your remember, dude?

Rick White [00:07:43]:
Remember?

Lucas Underwood [00:07:43]:
Yeah.

Rick White [00:07:44]:
How much pain did you go through in the beginning?

Lucas Underwood [00:07:46]:
Awful. It was awful. And this jackass, he's like, I need to know what your destination is. I'd be like, rick, here's my destination. He's like, that's not your destination. What are you talking about? I'm telling you, this is it.

David Roman [00:07:59]:
I. This is him Harder than I think. You would have pushed most people.

Rick White [00:08:04]:
I would bring in a room full of people that will disagree with that heartily. Really? Yes.

Lucas Underwood [00:08:10]:
He pushed me really damn hard, though. You know, Look, I'm just saying.

David Roman [00:08:15]:
Are you pushing him that hard?

Rick White [00:08:17]:
We're not having to push too hard yet. He's had a little bit of agita on his pricing, and he's gone up some. He's not where he needs to be yet, but he's gone up some, and I'm really proud of him.

Lucas Underwood [00:08:28]:
Why are we not where we need to be yet?

Mike Himes [00:08:32]:
I don't know. I don't want to jump too much all at one time.

Rick White [00:08:36]:
I know, I know. Don't hurt him. Don't hurt him. He knows. Baby steps, baby. We'll get him.

Lucas Underwood [00:08:43]:
I was telling somebody this the other day. It may have been my dad. So my dad has hired a business coach for my brother in the family business, and they're hit, man. They're going through some things, and they suck. Right? Really suck. This is bad stuff. I mean, this is. One of them describes it as a little hiccup.

Lucas Underwood [00:09:08]:
The other one describes it as a felony. Long story short. Whoops.

Rick White [00:09:14]:
Yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:09:15]:
I said to dad the other day, I said, you know something? He said, what? I said, there's. There's a lot of change that has to happen. And I am concerned about, like, the perspectives. And he said, I know. And he said, I know that what we've been doing up to this point hasn't been working. I said, right. And I said, you know, I said, I remember.

David Roman [00:09:37]:
They're $2 million a year. They're doing $2 million a year, and.

Lucas Underwood [00:09:41]:
They probably should be doing four and a half.

David Roman [00:09:43]:
Really?

Rick White [00:09:44]:
Well, they might be doing four and a half.

Lucas Underwood [00:09:45]:
Yeah, that's true. That's a good point.

David Roman [00:09:48]:
Good point.

Rick White [00:09:50]:
Let's not go there.

Lucas Underwood [00:09:51]:
Yeah.

Rick White [00:09:52]:
And so dad, I'm sorry, he's gonna.

Lucas Underwood [00:09:56]:
Listen to this and get us all. And so I look at my dad and I said, hey, I said, I remember this asshole one time. And I said, I was really upset, and I Called him with tears streaming down my face about this shop, like, being the death of me. And I said, you know, he said, you know, what you've been doing is not working. Is it possible that maybe we should try something else? Because if what you're doing up to this point was going to work, don't you think it would have already worked? And maybe we could try my way.

Rick White [00:10:29]:
He does sound like a jerk.

Lucas Underwood [00:10:33]:
The logic in that is not exactly something that I like to admit.

David Roman [00:10:36]:
I mean, I think for a lot of people, though, they can conceptualize different. Like, this is just what we do well.

Rick White [00:10:43]:
And it's sometimes when we're making decisions, it's a spectrum. I either do this or I do this.

Rick White [00:10:48]:
Yeah.

Rick White [00:10:49]:
And it's because we have such a limited focus. Right. A perspective.

David Roman [00:10:53]:
Yeah.

Rick White [00:10:54]:
It. Sometimes it helps to have somebody on the outside looking in because then I'm not as associated to the problem.

David Roman [00:11:03]:
Yeah.

Rick White [00:11:03]:
And I see more solutions. I can be more creative with it. Right.

Rick White [00:11:07]:
Yeah.

Rick White [00:11:07]:
And, you know, I have a quote. I have a quote. It's one of my favorite quotes is, you can't read the label when you're inside the jar. And that's a good quote. And that goes for me too. I mean, I have people that are calling me out on my crap all the time because I have blind spots like everybody else does. Sure. Right.

Lucas Underwood [00:11:25]:
Oh, hang on. Let me get my list.

Rick White [00:11:30]:
So we'll trade lists.

Lucas Underwood [00:11:31]:
You ready? I wasn't quite that ready.

Rick White [00:11:37]:
I have more practice. But ultimately it's just realizing that if you're not happy with where you're at, you gotta at some point recognize that what you're doing is gotten you to this point. It's not gonna get you any further. Yeah, right. It's recognizing being able to step back and say, okay, what can I do differently? How can I see it differently?

Lucas Underwood [00:11:58]:
But I think what I keep seeing from people is they get into that spot and they think that's just how it has to be. But they will not break their mindset. They're afraid because anything is gonna destroy it. If I change anything at all, it won't work. But it's not working now.

Rick White [00:12:14]:
Right. And at some point, why wait until? You know, I always tell people, can you call me when the lizard is this big? Right. Instead of Godzilla.

Rick White [00:12:24]:
Yeah, right.

Rick White [00:12:25]:
It's a lot easier to deal with the lizard when it's the size of a chameleon. I mean, a gecko or something like that. Right. Salamander. Instead of waiting until it's Godzilla tearing down Tokyo.

Lucas Underwood [00:12:36]:
Right.

Rick White [00:12:36]:
Because that's a lot harder.

Lucas Underwood [00:12:38]:
I couldn't imagine being in his shoes, though, where we're 29 years in. Right. And we've got a lot of baggage. And so like a lot of the shop owners that I see, especially when it comes.

Rick White [00:12:47]:
Are you assuming he had baggage?

David Roman [00:12:52]:
Everybody has baggage.

Rick White [00:12:53]:
We all have baggage.

Lucas Underwood [00:12:54]:
Do you have baggage?

David Roman [00:12:55]:
Oh, yeah, I got lots of baggage.

Lucas Underwood [00:12:57]:
Well, but I mean, did you open.

David Roman [00:12:59]:
The shop from scratch?

Rick White [00:13:00]:
Yes.

David Roman [00:13:00]:
Yeah, yeah. Were you a tech? Yeah, yeah.

Mike Himes [00:13:03]:
Yep.

Lucas Underwood [00:13:04]:
Why does this sound so.

Mike Himes [00:13:05]:
Yeah, my story sounds like it's everybody's. I was attack at a car dealership and I had a terrible boss. He come in one morning and started yelling at me. He picked somebody new every day. To this day, I don't know what I was being yelled at for. But when he was done, I went and got my truck, put my toolbox in it, and I went home and never went back.

Rick White [00:13:25]:
Yeah.

Mike Himes [00:13:25]:
And I had a little garage at my house and was working at it in the evening, you know, while I was working at the dealership. And here I am 29 years later. I got a big building now and.

Lucas Underwood [00:13:38]:
Well, I mean, that's the story that we always hear, and that's the trajectory that everybody takes. Right.

David Roman [00:13:43]:
It's good that you got a big building. How many. How many texts do you have?

Mike Himes [00:13:46]:
Three.

David Roman [00:13:47]:
Do you have three texts?

Lucas Underwood [00:13:48]:
How big?

David Roman [00:13:48]:
You don't do any of the work yourself? Not anymore?

Mike Himes [00:13:51]:
No. I have been recently one of my texts, a hip replaced. So I'm short one right now. So when they get behind, I do have to go out and help a little bit. I think I turned eight hours this week.

Lucas Underwood [00:14:03]:
Yeah. How big is the build?

Mike Himes [00:14:05]:
40 by 60.

Lucas Underwood [00:14:06]:
That's a nice size build.

David Roman [00:14:07]:
That's not bad. Yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:14:09]:
Well, so like, I guess what I'm saying though is that we have these experiences, like, even though you were really cheap. Right. And it was really cheap, was he overwhelmed with cars?

David Roman [00:14:22]:
Yes, like piles and piles of cars. Because he was so over.

Rick White [00:14:26]:
I'm still let him answer these questions.

Lucas Underwood [00:14:28]:
So you were really cheap and you're overwhelmed with cars, yet I guarantee you still had people that complained about the price from time to time, right?

Mike Himes [00:14:36]:
Yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:14:36]:
Did you ever have somebody that just like ripped you a new one over a price?

Mike Himes [00:14:40]:
Yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:14:40]:
Okay. And so that baggage. Right. Because. Oh, that didn't feel nice. So now the idea of raising the prices, because I've been yelled at before. But when you're working for broke people that don't have any money.

Mike Himes [00:14:53]:
Right.

Rick White [00:14:53]:
But we think it's not that they don't have any money. They don't see the value in what you're doing.

Lucas Underwood [00:14:57]:
Yeah, but I mean, I'm just saying.

David Roman [00:14:58]:
Like, if you're covering hats and the tattoos of $2,500 and they spend the money on that.

Lucas Underwood [00:15:04]:
Well, I agree.

David Roman [00:15:05]:
I'm just saying real bearings on their car.

Rick White [00:15:07]:
But that's discretionary spending. Right. Auto repair is seen as non discretionary spending. They don't have a choice. They don't like it. We don't like it. When we don't. When we don't feel like we have some kind of agency or authority in it.

David Roman [00:15:22]:
They could walk.

Rick White [00:15:23]:
They can walk.

Lucas Underwood [00:15:25]:
That's what David tells them.

David Roman [00:15:27]:
You can walk.

Rick White [00:15:28]:
Yeah. Trust me, I had plenty of conversations. But ultimately, it's one of those things where you feel like you have to be liked by everybody in order for you to be successful. But in actuality, that very need to be liked is what's putting you out of business. Yeah, right. It's putting people out of business because they're not standing up for themselves. And one of the things I say all the time is nobody is going to value what you do until you value what you do.

Rick White [00:16:02]:
Yeah.

David Roman [00:16:03]:
And.

Rick White [00:16:03]:
And there are so many people that don't.

Lucas Underwood [00:16:06]:
I went through cognitive behavior therapy about this whole needing to be liked thing. I started a podcast with David.

David Roman [00:16:12]:
Fixed it is not f. I started.

Lucas Underwood [00:16:14]:
A podcast with David and nobody's ever going to like me ever again.

David Roman [00:16:17]:
So I don't get a refund for whatever the hell you spent on that. Because it didn't fix it.

Lucas Underwood [00:16:22]:
Yeah, it's called a podcast. I mean, they. Yeah, that was the therapy.

David Roman [00:16:29]:
That's what the therapist told you to go start a podcast with David because.

Lucas Underwood [00:16:32]:
He'S the most hated automotive person in the world. I mean, I don't know. You've. You've got up there with Scotty Kilmer these days.

David Roman [00:16:40]:
Scotty Kilmer. Do you think we can get him on the podcast?

Mike Himes [00:16:47]:
Unions and brake lines.

Lucas Underwood [00:16:48]:
I know, right? I mean, that's exactly what. That's how David fixes brake lines.

David Roman [00:16:54]:
Are you. What kind of area are you in? A super nice area. Middle area.

Mike Himes [00:16:58]:
Like, it's a nice area, but it's. It's a small town.

David Roman [00:17:01]:
Small town.

Rick White [00:17:02]:
Small town. Upper middle. Upper middle class.

Rick White [00:17:04]:
Yeah.

Mike Himes [00:17:05]:
Yeah.

Rick White [00:17:06]:
Right.

David Roman [00:17:06]:
You have a dealership in town?

Mike Himes [00:17:08]:
Two.

David Roman [00:17:09]:
Two dealerships, yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:17:11]:
What? What?

Mike Himes [00:17:13]:
And. And my prices are low, but I'm honestly, I'm the most expensive independent garage.

Rick White [00:17:20]:
No, the others are too cheap. You're not the most expensive.

David Roman [00:17:23]:
Yeah, yeah, but there's a dealership in town too. Okay. Yeah, so it needs to go off of what the dealership is charging, not necessarily what the other independent repair shops are going.

Lucas Underwood [00:17:31]:
Yeah, yeah, they use a smarter. Yeah, they use a smarter tactic to calculate their numbers. Right. Dude, mine is substantially higher than everybody.

David Roman [00:17:44]:
Have you price shopped the dealer?

Mike Himes [00:17:46]:
I know what the dealers charge.

David Roman [00:17:48]:
I know what they do. No, that's what they tell you, right? Yeah, but you need to go in and get like, you need to go in and pay for the oil change and have them go through the car or one of your loaners or whatever, right. And have them. I need breaks and I need this.

Rick White [00:18:00]:
And I matrix the labor.

David Roman [00:18:01]:
Yeah, they matrix the labor so they can. You can call and say, hey, what's your labor? It's 125 an hour. It's like, okay, great. But what they're not telling you is they're tripling the hours or they're tripling the labor rate or whatever as it goes up. And so that front brake job that you're charging 350 for, thinking I'm the most expensive in town, Nobody's going to pay more than 350 for a brake job they're charging 700 for. You have no idea because you call it's 125 an hour. It's like, okay, well, 1.5 or 1.6 for front brake job. Plus the pads on the rotors that they're buying from the parts store and they're marking it up should be about 350 or whatever.

David Roman [00:18:34]:
No, it's $700. You have no idea. I'm telling you, like going in price shop price shopping, you're going to see.

Lucas Underwood [00:18:41]:
Whoa.

David Roman [00:18:42]:
Because with the other independents, like, let them do whatever the hell they do. But if that dealership can support that building and that network and all the employees and all that other stuff, trust me, they're charging a ton of money. And if they have customers, they have people willing to pay. And if they have people willing to pay, you should have what people willing to pay.

Lucas Underwood [00:19:02]:
Yeah, absolutely.

David Roman [00:19:04]:
The only thing that keeps a lot of shop owners from shifting their price up very quickly, where they're like overnight and they're like, boom. They just jump on. The price is their own perceived. Like he's saying, their own perceived value. It's the emotional account.

Rick White [00:19:17]:
I don't.

David Roman [00:19:17]:
Yeah, I don't feel like I'm worth 200 an hour. So you don't charge $200 an hour. And so you're like, I'm just gonna add $5. Ain't no one gonna notice $5 or 10 or 15 or 20. Nobody notices. 20.

Lucas Underwood [00:19:31]:
Yeah. In your mind, you could go throw 20 on it right now and nobody would ever.

David Roman [00:19:35]:
Nobody's gonna bat an eye at it. Nobody's got it.

Rick White [00:19:37]:
I walked in and raised my labor 30% in one day.

Lucas Underwood [00:19:40]:
Right. Nobody even noticed.

Mike Himes [00:19:41]:
I did do that this spring, like, after I started listening to you guys.

Rick White [00:19:45]:
Yeah.

Mike Himes [00:19:46]:
I went in one morning and just raised my labor rate $10.

Rick White [00:19:50]:
Yeah.

Mike Himes [00:19:50]:
And I thought, I'm going to give this a try.

David Roman [00:19:52]:
And nobody said anything.

Mike Himes [00:19:54]:
Nobody said a word.

David Roman [00:19:55]:
Yeah.

Mike Himes [00:19:55]:
Yeah. And my. My average repair order. My average hours per repair order are low. I'm learning from Rick. I was at 1.5.

Lucas Underwood [00:20:06]:
Holy cow.

Mike Himes [00:20:08]:
So really, I 15 a repair order. Yeah. That wasn't.

Lucas Underwood [00:20:12]:
Yeah.

Mike Himes [00:20:13]:
Very much. But I just too busy with too many cars to think of this stuff, you know? Like, my thought is, I just got to get all these cars done, you know?

Lucas Underwood [00:20:22]:
But the problem is, is that you can fix cars for 100 hours a week and not make any money.

Rick White [00:20:27]:
More cars does not equal more money. Right. That's one of our core tenants. Right. And tell them about the week you had.

Mike Himes [00:20:33]:
Yeah. Yeah. Another thing. I didn't. I wasn't doing inspections. Oh, listen to you guys say about it and stuff. But we just had. Well, right Now I have two techs, and I was scheduling.

Mike Himes [00:20:44]:
I had 12 cars a day.

Lucas Underwood [00:20:46]:
Holy cow.

Mike Himes [00:20:47]:
You know, and.

Lucas Underwood [00:20:48]:
Holy cow.

Mike Himes [00:20:48]:
Yeah. So, I mean, we're just fixing broken cars. And Rick. Yeah, Rick's wife and Eric Bach told me about his parking lot scheduling method. So I. One Monday morning, I went in, and that's. I start. I was scheduling six cars a day, so three per tech.

Rick White [00:21:06]:
Yeah.

Mike Himes [00:21:06]:
And we started doing this the DV or. No, I'm not using DVIs. I'm using paper.

Rick White [00:21:11]:
Yeah.

Mike Himes [00:21:12]:
But that week, I had a week that I've not had months that I sold that much.

Lucas Underwood [00:21:19]:
That's awesome, dude.

Mike Himes [00:21:20]:
So.

Lucas Underwood [00:21:21]:
Well, you know, we were just having a talk the other day with somebody, maybe it was yesterday that we were talking about the digital vehicle evaluations or at least checking the car. And I think it was Braxton, wasn't it? Braxton was in here, and he was sharing his perspective. And Braxton said, you know, until I went to Lucas's shop, I never realized that that's how other shops did business. And Braxton said, so I had the Subaru. And he said, it went to the shop and it needed this. And then it went, you know, two weeks later, it Went back to the shop, it needed this. And then two weeks later, it went back to the shop. It needed this.

Lucas Underwood [00:21:50]:
He said, each time, they just never a. They never called me to tell me the car was done. I had to call and ask, is the car done? And he said, they never gave me an estimate to fix anything. He said, I just showed up, dropped my car off, and they said, yeah, we'll take care of it. So I keep getting my car back. And he said, the axle is the last straw. It's like, my car's been in here three times, and I end up having to get towed in. And they could have seen the problem.

Lucas Underwood [00:22:13]:
Evidently, they weren't looking right. They just. They kept fixing the problem.

David Roman [00:22:16]:
He ends up getting rid of the car. Because in his mind, he's getting nickel and dime with this car that just keeps breaking down. When in reality, had they just done a thorough dvi, all of this could have been identified.

Lucas Underwood [00:22:28]:
He would have dropped six or seven thousand dollars, fixed the car, and it would have been over.

Rick White [00:22:32]:
So here's a quick story, right? I got a 2009 Dodge pickup.

Rick White [00:22:36]:
Yeah.

Rick White [00:22:37]:
Right. My wife's like, you can eat a new truck. And I'm like, why? She goes, yours is old. I said, it's paid for, right? I like that for sure. She says, you got a seat that's ripped. I said, we're going to get that fixed. She says, you got crank windows. And I said, woman, that's the only exercise I get right now.

Rick White [00:22:51]:
Don't take my exercise away from me, right? And so I drove it two hours over to Luke Salmon's shop, right? Over in Goochland, Virginia. Hilltop Diesel and Auto. And I'm writing Lucas a check for five grand. Cause this truck needed some work. I'm not ready to get rid of it. And it's worth the money, so you've gotta be able to slow down. I mean, why work so hard with so many people doing a crappy job? And I don't mean that disrespectfully, but you're really not taking care of the client. You're really not taking care of the car.

Lucas Underwood [00:23:30]:
You're not doing what's best for them.

Rick White [00:23:31]:
And here's the situation, too. There was a situation about two years ago or three years ago in Connecticut where a car came into a shop for a tire repair. It was. Had a leak.

Rick White [00:23:41]:
Yep.

Rick White [00:23:41]:
They brought it in. They did the tire, put it outside. Twenty minutes later, a brake line failed. And that shop got sued, and they lost for 750. $750,000.

Rick White [00:23:55]:
Yeah.

Rick White [00:23:55]:
And they went to the judge and their only defense was, we did what they asked us to do. And the judge said, straight up, you're responsible to make sure these people are safe.

Lucas Underwood [00:24:05]:
Right, exactly. You're the professional.

Rick White [00:24:08]:
Exactly. Now, what they decide to do with that information, that's on them.

David Roman [00:24:12]:
Yeah, right.

Lucas Underwood [00:24:13]:
Well, you know, we saw so many shops and David and I were talking about this the other day, especially in the groups. We keep seeing these shops that go in and they delete the recommendations so their close rate goes up. And I'm like, dude, that is your only legal defense if something happens.

David Roman [00:24:28]:
That's so stupid.

Lucas Underwood [00:24:29]:
Right? Like, why would you delete it? And they're like, well, because, you know, a. They're bonusing advisors on close ratios. And I'm like, dude, if you're going to do that, then you probably shouldn't set it up to where they can delete their own.

Rick White [00:24:42]:
Their own recommendations. Right. Lock that sucker up.

Lucas Underwood [00:24:44]:
What in the world? But I mean, seriously, think about that. There's shop owners deleting the recommendations so their approvals look better. I mean, who are they trying to impress?

Rick White [00:24:51]:
Come on. How often do we all do that with one number or another? You know, sometimes it's like, hey, I'm not going to step on the scale quite as hard. Or, you know what I'm saying? We all want that number. Or pardon me. Or we want to be able to justify why we didn't get the number.

Rick White [00:25:08]:
Yeah.

Rick White [00:25:10]:
It's easier.

Rick White [00:25:11]:
Yeah.

Rick White [00:25:12]:
I achieve what we think we want by fudging the number versus doing the work. Doing the work.

Lucas Underwood [00:25:19]:
I have found myself to at times have unhealthy relationships with the numbers at the shop. In other words, like, I really want to hit that number.

Rick White [00:25:26]:
And that's. And that's something we work really hard with shop owners with. Like, I talk to shop owners all the time about the fact. And more, even more so than when you and I were talking.

Rick White [00:25:36]:
Yeah.

Rick White [00:25:38]:
The numbers are a ruler, and they're there for us to judge our progress. They are not there for us to judge who we are or how we do things. Yeah, right.

David Roman [00:25:49]:
For sure.

Rick White [00:25:50]:
It's just a ruler. It's to look at. Okay. I'm exerting this effort. I'm getting this result. I can do better now. Let me do better. Okay, Now I can look at the ruler again.

Rick White [00:26:03]:
But that ruler isn't meant to define who we are or how we feel about ourselves. Right. Failure, success, or anything like that. It's simply a way for us to measure our progress on the effort that we're looking at, because most of the time, what we're looking at is assuming.

David Roman [00:26:18]:
You'Re doing the right things.

Rick White [00:26:19]:
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Legal, moral, ethical, the whole nine.

David Roman [00:26:23]:
More like, you know that if I do these seven steps, that I should be getting those results. Because you could be doing the wrong things. And you're like, well, I'm not getting the results. I'm gonna try. Try harder at the wrong things.

Rick White [00:26:36]:
But how many times do we do that? We just push harder on something and we think if we do it harder, it's going to get better, and it doesn't.

David Roman [00:26:43]:
0.5 hours per ro would tell you, like, you're working really hard for not the results you want.

Rick White [00:26:49]:
It's tough, man. That's a hard number to go. Right. But if you can bring that car count down and you can bring the hours up, man, that's a sweet spot to be in. Right?

Rick White [00:26:58]:
Yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:26:59]:
Especially with the volume that it sounds.

Rick White [00:27:00]:
Like he has, that allows him to either add more people or start to spread out the schedule a little bit. Or start to look at who I'm working with and do I really want to work with this person?

Rick White [00:27:15]:
Yeah.

Rick White [00:27:15]:
Right. Start to work with people that are. That value what I do versus give me a hard time every time I talk to them.

David Roman [00:27:21]:
Yeah.

Rick White [00:27:21]:
And I can also step back and look at the work I'm doing. And maybe some of the work I'm doing isn't profitable, but I always feel like I have to do it.

Rick White [00:27:28]:
Yeah.

Rick White [00:27:29]:
Maybe I don't. Maybe I should start getting more specialized and. Or recognizing what my wheelhouse is and do more of that profitable work instead of getting stuck into work that doesn't make sense.

Lucas Underwood [00:27:40]:
So let me ask you this. You started working with him. What. What were the. Because I know your process, and what were the things that you really saw right away? Because, I mean, you. I know how you do things. You sit down and you say, all right, we got a plan. And I see where we're at.

Lucas Underwood [00:27:55]:
We got a plan for how we fix this. And you analyze and you understand what their situation is. What did you see when you first started working with him and you said, aha. Here's what gets the asterisk. Here's what gets the red highlighter. Here's what gets the yellow highlighter.

Rick White [00:28:09]:
Can I ask you a question? What if we asked Mike what his take on that process was? And then I will tell you what mine is.

Lucas Underwood [00:28:16]:
Okay, let's hear it.

David Roman [00:28:18]:
Now you're on the spot.

Mike Himes [00:28:21]:
So what, Rick? What I. What, Rick?

David Roman [00:28:23]:
Yeah. What did he tell you? Like, first, like, first we got to tackle this.

Mike Himes [00:28:27]:
My first, like my 90 day push, he calls it. He wants me to get my average hours per repair order up to two.

Rick White [00:28:33]:
But did we start at the 90 day?

Mike Himes [00:28:35]:
No, no, we started right at the beginning.

Rick White [00:28:38]:
Like.

Mike Himes [00:28:40]:
Yeah. To get them up to two, we implemented his parts matrix.

Lucas Underwood [00:28:45]:
Yeah.

Mike Himes [00:28:46]:
And so far, that's about it. The rest of it's all the uncomfortable. Like, I'm trying to figure out what my value is.

Lucas Underwood [00:28:52]:
Right. I'll pray for you, man. I don't even know what to tell you. I mean, I, I Do you know how many goal sheets I wrote out and I sent to him? And he's like, this is shit. I don't like this.

Mike Himes [00:29:02]:
Yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:29:02]:
Sends it back.

Rick White [00:29:03]:
I'm not sure it was like that.

Mike Himes [00:29:05]:
It's the kind of stuff like.

Rick White [00:29:09]:
What Rick said was, hey, Lucas, I think he can do better. And what Lucas heard was, so from my perspective, the first thing is always, what's the destination? First. Right. Because we got to have a focus that's life changing.

Lucas Underwood [00:29:24]:
That is life changing.

Rick White [00:29:25]:
And we did talk about that. We talked about your focus with your wife and your daughter. Right. And those things and what you wanted. Then we start to break it down into goals, and then what are we going to do for those goals? Right. So right away it was, okay, where's the destination? Right. And then we start talking about value because we're going to need to increase prices. We can see there's no profit model in place.

Rick White [00:29:51]:
So we need to increase the prices so that he can start to make the money that he should.

Rick White [00:29:55]:
Yeah.

Rick White [00:29:57]:
Out of the whole. Everybody in the shop, Mike, who's the least expensive person in that shop right now? Who gets paid the least?

Mike Himes [00:30:06]:
Probably me.

Lucas Underwood [00:30:08]:
Right.

Rick White [00:30:09]:
And that's. And Lucas. Lucas, just so I don't know if you saw Lucas's eyes, but he knows what you're talking about.

Lucas Underwood [00:30:14]:
Absolutely.

Rick White [00:30:14]:
Right.

Lucas Underwood [00:30:15]:
Absolutely.

Rick White [00:30:15]:
There's so many shop owners.

Lucas Underwood [00:30:17]:
Really.

Mike Himes [00:30:17]:
It's not me, but yeah. My two. There's two tax. They make the same amount of money. They're the lowest paid. And then like my. I'd call him my lead tech. He probably makes the most money in my shop in the middle.

Rick White [00:30:29]:
Yeah, yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:30:31]:
And you're the one taking all the risk and you're the one taking all the liability.

Rick White [00:30:34]:
And if we did. And if we did it by the hour, if we figured out what he was getting, who was getting paid what by the hour, that would be an entirely different discussion. Right, Right.

Mike Himes [00:30:44]:
I mean, I've Been. I, I'm not, I'm, I wasn't at the point where I was going to close or anything like.

David Roman [00:30:51]:
But yeah, but yeah, you're just treading water.

Mike Himes [00:30:54]:
I just had a job. Like, I just had a low paying job. I could have went somewhere else and got, I could have went and got a job doing what I do at my shop and made more money.

Rick White [00:31:03]:
Yeah, yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:31:04]:
For sure.

Mike Himes [00:31:05]:
And Rick said about my destination, like kind of the. What pushed me to realize I got to do better. I have a 14 year old daughter. She's diabetic. She was diagnosed with diabetes when she was 8 years old.

Rick White [00:31:21]:
Yeah.

Mike Himes [00:31:22]:
And then a year later she was diagnosed with celiac disease. She's candy gluten. And last summer we noticed that she was clumsy. Like she, you know, she was 14 at that point. And she wears, she's wore glasses since she was little, so we just thought she needed glasses, you know, new glasses. And my wife took her to the eye doctor and that ended up, we ended up at Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh that night. She doesn't have any peripheral vision. That's why she was clumsy.

Mike Himes [00:31:55]:
She can't see to the side or up or down. And they didn't know why. And turns out she has, it's called, it's retinitis pigmentosa. She's going blind.

Lucas Underwood [00:32:08]:
Oh my God.

Mike Himes [00:32:09]:
She right now can only see like just a little spot in front of her. She five degrees and. Yeah. And so we know that down the road, like when she goes to college and stuff, like she's legally blind now. She can't, she'll never be able to drive or anything. So my goal is for my wife to be able to retire from her job when my daughter graduates high school so that she can be her ride to where, you know.

David Roman [00:32:42]:
Yeah. Take care of her.

Mike Himes [00:32:44]:
Right, right. So that's kind of like when I, that's when I realized, like, I got a get my together. Yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:32:52]:
I've had some epiphanies like that. Right. And, and I, you know that that's what brought me to this show the very first time is because, I mean, like, I don't, I don't mean this in a, in an arrogant or like a spoiled rotten way. I am spoiled rotten. My parents took really good care of me, but like, I could have lived off them for my entire life. Right. And been okay and they would have let that happen. But when I had a little girl in 2011, by 2016, I said, this isn't working.

Mike Himes [00:33:25]:
Right.

Lucas Underwood [00:33:25]:
Like, I can't do this. I Have to be more. It's about her. It's about taking care of her. It's about being a dad, somebody she can look up to. It's about more than that. Right. And so my whole thing moving forward was, how do I fix this? What step do I take? Now I'm going to tell you something.

Lucas Underwood [00:33:45]:
My destination has changed very much. Like, when I first started working with Rick, there was never any. Like, I couldn't even see a world where I could consider retirement, where I didn't work in the shop every day. Like, that didn't even seem like a possibility. You know what I'm saying?

Mike Himes [00:34:03]:
Yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:34:03]:
Like, it just didn't seem like that was ever going to be a thing. And so now here I am, all these years later, saying, okay, well, we're hiring an ops manager, and that ops manager is going to be responsible for my job. So what is my new role in the shop, and what does that ops manager give me as far as freedom? Like, what does this do for my life, and what do I want it to do for my life? And what are my roles and responsibilities in the shop now? And, oh, by the way, here I am, I'm getting ready to be 40, let's say in 20 years, I do want to retire. What does that trajectory look like? What steps do I need to take right now to be able to do that? Well, the problem was, is when I met Rick, I was in the fire, right? Like, there was no. Like, I was just trying to keep the effing place from burning down every day. I was trying to solve these, like, huge, monumental things that felt like really big. And he laughs at me because they were stupid and tiny and they didn't matter at all in the first place, but whatever.

Rick White [00:34:59]:
No, I just want to. I just want to say a tech name, but I won't.

Lucas Underwood [00:35:03]:
He's dead.

Rick White [00:35:04]:
No, he's dead. No way. Yep.

Lucas Underwood [00:35:07]:
He's dead.

Rick White [00:35:08]:
Yep.

Rick White [00:35:08]:
You killed him.

David Roman [00:35:11]:
That's what I said. That's the first thing I said. He offed himself when you fired him, you dick.

Lucas Underwood [00:35:17]:
Blood clot in the lungs.

Rick White [00:35:19]:
No shit. She died.

Lucas Underwood [00:35:21]:
She died. She died. First he went to her house. He went to her house and was saying he was going to get his stuff back. Two days later, her house burns to the ground with her in it. And then the girl that he married or whatever, she ends up in prison for all these meth charges, all this stuff. And then he said his parent, he went back to live with his parents. They said one morning they went up to check on him, found him dead.

Lucas Underwood [00:35:46]:
Said, blood clots in the lungs.

David Roman [00:35:48]:
Wow.

Lucas Underwood [00:35:49]:
Just like that.

Rick White [00:35:50]:
You know, one of the things I just want to. I remember vividly was when we were talking, Lucas at one point said, my wife and I really want to have another child. Yeah, but we can't afford one.

Rick White [00:36:02]:
Yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:36:03]:
Yep. That was off the table.

Rick White [00:36:05]:
And I can't tell you, I still have the picture of him, the little guy. And I was the only outsider that ever held him, that was ever allowed to hold him.

Lucas Underwood [00:36:17]:
And now there's no holding him because he's a million miles an hour in every direction.

Rick White [00:36:21]:
Oh, you know how your mom said, I hope you have one just like you someday?

Lucas Underwood [00:36:28]:
I'm telling you what you know, David got to hear him last night. We were on the way back from Little Chatterbox. And I'm like, at first you would think he had a speech impediment or something, because he. Ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba. He thinks so fast, and he thinks so fast, and he moves and he talks and he goes that. He doesn't even, like, finish processing a thought. He has to stop and think and look at something else and think about this, do this and do this.

David Roman [00:36:49]:
I remember my daughter having that. You know, that baby talk, the kink. Pronounce the words. Quiet. Oh, that is so cute. I remember that. I miss it so much.

Rick White [00:36:58]:
You know what's funny, David? You know, somebody asked me recently, they said, you got seven kids. What was the best part as the kids, as I was watching them grow up, and they said, what was the hardest part of being a parent?

Lucas Underwood [00:37:07]:
Watching them grow up.

Rick White [00:37:09]:
Yeah.

David Roman [00:37:09]:
Yeah, it is. It's funny, exciting when they get to the next age and you start to see new stuff. Mandy, you miss the old. You really miss them at three. You miss them at five. You miss little babies. Squishy. And they're so cute.

Rick White [00:37:24]:
My grandson has got a. Brandon's got a truck, a Nissan Titan that he bought.

Lucas Underwood [00:37:28]:
Oh, wow.

Rick White [00:37:29]:
Him and his they.

Lucas Underwood [00:37:30]:
I remember when he was, like, nowhere near.

Rick White [00:37:32]:
Oh, I know, I know. So he and I. He got an estimate on stuff that it needs to get fixed up. I was like, bud, I said, if you want. I said, we'll get the parts and we'll do it together.

Rick White [00:37:45]:
Yeah.

Rick White [00:37:46]:
So I've got wheelbarrow and gonna get dirty again. I'm gonna get some dirty. Or I'm gonna laugh at him getting dirty. One or the other. That's it. But I'm looking forward to it. Like, it's gonna be a bonding time, you know, for myself and my Grandson. And that's awesome.

Lucas Underwood [00:38:02]:
Did I ever tell you the story about how. How we decided that it was time to have another one? Have I ever told you that? So remember in my office in the old shop?

Rick White [00:38:10]:
Yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:38:11]:
How there was that little, like, cubby.

Rick White [00:38:12]:
Hole back behind Gemma, used to hide in the back underneath there?

Lucas Underwood [00:38:14]:
And we had the gate. There was a baby gate. And one day, Alex walks out, and she snaps the baby gate shut because the dogs are in there. And I'm sitting at my desk, and Jimmy's underneath her little cubby, and she comes out, and she comes up beside me, and she puts one hand on the table, and she puts one hand on me, and she's patting me on the shoulder like this, and she's tapping her hand on the table. She's five at the time. Four or five. And she said, dad, me and you need to have a talk. I'm like, oh, okay.

Lucas Underwood [00:38:43]:
This is odd.

Rick White [00:38:44]:
Now, you realize when a woman says, we need to have a talk, that means shut up and listen, right?

Rick White [00:38:47]:
Yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:38:47]:
Yeah, exactly. I learned. I learned. And it was odd because she had never said anything like that before. She said, I want a sibling. And mom has told me that if I want a sibling, you need to participate.

Mike Himes [00:39:02]:
And I ran out of that room.

Lucas Underwood [00:39:04]:
I said, what in the hell did you tell her?

Rick White [00:39:06]:
I would have been going, yes, let's go. Sign me up. And so I'm not gonna tell her I got a vasectomy six months ago.

Mike Himes [00:39:15]:
None of your.

Lucas Underwood [00:39:15]:
None of our business. None of our business. And so there he comes, years later. Oh, my Lord. God help me. He is man.

Rick White [00:39:24]:
I loved your daughter, too. I love. Man, we had some fun with her.

Lucas Underwood [00:39:27]:
Oh, I know. She's a.

Rick White [00:39:28]:
That didn't sound right, but I meant it in a good way.

Lucas Underwood [00:39:30]:
She's a. She's a bird person. And so she can tell you anything about any kind of birds you could ever want to know.

Rick White [00:39:36]:
Can I show you an. After we're done, I'll show you an app.

Rick White [00:39:39]:
Yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:39:39]:
Yeah, for sure.

Rick White [00:39:40]:
It's all about birds.

Lucas Underwood [00:39:41]:
Oh, she would love that. And so I'll. I'll send it to her. But now, like, him, he's a car guy, right? Any. Any machine. Anything that runs. So every night when we go for our walks, he says, I want to stop at the shop. Okay.

Lucas Underwood [00:39:54]:
And so we go in the shop, and he says, tell me what's wrong with that car. Tell me what's wrong with that car. Tell me what's wrong with that car.

Rick White [00:39:59]:
That's awesome.

Lucas Underwood [00:40:00]:
And I'm like, Aha. I figured out my retirement.

Rick White [00:40:04]:
I was thinking exit strategy right there, buddy. Right.

Lucas Underwood [00:40:06]:
I'm out of here and old enough.

David Roman [00:40:09]:
Keep that energy. And you're like, I'm going to tell you, but you keep that energy for the next 20 years.

Rick White [00:40:15]:
You're going to need it. Right.

David Roman [00:40:18]:
So what your goal is is to lose half your customers. Just gone.

Mike Himes [00:40:25]:
Right.

Lucas Underwood [00:40:25]:
It seems a little weird to say, doesn't it? It does.

Rick White [00:40:28]:
Did you just hear him suck up some of the seat cushion right there?

Lucas Underwood [00:40:31]:
Yeah, one half.

David Roman [00:40:34]:
You really do. Half of them need to go.

Mike Himes [00:40:37]:
29 years. It's.

David Roman [00:40:39]:
Well, they're. They're going to self select.

Mike Himes [00:40:41]:
Right.

Rick White [00:40:42]:
It's the only thing you have to do.

David Roman [00:40:44]:
Yeah. You don't have to do anything.

Mike Himes [00:40:45]:
Right.

David Roman [00:40:45]:
All you're going to do is shift your pricing and value proposition.

Rick White [00:40:51]:
Yeah.

David Roman [00:40:51]:
And they're either going to choose to participate or not.

Rick White [00:40:53]:
And some of them won't participate. Go somewhere else and go, you know, wasn't that bad over there. I think I'm going to go back.

David Roman [00:41:01]:
Yeah.

Rick White [00:41:02]:
Yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:41:02]:
And look, I'm telling you something. Those that left, like, I have recently had some of them come back.

Mike Himes [00:41:10]:
Have you?

Lucas Underwood [00:41:10]:
And I have realized that I don't want them back. I would much rather them go.

Rick White [00:41:17]:
That happens. That happens. Right. But that's part of qualifying.

Rick White [00:41:21]:
Yeah.

Rick White [00:41:22]:
I just don't think we're going to be able to make you happy.

Lucas Underwood [00:41:24]:
Yeah, exactly.

David Roman [00:41:25]:
That was, that was a difficult realization because I'm like, I'm going to put out a great product. I'm going to do things properly. Customers are going to love me.

Rick White [00:41:32]:
Everybody's going to want it.

David Roman [00:41:34]:
Yeah, everybody's going to want it. And you realize that these people are vultures. They are prying on the inexperienced shop owner or the undervalued shop owner. They're looking for shops that are willing to do it at this price. They know. They know that are willing to throw in the head gasket sealant because, like, I can't afford a head gasket job. Can you just put some of this in there?

Rick White [00:41:59]:
Now my heater's not working. What the hell's wrong?

David Roman [00:42:01]:
I saw it on the Internet. Can you just try it? Because you got the flushing equipment and all that. Can you just try it for me, please? Or. Yeah, can you use this part for me this one time? And you know, they always, they always have a story.

Rick White [00:42:14]:
Yeah.

David Roman [00:42:15]:
And I go back to my old customer, like, customer list and I see those names and I've got a story for every single one of them. And I took the brunt of every single one of those jobs got screwed for 8000, got screwed for 3000, got screwed for 500, got screwed for 1100. And just you go down that list and maybe people were just taking advantage of me. And the minute that I raised my prices, the minute I raised my prices, poof, Gone, right? Never saw them again. Because all of a sudden you're like, stress just went. Well, it creates other stress, but the stress, that type of stress is gone. The guy that screwed me installed an engine for him and catalytic converters. And we end up putting all these parts on this car.

David Roman [00:43:00]:
And he comes in and he's like, I only have $150, but I'm going to come. I'll be here every Friday to pay you. Every time I get. We let that car go, right?

Lucas Underwood [00:43:13]:
And he never have to do that so many times.

David Roman [00:43:16]:
$150. And I was banking on that. That's going to pay my rent this month and I'm going to pay my catch up on the electricity bill. This is going to. This is going to end up taking care of me.

Rick White [00:43:30]:
That's why we don't cuff work.

Lucas Underwood [00:43:33]:
Yeah, exactly. 100% cuff work.

David Roman [00:43:36]:
What does that mean?

Rick White [00:43:38]:
Allow people to charge work with us.

David Roman [00:43:41]:
Oh, no, no, no, no. Oh, yeah. No, no.

Mike Himes [00:43:42]:
Yeah. I've been lucky there. I. I've never been burned. Actually, I've had one. Yeah. 29 years.

Lucas Underwood [00:43:51]:
I just need to point out that the reason that you've not been burnt yet is because you weren't charging enough for them to even need to worry about burning.

Mike Himes [00:43:57]:
I did have one that I had to go to the magistrate and they had to send a sheriff out to get my money. But I did get it.

Rick White [00:44:03]:
But how much time did it take you to do that?

Mike Himes [00:44:05]:
Yeah, it took a lot of time.

Rick White [00:44:06]:
And that and frustration, but. Yeah, frustration and feelings of being.

Mike Himes [00:44:10]:
And then I'm like, if you owe me, you owe me a hundred dollars, I'll spend $10,000 to make you pay me that hundred dollars.

Rick White [00:44:18]:
I was the same way. I was the same way. But here's the thing. It's one of those. I had this one guy who comes in, had an 8 or $900 bill and gives me a credit card and it gets declined. Can you try it again? Sure, try it again. Same story. Here's another card that gets declined.

Rick White [00:44:40]:
Gives me a third card, it gets declined, then he writes me a check and I use telecheck, which I highly recommend, using some kind of check guarantee service. I run their.

David Roman [00:44:50]:
Or just don't take them.

Rick White [00:44:53]:
It runs about the same as the credit cards, and it's easy for them. And I get my money in two days and didn't have to worry about it. But anyway, I put the check into the machine. I swear to God, that machine started smoking. So then he says, can I cuff it with you? I'm thinking there are just four people with a lot bigger pockets than I got that just went, oh, hell no. So I said, what are you gonna do? He said, I'll give you 50 bucks a week on it. I said, fantastic. He gave me the 50 bucks.

Rick White [00:45:20]:
So I marked it on the bill. $50. I said, okay, great. And I put his bill back in the Lazy Susan that we had. And then I grabbed his keys and I'm walking away with his keys. And he goes, what are you doing? I said, well, I'm putting your keys away. And he goes, what do you mean? I said, well, you're gonna pay the bill. And he goes, yeah, I'm gonna give you the 50 bucks every week.

Rick White [00:45:36]:
I said, great. He said, why aren't you gonna give me a car? I said, no, sir. He goes, this isn't a payment plan. I went, no, it's laughing. You don't get it until it's paid for.

Lucas Underwood [00:45:48]:
Now, look, I'm going to tell you something that he laughed at me for, and that is that initially, when you start all this, right, that you're going to raise your prices and you are not necessarily going to know how to convey that value to your clients right away.

Mike Himes [00:46:05]:
That's what I'm struggling with right now.

Lucas Underwood [00:46:06]:
And you may find yourself in a situation especially like no client supplied parts, or maybe you're not breaking out the estimates and giving them each little detail and giving them labor rates and all those things. And what I promise you is that you'll call Rick one day and he'll.

Rick White [00:46:22]:
Laugh at you because he's laugh with you.

Lucas Underwood [00:46:25]:
I laugh with you because he realizes that, like, you've experienced what it's like to not be able to convey that value to the consumer and be able to have that conversation. He's giving you the tools and the knowledge that you need right now to save your business right now. I know what you're thinking. Oh, my business didn't need to be saved. It was like it was going to make it. Yeah, that's. That's where you were, is where I was. And that's not.

Lucas Underwood [00:46:50]:
That's not making it okay. That's like barely treading water, right? Because at the end of the day, if you had paid yourself what you should have paid yourself and you paid your team what you should have paid them, you wouldn't have had any money, you'd have been out. Right? That would have been it. And so what I found was, is that he was leading me in such a situation or such a direction that I had to feel a little bit of pain. So I was willing to learn new skills and new traits.

Mike Himes [00:47:18]:
Right?

Lucas Underwood [00:47:18]:
So you're going to find yourself as you say things and you're going to say something to a client and it is not going to feel nice when they blow up on you or they say this thing, but it is absolutely required that you go through that because then you're willing to listen to him or somebody else to say, that didn't work. What do I need to do different? Right. And unless you go through that pain point, you won't ever know that you need that knowledge, that you need that experience to take it and go a different direction with it until you go through it. Right.

Rick White [00:47:47]:
Well, and the other thing too, when you're coming up with your value and stuff like that, or what you believe your value is or you bring to the table, it's real easy to sit down and look at other shops and see what they say and go, ooh, I kind of like that. And I kind of like that. But they're not yours. Does that make sense?

Mike Himes [00:48:03]:
It does. That's why I'm struggling, because I, I don't, I, I thought about just Googling it, asking ChatGPT to do it for me.

Rick White [00:48:12]:
Yeah, but that GPT is not yours.

Mike Himes [00:48:15]:
No, I want it, I want it to be right.

Rick White [00:48:17]:
I want to, it's not so much right, but it's got to be something that really means something.

Lucas Underwood [00:48:21]:
Yeah.

Rick White [00:48:22]:
It's got to be genuine, right? Because people can, people, people have great lie detectors, right? We are built in, we have built in lie detectors and they can smell shit a mile away. So for when you say, like when someone had come up to me and said, wow, that's really. You're really expensive. Why are you so expensive? My simple answer was, because I'm worth it. What can I do for you? Yeah, that was the end of the explanation. I don't have. In the beginning, when I first went through it, I would spend 15 minutes telling you why I was worth the money. But eventually I got to the point where I was comfortable enough and understood what I did bring to the table, that I didn't have to go through all of that.

Rick White [00:49:00]:
I actually found I got more acceptance with because I'm worth it than I did with the 15 minutes of, well, we do this and we do this and we do that and we do this. It really is you understanding it more than it is anything else. Because one of the questions I asked. And you watch his face. I want you to watch his face right now. Hey, Lucas, Why, as a prospective customer, would I drive by three competitors to do business with you?

Lucas Underwood [00:49:31]:
Shut up.

Rick White [00:49:33]:
Shut up.

Mike Himes [00:49:34]:
That's hard to answer, isn't it?

Rick White [00:49:36]:
95% of the shop owners that I ask that question to go, I have no idea.

Rick White [00:49:41]:
Yeah.

Rick White [00:49:41]:
And that is why it's a race to the bottom in our industry today.

Lucas Underwood [00:49:44]:
And the other 5% will say, I'm the best. Okay, why? Right. Like, define it. Let's see why. Right. And I don't think. And that is the.

Mike Himes [00:49:58]:
A.

Lucas Underwood [00:49:58]:
The value proposition, but that is also the understanding of yourself. Right. That's the looking deep down inside. And if nothing else, that question incites something else that says, okay, now what? Like, what do I want it to be if I don't know what it is right now, what do I want it to be? Why would they come to me? And how do I achieve that? Right. But we didn't see, me and you when we started this. We didn't ever think about that. Right. What.

Lucas Underwood [00:50:25]:
What did we think about? Oh, just fix the cars.

Rick White [00:50:27]:
No, no. We were thinking, I got to feed my family.

Lucas Underwood [00:50:29]:
Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Rick White [00:50:31]:
I got to make money, feed my family.

Lucas Underwood [00:50:32]:
But the root of that eventually becomes, I'm going to fix the car. And we focus so heavily on how do I fix the car.

David Roman [00:50:40]:
It's not overly difficult, though, to answer.

Rick White [00:50:45]:
Don't. Uncomfortable. Because, see, what it is, David, I think, is we're getting into the limbic part of the brain where it's more feeling stuff.

Mike Himes [00:50:53]:
Right. I'm not.

Rick White [00:50:54]:
And it's harder to communicate that than it is when we're repping the neocortex. When it's all logic. Right. But being able to understand, hey, this is what I truly believe.

David Roman [00:51:04]:
But you can. You can approach it in a logical fashion, because a lot of times what you need to do is. All you have to do is take a step back and go, well, what is it that I do extremely well? In other words, do I believe that I provide a superior product? Yes or no?

Mike Himes [00:51:23]:
I do. Yeah.

David Roman [00:51:24]:
But what. Why? So what steps am I taking? That's the hard part for me to answer that, well, no, that shouldn't be difficult for you, because it should be like, okay, well, one of the reasons why I provide a superior product is because we always follow service information. One of the reasons is we replace every part that's required to be replaced on the repair. That's not true of every shop. I know dealerships that are not replacing fuel lines that the OE manufacturer says, hey, the car will catch on fire if you don't replace a fuel line because it gets deformed, you take it off, it's deformed. There's no way to put it back on there properly and not have it be off. So you have to replace it. Dealerships aren't doing it and they're charging a bajillion dollars.

David Roman [00:52:06]:
I'm going to do it every single time. Okay, that's an easy one. You can throw that out there. You can do something like. One of the things that I did early on was I went and bought the tool so I could flash the car. I could flash the car. I wasn't spoofing, I wasn't cloning, I wasn't sending it off to some sketchy website to get the module cloned. I was doing it in house, which required me to get to a certain level of expertise that I could then confidently tell the customer, nobody in this town has a J2534 pass through.

David Roman [00:52:38]:
Nobody. I do. That gave me a level of confidence that I could then tell the customer, that's why you should bring it here. I'm doing training that nobody else is doing. I'm doing work that nobody's willing to tackle.

Rick White [00:52:52]:
And notice, notice he didn't say we use quality parts and we have really great technicians. Because every freaking shop in the world.

David Roman [00:53:00]:
Everybody says that, yeah, there's gotta be something. And it did. And I'm not saying, like now we have a completely different philosophy because everybody now has a 2534 test. Now I'm the only one with an ADOS machine. But there's now I'm surrounded by ADOs calibration centers that just do ADOS calibrations. Sketchy ones, but they still do ADOS calibration. So it's not equipment anymore. Also, that's impossible to keep up with.

Rick White [00:53:23]:
No. Because any differentiator you have eventually is going to become copied.

David Roman [00:53:28]:
So now it becomes the easier thing. And the thing that becomes very difficult to copy is a philosophy and a culture in the shop. Those two things. Because nobody has my technicians, nobody has my service advisor. They may have the same philosophy, maybe, but they don't have my people and not my philosophy. Plus my people cannot be duplicated. Anywhere else. Therefore pay me or get the out of my shop.

David Roman [00:53:58]:
That's it. That's it. That, that's how, that's what it progresses to. But what you starting right now is just figure out what the guy down the street doesn't have. The closest guy to you go to his shop, drive by or whatever doesn't have as nice of an alignment machine. Maybe he doesn't have a tire machine. Maybe he doesn't have this. Maybe he can't do that.

David Roman [00:54:19]:
I know he can't die his way out of a paper bag. Okay, I've got a great diagnostician. Maybe you do, maybe you don't. If you do great feature that guy becomes the guy on your website. I have a great diagnostician. You open up my website, his ugly mug is right in front.

Rick White [00:54:36]:
So if you're looking for a diag tech.

Lucas Underwood [00:54:38]:
Yeah, just go look at David's website.

David Roman [00:54:39]:
He's a very pretty man. Don't. I'm just kidding. Sorry Randon. Anyway, but his face is right up front and it's him tinkering with something electronic on the website. I wanted them, my customers to convey that we can diagnose absolutely everything we don't want to, but we can diagnose absolutely everything. But that's not really the philosophy behind what we do is a certain thing that makes us comfortable charging whatever the hell I want to charge, whatever I need to charge. But what you need to do is take a step back just at the beginning.

David Roman [00:55:15]:
I'm just telling you it's a logical path towards something more concrete. It's just find out what the guy down the street is not comfortable doing. That you're willing to do.

Rick White [00:55:25]:
Yeah, you start out with that, that's the first way to break out the differentiators. But again as David said, eventually it becomes more of how am I going to treat you? How are you going to be, you know, what are you, what are we going to do for you? How are you going to make it easier for you? Right.

Lucas Underwood [00:55:41]:
You know one of the cooler things I've seen somebody do recently is what Mike Allen has shifted to in his shops because he's had some long term clients question pricing and say hey, you know, getting a little expensive.

David Roman [00:55:54]:
Are you saying Mike Allen arbitrarily jacks up the price of something that he shouldn't jack the price of because all up, all the way up to this point it's been a great value. And then he decides I'm going to jack up the price and then everybody complains about the price because it got a little expensive. And then he goes, we're probably at the top end of what I can charge. Are you saying Mike Allen does that? That's insane. Why would he do that?

Rick White [00:56:20]:
You know, if two people. I had one, I had a shop owner in Michigan.

Rick White [00:56:24]:
Yeah.

Rick White [00:56:25]:
And he says, I got to do some of my break jobs. And I said, why? And he said, because I'm getting all kinds of complaints.

Rick White [00:56:30]:
Yeah.

Rick White [00:56:31]:
And I said, okay, how many?

Lucas Underwood [00:56:34]:
Yeah, I need a number.

Rick White [00:56:35]:
I said, how many? He said, six. I said, in how many months? Six months. And I said, in six months, how many cars did you fix? Are you really going to run your.

Lucas Underwood [00:56:51]:
Business based on a quarter of a percent? Well, so Mike Allen, what he shifted to is he has got to the point that if somebody has a concern like that, Mike just goes to him and says, listen, I completely understand, but I recognize that we have a skilled trade shortage in this country, and I recognize that we have not been treating our skilled tradesmen the way we should. And so I want to offer them a 401k. I want to offer them health insurance. I want to offer them dental and vision insurance. I want to provide them the very best experience they can. So I'm not part of the problem anymore. And especially in his community, people resonate with that. They're like, I see that.

Lucas Underwood [00:57:26]:
Because they can't find people to fix their washing machines.

David Roman [00:57:29]:
And they can hearts out here, that's why.

Lucas Underwood [00:57:31]:
What?

David Roman [00:57:31]:
They're bleeding hearts out here, that's why. Ain't nobody going to give craps about that. In some areas, the country.

Lucas Underwood [00:57:36]:
That's true.

David Roman [00:57:37]:
Okay, that's great. I'm glad the guy has dental. Anyway, I can't afford this repair and I need my car fixed.

Lucas Underwood [00:57:44]:
You should try, see what happens.

David Roman [00:57:46]:
Oh, in Kansas city, it would 100% work. Kansas City is very much like Raleigh, let me tell you. Don't you worry about that.

Lucas Underwood [00:57:52]:
What the. What do you think of David's process of not calling the clients at all? I don't think they don't call him at all.

David Roman [00:58:00]:
Listen, listen, dear, before you say anything, okay, 20, 23. I'll show you the numbers. My aro was $20 less than dingus over here, so it's fine.

Rick White [00:58:11]:
Doesn't mean he was calling them. Well, yeah, that's true.

Lucas Underwood [00:58:14]:
Hey, that's the second time somebody's thrown shade at my numbers today.

Rick White [00:58:19]:
I haven't seen either one of them, so there.

David Roman [00:58:21]:
So I will say that I was also very uncomfortable with the selling and the. Because I felt like I can't pay eleven hundred dollars for that. But I also needed to charge $1100 because that's, you know, once the parts matrix was put in and my labor and it was $1,100, that's what the price spit out. Now whether it's 1100, 900, the only difference is an extra 200 bucks in my bank account versus not right. The customer's going to see it as expensive regardless. Okay, it's going to be expensive at $700 versus 1100. But I was uncomfortable with the selling and the whole spiel and then I didn't. That's not me.

David Roman [00:59:04]:
I can't do it. So I just started sending links. That was it.

Mike Himes [00:59:09]:
Yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:59:10]:
So I just see him cringing.

Rick White [00:59:11]:
Oh, I'm not cringing. I'm not cringing.

David Roman [00:59:13]:
At the front counter. At the front counter. We explained the process. We told the customer that we are a no pressure sales process. Like I want you to be comfortable with the process. We're going to present you an inspection. You look at the inspection, take pictures. We'll answer any questions you have and then we're going to send you an estimate because we're going to estimate absolutely everything.

David Roman [00:59:32]:
Now you decide what you want to do from there, but we're going to estimate everything. Just so you know the current condition of the vehicle and what it's going to take to fix absolutely everything. Do you understand? Uh huh. Okay, great. And people just go select all send sign and then I get a $4,000 estimate just approved. I didn't have to call them.

Mike Himes [00:59:52]:
Yeah.

David Roman [00:59:52]:
I didn't have to sell Dick. I had to.

Lucas Underwood [00:59:55]:
Just glad you don't have to sell that because nobody buy it.

Rick White [01:00:00]:
They're a very limited quantity too. But anyway, so I will answer that question. I. If it works for David, I would say fantastic.

Rick White [01:00:12]:
Yeah.

Rick White [01:00:13]:
It would not be the way I do it.

Rick White [01:00:14]:
Yeah.

Rick White [01:00:15]:
I believe there needs to be three conversations with a client.

Lucas Underwood [01:00:17]:
Okay.

Rick White [01:00:18]:
There needs to be a discovery conversation so that you're on the same page building value and differentiating yourself. I think you need to have a presentation with the client so that they can understand where you're building value and a sense of need and urgency in the work that's needed. And the reason why I say that, David, is I have seen people get estimates that they're sent out, something like that, and there's a fuel line leaking and a couple other things and they pick two services to do and leave the leaking fuel line.

David Roman [01:00:46]:
Yeah, that does happen. That now that's the same situation as the six Complaints in six months, though, that does. It's rare.

Rick White [01:00:55]:
It does happen.

David Roman [01:00:55]:
It does happen in the process. You have to have a process for that because it does happen. You have to stop. You have to call and say, hey, I'm glad you approved the $700, but this $400 repair comes first.

Rick White [01:01:05]:
It's the wrong $700.

David Roman [01:01:06]:
Yeah, it's the wrong $700. And sometimes you have to have that awkward conversation with customer.

Rick White [01:01:10]:
So the issue I have with this is people tend to look at an estimate very quickly. They don't read, they don't look at the inspection the way you'd like them to. Even like I had one shop say, oh, look at everything we put in. And I said, you're assuming they read it right and they don't.

Rick White [01:01:26]:
Yeah.

Rick White [01:01:27]:
So we have to have a way to create a sense of need and urgency in there so that they understand what is important. Okay. So we can guide them through this process. And then the last time we need to talk to our clients is when we're delivering the vehicle so that we can reinforce what they did, let them know that it was a great.

David Roman [01:01:43]:
So that conversation does happen every single time. You have to have that follow up conversation because they gotta leave with the warm and fuzzies. That's incredibly important. But I will say that the first conversation. Yeah. Because you wanna present, you wanna make sure they understand. The second one, the presentation thing, I send the links because I want that to do the talking for me rather than me. Like one.

David Roman [01:02:05]:
Because I know my abilities. That ain't it. Now could I do it? Absolutely. I just hate it. As opposed to him. He's a yacker. He likes to talk and he's friendly and everybody's his friend and he gets to talking and he's got the stories and the quotes and everybody is like, ah, that's how they get. I can't do that.

David Roman [01:02:24]:
I can't do that. You don't seem like that either.

Mike Himes [01:02:27]:
No.

Rick White [01:02:27]:
No. I'll bet.

Lucas Underwood [01:02:28]:
You two should move to Finland anyway.

Mike Himes [01:02:32]:
Email people estimates. Right. I have Mitchell and I can just text it to.

Lucas Underwood [01:02:37]:
You should probably get shopware.

Mike Himes [01:02:38]:
I probably should.

David Roman [01:02:39]:
Yeah. So I would. If you're not going to get. Yeah, we're sponsored by shopware. And that's why we're. That's not why we're saying it though.

Lucas Underwood [01:02:48]:
No, we're saying it because we love it.

David Roman [01:02:51]:
Now if. Here's the only thing I will say is the inspection has to be good. And the customer.

Rick White [01:03:02]:
Not only does it have to have.

David Roman [01:03:03]:
Great pictures that this is what it's supposed to do.

Rick White [01:03:07]:
This is what it's not doing. This is what's going to happen if you don't do anything. This is what will happen if you change it.

David Roman [01:03:13]:
The pictures have to be fairly self explanatory, that the broken part is featured, presented with a big arrow pointing to the broken part. And all we do is say that's broke. And then it's not like that.

Mike Himes [01:03:29]:
I can do that with. I have prospect, but the pictures aren't so great on it. But I can circle.

David Roman [01:03:36]:
Yeah. So the inspection has to be really good because if you're not going to get on there and go, well, Mr. Customer, we started looking at this and then this and then this and this. And if you're not going to do the spiel, which the spiel is important, you've got to do the spiel. The inspection process then becomes amplified and it can't be rushed. It's got to be thorough. And you want to make sure that the customer understands what they're looking at and be there to answer questions. Make the customer comfortable with the like, hey, do you have any questions? Okay, I'm going to send your estimate now.

David Roman [01:04:14]:
Okay, great. The why I like shopware is because they can just pick it themselves. Sign. They have to what? Like now they have to do a text authorization or they're going to get.

Lucas Underwood [01:04:24]:
Yeah, there's, there's different pieces of authorization. I don't know if you've seen that, but it like has buttons that they have to, they either have to verify.

David Roman [01:04:31]:
Who they are, they're doubling the you're the one approving, nobody else is approving this for you thing. And so they can, they can then sort of decide what they're going to do. And you'd be surprised because if you do the work up in the front that they come in, it's nice, it's clean, it's organized. It doesn't have to be Taj Mahal, just nice clean and organized, friendly face. You get a full explanation. You explain the process to them, they leave, they know what's coming up next. You're going to get a text message with a dvi. You don't say dvi, you say digital inspection with lots of pictures.

Lucas Underwood [01:05:08]:
Evaluation.

David Roman [01:05:09]:
Yeah, an evaluation.

Rick White [01:05:11]:
Vehicle health report.

David Roman [01:05:13]:
Yeah, you call it whatever you're required to in your state. We just call it an inspection in Kansas because we're a free state. Anyway, so then we call, we send it to them and if they have the text I love back is where's my estimate? Because I'm like, all right, this is going to go easy. Send it over to them. Because they're ready to spend. They're like, ooh, red. Bye, bye, bye. If they have questions, answer the questions and then send the estimate.

David Roman [01:05:41]:
And shopware allows you to. Now, with Mitchell, you're just gonna have to call them and say, hey, to fix everything, it's gonna be 2852, 46. And I can have it ready for you within a week or three days or whatever your turnaround time is. And then you take parts deposit, parts deposit, parts deposit. Because then you're not rushing to get the workout. Money's coming in every day. It's wonderful. Money's always coming in.

David Roman [01:06:08]:
I love the car deposits. Make huge difference because now they're. I'm not kidding. They are committed. They are committed. They have already purchased that repair. They've already paid half or, you know, 40% of the repair, but they are committed. They've already made the purchase.

David Roman [01:06:27]:
The fact that they have to pay me another seven or eight hundred dollars when they come pick up is irrelevant. They have made that purchase. They are committed. And you get that part surgery. Okay. And you tell them to turn around time. Easy peasy, easy peasy. And no selling involved.

David Roman [01:06:44]:
No selling involved. Because it, you know, I could feel him, like when you were like, oh, you got to call and talk to the customer and sell and all that stuff.

Lucas Underwood [01:06:52]:
Are you the service advisor?

Mike Himes [01:06:54]:
Yeah.

David Roman [01:06:55]:
Yeah. You gotta fix that. Either get really good at it and take all his 8,000 courses that he has on selling, or.

Lucas Underwood [01:07:02]:
And you will get really good at it if you do that.

Rick White [01:07:04]:
My 8,000 courses.

David Roman [01:07:06]:
8,000 courses on selling.

Rick White [01:07:08]:
But you have my one course, My one course on selling with a thousand.

David Roman [01:07:12]:
Little bits that you have to get to get out of here. Making it seem like, oh, it's really one hour. I'm going to make you a good service advisor. No, it's going to take a long time. Especially if it's not come. Doesn't come natural to you. Like, I can understand. Trust me, dude, I can understand.

Lucas Underwood [01:07:26]:
Lots of things don't come natural to David.

Mike Himes [01:07:28]:
Just so you know, my biggest problem with it is I'm just too busy. Like, I need help. I need a service advisor. What are you doing running the business? I'm trying to run the business.

David Roman [01:07:39]:
What does that mean, running the business? Like, what are you doing?

Mike Himes [01:07:42]:
Paying bills, ordering parts, trying to answer the phone.

Lucas Underwood [01:07:48]:
I did this, this little lesson of futility a while back, and I wrote down everything I did in a day washing the Toilet.

Rick White [01:07:58]:
Yeah, that was in that 15 minute.

David Roman [01:07:59]:
Intervals we have every 15 minutes or intervals you write down what you're doing. You were like, I waste my entire day dicking around with completely irrelevant, useless stuff.

Rick White [01:08:08]:
Was I doing watching cat videos, David.

David Roman [01:08:12]:
It may not be cat videos, but you might be surprised that you can find things that will speed up the parts ordering through Parts tech, which is available on Mitchell. Yeah, that makes it easier. And then you hit the one button to order your parts. And you don't have to sit there and look. And here's the other thing too. Stop. Stop looking for parts. You have your flavor.

David Roman [01:08:41]:
It's vanilla. Just selecting vanilla. Just slap it up there. Don't serve. Like, maybe they want cookies and cream today. No, they don't. Slap vanilla on there and move on. You don't need to be like fishing for new flavors because you're like, maybe don't like this today.

David Roman [01:08:56]:
No, they won't slap that same water pump on there. Slap those same brake pads on there every single time. Just let it go. Because trust me, the customer doesn't give two craps what you put on there. Does the car work now? Yes. Great. Congratulations. It's fixed.

Mike Himes [01:09:10]:
I do do that. I know what parts I'm getting before I go looking.

David Roman [01:09:14]:
Now. The other thing, too is like in shopware. Past services. Yeah, yeah, past services go down, select, dumped, done.

Lucas Underwood [01:09:25]:
Never have to build that.

David Roman [01:09:26]:
It's like every canned job without making it a canned job.

Lucas Underwood [01:09:30]:
Yeah, it's pretty nice.

David Roman [01:09:31]:
Does it update the pricing once it dumps in there? It'll have you like, click, click, click. And yeah, it'll update the pricing to the latest matrix or whatever you happen to be.

Lucas Underwood [01:09:41]:
Hey, just so you know, just so you know, what it also puts in there is the notes that were made in labor lines previously. So if you don't remove the note that says that the technician torqued the drain plug to specification and drove the vehicle, they might think you're full of shit.

David Roman [01:09:57]:
Don't put that in there. Then don't put it on the labor line.

Lucas Underwood [01:10:00]:
I didn't see it.

David Roman [01:10:02]:
I never looked it anyway. So you need to find. Get a virtual assistant on the phone so they pick up immediately. You're not immediately having to answer the phone. It picks up the phone for you, then starts to ring. And that gives you an extra like 15, 30 seconds to go grab your phone. And then finding somebody to answer the phone for you is probably the easiest thing to find.

Lucas Underwood [01:10:25]:
You know what I did? I hired a remote CSR to help answer the phone and I thought it was going to go horribly and they have done a fantastic job. Now I will say that it was Monique's daughter that works for Shopware. So like she's had a lot of.

David Roman [01:10:38]:
You know, what she needs to do is farm out her services.

Lucas Underwood [01:10:43]:
That's a good idea because she can.

David Roman [01:10:45]:
Probably handle way more calls. 2.

Rick White [01:10:47]:
But can you imagine going, this is welcome to. Oh, crap.

David Roman [01:10:52]:
I worked in a call center. And you pick up and it would go beep and then it would tell you what company you're supposed to go to and then you went to your script and then you would go into your thing. So it's not. Yeah, we used to juggle like 11 different companies and you'd sat there on a phone call all day long.

Lucas Underwood [01:11:08]:
Could you imagine calling a company and getting David Rowan into the line? The fuck do you want?

Rick White [01:11:15]:
Yeah, I'll send you the estimate.

David Roman [01:11:18]:
They monitored your phone calls and they required you to like hit because the client would pay for conversions. And so they were trying to get you to sign up for whatever. And so you would have to go through the script and if you weren't hitting the points on the script, they would pull you into the office and be like, let's talk about what happened here. Yeah, but you would get bonused if you hit like 100% or whatever. They would end up hitting you with bonuses, extra money and days off, which I loved.

Lucas Underwood [01:11:47]:
So I vote we do a follow up episode at some point. Where do you. Where are you going to be in a year?

Mike Himes [01:11:55]:
Probably be here. Okay, probably come back here.

Lucas Underwood [01:11:58]:
But where's the shop going to be in a year?

David Roman [01:11:59]:
You'll have a service advisor. His prices will be 50% higher than what they are right now with a healthy parts matrix. You'll have the 300% rule put in a DVI shopware. A good online. I'm not kidding. That's what it will be. And on the good online scheduling system. So like some of those phone calls will get shifted on to just ordering online.

David Roman [01:12:25]:
A beautiful website by Shop Marketing Pros.

Lucas Underwood [01:12:30]:
Sounds like a plan to me. Now, now we've just got a whole.

David Roman [01:12:35]:
All of that you can do tomorrow. You know that, right? Tomorrow you could do all that?

Mike Himes [01:12:38]:
Yeah, some of. Some of it I'm already in like the phones, I fry or whatever day it was before I flew out here. I did switch phone companies and I'm getting phones that'll have you know, you'll be able to pick one to talk to me and two to talk.

Lucas Underwood [01:12:54]:
Yeah. To get rid of some of The Flack. What phone company did you go with?

Mike Himes [01:12:58]:
It's Windstream, a local company or whatever. Yeah.

Lucas Underwood [01:13:04]:
Have you. Hey, have you seen Digital Concierge? Holy cow. So cool.

David Roman [01:13:10]:
I got into it with the shop controller guy because they're pushing their, like, AI.

Lucas Underwood [01:13:16]:
They were?

David Roman [01:13:17]:
Yeah, their AI thing. And I'm like. They're like, why aren't you getting on the AI thing? And I'm like, look, every time I've ever used an AI chat, bought anything, I want to kill it, I want to destroy. I want to burn it to the ground.

Lucas Underwood [01:13:30]:
But you say the same thing about me.

David Roman [01:13:32]:
That's not the same thing.

Mike Himes [01:13:34]:
Rick's AI now.

Lucas Underwood [01:13:36]:
Oh, we've got a Rick AI?

Rick White [01:13:37]:
Yeah, we do.

Mike Himes [01:13:38]:
Oh, my God. The other day, I needed to email a customer, and I really didn't. I just asked Rick AI and copy and pasted it in my email.

David Roman [01:13:51]:
That is hilarious.

Lucas Underwood [01:13:52]:
And it worked.

David Roman [01:13:54]:
That is awesome.

Rick White [01:13:55]:
2.0.

Lucas Underwood [01:13:58]:
Hey, as long as it's not shop monkey 2.0, I think you'll be okay.

David Roman [01:14:02]:
That's awesome.

Rick White [01:14:03]:
Or Butt Monkey, if you've watched Bruce Almighty.

Lucas Underwood [01:14:08]:
Yeah. So Digital Concierge reviews your telephone calls, and it, like, tracks them, and so it gives you the sentiment and everything else. Like Shop Genie, but it, like, tracks the call to see. Did you convert it from a call to an appointment? And did it convert from an appointment to an actual repair order in the shop? And then it transcribes all of your calls, so you're not saving, like, recorded calls necessarily. It'll save them as long as you want to save the recorded calls, but it transcribes them and it gives you the sentiment and it says, hey, here's where the call went sideways. Here's what happened. Here's like, what? Wow, it's really neat. But now I was talking to him, and he said, like, hey, don't talk about it on the show.

Lucas Underwood [01:14:52]:
I don't really want it to. Like, he's like, what his thing was. He said, there's four other phone companies that do similar things to us. And he said, I am learning from their lessons. And I said, what's that? He said, they grew too damn fast. And they grew so fast that they couldn't provide the product and the quality that they should provide. And he said, so they didn't have support behind it. And he said, I don't want that to happen.

Lucas Underwood [01:15:15]:
He said, I'd rather go slow and grow. And as we get more ability.

Rick White [01:15:19]:
Yeah. So.

David Roman [01:15:20]:
All right, all right.