Surviving the Dog Eat Dog World of Auto Repair With Brandon Dills

00:00 We started to see that engine come in with service history and it was just like it'd be seized up or knocking or whatever, right? We were seeing them up here.

00:07 I remember the first one I did was 33,000 kilometres on it. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome back to another exciting thought provoking episode of the Jada Mechanic podcast. My name's Jeff and I'd like to thank you for joining me on this journey of reflection and insight into the toils and triumphs of a career in automotive repair. After more than 20 years of skin knuckles and tool debt, I want to share my perspectives and hear other people's thoughts about our industry. Support yourself a strong coffee or grab a cold Canadian beer and get ready for some great conversation.

00:58 Good evening. So tonight I'm joined with a really good friend of mine, the infamous Brandon Dills from Jarhead Diagnostics.

01:11 Brandon, how are you feeling? Like I said earlier, man, living the American dream, just working to working. So I feel like that's all I ever do anymore. Yeah, you guys have been busy. Oh yeah. This past probably, oh shoot, it's been almost since January because we started working up to go to Visions, you know, taking all the Jarhead stuff to Visions, which started around January. Then it was like, as soon as we came back from Visions, I got an offer to move into a much larger facility. And so as soon as we came back from Visions, we rolled right in to move in.

01:45 So I feel like it's been a pretty hectic year for us. You're not even two weeks into the new facility. I was just looking at pictures of it.

01:52 It's beautiful. Oh, thank you. Last Monday was our first official day. So Jarhead's been in there for like a month. It was like maybe three weeks after we signed the lease, we went ahead and got Jarhead put in because our other building was super small and it was like bursting at the seams. So we put Jarhead in this one and it's been going in here ever since.

02:15 And then the shops, the first official day was this past Monday. And the name of the shop, Brandon, is for all of us listening? Small Town Automotive Technologies. Nice. Very cool name. Good. And then Jarhead Diagnostics is kind of your, I don't want to say a side project, but you

02:33 build a lot of accessories for scan tools, scopes, that kind of stuff. So yeah, so Jarhead's actually, it's actually Jarhead Diagnostics LLC and then the shop is a DVA under Jarhead. So Jarhead's like the main, I guess, umbrella company for right now. And I mean, they both do really well. So like the shop's still growing. So we don't, I mean, we don't turn hundreds and hundreds of hours a week or anything like that. But Jarhead definitely holds its own as far as, you know, paying the bills and everything else, which Jarhead is kind of what got me out of working for somebody else and into my own thing.

03:18 So. Yeah. Yeah. Which is, and so give us kind of some history. Like, do you, were you a gearhead in high school or did it, you know, how did, how did it, did you grow up in, somebody in the industry was related to you like a dad or an uncle

03:36 or hang out with a bunch of kids that were all into it? I mean, I had an uncle that did it, but we didn't really do much with him whenever I was younger. My dad did heavy equipment in the Marine Corps. And then I just think back to like, whenever I was younger, I was the kid that I'd get something. I'd always take it apart, figure out how it worked and, and just play with it. And then as I kind of grew up from toys and to bicycles, you know, fixing my own bicycles and then fixing my own four wheelers. And then whenever I got my first car, just playing with that. So it's kind of been just, I guess, in me since I was really young and it just kind of entered into it.

04:19 What's that? What was your first car? Ninety seven Jeep Wrangler. See, I like that a Jeep guy like myself. That's good. So I've had too many. Oh, can you have too many, though? I mean, it's most of the people that diehards I know now, they have like a trail rig and then they have like a daily rate.

04:39 So, yeah, I've had a bunch and then I was like, I'm done with Jeeps. I don't want them. And then my wife was like, I've never had a Jeep for myself.

04:48 So now we've got her a Jeep and so. Yeah, I think that's awesome. And I love the product. I mean, you know, my background, right? I worked at the dealer from like 2002 on. So, I mean, I and the first shop I mentored or apprenticed at on automotive side anyway. One of the senior taxi had an old CJ that he warmed up and done over with a 350 in it and everything else. And I mean, it was more like a garage queen. He hardly ever drove it and he never got it really set up right. But I mean, it was it was pretty cool to see. So, you know, and for because to find a CJ up here in Canada, there's not much of them left, right? They're they're pretty gone. But it was once I got into the dealer and started working on them and and seeing enough of them, I was I was hooked on the whole the whole brand. Just love it. So, yeah. Yeah, so you are. They're very enjoyable. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, I'm not hardcore like I don't, you know, this one I have, I have a 2015 Wrangler. I don't I don't have it. It's bone stock. And it's you know, I don't wheel it. It's just to put the boat in at the boat lake at the launches and fish with that's, you know, I had a. I've had four Cherokees and I had one that had a pretty good lift in it. And it was a lot of fun. And it was it was like a thousand dollar jeep. So, I mean, you didn't care if you crashed into a tree or whatever, because that's the best wheelers to have as ones that, you know, you don't have a ton of money into. So more more smiles per mile. Right. But yeah, yeah.

06:21 So after after you kind of got bit by the bug, we'll say. Or really, when did you know that it was going to be you were going to make it a career? Like you said, your dad been in the Marine Corps, right? You went in the Marine Corps. Tell us about that. So, I mean. Whenever so for United States military, you have to go into Mets, which is like kind of the. You you sign up, you go to Mets and you take what's called the ASVAP, which is like a placement test to kind of figure out what your strengths and weaknesses are and all that sort of stuff. And I qualified to do anything in the Marine Corps entry level. So anything that entry level for the Marine Corps, I qualified for. And I don't know, I just I wanted to work on helicopters. That was my thing. But for the Marine Corps, the way that they work is you say, I want this field. So I was like, I want to be aviation repair. And so I ended up working on the Harriers, which is the hovering jet. And I'm actually I'm really glad that I did that. I knew a lot of rotorwing people and stuff, but I know once I got to the fleet and I was working on the Harrier, it just I loved it every minute of it. So it's pretty amazing piece of equipment. Oh, yeah, it's by far probably one of the best CAS aircraft, CAS close air support. It's it's really good at low altitude, just going in and dropping bombs and doing gun runs and stuff. So it was it was always fun just working on it and just being able to see it perform. Yeah, yeah. So and so was it strictly in the in the core for you? Was it strictly like that particular airplane or did you did you move to ground ground equipment or? No. So. In the Marine Corps, they at the way the Marine Corps works is they go to what's called an A school and then a C school. So your school is kind of they give you the broad what your M.O.S. is going to be. So I worked on ejection seats, canopies, the cabin cooling, defog, oxygen, oxygen system and and that sort of stuff. So in a school, they taught us everything on an F-18. And then your C school is whenever you actually go to whatever your designation is going to be. So my designation was a 62-82 was my M.O.S., which was an egress mechanic for the Harriers. Most other M.O.S. is so like if I worked on airframes or the power plants or the avionics, I would have the ability if I wanted to to easily transition to another aircraft. But for the egress, because it's it was such a. Safety related thing, because if the aircraft fails, your ejection seat has to work like that. That was the thing. Your ejection seat has to work. And so they they didn't let us do like it's called a lateral move. They didn't you didn't really lateral move from one aircraft to another, because to do that, you physically have to go all the way back to the beginning and start your training all back over. Whereas like airframes and that sort of stuff, they could. Go to another aircraft and do OJT on the job training and kind of get their qualifications, whereas for a seat, we couldn't. So long story short, yeah, I stayed on the Harriers for my whole eight years that I was in. So your it's the egress system pretty specialized in. Yeah, right. And and it was fun. I got my CDQAR QA so so your CDQAR. You start out as a seed like you start out as a worker and then you can get what's called your CDI as a collateral duty inspector. So that way you can go in and the way. The Marine Corps part of the Navy, so the way the Navy does all theirs is if somebody works on an aircraft, they can't just sign it off like it's done. You have to have an inspector go in and inspect to make sure that the work was performed properly. But then. They can only expect inspect up to like a certain level, and then there's like. Certain items where it's like extremely critical and to be able to inspect the critical, then you have to be a CDQAR. So I got I went all the way up to CDQAR, which was a collateral duty quality assurance representative. So we were part of like the quality assurance part of the of our unit and then QA. So was a quality assurance safety observer. So for the hair like for what I did, we handled explosives all the time from the rocket motors and everything that went into the ejection seats. And to do that, you have to have somebody there to witness you handling them just to make sure it's all safe and everything. So I was the safety observer.

11:17 So that way, whenever we're doing ejection seat work, I could actually physically sign off on everything and witness people handling the explosives. A lot of responsibility, man. That's impressive. Very cool. Very cool. Yeah, that's fine.

11:31 Uh, how many years did you stay? Stay with us eight years. Yeah, yeah, I did eight years, three deployments. It was. I had a lot of fun, but then. I started realizing. What I was like my job, it took a lot from the family, and so they just it. It was my time to get out type thing because for the Harriers, which now it's kind of transitioning into the Joint Strike Fighter, the JSF F-35. The Harriers were always on a six month rotation for deployments. No matter if we're at peacetime or war, because at all times, the Marines got a Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is out and it's part of an ARG. So you got the naval ships out.

12:22 The Harriers were the fixed wing part of that. And so every six months there was a Harrier Unit deploying, whether it was only at the time there was seven Harrier units, then it was every six months on the East Coast and every six months on the West Coast. So it was like a constant deployment schedule. I really enjoyed it, but then I also enjoyed seeing my daughter grow up too. So I chose daughter. Well, I mean, I know we're on separate borders, but I want to thank you for your service. It really, you know, I know you guys hear that pleasure and it's, you know, it's important. But I mean, it's it's. Yeah, it's so, you know, you guys still don't get the recognition you deserve, especially people, you know, they glorify sometimes, you know, the other roles, right? But I mean, it's you guys that are just as important as they can't do their job without you.

13:17 So hats off to you, man. Yeah, I mean, no, thank you. And and trust me, I'm not one of those ones where I'm going to be like, yeah, I was out there killing people. And I literally just worked on airplanes and that's that's just how I play it. And but, you know, thank you. It was my pleasure for doing it. It I mean, it was I grew up in it like I literally was on a Marine Corps base from the time I was born. So.

13:41 So how old were you when you when you signed up?

13:44 I signed up whenever I was I signed up whenever I was 17 and then I went to boot camp at 17. So. For the Marine Corps, you can do what's called the debt program, delayed entry program. And so I dipped in the summer between my junior and senior year of high school. And so I was part of the delayed entry program my whole senior year. Graduated. Walked across the the thing to get my diploma on Saturday. Sunday, I was back at MEPs. Monday, I was in boot camp. So it was just like graduate high school and literally went straight in. Wow.

14:23 So. Good for you, man. Good for you. So did you so is that the bulk of your kind of like to come out of that, I guess, and go to working on cars? Did you did you transition? Was that pretty smooth transition for you? I mean, obviously, your fundamentals are strong, right? If you're handling that kind of that equipment and that kind of, you know, it's nothing for you to read a schematic or blueprint, right? Did it how was that to make that transition? I've heard, you know, other people talk sometimes about like adjusting to, you know, a consumer civilian type scenario, right? Versus. I for me, it's like I do fleet work, right? So it's like I don't have a ton of customers on obviously, you know, dealing with day to day, right? It's just my boss's fleet is the number one priority. It trumps everything else.

15:19 So did you find that that was kind of difficult to transition into or? So transitioning from. Working on Harriers Automotive, we did a lot of schematics in the Marine Corps, like everything has schematics and the way. Natops, the naval aviation, the way Natops worked is anytime you're working, you had to have a publication open to that, whatever you're working on. So that way you could constantly reference. So schematics and reading service information and stuff, I mean, it was drilled into me for eight years before, so that stuff was pretty cut and dry going into it. There was a learning curve as far as switching from aviation to automotive, but I worked on my own stuff the whole time as a Marine Corps. So I had like basic fundamentals, but I mean, I didn't know how to set a lift because we don't use a two post lift to pick up a Harrier. So like that sort of stuff and tire machines, but then. But as far as like just transitioning, I went right into it. I started at Firestone and they're like, we understand you turn wrenches for eight years, but we're still going to start you out of general service. So I started out oil changes and tire rotations. I did that for maybe a month and a half, two months. And then I went straight from that to a flat rate tech and then started turning decent hours. And I turned pretty good hours, like my entire career. So like if you average the hours turned, I probably averaged 50 to 55 hours a week for my entire career. That includes, you know, slow weeks, but then I had some weeks where I did over a hundred hours in a week. So just it averaged out to about 50 to 55.

17:12 Good stuff. Yeah, yeah. And it seems there's a lot like we don't have a Firestone per se anymore up here in Canada, right? So it seems to be the biggest kind of when I hear people discuss chain stores, right? There's so many people that reference a Firestone. And what is it like? We know the horror stories and we hear the horror stories, right? But is there like you must have had a pretty good experience?

17:43 I had I had a decent one. To be honest with you, whenever I got whenever I first got out of the Marine Corps, I didn't go right in turning wrenches. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. And so I took what is called terminal leave. So they pay you while you're still in. And I had about 60 days of leave saved up. So I took almost a month and a half off. But I mean, I got paid for two months, but I took like a month and a half off. I was like, I've been killing myself for eight years. Let's just take some time off. So I took about a month and a half and I was like, all right, I need to start working. So I went to a welding shop and I did that for about six months. But then around Christmas, they slowed down and the old saying last hired, first fired. So I got let go right before Christmas. And I went to AutoZone, I was working at AutoZone behind the parts counter for a little bit. And I was just on Indeed looking and the Firestone was having a. Like a hiring thing where you just go in and open hiring. So I went in, applied, got the job. I enjoyed it. Like I really enjoyed my coworkers and all that sort of stuff. But I also came into it with my background. And so it wasn't like I was just some podunk off the street. But Firestone's are so big and they need, they're one of the type of companies that they just want a warm body. So they hire warm bodies. And that's where the, I think the bad rep gets, because we had some people that worked with us there. That, I mean, I wouldn't even let them rotate my own tires. Like, I don't even want you to touch my stuff.

19:25 And so I think that's where the bad rep comes from is just, we need a body in our base. So. Yeah. They got to mandate, they got to fill it, right? Like they've got to, they've got to have X amount of people on the job. And, you know, it's to their, I ultimately think like up here, we are similar thing as Canadian tire. And I think it's to their detriment that the way they're still doing business, right? But I understand how it is because they walk in every morning to a whole lot of appointments, right? Way more than probably most shops do. And it's just, you can't tell everybody that like, listen, you know, we don't have, they don't, they won't accept that, you know, all three people are on the phone and sick, right? They still want their stuff done. Right? So it's, and when you're the biggest player, right? They can, they're the loudest, they can get online and say, Hey, Firestone store, whatever, can I pay your Canadian tire store? You know, Princess and Gardner did this. And it's just, so they're, they're always, I try not to run those guys down or gals down because you know what it is. I mean, a lot of us have gotten our start in stores like that. I mean, you're an example. And I don't like to say that, Oh, well, you know, it's only this type of mechanic that works there. That's not true. That's not true at all. It's just, there's, you have that reputation overhanging you all the time, right? Like that just kind of looms over. And I want to, I want to work somewhere where I can be proud. I want to say with pride, I work here. And I feel like, you know, if I was to stand around at a party or something to say, Oh, I work for, you know, this store, everybody's going to have a horse. Or everybody's going to hear this. Oh, well, what about that? You know, that's bad enough when you're at some place and you tell people are a mechanic, right? It's some people still roll their eyes or all they give you that side glance, but you know, drugs. Yeah. Right. Yeah. You curse a lot. You're a misogynist. It's I, yeah, I'm just, you know, we have to, we have to look at what they do good in terms of they give people opportunity. And then if we can eventually see their business practices and morals and culture kind of change, then I think they can really do something positive.

21:38 So yeah, so that was, go ahead. Go ahead. No, no, go ahead. I was just going to ramble on about Firestone, but we're good. Please do. Well, well, so their, their biggest thing is they're very, hang on, the, the terminologies went out of my head where they only care about the dollars coming in. Like, so they transactional, there we go. They're, they're 100% transactional and they don't care about, I mean, they care and they, they always looked at, you know, how much of retention we're getting, but they cared more about, I want to get as much as I can out of this person. And, and that was kind of one thing that I didn't really care for too much working there. It was, was that aspect of it. Don't get me wrong. I turned a lot of hours when I was there, but it was just a lot, a lot of that. And, and so it didn't necessarily align with, um, my thought process and what I seen in my career. And so I stepped away and I went into a dealership from there. Um, then I wound up back there for a little bit in between dealerships, but yeah, it was a lot of, it had to do with just that. I'm not necessarily a transactional based type person. What, what brand for dealership? So I left, uh, Firestone. I went to Toyota for about a, how's that Toyota for about a year. And then a guy that I was with that Toyota, he left and went to, uh, Kia and he got me a job at Kia. And so I stayed with Kia for five years, like in between Kia and Hyundai for like five or six years. Um, and then the dealership life just, it burned me out because it's 100% dog eat dog and just, and so. And then, and so, yeah, I was that, to be honest with you, if it wasn't for going to an independent shop, like a good one, I was getting out of the career. Like I was getting out of the industry. My wife got tired of me coming home in a bad mood every day. And just, it was just every single day. It just, it, I loved what I did, but it was just burning me out. And I almost just gave up everything. We were trying to find something I could do that would replace the money that I was making. I mean, you know how that is. It's like, you make really good money as a good tech and it's hard to replace it because you got to start back low.

24:09 So, yeah, it's, I mean, I, you know, people think they hear me and they're like, Oh, he runs down the dealer all the time. No, man. I like, when I was at the one I was at for the longest term. Yeah, there was, there were struggles every day, you know, and there was frustrations and it was like, you had to know your role, which was just like, it's, it's just like he says dog eat dog. It's not a team, regardless of what anybody says, it is not a team. You are there to produce as much revenue for them as possible. If, you know, if you're over there stepping on your coworker's throat to get the next job, they don't care as long as the job gets done. But I mean, I had lots of weeks where I made really good hours. I, you know, I turned 50, 60. I mean, you know, I had turned 28 in one day and that's no carry over. That's a Saturday, right? Like, I mean, that's, will I ever do that again? No, not even close. Like it's just, everything aligned perfectly, you know, with the cars that came in and all the jobs and what was quoted and whatnot. It was, it was, it was amazing. But it's, I mean, I'm glad I did it. It taught me how to be a tech. I learned a lot, you know, and I, I don't want to paint it all as all bad, but it's just, you have to be, you have to know what you're, what you are when you're there. Right. You know, I had, I worked a Saturday once, made 28 hours in one day. That's no carry over. That's just, I had like 12 cars come in that, you know, needed it. They all had some Diag attached to it and then some service and everything lined up perfect. All parts were in stock. Nothing broke coming apart. It was just, it was just perfect. And, but I mean, I, I don't know. I know I'll never have another day like that, you know, in my career. And I, I, if the work was there, making 50 was not a problem. You know, I was never, I was never a guy that turned a hundred, you know, I think my best week ever was probably 72, which was still, I was happy to do that. But I mean, I was always a guy that it was like, if I hit 45, you know, that was, that was the best week of my career. You know, that was, that was okay. I mean, I was, I was good with that. I could, I could pay my bills and, and, you know, survive. What drove me nuts is you could make 45 and you'd watch the guy over there do 60, you know, and you'd do 10 of his work, 10 of 10 hours of his next week over again for him. Right. Or, or guys just do, you know, the low hanging fruit. Right. If you've got any kind of. Diag ability, you tend to be a little struggling with that or you break even at best or whatever.

26:48 And I mean, let's, you know, yeah, let's, you have any certifications at all. Yeah. Usually as soon as you got certifications, that was when it went downhill. Yeah. And that was, that was always the thing that I struggled with because like same thing, whenever I was in the Marine Corps, I always strived. I wanted all of our certifications that we needed for MOS. I wanted every single one of them. So I worked my way to that. Um, I almost got all of them whenever I got out. So like whenever I went to Kia, I was like, I want to be a master tech. So I worked my way up and I was a master certified. And so I'd not 90% of the time I was dealing with just BS. Now I still turn really good hours just because I was quick at what I was doing and that sort of stuff, but it just. It, it just, it, like you said, it just wears you out. And like my, towards the end of, and the reason I, um, I left Kia and wanted to leave dealerships altogether was Kia dropped that engine recall. I don't know if you paid attention to that where they were doing all the engines. They, it got to the point where I was doing five plus engines a week, if not more. Now they were pretty quick. My best time doing one, I did a Kia Optima start to finish, like rolled up to the car to start working, had the new engine running in just over two hours. But it's like, it was just because it was repetitive and it was. And that's all we were doing was engines back to back to back to back. And it just kind of got to the point. I was like, yeah, I need to find something else because this sucks. Yeah, I did. I did.

28:28 I was at Hyundai for just about a year. And, uh, I got out just before as they were coming in, we started to see that engine come in with service history and it was just like a be seized up or knockin' or whatever. Right. We were seeing them up here. I remember the first one I did was 33,000 kilometers on it and it was a year old. So 33,000 kilometers, like 20,000 miles, you know, like it was, it was low and he had service history and whatnot. And we're like, what is happening here? And then, you know, after that, I was, I was not long for that deal. There was other reasons for me leaving. It had nothing to do with the, the product was easy to fix. It was not hard. It was, uh, it was just, uh, just another dealership with a culture that, you know, um, didn't align with what I wanted to do either. Right. Like we had, they had their guys that they were going to feed every day because they had, you know, five years there and then everyone else. Well, too bad about them. Right. Like we've got to look after these five first.

29:25 Now at Hyundai and the way Canada works, do you still have to like do prior approval, like contact tech support and all that stuff where you do engines and all that? So when I was there, I never had to call anybody. Right.

29:39 It was just a situation of I went into the service manager, the service advisor and said, Hey, you know, this thing's leaking oil from, you know, the side timing covers used to leak like a sieve. Right. And everything else was leaking oil. What is that? That sensor in the transmission would be bad all the time. The temperature sensor or something. Yep. Yeah. So it was like, we just kind of had to tell them. And then I got out before the engine recall hit, but I can remember that like I did the first one and then I had another one that it failed. This is before completes were available and it pumped a bunch of the engines out. So I had to tell them. It failed. This is before completes were available and it pumped a bunch of the engine or metal through it. And they called a short block and I tore it down and there was metal all through the variable valve timing solenoids and the whole thing. I'm like, you should really probably like, you know, send these out and it all, no, just slapping back on. And it ran for all of, you know, 10 minutes and then went to jump time again. And I had to do that all over again. And that was, that was, you know, my fault, even though I said to them that like, hey, this sucker's full of oil, right? Like a short block is not really the best choice. And then I was gone. And then we didn't, so we didn't have, I didn't have to go through the headache of approval.

30:56 Go ahead. In the U S it's like that. So in the U S anytime we had to do engines, like for, it was better on the red side than it was the blue. So red side's Kia, blue side's Hyundai. It was a whole lot easier on the red side because you would just, it was, you'd log in a tech line and then you would just pretty much send an email and the, they would, they might have you do some stupid checks that you already know is going to fail. But, you know, and then they would just approve it. Well, on Hyundai, you actually physically had to call in the tech line, talk to the tech line person while they're on the phone and then get all these approvals and stuff. And so that was kind of like the, doing the engines was easy, but you'd spend an hour to two hours trying to jump through all the hoops and all that sort of stuff. Like probably the funniest one that I ever seen is like whenever the recall was like going hard, tech line was trying to find any way that they could to see, okay, is the engine actually locked up? So then they started having us take videos of us putting a wrench on the crank and trying to turn it. And it's like, okay, we'll do that. Well, then it was, oh, you pull the drive belt off and let's verify. I worked with a guy and like, I'm not even lying on this. He got so fed up because he did three different videos and tech line just kept adding and adding, adding, adding. So he did a five minute video going from a quarter inch breaker bar to a six foot breaker bar, trying to pull the engine and rotate it.

32:25 And at the very end, he's like, is this a good enough video for you? I like that. So, yeah, so we had to do a lot of, of that sort of stuff. And, and so the engine was easy, but it was all of the rat race and red tape and everything just to get them approved. So, and really is that the tech's job? You know, like, I mean, they say it is, but to my opinion, it's that's that gets into it at admin realm, right? Like, I mean, you've got a customer that has an obviously broken car. I mean, it got towed in, right? It's the starter motor's just clicking or just smoking when you try to turn the key, like quite wasted everybody's time and just like, you know, the thing is, is not a quality built engine. Just shift the truck load down, put the truck on the back of the lot, put a forklift in it and have the pallets of them ready to go. And let's start, you know, making your customers happy. This, yeah, it was when I was my tenure at Nissan, it was starting to get towards that. And I mean, they were talking about how, because when I was at Nissan, I was on a Facebook group and everybody was talking about in the US, how they were starting to do the CVT rebuilds versus just taking one out of a crate and putting it in the car. And, you know, you had to quote it and price it up and, you know, so everybody immediately just priced them to where it was cost exceeded. And you just put it in reman unit in, right? But I was, even then it was just like, so I've got my screenshot captures of what the, you know, the slip in the, in the CVT. Now you want me to like take the thing out, tear it down before you tell me what to do with it? No, that's not. And so that never seemed to get heavy in Canada because I mean, that's the advantage up here is there's so much more dealerships in the US versus here. There were just a blip on their radar, right? Like we're small. So they just, yeah, like, you know, we're trying to build the brand there and like they sell more Nissan Titans in California than they do in all of Canada. Right. Which is, I mean, and they're, they're a terrible truck, but I mean, so I got, I left Nissan before that became a thing. And we were, but we were doing CVTs five a week, you know, it was just trash. So, and that's, that always shook me. It was just like, so the labor ops says it's this to do this, you know, there's no set time when you're going to go in and get authorization or approval to do something. Of how long the time the email trail is going to take, how long the phone call is going to take. That's all time that I'm expected to donate. That's that goes against my core, right? I can't, I can't do it. I'm, if you're going to treat me like a flat rate monkey, I'm going to learn my labor ops and I'm what the time is, pace is what it gets, you know, it's how it has to be. It's business.

35:17 And that's like, so with Kia and Hyundai now, originally they had, with inspections and everything. You were getting like, I don't know, it was like nine hours or nine and a half hours to do a long block. And even then people were bitching. I wasn't bitch at nine and a half hours. Cause I was, like I said, two and a half, three hours doing an engine. That's really good money to me. But then just how people blab on Facebook and blab and we're doing these engines this quick. Kia and Hyundai started looking at it and they dropped their labor times. And now the guys on most of the long blocks, they're getting like less than six hours to do a long block. And that includes all of the testing and everything else that they want you to jump through the hoops on. And it's just, it's like, it's not even worth, you know, messing with it anymore at that point. Yeah. They're just trying to get you to where you break even, right?

36:13 They don't want you to be making time. They just want you to break even. And then, and I understand both sides of it. I mean, I still feel like, well, if you guys, you're high paid engineers determined that it took this long and little old me that's smart and figured out how to shave time. I should keep that time. You know, that's, that's the, that's my expertise, your expertise of determining how the process and the procedure. That's cool. But if, if I can get it done faster and the customer leaves with a repaired, you know, car that's still going to hold up the way it's supposed to hold up. Car that's still going to hold up the way it's supposed to, you know, then, then don't punish me by being efficient. Yeah. We have the time.

36:55 Yeah. They same thing. The steering couplers in the electronic power steering motors for like the Sonatas and stuff. I mean, they were failing constantly and all it was a little piece of rubber. Well, the manual wanted you to pull the whole column out of the vehicle, put it on the workbench, take it all apart. And it paid hour and a half or something like that. And then if you had to do an alignment, they would let you add an alignment onto it. Everybody found out you can do it in the car by just dropping the column down a little bit, reaching your hand in there, taking the motor off and doing it. Well, so they took an hour and a half, two hour job and they dropped it down to like six or eight tenths because people were doing it in the, in the car. And it's like, how was that my fault? You know, but same thing comes back to sometimes like. I'm one to always try and share my knowledge and try and help people out. But, but in a dealership, they don't want you to, because the moment that you start sharing your knowledge, it gets back to the factory. And then they realize that they can save money at the factory by cutting your time. So, yeah.

37:59 And we, we know that they can fix that or have less occurrences that happening if they allow, if they're smarter with what they show as the, you know, clocked time against the repair. Right. But too many times I think the admin side screws it up because they're not catching it. Like, Oh, you know, Brendan's lawn block pays nine hours. His punch time on it is 4.3. Right. They should be allowing them more the way, you know, we all hear how guys talk about how they ran multiple punch cards, right. Way back when that's, that was how, and I see it, you're technically, you know, taking advantage, maybe of the old E-tank. But at the same time, the tech shouldn't be punished for that. Right. Like you should not be punished for your, for your proficiency at all. I don't feel like if you're efficient, good work, the cars are not coming back. You know, where was the incentive to do it faster? If you're all of a sudden going to make less money. Yeah.

39:00 Especially like in my opinion on certain stuff was like, so all of the testing you could spend a day working on a car to make money. Working on a car, trying to figure out what's going on with it. And if you don't have a labor op code for whatever, if you replace a part, they just expect you to just eat it. Now, if you have a good service manager, the service manager might pay you some straight time or whatever. So they just expect you to eat it. And that's where like a lot of the stuff of I was making time on it. I just considered that my makeup time for spending hours on cars and not getting paid for it.

39:35 Yeah. But when that dries up though, right, because we're all really look at the end of the week, right? It's not the when you're flat rate, you're trained not to look day to day, but look week to week. And, you know, year end is important, right? But it's hard to get through the grind when you might have three days in a row where it just kills you. You know, you got one problem car after another. Like that's my thing was I got fed, you know, I got to fed a fair amount of the drivability electrical in just about every shop I've ever worked at. Because I'm not great at it, but I got a pretty good set of fundamentals and I get through it in a relatively easy time. And, you know, and that was so when I could do it, they're just like, oh, OK, give it to him. You let him take a shot at it. And yeah, you take pride in fixing it. But you can't you can't eat pride. You can't feed your family with pride. You know, that's that's a personal thing. That's not something that goes into the bank account in the week. Pride is pride's just pride.

40:37 Yeah, because I I started making a joke because at one of the dealerships I worked at is like I would usually make no money Monday and Tuesday and then half a Wednesday. And then usually at the end of Wednesday, I pretty much have to tell them to F off on all these cars that aren't paying and give me something to make a paycheck. So usually my paychecks were only like the last two and a half days of the week. And if I worked a Saturday last three and a half days of the week, because that first half was usually on average a wash because you just go in there and you get fed crappy cars over and over and over again until you tell them I'm not taking another crappy car. We'll start this again next week.

41:17 Yeah. And then you get labeled a prima donna or, you know, a difficult employee like that. That's that's should be a headline on my resume is, you know, good at fixing cars, terrible attitude, you know, because it's you know, it's a lot of work. I learned the game early on, same as all of us, that like if you allow them to treat you that way, they will continue to treat them because it's to their advantage. You know, they're getting somebody that will take pride and solve the one. And, you know, and that Lord knows I did it and I'm not I'm not ashamed. I don't regret doing it. Yeah, you had to have some days where you had to. And that's why I think you see so much of the pushback. The advisors get hammered a lot, too, and it's not really their fault, right, because they're only writing up the work order a lot of the time, but they don't understand. Like if they don't know that you had 10 cars that were all junk. So when they go in there and they try to shave your time or, you know, can you scan this real quick? I can't charge a customer or, you know, throw that light bulb in for like, you know, it's supposed to be point three. But they said, well, that's why it's those things that suddenly you see. That's like you're the last straw and you know, your whistle top blows and and people are having arguments, right? It's because they don't know. And it's. Do I want to see it all go flat rate go away? Well, it doesn't have to go away. But I think there needs to be more of an understanding about what makes us. So many of us resent it, you know, or have negative, negative relationships with it. And, you know, and they'll say, well, it's, you know, you just need to find. I love that line. You just need to find another shop or they don't treat you like that. If you're really familiar with the product, you're going to probably stick with a dealer. And if you jump one dealer, guess what? The management tactics are the same. It might even be the same dealer group. It might even be the same manager you left, right? So, you know, you just have to learn to to roll with it. You know, look at the end of the week, not the end of the day.

43:21 So, yeah. And like talking about advisors, I mean, so I've got a bad shoulder injury that happened in the Marine Corps, and I've always been the type where I'll work through pain to make the like just get to the end of the day. Hindsight's 2020. I probably shouldn't have been doing that over the past 20 years, but. Yeah, it's life, whatever. And but I went to my service manager. I was like, look, it's also a dealer. You know, could I possibly do a service advisor role because I still want to stay in the auto? I just I need to rest my shoulder for a while. Yeah, I did that for a day and I was like, F this like some of the service or service advisors might make really good money at the dealership. But how you were saying a minute ago, all the stuff that they deal with. Yeah, they usually work longer hours than a technician, and they deal with just all of the crap. Sandwich that just goes in through the dealership, and they're usually the ones that get stomped on the most from sales department to the service manager, to the customers. I was like, yeah, I ain't doing it. I'm doing that.

44:27 When we're being pained for a while. When you were there, were your service advisors, did they make any commission on warranty work or was it just straight retail?

44:35 So they all of the ones that I had, they were they were commission based on everything. And they, I remember laughing. Because it comes back to dealers just trying to be shady. Like not all of them are, but a lot of them have a bad rap, especially the owners and upper management to the employees. So whenever the engine recall first dropped for Kia, the service advisors were making, I think it was like two or 3% on parts. So it doesn't matter if it's a warranty part or whatever they're making on average. And I think it was like two or 3%. And then they were making so much percent on labor and yada, yada, yada. Well, whenever the warranty or the recall dropped, we were doing 20 to 30 engines in the shop a week, two weeks, three weeks or whatever. That adds up a lot of money into the service advisor's pockets because, you know, an eight or $9,000 engine, 3% times 20, I mean, that's, that's a hefty paycheck. And that went on for like two or three months. And then the owners were like, Oh crap, we're paying them a ton of money. So they went and like, took all of their profits out of it completely to where it kind of screwed over the advisors.

45:58 That's good for the culture, isn't it? Yep. We had two advisors quit almost instantly whenever that happened. Sad man. It's, it is so many, you know, it doesn't seem to matter who you talk to, where you go, there's always similar stories. Hey, it's just, it's, it's such a fascinating thing in this industry. It does not seem to matter.

46:20 So, so tell me like you were there at the dealer for how many years total. So I bounced around between a few different dealerships. But staying with Kia and Hyundai? Yeah. And, um, because we had within 30 to 40 minutes of my house, I had like four different Kia dealers I could choose from and two different Hyundai dealers to, or three different Hyundai dealers to choose from, but it all came back to culture, so like the way I was raised growing up and then being in the Marine Corps, I'm very family oriented and team and all that sort of stuff. And so I bounced around a lot, just trying to find a shop that's like accepting of me and vice versa and stuff. But, um, so I was with, I went to Kia, it was like at the end of 13, beginning of 14, um, and then I left dealership altogether at the end of 19, so, um, was that five years, uh, five or six years. So, and then after I left there, I went to an independent shop. Um, loved it. I mean, 100%, I was like, I found my home, loved it there for about six months. And then, um, the owner was an absentee owner. He'd come in maybe like once a week. He had a general manager that was just running it. He was, he was towards retirement age, trying to sell, um, and so he just had a general manager just running it. General manager was a younger lady. She started getting addicted to drugs. Um, and that brought a lot of bad stuff into the shop to the point where like me and another guy on multiple occasions would literally have to pick her up out of somebody's Bay because she leaned up against a two post lift and slumped over and passed out and we'd have to pick her up and a lot of bad stuff. So I ended up leaving there after about eight months and I hated it. And I even told the owner, I was like, look, if she's gone with the drugs and everything, I'll come back in a heartbeat because I loved it. It was, it was the shop for me. But then after I left there, I just kind of bounced around a little bit and it got to the point with my wife and I were like, let's figure out something with like, you know, you got, you got to do something. And so that's whenever I took jar head on full time was COVID happened, shutdown happened a month after the shutdown. And I was like, let's start a business.

48:52 Right. So you kind of, did you kind of walk away from the repair side with jar head? And it was just about, you know, kind of the, I don't Brendan, I don't want to say that it's like, I don't want to, I don't want to minimize what it is. Right. But it's, it's, you know, what is, what is, what is jar head predominantly?

49:11 Like if you were to describe it. So I'll listen to what I had originally. So jar had originally started out. My wife and I were goofing off. I was building a dyad cart and you know, you had like Cody's auto dyad and super Mario and, and I was just like, Oh, I'm going to make my own name and stuff. And so my wife and I were messing around and she just wrote jar head diagnostics on this thing that was going on in my roll cart and it started from there. It was like literally just her, her writing the name down. And then I made a tool for myself and, um, it wasn't like a, I'm going to go sell a bunch of tools. It was like, I was just balling on a budget and I wanted a tool. So I made it posted on Facebook and then one sold and two sold. And then I blinked my eyes and it was like, I would come home from working all day and then I'd work till midnight building tools for people to sell. And that tool was. It started out as a pulse sensor. Um, and then I just added a lot more to it, like different tooling and that sort of stuff. Um, and then they got to the point, like at the time I was making them out of like just over the counter products and stuff, just putting it together. Um, and it got to the point where I didn't have time to do all that. And my wife and I were talking, we're like, all right, well, let's try and 3d print one and we'll just see if that works. You know, we didn't even know at the time because I mean, everybody was like, you know, 3d printers have been out for awhile, but in the space of jar head diagnostics and that type of tooling at the time, nobody was really 3d printing. Tools. And so we got a 3d printer, we printed one, it worked, worked out really well. And so then that was end of 2019 when that happened. So that was maybe December is when we first started printing. Um, and then we released the first 3d printed products and January 1st. And, uh, and I mean, it blew up from there. Very cool. Same thing. I was like, I was like working all night or working all day in a shop as a tech coming home and doing that stuff till midnight, 1am. And whenever I left the, um, the independent shop that I was at, I went to a AAA, uh, repair shop. I liked it there. I was getting paid really good money, but come back to management. The manager wasn't feeding me. Like he only wanted me to do diag, which I'm fine with, but upper management was seeing that I was only flagging 20 hours a week because 90% of my stuff was diag. And, and so upper management started approaching me like, Hey, you know, what, what's up with your hours? I'd be like, well, you know, my manager's only given me XYZ and they're like, and they put in the, the both managers put it back on me. It's like, you know, no, it's, it's your fault. And we kind of went back and forth, back and forth. And then they wanted me to do a free diag on a car where I was already not making a lot of money and this was during the COVID shutdown. They took away. I was, I was on a 40 hour guarantee. Um, but when COVID happened, they took away everybody's guarantees, which was completely stupid. And so they took away my 40 hour guarantee. They wanted me to do a free diag. And I was like, am I going to get paid for this? They're like, only if you find out what's wrong with the car. I was like that. I'm not touching it. Like it was, it was to the point where I was only turning like 20 hours a week. I was like, I'm not touching it. If I would much rather sit here and twiddle my thumbs than work on this car for free. Like, I was at that point.

52:58 It drives me nuts that everybody thinks that when they're handing at work or dispatching or whatever one you call it management, that they think that everybody has an equal opportunity, right? You and I know that's not the case, right? It's otherwise that this, that very statement would mean that you'd be able to sell the same work order to the same customer every day, right? It would matter if you use same opportunities. So no, you don't all have the same opportunity. And that's what I got labeled a lot too, was like, well, you only fixed the car. You didn't sell, you know, the other work that needed to be done on it. They forget that oftentimes that when that car is brought to you, it's a, it's a do or die for that car, right? If the customer can't get that issue resolved, they're not fixing their brakes. They're not fixing their struts. You know, if they've already, we know what it's like if they've already thrown a bunch of money at it somewhere else and it's not resolved, they don't have the budget to do all the other maintenance repairs that they would, you know, a shop would tell you, you should be selling until they know, right? And then that's the thing. If you build them properly for, for the die egg and the tech's expertise, there's not a whole lot of money left over to fix the, you know, tie rod end that's loose or something like that. I just, that, that part drove me nuts too, cause it's, it goes back to like we

54:15 were talking, the better you become, the less hours you produce. And, uh, and that was, that was that it was. It, we, it was me and the store owner or the store manager, the one that was dispatching all the work and stuff there at that AAA, just if you can't figure out this, we're not paying you die egg. And I was like, then I'm not touching it because it was a noise concern. I already test drove it four times. I had a service advisor ride with me. We couldn't even duplicate the noise and he wanted me to just start taking apart breaks and all this other stuff to find the noise. I was like, unless I'm getting paid, I'm not going to do it. So we argued back and forth, back and forth. And so he got the regional manager to come in and talk to me. And the regional manager is like, you work for AAA, not brand and deals automotive. And I was like, well, let's see how this works. And I was like, see ya and quit that day and took jar head diagnostics full time the very next day and started mobile diagnostics and programming as well.

55:20 So for you, man, good for you. It's, you know, that's the kind of, those are the kind of, you know, examples and stories that make me really proud to be in this industry, right? Because I think that people have known me a long time know that I've said for years, we need to put our foot down and, and stand up for what we're, what we believe in and what we're worth. And stories like that make me always just smile because that's, you know, they can't, if everybody does it, if everybody stood up tomorrow and said, no, it's not happening that way anymore. Today's a new day. We all start different. We could have turned this mother around and you know, years ago, but it's, it's that, it's that dog eat dog attitude that goes back to it. It's like, oh, all of a sudden they'll find that, you know, weak moral guy over in the corner and they'd be like, we've got a mutiny on our hands here. Like, uh, how do you want some extra work? And they're like, he's like, oh yeah, for sure. Right. And he'll turn his back on everybody. So there used to be a thing around here called parking lot justice. And, uh, you know, that was the old say that we used to take guys like you out back and, you know, beat you with a fucking flashlight and a phone book. But I mean, that's, you know,

56:35 and the Marine Corps, we, we called it tree line.

56:37 We take you to the tree line and get the shit out of you in the tree line. So, and I'm not trying to say that we should have like, you know, crazy teamster type, you know, uh, organizations, but I mean, there's always one tech that ruins making change in a shot. There's always one. And it, it, it was back to that, you know, incentivize, Hey, right. We'll look after you really good if you just don't mind. So, so you started with the mobile, the program in the diag and then burning the candle at both ends. Well, the sounds of it rates with the jar head and then the, the, well, I don't mean to say the jar head. I mean, like the, the accessories and the tooling and then still going out

57:22 and diag and repair on cars mobile. Yeah. So there's no repairs, just diag and programming, um, started getting into a little bit of locksmith, but I didn't hit that like super heavy. I did that for about a year and a half, give or take a little bit. And I mean, I had a pretty good clientele built up. The tooling got to the point where I, I needed to hire an employee just to take care of the tooling. Wow. But I didn't really feel we, we put a small building out of my house and I completely transformed it into like a good workspace, it was climate control, nice area, but no bathroom. So they would had to go in my house, use the bathroom and all that sort of stuff. So we leased a very small warehouse. Um, and I, and my vision for that warehouse was to do all the tooling and the, and all that sort of stuff. And then every once in a while you'd get those, like the cars that are just whooping your ass and sometimes you can't do it mobile because it would be, you know, it's a several hour endeavor. And so I was like, you know, I'll just have whenever that that's happening, I'll just have the shops bring them to me. It just, and I can mess with them there. And I, let's see, I leased that I moved into that warehouse in July of. 2021. Um, and within three months, I started having the clients realize that their cars were getting brought to me more and more. So then I just started having clients just show up for me to do everything to their car. And so that's kind of where small town started was because it's in the shop wasn't even meant to be a shop. It was more or less just for the tooling and for me to park my mobile van. And if I needed to some downtime to figure out a vehicle or whatever, but one thing led to another and, and the shop started coming about. I was still pretty heavy a mobile and I didn't want, I guess, animosity, um, from shops being like, wait, you're taking it where? Yeah, they don't. So that's where, yeah. Yeah. And so that's why I changed the name completely for the shop to small town automotive technologies was just so that way, if a customer was to come to me and then they went back to a shop that I'm servicing mobile, I didn't want them to be like, you took it to jar head without me type thing. So that's where the shop started and kind of the same thing with, with one, with the way jar head and the tooling went, it was just one thing led to another. And it was kind of more work than I could justify doing anything else. And so, well, maybe February of 2022, I just, I stopped all mobile unless it was for a quick programming at a very local shop. It was, we just stopped all mobile and now it's just the shop as far as repairs go and stuff. Yeah. We still, I still, uh, work with a lot of the shops I was working with before, but they just bring the vehicles to me if they need me to die agate or, or program it or whatever they bring it to me, unless it's an easy program and, and I'm only out of my shop for like 30 or 40 minutes, it all comes to me now.

01:00:56 So was that, did you have like how, cause I've always wondered about that, right? When, when you see the guys and they make that step where they go from being a mobile to the, to kind of a brick and mortar, do you got, do you get a lot of kickback from, from your people?

01:01:15 Like, do they feel like they've been, you've, you know, what's the word I'm thinking of that you poached their customers or a couple of shops? Yes. Some of them didn't really care because there's some of them that kind of have my thought process of if you stand out in front of your shop and you just watch the cars drive by, you cannot service no matter what you try and do, you cannot service all those vehicles. So some of them realize that and would actually send me customers at the time, like when I was like, okay, we're going to do the shop. I didn't care what cars came in. Now I'm kind of a little bit more picky on what we get, but at the time it was like, yeah, if they want to send me a shitty car, just, just, you know, I'll take it. And so we, we got some where they didn't really care so much, but then I had some where they just completely, you know, cut ties with me, which, you know, I understand it's, it's a business and they made their business choice, just like I made my business choice, but I'm still, if they were to call me, it doesn't matter what shop, if they were to call me with questions or needing advice or to go over there and help them, I'll, I'll go over and assist anybody. I'm still like that. And so it, I had some, yes. And then I had some that didn't really mind.

01:02:37 Yeah.

01:02:38 Do you think we've kind of heard that argument before, or I don't know if it's an argument so much as an opinion. Do you think that the mobile people are kind of holding up the shops that maybe should have, you know, fallen onto the wayside and not survive the change? Do you think that?

01:02:58 100%. Yeah. 100%. There was, there was several shops. Well, I won't say several, um, I service probably about 30 to 40 shops, um, unless, but, but it wasn't like in every single day I was at all 30 or 40, but total it was probably 30 to 40 shops. And I had two or three that if a car came in with a check engine light, they would just automatically sell the testing and have me go in and do the testing for it. It could be the simplest thing, but they didn't even want to touch it. It was like, Oh, the check engine lights on. I can't, I can't do that.

01:03:38 So it was, I would just go in and do it. So yeah, there was plenty of shops that are held up by some of them. So, and you think that we're, do you think we're hurting the industry by doing that by, or do you think it's just a necessary service that has to be out there? Like, and we're never going to, cause that's, I think that's what I, I see is that the consumer is just not educated enough, the difference, right? And I don't think that they think a garage is a garage is a garage. And I think that no matter what we're always going to need, you know, specialized people that either go there and do it, or it gets sublet and it comes off site and gets done. Cause I just think that there's, especially now with everything becoming so specialized and whatnot, you know, the customer just wants it fixed and they just expect to pay and I don't, I don't fault the guys that are mobile that are going to someplace and helping a shop with a, with a problem vehicle at all. I mean, there's a, there's a need for it. You know, they have a right to feed their family. They have a right to earn a living. There's, you know, do I like it? Does it make me kind of shake my head when you hear about, well, they showed up and it was a fuse was missing, you know, stuff like that, like it makes you wonder like, okay, how much more training and standardization do we need in the industry before that doesn't happen?

01:05:05 But I mean, you know, is there ever, I couldn't even tell you how many invoices I filled out saying that I repaired an open in a circuit and that was literally putting a fuse back in or whatever and, and it kind of sucks in an aspect of I'm there to do my job. And so you don't necessarily want to give them too much information because in one hand you're trying to raise the industry, but in the other hand, I have my family to feed too, so you don't try and say, I did X, Y, Z, make sure you check XYZ because the next thing you know, I would have been out of business because I would have helped everybody take care, take over my job. Yeah. But I think that there's always going to be a need for a mobile person. And the reason I say that is you could have an excellent shop that has top tier technicians in it from A to Z and they can do anything, but there's always going to be that problem car where you need somebody else's point of view to just come in because you could have racked your brain over that car for three weeks and they just come in and be like, well, let's check XYZ. And you're like, holy shit. I didn't even think about checking that.

01:06:24 It's still my shop with me, right? We always do. We just, and we're all pretty good. We don't look at it and like nobody gets upset or it's just, just a new, a new, fresh outlook, a new set of eyes on it. Right. It's sometimes at all it takes. And I mean, you know, especially when you're chasing intermittens or stuff like that, right. Or I suck at sound diagnostic cause I'm losing a lot of my hearing. And you know, it's, it's one of them things where I always kind of had that attitude is just like, well, there's nothing to lose. There's nothing falling off. The thing is safe. Just drive it. Right. And, and that's not the attitude that when the customer is concerned that they want to hear. So it's that as a weak point for me is, is that, and it's mostly an attitude thing. And we don't have a set of chassis here. So it's like, you know, it, it makes it tough and, uh, you know, the shop needs to buy a set, but you know, I'm not going to buy a set. I, I've bought enough tooling for, you know, the whole shop to use that I'm going to draw my line on the sand on a set of chassis here. So we don't get a ton of it, but it is, it is frustrating for me because I don't hear a lot of the things that the customers hear. I'm, I got frequency irregularities and what I hear anymore. So it's, it's tough sometimes.

01:07:40 Yeah. Which, you know, the aspect of the shop should supply like the way I run my shop. I've got two techs and the way I run it is I don't require them to have anything specialized at, at right now, we're not big enough to where I can say, yeah, I'll buy all your hand tools. So I require them just to have your basic stuff to just turn wrenches. Um, any specialized tools, any diagnostic equipment, I don't require any of that. And the reason I don't is because that's not, I feel like that's the owner's responsibility is to cover all that. Because why the hell does a technician need to spend $200 on a timing set to time a GM motor or whatever, and they're going to do it once every two years. Why would they need to pay that? That's, that should be on me. Um, so that's, that's how I run mine.

01:08:40 You know, I have chassis years, but I just bought the Amazon ones because yeah, I'll touch you doubt, but. Yeah, no, I, I, I agree. That's, I think how it should be, you know, some guys are tool addicts. I think a large percentage of your customer base may be, you know, are, are tool addicts, right? They like what you guys create and what they, and what you build. And I think that that's, you know, we need that, but it, I'm, you know, I want to spend less on tooling every year now at this point, Mark, or not more. So it's, uh,

01:09:14 yeah. And my, my, my lead tech, whenever he started, he had his own Zeus. And whenever it came down time for update, he was contemplating training on the Zeus plus or whatever. And so him and I, we kind of sit down and we had a discussion on what's the best option for the shop. And whenever we figured out what the best option for the shop was, I countered him with, if you want to do X, Y, Z. That's fine. That's fine. But I'm going to cover that. So you don't need to be out of pocket, any extra money. I know it's your tool and I know that tomorrow I could do this and then tomorrow you quit and I'm out that money, but that's, you know, it is what it is. So yes, he has his own Zeus, but a lot of the, the, the burden of it is on me and not on him financially for it. So. And, you know, he was very grateful for it. But kind of back to the same thing. It's not his responsibility. I am charging X, Y, Z for a testing. He's not getting paid X, Y, Z because we're hourly here. So he, whether he does the testing or not, he's still getting paid the same. Whereas I'm charging appropriately for my testing. So it shouldn't be on him to buy the testing equipment. So.

01:10:38 So are you guys straight hourly or do you have a hybrid plan or? Like you see, I don't think you necessarily are a proponent of flat rate by itself, by the sounds of it after talking to you for the last little bit now.

01:10:54 What do you think? I mean, we're, we're hourly only right now, mainly because we're, the shop's coming up on two years old because we started towards the end of 2021. And so we're coming up on two years old, but it's still a fairly new show. And so we'll have days where we don't really have a high car count or whatever. And so I know for me, if I was flat rate at a shop that I'm, that I have right now, I'd be kind of pissed off because there'd be some weeks where I'm not turning really good hours. And so we're hourly only right now. As things pick up and we get a little bit more going on and that sort of stuff, I plan on doing some sort of hybrid, not flat rate. I S I still feel like everybody needs to always go home with a living wage at the end of the day. And if they shouldn't have to sacrifice, if I didn't do my marketing properly or what have you. So, but eventually I want to try and add in some sort of bonus structure of some sort. I don't know how I'm going to do it yet, but just to kind of make them have a little bit more skin in the game to want to produce more, if that makes sense.

01:12:18 Oh, it totally makes sense. It's one of those things that when I started to hang around in the changing the industry and ASOG when I was in there, I'm starting to see more examples of how it can work. Because I used to say, and I still say it, I don't think I could trust an independent shop to run efficiently enough and run from a culture standpoint well enough that I would work flat rate in one. I think that there's too many times where they would want to discount to sell jobs and then I don't get paid when you discount. I get paid a little bit, but I don't maybe get paid what I'm supposed to get. And as I see more and more owners talk about how they show you that how it works. Yeah, it can work. But I think that most, if I was going to go start a shop tomorrow, I would start from just on hourly and work up just like you're doing to where we're getting more car count. We can kind of qualify our customers a little better. You know, charge a really good rate, you know, pay a really good rate to our staff and then see them have some kind of incentivized bonus. But you know, we know up here, especially how much it's seasonal up here that you know, like in January, you're not making any money because nobody has any money after Christmas. So, you know, you're going to make money in October and November and December for snow tire season. And then January when everybody's credit card is maxed out from Christmas, you're going to starve January, February, March is going to pick up again when the first early birds come in to get their snow tires taken back off and you can get a little bit of upsell. But you know, you've got that dry run between that and AC season. And then that's it. You know, you're waiting again until snow tire season happens in the fall when people send their kids off to, you know, university, college, whatever. There's no money in September to make. No, you know, the money gets made when they wind up somewhere with mom and dad's car and it breaks down. But in terms of them coming in and going, oh, like I, you know, and selling them a $2,000 worth of preventative maintenance. No, they don't have the money for that. So it's I would I'd be I'd be hourly to start tomorrow. I mean, I'm hourly the way I'm paid now. No incentivized. Nothing. I'm just hourly. I show up, I fix the stuff that needs to be fixed and I get paid. And that's it. That's I work.

01:14:52 But well, so whenever I first started the shop, I was doing pretty much everything. I had my brother helping me up front a little bit, but I'd say 90% of everything just rested on my shoulders. And so I hired a tech and then I actually and then I ended up hiring two techs. They're both hourly. And I learned this the hard way is you have to watch out who you hire to work hourly because they will 100% take advantage of it because for them, neither one of them wanted strictly hourly, but they wanted a like a guarantee. And so I was fine with that because either way I'm paying the money out. Right. So either way, guarantee or hourly don't matter. But they 100% like lived off of the guarantee. Two hour lunches, coming in late every day, wanting to leave early. And so the production was horrible to the point. I didn't catch it soon enough because I was still very new at the ownership role of a shop and stuff. So I didn't catch it soon enough to the point where the doors almost got shut because I didn't catch it fast enough. And especially being new, my capital and bankroll and stuff, it wasn't a whole lot. Like I was on a shoestring budget. And so yeah, that's one thing is you have to make sure that you have the correct people that's wanting to do it, that is willing to produce on hourly.

01:16:35 So yeah.

01:16:36 And it's a slippery slope there, right? Because I mean, so much of it can come down to if you just don't have the work for two days of the week, it can set your whole pace where you never really get into that overdrive type state, right? Where you're like, oh, all of a sudden we got all this work and let's pump it out. Right. You kind of had two days where a lot of not slow and then it's hard to kick back in. Whereas you talk to the dealer guys and it's like, man, they can go from one to 10 with a flick of a switch just because if that works there, then you're just humping. But the hourly guys, I've seen both sides and it's, I get to it when I get to it. You know, it's no big deal.

01:17:22 My tech that I have now, he's very steady. His performance is, I can count on it. But there's been times where it's been like that where, because I'm still riding that new business roller coaster and where we were like twiddling our thumbs for the first, like it was probably about three weeks ago or four weeks ago, we literally twiddled our thumbs for Monday and Tuesday. We were caught up on all of our work and there was absolutely nothing for us to do. I'm sitting there getting nervous. It's like, oh shit, like how am I going to do payroll this week? Just because it was, you know, we had nothing coming in. And then towards the Wednesday, maybe around 11 o'clock Wednesday, we got some cars coming in. And it was that thing that you just said, it was, he's like, man, I've just been relaxing all week. How am I, like I'm trying to get kicked back into overdrive. And so it took a lot of pushing. It's like, look, we've got to, like, you've got to get these cars done. Like there's no questions about it. We're getting these cars done.

01:18:28 Yeah. But I mean, hats off to you because like when Monday and Tuesday, when it's not twiddling the thumbs, you didn't send them home. I mean, I even in straight time shops I've worked at where in January, you know, you'd go out and shovel the snow out of the parking lot. I mean, it was a big parking lot, but you'd go out there and shovel for five hours. Because I mean, they're paying you pretty good wage to shovel. And but you'd come in and then the next day it's like, oh, it's another day with nothing on the appointments. Who wants to go home? And I always found for me, it was really hard to be there and not have anything to do. So I was, I nominated myself a lot to go home. And in the summertime, like if I can get away and it's like, you know, because I'm pretty lucky I'm Lake Ontario is two blocks from the house and there's a lot of lakes. So it's like, and I love to fish. So it's like, if I can, you know, if it's a nice, beautiful day and it's there's not a whole lot on schedule and they're like, do you want to go? I'm like, do I? Heck yeah, I want to go like, get out of my way. Let's fire that Jeep up. So I mean, I commend you guys that don't send your guys home because it's, you know, there's that there's that argument. Well, listen, you know, make them do this and make them paint the walls and make them pressure wash, you know, the bathroom and all that. And that's all jobs that have to get done. And yes, if they want to do them, they should. But I can remember way early in my career, we had like a week, I was working at a truck shop and I was on night shift and we spent four nights pulling everything away from the walls, pressure washing the walls and then painting them. And I mean, it was like, it didn't look any different when it was done than when we'd started, you know, it's just, but we did it and it was something that the boss wanted done and we got it done. That was tough. But I mean, at the same time, they're paying me very good to paint a wall. So, you know, it was, I appreciate now. I didn't always understand it, but I appreciate it when they give me something to do to keep me working.

01:20:33 So yeah, I mean, so like whenever a few weeks ago, whatever, whenever that that those couple days were, don't get me wrong. Like he wasn't just standing there playing on his phone. We made sure the shop got cleaned up and stuff. But I'm also very big on training and that sort of stuff. So we pulled in a couple of vehicles that we had sitting because like we were waiting on parts on a couple of vehicles that we just couldn't get in and that sort of stuff. So we pulled those in just to play with the oscilloscope and get him some more hands on with that stuff to make them more comfortable with it. So we did training just to make sure that there was stuff to do.

01:21:14 So, and you know what? Honestly, Brendan, that is such a way better way to utilize that slack time than to just to make the work, right? Because I mean, it's, you know, we always talk about there's, you know, there's never enough time for training or there's never enough, there's never enough money for training. You're already paying the guys. They're already there, you know. Not every shop is going to have a Brendan that's got that wealth of, you know, expertise and knowledge on how to train them on that kind of stuff, right? Some guys work with a boss that wouldn't be able to hook us a oscilloscope up. But I mean, I think that is so cool that, you know, shops will do that and see the value in it, right? It's an investment in time. Like you might as well. It's way cheaper still to pay them how many hours for Brendan to pull a car in and go through an ignition trace than it is to pack them up, shut the shop down, send them to a course, you know, and pay them. You might as well do it while you've got them there, right? Like, fantastic. Love that. So more people need to think about that, right? So.

01:22:20 I mean, especially like how you said, if you're just sitting there twiddling your thumbs, idle hands become idle minds and sometimes idle minds aren't necessarily the best. And so if you can keep them, keep people engaged with training or whatever, it's going to be better all around for you.

01:22:40 So not only that is in my opinion, it was just simple stuff that we were testing, but now it's less likely that I have to go out there and do this sort of testing. So now I can stay back and do more ownership stuff, if that makes sense. No, totally does. Totally does. I mean, that's what it's about, right? It's to you. It seems like it's something that's rudimentary. You've done it a thousand times, right? This is how you do a relative repression test. This is what it's supposed to look like, all that kind of stuff. For them, they're certainly probably not as proficient with it. For some of them, maybe it's their first time that they see that or they've seen it in video and all of a sudden to see it in real life on a real car. Light bulb moment, right? Like, when you mention idle hands, that's why for me, when there is no work and nobody's got really a contingency plan for me, it's always, I learned very on it's best for my mental health to just get out, just write the day off, go fish, go do whatever. Because it's way better than, because you know what it's like at the dealership when it's slow. Everybody kind of parks at one place to a box and drinks coffee and starts to grumble. And you can get in that same head space even when there's nobody else to grumble too. And it's still a bad spot to be. They call me jaded, but I mean really it's a situation of, I just, I had to learn a long time ago that the limits that I put on what I can do is all in my own head. Nobody's ever, have people held me back? Not really held me back, but they've put up more obstacles than they ever really had a right to. But it's, when I decided that it was over for me, I decided it was over long before it was ever over. You know what I mean? Because it was just like, I checked out, I became disgruntled instead of modeled employee. And then it's just a matter of time at that point. And that's, I appreciate more people that recognize that and cut it off. Which like to your point on that one, and this one might cause a stir fire in people. What's your thoughts on a two weeks notice? Of termination or like me giving one? You giving one.

01:25:16 So I have given them? Or working one.

01:25:22 That's a funny thing when that topic came up, right? Because it's like, here's how I've seen it in the couple of times that I've done it. Is that you give that, but then they normally, you don't last the two weeks because either they start to, well, I can't really give them that big job because like he could be gone or he might sabotage it. And this is not me personally, but this is, you know, things I've heard. Or they start to feed you the absolute, they're just trying to make you quit. Right? Because that's the thing, right? Up here, you know, termination gets severance, you know, quitting. So yes, you've given your two weeks notice, you try to work it through. But normally by the time then it's, and I worked at one place and it was like, as soon as I gave my two weeks, the acting foreman, he just came to work every day with like, pretty much, I think he wanted a fist fight. And he would just try to instigate whatever he could and little, you know, they'll walk around and it's, it's one thing to joke, but it's another to start taking pot shots of people. Right? Or, you know, and I've seen some guys in this industry, when they give their notice, the one thing I tell them is don't tell them where you're going. Now in small towns, the word gets out, right? The tool guy comes in and he says, Hey, congratulations. I heard you're going over here, blah, blah, blah. Or, you know, we'll have your box. Well, then immediately I have seen not personally, but I have seen other people that I've talked to that immediately that shop that you're leaving tries to sabotage that tech where they're going. And like, and I get it, you know, it's, it's a, there's a shortage and, you know, we're, we're all fighting for talent, but to do that, there is not much more of a dick move you can do in this industry than that. Like, you know, I don't think, I think it's the professional thing as an employee to do is to give you two weeks and work them through, but I haven't seen too many guys finish your two weeks. So I didn't, I was like, I've always, I tend to give them the notice on either the Friday or the Monday morning because I normally have to think about it or by the Friday I'm fed up. And they go, okay, so you work 10 more days. Normally by that second week, by Tuesday or Wednesday, they're like, you know, you don't need to come in the next two days, you know, and it's, and I had the last one, I quit, I had three weeks left in my two weeks and it was 30 below. I was on a service call for a tractor trailer that had pulled away, left the glad hands hooked up to the trailer, ripped the airline fittings off. Instead of having it towed to the shop, they wanted that fixed in the yard. Everything that I touched was so cold and so broken. It just kept cracking and breaking and fall apart. And I called the night manager for, cause we were, I was on night shift and I said, I've got three days left. I quit effectively now. And I came back, I parked the service truck and I changed into my street clothes and I went home. And the next day I had my toolbox towed out there. Cause it was, it was, I wasn't supposed to be doing that kind of service call work and it was cold and the things should have been towed, but they're like, well, we can do the service call cheaper than if we tow it over to you guys. And that was just like, you know what? I've got limits. I don't mind working on the side of the road. I've done lots of service calls in minus 30. I've, you know, done all kinds of stuff, but it was just that night is like, no, you know what? I know what you guys are doing and you're trying to make me and congratulations, you win. I'm done. And it was only two more days. It didn't matter. Right. And you know, it's what I take pleasure in is when you see, when you leave a facility, how do I say this the right way? And you see them struggle with you gone. You know what I mean? Like it's whether it's in the, in the, in the text that you leave behind, if they're friendships, if they call you and they, and they, they need help or, and I never not help, but I take, pride's not the right word, but it kind of is. It makes me feel better that I made the right decision because, you know, I'm showing them that, yeah, okay. I'm, you know, I'm not perfect, but you know, somebody else is valuing me and I've left a hole. And I think that that's what, you know, whether you give them any notice at all, take pride in that, take pride in the fact that, you know, if you are the worker bee and they suffer with you gone or there's a lot, whatever suffer is not the right word, but if you, if they struggle a little bit more because you're gone, maybe that's how they learn to appreciate the next guy that comes in and takes your spot. I think that that's all we can really do. And that's, that's why I've always felt that you got to stand up for yourself in this industry. You really do. I mean, anytime, any job I ever left, the next job was a better job for me. It's the way I've always seen it now. And even when I left the dealership way back when, when I left the dealer, three really good friends of mine, but we all kind of did the same kind of die electrical. They were not long after I left. They had, they had had enough and they left and they've all gone on to much better things. And, you know, I, did they ever say, Oh, well, Jeff's the reason, you know, he gave me the courage. No, they didn't say that. But if I inspired them to value themselves, to go find a better spot, then that's, that's, that's a big contribution. It really is, you know, you got to show people in this industry that you're willing to work. You got to show them that you're willing to learn. And you have to show them that you're not as replaceable as we all were probably maybe 40, 50 years ago. We have to, and I hate the shortage for the technicians, for the businesses out there. I see them struggling. I hate it. It sucks. It really does. But I'm, I am an advocate for techs first. And you know, if it's finally starting to shift the other way, where some of us are really starting to be valued, we've got to, we've got to, we've got to take advantage of that.

01:31:56 Well, it's here, you know, so. Yeah. And like for me, as far as like business sense is what I do is probably not the best business sense whenever you look at it. But whenever I come from my career, how I was treated as a tech and everything, and how I would have wanted to be treated as a tech, that's why I treat my guys the way that I do is because I want them to know I want them here. And I am super appreciative of them. They're not just a number. They're not just, you know, make me money so that way I can go do XYZ. It's they're here because I really truly appreciate everything they do. So I spend more money on tools and XYZ. And like this past Friday, we did steak lunch for everybody. Like I grilled steaks for everybody. And it's like, just my way of trying to give back is like, look, I truly appreciate you guys. And how you say is like, a lot of times you go to a shop and they don't treat you like that at all. And that's like, so the reason I was asking about the two weeks is because I'm kind of hit or miss on my thoughts on the two week notice. I truly am because sometimes you turn in the two weeks notice and they will literally bend over backwards to do anything that they can to keep you up, whether that's because they feel like they're going to be short staffed or because you were a good employee, but sometimes they'll bend over backwards. But then you get that flip side where it's they want to try and do anything they can to make your life miserable for two weeks. And so if the times that I've turned in my notice, if I felt like it was going to be one of the ones where they just make my life miserable, I usually don't finish the notice. I'll be usually,

01:33:49 if I get that feeling right away, that's I'm just like, okay, I'm done. Like we don't need a work of notice. Yeah. Yeah. Like when I left the dealer in Ottawa, the dealer that I've been the longest time, when I walked in that morning and there was time cut from my time from my hours the day before and when I asked it why, and he gave the bullshit reason for why, I didn't tell him that was my last day. It was a Friday before a long weekend. And it was so it was 8 15 in the morning. I went out and shut my toolbox. I had two bays with Dyag sitting there apart. I had three more booked in outside and I went home. And I came back in Tuesday morning and he kind of looked at me and the two cars that were in the bay were down the shop still trying to figure out what was wrong. And I'd had an offer and I had done the interview for the offer at the other dealership, but I hadn't agreed. And when he did that to me, I literally, as I was walking out the door at that dealer, I was calling the next dealer to say, I'm going to take that offer. And it turned out that that dealer job that I took was not a wise move. It was a lot of promises that were not upheld, which is fine. I'm used to that. So that's the one time that I really didn't give the notice and didn't work anything after that. Because I felt I was justified in leaving. You were trying to, I look at it as theft, right? If I perform a service and you don't pay me for it, that's theft. That's theft of service. So I didn't feel like I had to be the professional at that point and give him notice. I came back on the Tuesday morning and I told him that was my final day and I would be in tomorrow to get my toolbox. And then I moved the toolbox and packed up my life in Ottawa, moved back home here to Kingston and life went on. And it was at that dealer that then started an effect of people starting to be fed up. Because this was a relatively new manager and him and I, we could work together, but he'd been promoted from a foreman role to a manager role. And he all of a sudden had a, he became a really big hypocrite. And I was like, no, man, you and I are not going to jive. And it wasn't like I was a prima donna or a princess. This is the thing that drives me nuts when you see some owners and they say, oh, they're just prima donnas. Okay. Does that solve anything to say that? No, it doesn't. There's already so many issues at hand by then when you decide that they're that, and they've decided whatever they've decided about you, it's already over. The marriage is done. It's just time to move on. And yeah, this calling each other names or labeling was solving, not a darn thing. So you just, you go to the resume file and you pull another one out and you hire somebody that you know nothing about and you get them back in and you just repeat the cycle. At some point in this industry, that's got to stop. And I think that, you know, with owners like yourself that get it and have been through the druthers, I think we can start to shift that. What scares me, Brent, is when you talk about absentee owners, right? Because I see this trend coming along of, you know, we'll touch on this, of they just have a say a coaching group or whatever and they go, listen, you know, just make them work as cheap as possible, make them sell as much as possible, make everything incentivized and don't be there. Let your people do what their job is, which I agree you should be. A micromanager is a waste of effort. It doesn't do anything positive. But we have them where they say, oh, you know, like there's an older tech over there. He's got some, you know, body aches and pains and, you know, sore shoulders, sore knees, sore backs, sore necks, sore hands, whatever. It's all there. Sore feet. And he's starting to slow down. Now, he's a really sharp guy. You know, we pay him a lot per hour. And, you know, he's selling, you know, he's running 50, 45. You know, some weeks he only hit 35, but we laid him up heavy on Dyag that week. But we've got a guy that, you know, is 10 years younger. He's been working with him for a few years now. And he's not, he's killing it. Like he can do everything that that tech does. Let's get rid of that old senior tech. That's what scares me. I'll be 48 this fall and I don't work in an incentivized plan, but I, every month I heard a little more and I'm sure every year I get a little slower, right? It just, it's the way it goes. And that scares me in this industry. Cause I think what we saw kind of happen with the flat rate master is I think we're going to see that really happen a lot more in the very near future. If the coaching trends seem to go in that direction. And it's, Dutch and I had a quick conversation yesterday and we'll pick it up on it at some point and discuss it. I think a lot of techs have to realize that, you know, it is dog eat dog and you have to plan for the lean times and you have to plan for when you're physically can't do it anymore or emotionally, you just can't go to work and keep fighting the battle. You have to have something to fall back on. And, you know, it's just, you know, I can't say it any more than that. You know, whatever it might be, you got to, whether it's a YouTube channel, whether it's, you know, like you making tooling training, you know, you have to have something because,

01:40:05 you know, there will always be- Not that you're going to be that, that you're going to be that 50 year old guy delivering parts. And you're like, well, what'd you do for your career? I was a tech. And then now they're making $12 an hour delivering parts because that's all they can physically do anymore. Yeah.

01:40:19 I joke that I tell people all the time when I'm done, I'm going to go work the parts counter at Canadian Tire up here. And I joke because I say there's about five of them around here. So I could work them from probably, you know, November when fishing gets too cold to go to May. By then I'll probably have smart mouthed enough of the customers that they'll can me. I'll have the summer off to go fishing and then I'll go to another store in the fall again. You know, because I'll be that guy that like when the customer comes in and wants to buy something and you know, it's not going to fix that. I'll be like, oh, you ain't going to need that. You know,

01:40:57 because how can I not, right? It's just how I'm weird. And that's my little fun way of getting it through, you know, getting through the day. But I can tell you from experience, it is fun to do that. Yeah. Right before I got out of the Marine Corps, I was like, I don't know what I'm going to do. And I told you earlier that, you know, I worked at AutoZone for a while. Well, I started AutoZone whenever I was in the Marine Corps, just so that way I could say, I like, I got a job and they can transfer me from this one to the one close to my house or whatever. So whenever I worked there in the Marine Corps, I didn't have to have the job. It was just to set me up. So I just didn't care. It was like customer come in and they want XYZ. And I'm just like, I don't know about that one. And you know, just, I just didn't put up with it. It's very fun whenever you don't have to worry about that piece of employment.

01:41:57 So it's either going to be, I'm going to be delivering parts or selling parts. That's what the way I think, right? I mean, the selling parts probably won't do well because I'll probably interject too much of my own opinion on what they want to buy or the first time that they buy something and then send it back to me, right? I'm going to just be like, oh, you're that kind of, you know, shop, are you? But whereas if I just deliver them, I can kind of walk in and look at what they're doing, say hello, walk out. I'll probably be sent back over there another hour later with another part, you know, for a different car. And I could see myself doing that to just finish out, but it scares me. It really does. It really concerns me when I think of some of the older techs I know that aren't owners. What is their contingency plan? You know, I mean, I worked at a dealership where there was two brothers, one had already, he'd already passed on. But when I worked there, he was 63 years old and his brother was two years older than him. And he'd worked there with him and he died working right on the shop floor at a heart attack. And you know, he was, he was a tech that he could get the work done, but he, he couldn't lift hardly anything at all. You know, he could do, he could do an old Chrysler 2.2 head gasket, but he couldn't do the neon one because the timing was, he just didn't want to learn it. Stuff like that, right? He was just a little bit more than a lube and tire tech, you know? And I look at that and I go, man, I don't want to be that, right? I don't want to be that. And that's just so, I mean, I think about my contingency plan and it changes, but I'm really worried for a lot of us in this industry right now with what I saw with Michael, what he's gone through. And you know, and that's catching a whole lot of heat and hopefully he'll come on and he'll discuss it. If he doesn't, it's cool. But I see how some of the people immediately jumped to a conclusion about that situation. And I go, man, like, did you, have you ever been in those shoes? Right? Have you ever been through what he's been through? Did you ever think that you were so vital to the business that you went to work in? Did you ever feel that comfortable enough to have it pulled away from you like that? There aren't many people that have. Anytime I've ever been fired, I knew I was coming because I was almost looking for it, right? I don't think he was looking for it. And I feel for the guy. I really do, you know, and him and I are not friends. But for him to be able to get the severance package, that tells you that it wasn't a lack of, or like he did something, you know, with malice intent. Because like how you said, I guess, so in Canada, you get a severance if they fire you. So I can speak for my state at least, and I think it's pretty about the same all the way across, is if they fire you, usually you're not required to give a severance. So for him to get a severance, that tells you that they fired him or let him go. But it wasn't because of just you messed up and a will fell off or whatever. So yeah, I don't think it was that at all. And we may never know. And that's fine. It's not our business, right? It's between him and them. But it's just like, I'm sharing his story as much as I can, just as an educational thing, right? Because it's a very poignant thing that's happening. And I think it's a cautionary tale that more people need to pay attention to. And I feel for the guy, I really do. You know, it is because I've been in those shoes. I've been at the dealer where they tell you that, oh, well, you're just not producing enough hours. And that's why we're going to let you go. Like you said, last hired, first fired. You can't produce hours if they won't give you cars, right? So I've seen, and you've seen it, they'll starve techs out, right? They'll starve them out. And I'm sure that's a coaching, you know, probably page four, section C on how to do it. But it isn't right. And, you know, I would like, I wish we could come together in this industry and come up with a plan where when we see guys that are starting to age out and, you know, we need them to fill a role, how we can fill that role with them, still keep them well paid and appreciated. And instead of just saying, well, you're a revenue generator and you fell below a certain line. And, you know, we've got a young person that's going to come in and going to take your spot. I think when you, when it was Matt Fonzo and I were talking, when you think about all that, especially in a dealership, when you think about what they know on your product line, like example, you and Hyundai, Kia, you know, when you have a guy, they can do a nine hour job in four hours. That's an amazing understanding of how that particular product goes together, that all the intricacies, the pattern failures, the shortcomings, that you can drive it no in two seconds. That sounds exactly what it is to just terminate that person because of an attitude problem. I'm sorry, but let's, let's cut the crap. You're going to hire somebody that is going to go through years before, if ever they get to that knowledge of that, and you want to fire them because they are slowing down or because they're starting to voice some concerns that there are legit concerns. Man, I can't get on board with that. I really can't.

01:47:49 So to play devil's advocate with that's like how you're saying, you know, as an industry, figure out what to do with them at, and this is just a devil's advocate statement. It's, you know, how much of it should fall on the shoulders of that person though. Like in an essence of, and like I said, I'm not saying that I'm going to be this person or whatever, but like I'm just looking at it like, okay, I'm a shop owner. Why, why is a shop owner? Do I need to, to figure out what my technician needs to do when I'm, whenever we put them to pasture, so to speak, you know, that as a tech, like you, as a technician, you should already kind of have in your mind, like let's just, because my, my, my lead tech, he's 40, I think he's like 49, but like he broke his foot whenever he was, you know, about four or five years ago, when you're older and you break a bone, it's not like it's bounced right back. So he limps into work every morning, usually about nine o'clock. He's, he's fully, you know, he's good.

01:49:01 He just has to break it in, in the mornings. But, you know, if he was to come to me and like, look, you know, I think that I would fit a good role to do this in the shop. And it made sense then that's, you know, the, the, him as a person is taking a hold of his future. Whereas instead of me trying to say, okay, what can I do with him? If that makes sense. Yeah, it does. And you know, we all used to wax nostalgic about, Oh, wouldn't it be great if, if the service advisors had actually been mechanics, right? And, and, and really knew the car well and could speak to the customer. But let's look at, let's be real, let's look at a lot of us, right? Not from the appearance standpoint, but the way just generally the type of personality that does this customer relations is not a rampant skill that we are, you know, so great at it. Some of us just don't have it. We don't have those soft skills. It is really hard when you, when you do this for a living for so long, to have those soft skills. I can speak to customers. I don't have a problem with it, but I cannot, when they start to come in with that preconceived notion or that attitude of entitlement, or you're just going to rip me off anyway. And they come in there with that. I, I can't, I'm not big enough to be able to look past it and try to win them over. I'm just going to hold the door open for them and put my boot across their butt. That's the way I am. It's just, to me, it's you're disrespecting me. Every brother and sister I have in this industry, when you come in here with that noise. So I can't, I will not enable you by allowing you to treat me like that. It goes against my core as a human being, what I believe, morals and ethics and standards and stuff. I can't, I can't do it. So for me, that's not an option. So I'll probably do doing parts or something like that. But I think you make a good point. It's not on the shoulders of the shop owner to provide them with the same pay that they were always getting, even when the production slows down. That's not what I'm trying to say. I just, when I see

01:51:07 different, you know, Dave and Lucas talk, they bring in. I think you, I think you misunderstood, not like, not an aspect of he's slowing down, so I need to cut his pay, but more of whenever he's done turning wrenches, is it on the shoulders of the owner to be like, okay, I'm going to move him to here. Or would it be on the shoulders of the employee to be like, go to the employer,

01:51:35 like, hey, I'm slowing down. I can't do this, but I think I would fit this good role in your business. I move to that. That's what I'm meaning. If that makes sense. Yeah. I think it's on the owner. I think it's on the employee's responsibility, right? Because and there's where the pride and ego thing kind of come in, because it's like most guys can't admit that they're slowing down because they're slowing down. They want to say that, well, the job used to be this and pay that and it got cut. And that's why I'm not producing as many hours. Reality is, is maybe they're taking more cigarette breaks or they're having to take more days off. They just want to take more days off. They're not, they're not there as many hours in the shop. There's why your production is down. So yes, you should, if you're mature, professional should be able to go to them and say, listen, I'm starting to really feel this. Is there a spot that you can put me? I feel like I could be an asset doing this. I feel like I could really benefit you guys by doing that. If there's nothing there though, right? If you, Brendan, decide, I don't, I just, I don't know what I could do with you, right? I don't have the payroll or I don't have this. I don't really, I kind of handle that responsibility. So it'd be, yes, it'd be nice to, but I couldn't pay you a full wage to do something that was only 30% of my time. Then that tech has to have a backup plan. You know, it's just the reality. And it's, I, going back to what I was trying to say, I have admiration huge for, for owners. Like I've seen Lucas and David both do it and they bring in a financial planner and they sit them down and they explain to these guys, this is what you're making. This is what you should be doing with your money. You need to be buying rental property. You need to be investing in this because this is not a job where, you know, you, you start it when you're 20 and you get your little cubicle and at 65, you, you retire out and they give you a watch and a, and a pension. And this isn't that. So that, that you always built through those traditional kind of jobs, that's not, that's not us. So we have to take it upon ourselves to, to, to look after what we're going to do for the, the last half, the last quarter of our life. You know, it's not on the shop owners to, to provide us with that second career, right? It's just the shop owners responsibility is to pay us well so that we're not struggling to buy tools that the shop utilizes that the tech bought. That's not, you know, making the tech donate X amount of hours every week out of their paycheck to sell work or sell a job or make a customer happy or have to do rework because the cheap part that they put on failed and you can't get, that's none of the tech's problem. It's not it. So the, the owners need to be operating at an absolutely stellar professional level, employing good people, taking care of those people. And then those people, you have to show up and be professional and you have to show up and do what it takes to advance yourself, you know, invest in yourself and have that contingency plan. You have all that. It's an easy, smooth transition, but you know, when I see shops that are making techs, buy tools or making techs do rework, you're not helping the current situation. So it sucks.

01:55:15 You know, and you look at, you, you ask techs, what's your, what's your goal? Like whenever you're done working, what are you going to do? Like, what are you going to do for retirement? I'm going to sell my toolbox and my tools. It's, it's, it's pennies on the dollar. Yeah. Don't you look on Facebook marketplace where you've got a snap on toolbox that's full of tools and they're wanting $8,000 or $9,000 for it. Okay. So now you've just, you've held yourself over for a couple of months, you know,

01:55:47 now what are you going to do for the next 20 years? So, yeah. Yeah. So let me ask you in closing, what's your, what's your end? Well, I don't want to say end because what's, where does, where does Brandon and, and, you know, small town technologies, is that small town? Small town automotive technologies. Small automotive technologies. Where do you see yourself in 10 years with that? And then what's your, what's your contingency plan? Like, do you, do you want to see someone in the family continue it or?

01:56:21 So I'm, I'm a firm believer in building a business that can be sold. And so, and they're and sold for a value, not like pennies on the dollar, but sold for value. So, so that's my, that's the, the contingency, I guess you could say is, is build it to where it can be sold. But my oldest daughter, she's about turn 16. She is just became infatuated with the auto industry over the past probably six to eight months. Wow. To where, I mean, she's in the shop with me working. She enjoys pulling cars in and just doing all that. She's been stuck to my hip whenever I'm up on the counter, pricing stuff and everything. So I think my, as of now, I'm hoping for my contingency is to be a absentee owner to her running the business is what I'm trying to gear it towards. If it works out, it works out. If not, then like I said, the, the, the true contingency, I guess, would be just build it to where it's profitable enough to sell. So that way, you know, I can get some sort of retirement. I need to start building up my retirement because I don't have any right now, but that's within the next couple of years, I'm going to start dumping a lot into retirement and just getting the businesses to where if I'm just done with it, then they can be sold and continue on or have my children take it over. So I'll do it. Oh, go ahead. She's 16, you have what, maybe 10 years? Should be built 20. Yeah. I mean, yeah, mid twenties. I figure she's kind of already insinuated. So her mom and me, we separated whenever she was three and a half. And so she's lived with me primarily since she was four. She goes to her mom's every other weekend and her mom lives about an hour and a half away, but she's kind of already insinuated that whenever she graduates high school, like this is her plans is now she wants to kind of do this with me. So at, you know, early to mid twenties, she could very well be, you know, the general manager of the business. So if she doesn't want to do the shop side, then, you know, we've got Jarhead like with the tooling, because to be honest with you, Jarhead right now is grossing almost as much as the shop is. Wow. And so that, you know, she could step into that because even if she's like, well, I don't want to do automotive, you know, from the social media and just the everything else that goes into it, you know, she could step in and take over that one. And then I've got my youngest daughter, you know, every parent has that dream, you know, their parents take over or their kids take over every thing. So if I've got my other daughter that wants to take over Jarhead and she takes over the shop, then, you know, I'd be happy with that. Good deal.

01:59:28 And then I'll do exactly what they do to live to me. And I'll just live off of them. Exactly. Right. That's your retirement plan. Just build it. Build it. I mean, for the, for the first 18 years I lived off of them. So for my last 18 years, I'll just, yeah, just build a big shed out in the backyard, get one from Home Depot and, you know, we're going to put that out there. And yeah. Oh, Brandon, I appreciate it, man. It's been, I mean, I've been wanting to do this, you and I never really had a chance to have a good long conversation. And this podcast has been, has been awesome to get some of that happening. I mean, I, I, I met you at AST and I didn't really get a chance to talk to you for very long. And it was the first time I didn't realize what Jarhead was, right. In terms of the tooling, I just was like, that was the first time I'd seen a 3D printer up close was, was at AST with you guys there. So I mean, you, you have my respect because you know, you certainly have not taken the easy route. And you know, I, I admire a person that, you know, takes advantage of every minute of the day and you do that. And I think that is just absolutely what we need more of. And you know, we need more guys like you. And girls, we need more guys like you that have been through it. You know, we talk all the time about, you know, what we don't need is more techs becoming shop owners, but what we need is, is the right type of techs becoming shop owners. And you're one of them, man. And I'm proud to have you here. And I'm proud to have you here. And I'm proud to have you here. And I'm proud to