RSR Feeling Stressed Pod

0:00Welcome to Repair Shop Reckoning from Chaos to Control, because too many shops today are running on Chaos. Phone's ringing, technicians frustrated, front counters overwhelmed, owners buried in problems with nobody to call. Kevin Brown has spent over 30 years in the trenches learning how to take that Chaos and turn it into control. Shop owner, operator, consultant, leader, through industry shifts, insurance games, bad hires, great hires, and lessons learned the hard way. This isn't theory, this isn't corporate training fluff, this is real shop experience, unfiltered. On this show Kevin breaks down what actually works, running profitable shops, front counter control, training technicians, negotiating with insurance companies, building systems and make your shop run instead of burn, and the mistakes that quietly bankrupt shop owners every single day. No corporate scripts, no sugar coating, and yeah, somebody might get offended. That's okay, Disney's two doors down, but if you want the truth about this industry, buckle up. This is Repair Shop Reckoning from Chaos

1:04to Control. Let's get started. All right, welcome back to another exciting episode of Repair Shop Reckoning. Today we're going to talk about something that I don't think a lot of people talk about, but it keeps coming up over and over again when I'm talking to clients, stress as a business owner. So I have to like really kind of break this whole thing down for mindsets and everything. I also like this, usually people that are business owners are usually high performers. Statistically, it's guys that the guys in the hall, yeah, we are guys that always have to have something going on. So we worry a lot. I don't want to use the word anxieties because we're not fucking liberal snowflakes on this show, but stress is a number one killer of fricking middle age men. I actually went to Dr. News several years ago when we were talking about blood pressure and stress and everything like that. Obviously, weight is a factor, but he says stress. He said, you're better off having one drink of alcohol to relieve stress. He said, I'm not saying to be coming out of the alcoholic. He says, but stress is an over one silent killer. And having a business,

2:11most people sit here on social media and run their mouth, all these people, their technicians and stuff like that, you know, the owners doing this, the owners doing that. I agree the owners make a lot more money, but the owners are taking the risk. Okay, the owners worry about a lot of stuff that people don't talk about. Like, let's just go down to list of stuff. I worry about like right now, say the shop slow. Okay, how much money do I have in reserves in my head? Okay, I think I can go maybe six weeks, four weeks, whatever, as a business owner of payroll. Okay, then I think to myself, okay, I don't want to fail because I have a bunch of families that are counting on me. You know, I got a bunch of families, you know, between all these companies I have, we're responsible for a lot of people, kids and everything. So that's stress on you. You worry about, you know, paying your bills, not looking like an ass wipe to your vendors. You worry about that. You worry about the customers, you know, what did the so and so get pissed off? I haven't seen them in a while or maybe their cars are disproved, but you worry about that. And there's so much stuff going on as a business owner,

3:16it can literally drive you nuts. It's an emotional roller coaster if you really stop and think about it because I've said this before, when you're really doing good at business and the shops fall, the money is coming in, cars are getting fixed, everything's going great. How do you feel? If somebody says, Hey, are you a business, fuck you have a business owner? I got this shit, make a money, everything's going great, right? Then it's hooked to the, you're literally on your on an emotional roller coaster. All of a sudden it's slow. Like right now, last month at the shop, down in Firmerton, it was slow, slower than normal. And this month is, we have some jobs, you know, I think we have like 26 vehicles there right now, which is that's light for us, right? We're usually in the high 30s, 40s. And you start thinking, Okay, what's going on? Was our pricing not right? Was our pricing too high? Do we make everybody mad? What do we do? Why are we slow? Okay, you always think what, what did we do? When sometimes the only can take care of what's inside the gates, you know, you got to keep the enemy at the gates, as they say, well, there's stuff going on that's,

4:20you know, unforeseen to us that we can't control. You know, the gas prices, regardless of what anybody says, the gas prices are killing us. And just so everybody knows, I'll just say that the president does not control gas prices. Now he can do it by wars and everything else. But reason I say this is like, well, I didn't control gas prices. Donald Trump doesn't control gas prices. Now wars and stuff like that, obviously drive. Yeah, we're not political here. I just want to throw that out there. I don't want to fucking hear it in either side. I'm either side. Okay, yeah. But it's just the fact that matter gas prices are high. Right. And you know, in the motor city here, we are heavily tied to the automotive industry. We have the big three in our backyard. You know, we have a lot of, you know, UAW workers, okay, a lot of these companies around us, you know, they are suppliers to the big three. And most people don't know it. That stuff's really getting slow. Yep. Uh, the big three is getting slow. There's a lot of different things going on right now. In my opinion, they're causing all kinds of mitigating factors or why business is slow.

5:20You could up your marketing. We don't obviously slow it on our market. That would be the dumbest thing you can do. You know, we had storms come through last week. You know, that killed the power for a couple days. We didn't care because I closed Friday and Mondays because the guys are tired. I'm just like, peace out. Well, we'll deal with this shit next week. You know, but we could do stuff like that because it always goes back to our pricing is right. So we have money in our savings accounts. So I came to Thursday. We weren't crazy busy. Everything was kind of done like, you know, what guys were just going to take Friday off at both places. You guys have a four day weekend. Enjoy life, you know, I think there's a lot of things that we'll get into today as far as what's a driver's stress and how do we deal with it? You know, and how do I got on this topic is I was talking to one of my clients. I really like the guy owns two shops and he reminds me a lot of me. He's just always going, going, going and he's, you know, he's like, you know, I got this going on. I got money in the bank. I got this, but I always worried about failing and I'm like, man,

6:20this will be a good topic. You know, being a overachiever and worrying about failure and the stress that having a business is all one. Because you think about it, if everything's going great in the business and you got money coming in and all this stuff in the bank accounts full, you think I'm winning, right? But the minute something happens, it drops out. The money's not coming in, but I'm spending money. We're slow. You know, the guys are doing this. Okay, it's stressful. Okay, and I know these guys are like, yeah, you guys make all the money. You're making 70% on labor and this and that. Whatever. Okay, the bottom line is a business has to have built-in profits on the gross on the front end so we could pay for the stuff on the back end, the benefits, all kinds of different stuff. And, you know, I don't think that a lot of these guys that work in the back, what in order to I expect them to have the mindset of a business owner, the things we deal with on a daily basis as a business owner. Well, in that's where, yeah, the beginning,

7:21you said something of like people, employees say all the time, it must be nice. Oh, like, they start doing the math and like they see what they're paid and they're paid like 20 to 30% of the job and they're like, well, what's that other 70%? Well, that other 70% is this stress of the expenses. It's the, you know, worrying about insurance and all the back end costs and the, you know, there's so many different things that go into that they don't see until they go to start a business. And then they're like, oh, shit, this is much harder than what I thought it was. Oh, the owner is taking on all this stuff that he protected me from. And then some people are just going to always bitch. They're never meant to be business owners. There's only a few select people that are even meant to go start their own thing. I would totally agree with that and the funny thing about that is, uh, you're 100% right because we don't expect these guys to know what we go through on a daily basis, but here, let's put this in perspective. If you're paid to be a technician, service advisor, manager, whatever, and you have to come to the owner because you're being lazy and you're not wanting to do the number one to put stress on the owner right. But number two,

8:22if the owner's doing your job, what about the owner's duties? And I talk to a lot of people, guys, like we're getting really, really super busy with consulting. And I talk to a lot of guys. And people always ask me like, what does all the other shops have problems with? It's a mix bag of dicks, meaning like, okay, you've got people that are making great, have great production and their technicians are killing it and doing great hours every week, but they're not marking up their parts enough. Then I have guys that their parts mark up is perfect, but they're not producing any money. Then I have guys that just don't do it. Neither. I have people that don't write bills. I have guys that I talk to and I say, you know, what happened last week? Man, I was a guy down. I was this. I worked to one, two o'clock, three o'clock in the morning. And I'm back here again at eight or nine the next day. Okay. You guys remember something. When you're an employee of a company, and you go home at five o'clock, you go home at five o'clock, we eat, breathe and sleep our businesses. Okay. If you really think about it, we have no safety net. We're on commission too.

9:27The commission is all the, all the, you know, the loans or if you have them or whatever lines of credit, your name is on the line. You have a personal guarantee. I'll assets guarantee on a lot of stuff for the real estate. The banks aren't stupid. They'll time its five years shit. If you buy a $300,000 building, they want $1.7 million in collateral. So they take your kids, your house, you don't even mean anything that they could possibly go. They'll take it all and sell it and they'll give you the change after they collect their money. Yeah. Okay. And people don't stop to realize how real that is. And if you really stop and think about it, guys, stop and think about companies that over the years, you thought were big ballers and all of a sudden, you know, something changes in the market. Let's think about some businesses that are just getting killed. Staples. Okay. Here's a perfect example. So we've gotten so busy with the accounting matrix accounting now, or metrics accounting. My wife's new company with our consulting clients, she needs their own office. So Lincoln moving out, we took his bedroom. He was using because it has

10:30a bathroom on and everything. We set her up an office there. So I went yesterday, when I left, here I was going to get her as I saw stop and grab a printer and a monitor and a desk at Staples because I like to shop local, even though they're corporate, whatever. I went into Staples and I thought, Mother fucker, this place looks like a bomb went off. And there's like a Amazon line to Amazon, he turns it on like looking around the store and I'm not joking. It's like ghetto. Yeah, it looked terrible. Like dirty. And there's like toast, like inventory not plug. This is the place is locked. Yeah. And I go in the back. There's no desk. There's no chairs. I'm like, wow. So I end up buying a printer. So I leave and I said, they're thinking, man, what's going on? So I just go to work and on the way home, I stop at Best Buy and I go at Best Buy and I'm like, okay, after I bitch to you about the traffic, I think, I'm pictured you're trying to get in that spot. It's horrible. It's horrible. So I'm sitting there looking at Best Buy and I'm like, okay, that place is clean. It's organized. The manager, Jeff is awesome over there. He always,

11:33like, hey, Mr. Brown, what do you need today? I'm like, I need these monitors. But I'm like, blah, blah, blah. He had it all. And I'm like, okay. So I was leaving there and I'm like, shit, I can eat a desk. Nobody has desks. So I, I'm in my side, I'm on a grock. Who sells office furniture? I can go get a raiseable table. They said Farmington. I'm like, fuck, I was just in Farmington. So it'll take me there. So we drive down to Farmington and I buy the desk. You go on that place. That place is recycled. Some recycled office furniture, but they sell new places booming, right? Yeah. And I got a punch line. This whole thing. So we go home and she doesn't know what kind of chairs she wants. We set up the whole office. So it's like 530. I'm like, let's go get a chair and a runner for the chair to put in there. So you can roll on the carpet on the plastic. So I'm like, look in. I'm like, well, Brighton staples or there's Grand Blank's Grand Blank Michigan staples, which it's farther away, but less traffic going that way. I'm going to be there faster. We go in that store. It's blown up. We get a chair. The last one. We get all the

12:36mats are broken chunks. Missed. I'm we find one mat. This finally good. I'm like, I got my cybertruck. I'm like, so Grock, tell me about staples. Staples is swirling the drain. Wow. I'm like, why? Grock. Yeah. Grock is fucking honest. That's an easy. It's swirling the drain. Yeah. And I'm like, why? And they say because Amazon has eaten its launch. Amazon has changed. Amazon is with the times. Amazon has better prices. And staples has taken all of its focus on being an Amazon return center. So it's like literally Grock says this. Staples has become Amazon side piece. He does all Amazon's bitch work. And online, the employees are saying how stupid could the corporate powers to be helping the company that's putting us out of business with returns getting pennies on the dollar. Wow. Wow. That would have been like, best buy,

13:37or not best buy blockbuster lining up Netflix vendor boosts there. And they're in their shop. Right. So my thing is if you're not doing your job, like they're not doing their job, somebody you're doing somebody else's job, they're doing Amazon's job, Amazon's eating their launch. Is that not crazy? That is crazy. I never thought about it. So I walked into the staples. It's a man. I used to love going to staples. I used to love going. I love all their office stuff. Yeah. Absolutely. I love going in there. And yeah, that's sad. So when you're sitting there thinking about businesses, you know, you have to always be working on the business, not working in the business. Like I said, a thousand times. So what you have to do is have standard operating procedures in place. You have to have all the stuff in place so your people do their job so you can work on the business and roll off the times. You should be able to sit in your office as a business owner. Okay. Is my pricing right? Is there is there a retraction in the market? So do I need to do something with my prices? Do I need to do maintenance prices for my oil changes? I could be competitive. If you're always running around with your hair and fire, because you won't take the time to get people to do their job,

14:40it's stress is just unbelievable. You're working into the middle of the night because you're doing other people's jobs during the day. What is it going to do? You're going to have a fucking heart attack and die and then nobody's going to win. And that's what these guys don't understand. How bad the stress really does become on an everyday basis. I mean, let's just think about the problems I ran into today. Let me think about the problems. I was I had a couple appointments this morning, but I'd e-mails, you know, so and so didn't get get paid. You know, like I get to the shop. I look and they got paid. The check out mail they got lost. You know, it got your renewals for your medical. Your insurance is going up. Okay. Then you're figuring about that. It's just non-stop stuff on a daily basis that you just deal with. You don't even think about it. Well, and you think, like from a business owner standpoint, you've got to go, you got to do the hard thing. You've got to be in a certain mindset and all day long, you're getting on controlable things like your rates are going up and stuff like that. And so it's adding to that stress. Like you have already the day stress on you and then you have these other things that are like the surprises. And I know you go, you say,

15:43I hate surprises. You know, you get the surprises in the mail. Yeah, when you become when you become a business owner, you don't like surprises. Yeah, you don't like the mail. Yeah, because I will tell you what it's always seems like always somebody's got their hand out. Yeah, they five hundred to use a hundred out of you that now it's five hundred out of you that everybody's charging. You have to fight. I mean, you got your insurance companies. Think about the time suck. Some of these people put on you as a business. Just trying to defend your bank account. Like for instance, you know, workman's comp audit, workman's comp insurance audit, you're in liability. You're all your audit insurance audits. You know, some of them are hooked to your sales, some of them are hooked to your people. Whatever flavor and church you have. But at the end of the day, your wife has to go or your book, you rest in compile a bunch of information to give the act to the insurance company to stop you from getting a frickin bill. Like, oh, we charged you 40 grand last year. We fucked up. You did better. Now you owe us another five grand. They audit you. They literally audit you and say, oh,

16:44we didn't charge you enough last year. So let's charge you some more this year because you did better than we thought. That's what these insurance audits are. They're just more money. Take a more money out of you. So if you're not playing the game, you know, by their rules and you did better because you are smart business or whatever, it costs you more money. Wow. It's just kind of crazy and all and it's kind of like you go back to the thing where state fire and comes out and says, yo, hey, we have to lower all the labor rates. We pay the shops and tell all the people that are, you know, all the people that are insured by them, hey, we need to raise the rates because, you know, times are tough to get more expensive. The thick cars on the other hand, other side of the mouth are saying, ah, guess what? Labor rates are going down. It's not expensive. It's fixed a car like that's a dumb as shit ever, but they get away with it. But that's shit you have to do is to defend yourself as a business owner. How can you even make an argument that labor rates are going down and everything around it is up. We all see it. You talk about gas lighting. Like, no, you don't see this. Yeah, exactly. And then you run into this situation where, you know, we had a medical insurance increase go up. You sit there and you have to say, okay,

17:46we need to go through the plans. And what I'm trying to depict to you guys is the time suck on a daily basis. You as a business owner say, okay, today I'm going to get up and I'm going to go do this, this, and this. And none of that shit even gets done till the end of the day because you had all the stuff thrown in in front of you. Yeah. You know, my latest one I spent, you know, last night, it was eight o'clock at night. I had to read an NDA that, you know, a company that has some autonomous vehicles, one of the work on, they sent us an NDA. So I go through the NDA and I'm like, okay, I put it, I read it. Then I'm like, okay, then I'm like, what did I miss here? Obviously the venue clause. I'm not going to California. There's a problem. It's going to happen in Michigan blah, blah, blah, blah. So I have to sit there and read it. Thank God for a chat GPT because now I'm like, I don't like this, this, and this, write me an email that, you know, telling, I don't want this to, boom, I don't have to sit there and write emails, you know, yeah. But, you know, I'm sitting there thinking about like stress, you know, as a business owner last night, it was 10 or three. I was working in my office on a program called Protractor for one of our clients, pulling all his financials.

18:48My wife was upstairs at her office working on the bank practice associations and Lincoln calls me, hey, dad, I'm doing quotes for Bill or young, one of the customers for detailing and stuff like that. You know, can you help me with this? What do you think about this? blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And I'm sitting there thinking to myself, you know, if I was an employee of a company, I wouldn't have to do any of this shit. Yeah. And the stress would not be there, right? Yeah. Because if you're a technician nowadays and there's a shortage, okay, you could just, if something happens, you can go get a job somewhere else. What happens as a business owner doesn't do his job, you know, or doesn't run it right? He goes out of business. He loses everything he has. Number one, the shame alone. The shame alone. The shame alone, right? The stress of owing all these people money. If your chances are if your business fails at the magnitude of having a repair shop, you're going to have a lot of money into that whole situation. You're going to have to go bankrupt, or you're going to have to go get a job being a rent somewhere else, working flat rate or whatever, not making the kind of money you were even making to live. Now you have to pay the bills for that shop.

19:51You know, because they're going to start attaching if you don't go bankrupt. There's a lot of different things that people don't know that business owners go through. And I'm not here to sit there and flame the technicians and say, oh, they don't know what they're talking about. This is a stress about stress. This podcast is about how people deal with stress and how shop owners have to deal with all the different things that people never take into account. And it's not this shop owners every owner, but we're a shop owner. We talk about shops here. You repair shops. But you don't see, and you know, when you get like, you know, I was talking to Jeff Compton, the JD Mechanic, the other day, he's like, hey, you took a shot at me about you didn't, I don't know, no, no shops don't have a motion. I'm like, no, Jeff, I really don't have a problem with you. Not owning a shop and having a motions, but I will tell you, it is an emotional thing when you have to start worrying about paychecks and stuff like that. A lot of these guys worry about paying their people. Okay, it's one thing for me to sit there and talk about something I'd never had be 100% in charge of like a payroll and stuff like that. And I'm not knocking anybody, but

20:56there's a lot of emotion in here. And I don't give a fuck who you are or what you have to say, we're all human and we all have emotions. You know what I'm saying? So you sit there and wake up, worry about, okay, do I not have enough money in the bank for payroll? What am I going to do for Jason Tracy, Bob, Fred and Mike that set there all week and work their dick off for me and I'm looking at him go guys, I can't pay you this week. Okay, you're going to feel like such a failure. You don't want that to happen. And you know, like Mark Twain said, 90% of the stuff you worry about never even happens. And you know, Pam Garrett, you always say, you know, we're not going to borrow tomorrow's problems for today. And that's true. As business owners, we borrow tomorrow's problems the next day's problem. We should off. Right. We need to sit there and go, okay, let's worry about today's problems. You know, give us what is it that prayer? Give us today our daily bread. That's like a lot of steel that problems today. Yep. Yep. So what I started doing after I read that book, how to stop where you start living by Dale Carnegie. I started the stop loss thing. So what is a stop loss thing? We never really talked about we just started using it. Yeah. So my stop loss is

22:02anything that waste time or energy in me that I can't control. I stop loss it. Meaning, okay, if I have a meeting with you in your 10 minutes late, I leave. It was a stop loss. Yep. I'm stop losing time. It's stressful for me to sit there. When somebody doesn't show up for an appointment, number one, they don't respect you. By the way. Okay. They can call you and say, hey, I'm in bright and I'm stuck in traffic. Understandable. Yep. But if they just flat as come up 10 minutes late, 15 minutes late, fuck that. Yeah. They don't respect you. They're wasting your time. Stop loss them, right? We do customers that, uh, my wife's telling me to transfering whatever. Um, it's tell or something. Yeah. The other. Um, the stop loss thing. And once I started explaining to you, I like, you read that book too. It's fucking brilliant. It is. It is time for me as a big trigger of like having your time

23:07wasted and that kind of thing. It's that's a big one. And like I use that example of the guy that was going to lunch in like the every week you go to lunch with his friend and every week his friend would show up like minimum 10 minutes late. And you get so frustrated. It would ruin his day. And instead he just decided I'm stop loss and get moving on. Yeah. We do that with customers. Now we run into situations with customers when they started giving us a hard time. There's this guy that came here probably about five years ago. We did trailers in this guy, which is the biggest time waste. You're finally Steve Garrett blew up at the guy because he's wasting our guys' time. So we're we're going to position some lights. He's told the guy, you know what? Figure it the fuck out. You've been here for an hour wasting my guys time. We're not going to sit here and do it. We did the lights or whatever. Well, yesterday I walked in. I'm like, man, that guy looks familiar. He's like, I don't remember you. You did my trailers at the other place. I'm like, huh, I went my office. I'm like, why is that guy giving me the creeps? So I looked up the name like I know exactly this fuck guy. So I walk up front. Sure. Shit. He's started. He's already given Lincoln a hard time. Well, you know, Lincoln's like, do you want a fuel filter with your oil change? Well,

24:09fuel filter comes with oil change. Lincoln's like a fuel filter does not come with oil change in no world. Yeah. The guy's like, you're wrong. You know, you didn't tell me it's going to be an hour to check out my breaks and my front end and all this stuff. Lincoln's like, it says it right there. We are like, you know what? I remember you. I'm not going to say his name. I said, I remember you. I said, we're not going to. Here's your keys. You have a nice life. And they don't know what's going on. Yeah. They're like, what is going on? I just stop lost that fucking guy because he's been nothing but a pain or ask. Now he came back and I had to think about it. I walked in my office. Lincoln's like, I thought it was weird how you walked in your office. Then you came right back here for a few minutes and kind of like basically stopped the guy from giving me a hard time. I'm like, yeah, it's a stop loss. We don't have enough energy as business owners or people in general to stop to just put up with people's shit nowadays. And if you think about it, how many companies right now are short-staffed? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you think about it. Number one, the employees are under a lot of stress because with corporate employees because you have like yesterday from what

25:13I could tell at both staples stores, I'm not even exaggerating. There's two people in both stores. My God. They're in there both running around. The guy in the know by store was literally taking the Amazon. Nice guy. He was great. Yeah. Yeah. Take the Amazon return, turn around, cast register, ring a me out. Thank you. I was watching him because I've sitting in line watching him do this. He was literally going back and forth. In the grand blank one was the same way I'm sitting there thinking, man, these two people, right? And hear me now guys, as shop owners right now, I cannot tell you nobody has too many technicians nowadays. Nobody nobody nobody ever talked to says, yeah, my shop, I have too many technicians. Okay. A lot of times these guys are running a skeleton crew. I run my shops on a skeleton crew. We're more efficient. I figured it out. We're 93% efficient at my shop, bar's production, bar's labor production. I figured out Thursday before I left. The thing is we do it with less people. We've had to figure out how to be

26:13more efficient. So. But you also create a longevity with your team. Like your guys have been here for a while. Yeah. And what I'm noticing with our clients is that is not a standard. That's not a, you know, there are some people that their teams are their highest longest guys. Been there has been there for a year. Yeah. And you know, you hear it a lot of that type situation. These guys are struggling because we're fixing a lot of them. They're having money problems or having, you know, they don't have benefits. They just have it's they have not got to that point yet. They've got to the point now where they're paying their bills and paying their self a paycheck and paying their employees on time. Yep. I'm not saying all of them were, but some of them were having a little bit of a trouble. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We had guys that didn't even have time to write bills. It but blows my mind. Like you have time to fix the cars or the bars by the parts, but you had time to write them an invoice and have them pay you. Well, and going back, I, you know, at the beginning, you talked about how like with clients, it's not people ask you, you know, what's the most common problem and in every every problem is different. Every every there's every flavor that's different. I would say that one thing that every single person or every single shop, every single

27:18person we've worked with hasn't come in is what's between your two years. What you're in you said it so many times like look in the mirror. You're the problem, right? Because it's it's not saying they're dumb or anything else. It's their experience. You had to go to management success in order to get a different education of you on the finances in the back end. And then you had to go through the experience with Jordan where you're going through the books like all your experiences led you and in part of who you are, big part of who you are, plus your experiences. So many guys have not been to that experience yet. They're just learning how to become business owners. All this stuff we're talking about and all the things you're stressing about, that's the things that they're struggling with. So it's not when we're talking about this stuff is not saying that any of these people are dumb or anything else is just you can only perform. It's the law of the lid that John C Maxwell talks about. You can only perform your highest level. Yep. And so like if you haven't been to this point before in your life, how can you get past there if you don't have somebody helping you? Yeah, what do they always say? A business can only grow to the level where the owner's chaos is capped like you just said just in the different terms, but yes, 100%. You know, my thing is now, you know, first of all,

28:25everybody's stress is different, right? Like, you know, how when you get up in the morning, you don't even know things, Tres, what if you're getting a fight with your wife? That the worst thing in the morning is getting a fight with your wife, right? Yeah. Have them words with your wife and you leave the house pissed off, right? That sets the day. How you're going to be? Yeah, then you get to the shop and you're in a pissed off mood so you'd bark at somebody else and what does it do to the tone level in the shop? It drops the tone level down, right? Yeah, just because the stress started at home and you bring it with you. Okay? You can see it on people's faces. You know, my stress might be different than something that stresses you out. My wife has no outward stress. Like, you can't tell my wife's stressed, but she's got ulcers. Oh, so I know she fucks you. She's just trying to lie. She's just trying to lie. And my wife is like, we call her the honey badger. She don't give a fuck. She gives a fuck. She just doesn't display it like we do. I'll bite people's heads off when I get stressed. Like last week was not last week. The week before I asked, like, I think Wednesday, I had like a bunch of shit hit me. I had some really big decisions, like five of them all to make and I'm not going to get into it, but I like, I don't usually get to

29:26the point where I'm overwhelmed because I'm so used to making decisions like that, but these weren't decisions that I could take lightly. Yeah. They were going to affect a lot of different pieces. Yep. So I said to her, man, I just told my wife, I said, man, I can't really fucking take today. So I just got on my tractor and I sat there and grayed the road and shit like that. And I did stuff this to cope with and think about it. But I've had to learn that. Yeah. Because a lot of people will come home and sit there and open the tequila and get fucking drunk every night. Or whatever. You know, I have a few beers pretty much every night. It kind of chills me out. Whatever. And I like to taste the beer. But, you know, people's stress, it can ruin your life. Yeah. And it makes you make poor decisions. You can't, when you're under a lot of stress, like they teach stress management in the military. Okay. You got to be able to think of somebody's fucking shooting. It's called stress, right? Well, could have proven if you're emotion, if you're running on high emotion, you're not making good decisions. You think about as an owner of a company, you have that fight with your wife and then you come to work as the owner of the company. If you have an employee of the company that's having a fight with his with his wife and he comes in and he's in a

30:28bad mood, it changes the shop. If you're the owner coming in with that you're now in a bad mood because you're the fight with your wife, you're changing the lives of everybody in the shop. Because everybody's got to have to deal with you. You know, and so in thinking about it, you're doing that every single day. What reality are you creating? Oh, really? And you know, the thing is about it. I, and you've heard me say this too, I have a 24 hour rule. Like a lot of the decisions I would make, like knee jerk decisions, I pissed off emotional stress out or something. I'm like, you know what? I'm gonna wait till tomorrow and deal with that. And a lot of times you what you'll realize is your outlook is a lot different. You know what I'm saying? Like, you know, business is, you know, as much as we hate to say that there is emotion as business owners, business has to be cut and dry, meaning the decisions you make with employees and everything else have to be cut and dry. And you have to do stop loss on employees. Like, friends, I have a client that he called me. He's like, yo, I had this guy that we let go of, you know, a few months ago. Remember, I'm like, he up. He's like, he came to me and he said, I've changed everything's fucking batter in my life. These, this is where I was at. These are the problems I had. He's like,

31:29what should I do? He's like, I'm so behind because I don't have that guy that did that kind of work all the time. I said, bring him back, but keep in mind, nothing's going to change here. Yeah. This is a business decision. You don't have to love him. Hey, I'm writing anything. You can say, okay, I'm going to bring you back at what you were making or even a little bit less because I had to fix a lot of shit. You screwed up. I'll give you your job back, but just keeping your, your mind is mean as this is to say, chances are, this is going to be a re rinse and repeat situation. Yeah. I said, but the devil, you know, right now, you know what he's capable of. Think about if you had to try to find somebody to bring him into your organization to train on how or everything is, how everything works. This guy already knows. So you're kind of in head, but you have to make this as a cold, calculated decision. If he comes in and does a great job, because you know stress, does what he's paid to do and goes home, that's the best you could hope for. Absolutely. And he can get you out of the hole you're in and he keeps going great. He learned his lesson. He ends up being a great model employee for the rest of great, but in my experience, when you do a repeat on these people, we call them reruns. Yeah. I used to call them rerun all the time for

32:33their first couple weeks. What's up rerun? Because you know that they really didn't change. They're just changed for that particular moment. Yep. Yep. But they get a good month out of them. So my thing is the whole stress thing, you know, comes that come that all this is added stress to a business owner. These are decisions that they're maybe not thinking they're going to have to make that particular day. And here comes homeboy walking in the door, going here, you know, I found Jesus Christ. I've quit drinking. I'm here to save the day. And you're like, okay, do I need to make this issue? I look over here. My customers are pissed off. I can't get this stuff done. Homeboy has found Jesus. Even though Jesus has never been lost, we all know that, right? He stopped drinking or whatever. You could put it into a business plan with them and say, okay, here you are. We'll give you all this. You know what I'm saying? Yep. You don't have to be that cold. Sometimes as a business owner, you have to do its best for you at the business. And that's where a lot of these guys, I believe, get tripped up on emotion. Okay. Sometimes I was like, you're really cold and calculating. I really am in a lot of cases because I had to learn to be because I'm going to tell

33:37you something right now. Your employees are not going to come and lay in the ditch with you, nor the casket. Okay. And your customers are your customers will throw you over for 50 cents. If a guy will do something cheaper, they will throw you over most of your customers. They do have not no fucking loyalty, especially it's getting worse in today's world. Would you agree? Absolutely. Okay. You know, you, you back in the day, like you would have the mark MC cartridges in the, you know, the Craig's cabinet and all of them guys that have retired moved away, they would stay with me because you had a relationship with you and they trusted you and stuff like that. So even if you were more expensive than the other guy down the street, they would say, hey, he's always taking care of me. So there was more of a personal connection, right? So the stress of maintaining customers as business owners was not there. Now, we do have stress as business owners now because we have Google, we have that. Think about just advertising stress alone guys for business owners. We used to have yellow pages. Remember when the big book would come out, yellow pages was fucking ridiculous, what they would charge you for these ads. Oh, yeah. Right? That's where everybody

34:40came with the AAAs and everybody wanted their business names to be in the alphabet at the start, right? Because that would be at the start of the yellow pages. If you look at a plumbing company, you would start at the age, right? All that stuff is gone now. So think about how much stress that has came out from business owners, more on business owners. And keep in mind, guys, I'm not blowing other business owners here, but this is a stress talk on building a business. And it goes across all businesses. We used to meet with the yellow pages lady and the nine times they had blonde hair, blue eyes and big boobs. Okay, because sex sells. Let's just be completely fucking honest, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay. So she would come in, she'd bladder eyes and stuff that you touched on your shoulder, remember you spent up for a 3500 a month yellow pages ad. And you didn't have to worry about it for a year. Think about now, the stress of advertising. I'm slow. I don't know what to do. Let me look online. Okay, I see Kakool year one of these marketing companies. Let me call them. They come here. Don't worry. We got you. You know, you need to do this. You need to do that. And they talk about impressions and they dazzle you

35:43with all these freaking buzzwords that mean fucking nothing was we all know, right? But you're sitting there going, oh my God, right? And then, you know, you get a bad review, which we didn't have bad reviews back in the day for something that's not your fault that I'm trying to paint the picture. So you're dealing with all the marketing, right? And then your service advisors does something or you're one of your tax and you get a bad review. So you're now you're dealing with that, right? So then you call the person, you're like, Hey, you know, what happened there? Shitty with you. So that adds stress to you as a business owner. Like that's just one piece of it. Did you know, Matt, you do you don't mix in the scams of like, have you seen better business bureau? They go to marketing company where like they send you like, oh, we've done all those research about you. People are talking about you. And then you, and then it's like they try to run a marketing ad with you. It's so crazy. Yeah. Basically, they use that power and they don't have more. Yeah. Yeah. You know, so now they use this whole prestige fear tactic type thing to go out and sell. It's insane. No, it isn't. You know, so you know, you guys sit there think about, you know, your technicians, but you're sitting there looking at the owner going, he doesn't really

36:46do nothing. He's sitting in his office with his frickin head in his head, or he's looking at his phone or whatever. He's probably reading an email or doing some more. You're sort of jerk off owners on it. Let's face it, right? Yeah. And there's a lot of guys that don't really give a shit. They got put in their second or third generation. They didn't have to build it. So they're just basically milking the thing and going to kill it. Yeah. Let's let's just face facts here. A lot of these guys you talked to are not necessarily shop owner material, but they're dead on the shop and they got put in place. And now they own a shop. Yeah. So yeah, you know, I don't get a lot of that. I worry about stuff all the time. I worry about making sure I'm doing a good enough job for our consultant class. I mean, you've had our conversation. You know, and once I realize it, there's so many people out there that do minimal in charge people way more than we charge them. And we do a lot for them. You know, I stress about that because I never want to be in the situation where I was in a few months ago where I trusted somebody to do something for me. I paid them for

37:49years and years and years and years and bought out there. Fucking me can do anything. Okay. So that's how I might as an added stress. I'm just talking about this things that stress, right? Yeah. You know, I'm talking about if you have a line in credit, you have to deal with the bank. You know, the banks want you to fill out all this paperwork. They want your personal financial statements. They want this. They want that. That's the added stress. So as a business owner, you have all this stuff to do over here. And then you have your employees not doing what they're supposed to over here. So then you're like, okay, if these guys aren't doing what they're supposed to over here because they really don't have no direction, no procedures, policies, a place I haven't trained them much. How can I be doing stuff over here when I still got to keep going over here and doing it? So now I end up working to one or two o'clock in the morning. And I'm not making any money because I'm tired and I'm being irrationally stressed in the maps, right? And then so I'm not even making a, I'm making 40 grand a year out of a million, two million, three million, four company. And I would be better off going into a job not having any stress. Well, because everything you're describing is what you're in the podcast. I was just on when we were talking about like that work life balance is a business owner, right? And it's one

38:53of those things is an employee you work your hours, you work your nine to five or whatever it is hours, you go home at five o'clock and you do whatever it is that you do. You know, like, you don't think probably about work unless you're like, as an employee, I thought about work. I thought, but it was just I think it's why we got to where we are as far as being business owners and stuff like that because I was constantly I was, I was, it was constantly in my head. Right. But most people when they leave work, they don't think about it. For as a business owner, like you don't shut it off. And then to your point, if a customer calls up and they need something or there's something you forgot to do or something, you talked about ruminating before and like for me, like if I get a call or I get a message like or and I got to make a call back, I, I, I ended up doing, ended up doing it right now because of not all sin think about it anyways. And I've just spent that time, you know, like if there's something like if you message me, I'm like, oh, they hate this is wrong. I've got to go do that and fix it. Yeah. And get it taken care of because I'm not I'm sitting and thinking about it the whole entire time in like I'm just spending my time anyways. I might as well go get it done. No, you're right. And I had to learn some, I had some new types of situations come up when

39:58Lincoln start working at the shops because a lot of times the guys wouldn't, they would handle stuff like Jason and handle or Jim would handle it and I really wouldn't really know about it. Yeah. It would never rise up to my level where I would need to deal with it, right? Because I'm a guy that handles shit. And it comes up my cross my desk. I'm like, I nail it and move out of my day, right? Well, Lincoln would just come home and start in general start talking about stuff going out at the shop. So and so did this. So and so did that. What I started to realize it was stressing me out. Yeah. Because I'm like, okay, shit. I'm not there. So what the fuck happened? How did this outcome? Yeah. So it went on for about a week. And I finally told him I said, dude, don't come home, bring the shop home. The shop is at the shop tomorrow morning. If they're probably the problems will still be there. I guarantee it. So if you need me tomorrow, if them guys can handle it, let me know. I understand what he was trying to do. He was trying to basically depict to me that he was paying attention. Everything is going on. Dad, this happened. I was I yep. Yep. If you feel

40:59in turn, it was doing his raise in my love. Trust me. You're up. And you know, a thing about it is, you know, I can sit here and talk on my podcast like this shit isn't happening to me. I'm human just like everybody else. I don't give if I wasn't you would have to worry if I didn't give a fuck. Yeah. But I got on this podcast and said, I don't give a fuck about by people. I don't give a fuck about. And there's a lot of guys out there that do not give a fuck. Yeah. They will cut your throat for an hour. I'm not that guy. I rather make a little bit less than make all my people have good make a good living. So we're coming across. We're coming down our driveway the other day in my wife was at the shop and I wasn't. And she starts, you know, hey, you know, Mr. So-so was back and he was not very happy. You see the note said that blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, that's just like in so and so had a problem with the check. And I'm like, I'm getting pissed off. So immediately I pick up the phone. I'm like, you know, what happened with this? He's like, Dad, we handled it. The guy was a fucking asshole. But it wasn't our fault. We already showed him where he told him on the work or this could possibly happen again. And he's fine. I'm like, okay, what happened with that check? What about the check? I'm like, well, mom said this. And I'm like,

42:02he's like, no, that's not even what she. So she was talking about one company versus another company. She wasn't really wrong, but it's a whole long story. And he's like, no, don't worry about it. I'm like, okay. But my point was she started to start to get me wound up. I was getting spun out. My mind all sun hits overdrive. I'm pulling in our driveway to go get in the pool with the grandkids and shit. And I'm what the fuck the place is burning down. Just going on. And I'll tell you another thing business owners do. And I did this for years and years and years. Okay. The end of the world is here. We're slow. I have no fucking money in the bank. I can't pay my bills is what you're thinking. You're at home. You're sitting here laying in bed. You're thinking, yeah, I don't have no fucking money. It's slow. This and that, right? This is what your mind's doing to you. It's an evil, evil thing. It is. You go the next day, you look to bank, concert just fine. Yeah. I'll have money in them. Plenty of it. And your bills aren't past due. And you could pay all today's

43:03bills that we're due. It's still have plenty of money left over. There's still money in your savings account. But you're at home all night torturing yourself because you basically said, I'm slow and I'm struggling. But it's all made up fiction in your fucking head. Yeah. It's not even reality. Yeah. Perception is reality. And it's just like what I was perceiving with my mind was not matching. Yeah. It's crazy. And I will tell you guys go through this shit all the time. Now, I'm sure there's plenty of guys out there with their dead ass right. I broke. I don't have the money. I have no bit of absolutely. But what I'm saying is a higher achievers run into this thing. And I was talking to a guy last week. One of my clients, he said the same exact thing. I said, let me tell you what my situation is. But I told them what pretty much I know these guys financial situation. So I told them where we were at. Yeah. He's like, holy fuck, you worry? I still worry. I said, he's like, my wife said, he said to my wife says, what the fuck is wrong with you? He's like, I don't want to fail. Yeah. That's a million dollar. That's the answer to the million dollar question. We all worry about failing. Yeah. This isn't about we don't want to

44:06be failures. Yeah. Somewhere in our life, something triggered us. So we stress ourselves out all the time in these businesses that are just going just fine without us. Well, we're not there working because we have all the like my case, everything's going just fine. But I'm guilty. I'm stressing out that I'm not there. I have to go do some stress out like today. I had appointment this morning. I'm doing the podcast of you. I have to go to the lawyer at three o'clock. So I want to be at the shops today, right? But I'm torturing myself. I actually be at the shop. The shops going to burn down. We're not going to make no money. What are they going to do today? Right? And guys, guess what? Everything's just fine. I haven't been I wasn't even there last week. Yeah. I was there for an hour last week to frickin go grab some checks. So we can print checks at home. Like I've literally beat myself to death over the years to get these shops to run by their self. And you know who my worst fucking credit is? The guy in the mirror. Yeah. I literally stress myself out when I'm not there. And if I didn't, that means I didn't care, right? Absolutely. And I worry about the employees and stuff like that. And this is all heartfelt stuff. Like that's one thing about me. What you see

45:09is what you get. I don't fucking sugar code. It's like I run into all this stuff. And I'm pretty freaking well off. I was like, I don't have money problems at any of my companies at home. I have a nice house like my shits. I'll pay for most of it. But here I am torturing myself. Is that not fucking nuts? There is a I don't have this book called Driven written by Douglass Prackman. And he talked it talks about this is 10% of the people in the world 10% of people in the world are driven like on this driven path. And it's a mutation of your genes. And it's usually caused by like trauma through like childhood or something that mutates a gene. But it feels like you're never enough and you're just driving driving driving driving driving. So it's just spectrum bullshit. Yes, it is. Yeah. Yeah. And so so like you think about 10% of the people in the world create 99% of everything that is in our world. Is that nuts? 99% yeah. And out of those 10% and 6% of those people are entrepreneurs. There you go. Yeah. And you know, let's go back to the

46:11freaking kids in the hall. Yes. Did you realize that YouTube turned off the ads on that? Yeah, I thought that. I'm like, what the hell? That was one of our better episodes. I got people called me so that was a great episode. Yeah. So it means I hit nerves. Like a lot of people thought think the same way what I talked about in that thing. You know, and the thing that we're talking about right now is like, you know, my wife, I'm like, man, I think someone so it's kind of lazy. She's compared to you. Everybody's fucking lazy. Because you know, we talked about, you know, I'm always going, going, going. And lately, I've been trying to, ever since I found out when I started, yeah, I think I started talking about all that stuff. And I did that podcast and stuff. I tried to change the thing. I tried to say goodbye on the telephone. One of my clients said, hey, you just said goodbye to me earlier. I'm like, I've been working on it. I've been getting up in the morning, not setting alarm clock, getting up and sitting down at the kitchen counter and sitting there and having coffee before I get dressed. Like, I've been trying to slow down. Yeah. And try to get to even, you know, get my day started later. And I'll tell you what it's a struggle.

47:13I feel like I'm lazy. And if you really haven't think about it, you want to talk about lazy. Corporate America has fucking ruined our world and COVID made it worse. When these people got to start working at home, it just got lazy and lazy. And my wife told me some stuff that made sense to me. She's like, listen, she's like, you always have your employees that always are in the hole in their vacation time. They're sick days. They're always borrowing ahead from their sick days. She said, do you realize that since where they're allowed to work from home, these people don't use any of their vacation days. They don't use any of their sick days or personal days. Yeah. She's like, but you try to get a whole of them to ask them a question because you're at work. They're like, whisper and hang out the doctors. Obviously, I can't call you back. Let's fucking find out. I didn't see a vacation slip or a, you know, personal sick day slip or anything like that. And what it's done is is, Corporate America has taken the urgency out of anything. I was a percent. Listen, it's hard enough. We know it's hard enough to get people to perform at work. What do you think they're doing in the comfort of their own home with no supervision?

48:17I'm not telling you all people are bad, but most people are inherently lazy. And when they've got distractions in front of them, when I first came home, like, I left my job and started my business, and I'm at home. I like, I had to like, make sure that I got up in the morning and got dressed because if I didn't, like, if I just wore like sweatpants throughout the day, like, I felt like I was like sitting at home on a wall here, like eating my conchuria while drinking cool ate, you know? You know, it's kind of funny. Mondays is the day I start, basically start calls with all the clients at eight o'clock. And I actually get done late in the afternoon. Yeah. It's fucking torture. Yeah. But I said, home, there's no TV on. I get up and I get dressed, like you said, I sit there, I have everything together. I just every half an hour, I'm talking to a new client. We go all through the day and we get all of the calls done. At the end of the day, I'm exhausted. Okay. But what if nobody is watching me. It didn't matter. Their credit cards auto got it auto hit. I said a few emails. And then I don't answer the emails. Yeah. You see how much people

49:19hide behind email. Voice mail and email are horrible. You know, right? Absolutely. I mean, these insurance companies we try to deal with at the body shop, it might take a week before these people answer an email. You mean to tell me you have so many emails. When you're dealing with a shop on a claim, you don't see that claim come through with a shop name and go, oh, I need to, I can just deal with it. They just say, fuck it. Don't deal with it. Yeah. It's crazy. It's just kind of like, when you talk to these people, like, okay, here's a great example. You ever can go to cancel, like just say you buy a extended warranty on your car and you sell the car, you can get a refund. Yeah. How the fuck does take four to six weeks in today's world to fuck get a refund? It didn't take four to six weeks to sign up for that motherfucker. Do you ever notice that? No, the whole like it takes so much time for us to give you our money back, but your money back is crazy. Yeah. And it's just like so, you know, the whole stress thing, there's so much stuff going on for shop owners, business owners and stuff with stress. And then you're sitting there trying to get people to work. That's a whole other stressor in itself because you can't see something

50:26that's so insolent because she's a girl and she might, you know, say you're sexually arousing her and then you worry about this and all this is at its stress. Like, you ever have that heading? That's right. Oh, right there. Oh, my God. Yeah. It's just like, oh, my God, you're ready to jump out of your own skin. Yeah. There's been times where it's like so stressful and certain situations. It's just like, it's going to kill you. And you know, I got one guy that's going through some stuff right now. He's lost like 30 fucking pounds from stress. Can't eat, stomach, you know, problems and stuff like that. And stress is doing it. Yeah. Number one killer, freaking, regular. Yeah. It's stress. You know, we have to learn to let it go. And how can you do that? You know, like Friday, I looked at it as like, okay, the guys have been working a lot. And do I really need the aggravation of them guys for can, you know, uh, staying around Friday when everybody else is, you know, I'm at the lake house. It's closed the place. Yeah. Drop the stress all over for everybody. Just not worry about Friday and just close the place. It's kind of like, but here's the problem. Greed is another problem that leads to stress because

51:32we're so stressed out about money and greed feeds that way and then greed. You know, being greedy, you start pushing and pushing and it causes stress for money on your guy. So it kind of goes back and forth, you know, you see these shop owners that are so greedy, you want so much money so they can buy this one more sports car, one more of this, one more of that. They just, they just ride their people like sea biscuits. And it puts stress, it's stress across the whole all the employees. Yeah. And nobody wants to go to work at a place where it's so stressful. And you're worrying about what the owner's going to do because he's stressed out because they're not making any money. And how can this all be fixed? With a few mindsets. Number one, read the Dale Carnegie book. Uh, what is it called again? I just forgot. Ah, how to relieve stress. Yeah, let me I could look too. Right. How to stop worrying and start living? How to stop worrying to start living by Dale Carnegie.

52:36That was probably one of the better books I've ever read. Yeah. Absolutely. Uh, I didn't think of who he was talking to about where he's talking with like the guy like stressed constantly, that he's going to constantly fail. He should rent like he lost all that weight. He was losing his hair and clumps like all that. You know, just a JP Morgan. Yeah, that's who it was. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he owns that that is the founder of Chase Bank Guys. Yeah. Yeah. One of the biggest institutions now, right financial institutions in the world. It's huge. But they said that they he the people hated him so much because he was so greedy. They talked about the insurance. Remember that they hated him so much. They were actually going to consume bodies out of the family plot because nobody wanted to be very next to him. Yes. He was such a fucking asshole. He was so greedy. It had it was stress. Everybody out so bad. They hated them. Then he got alopecia. So I lose his hair. Got sick. They said he's going to die. And then I was on he changed just overnight. They said he became easy to deal with. He started giving money away and stop worrying about stuff like that. And his whole life changed. Actually got better. Yeah.

53:37He was one of the people I find I remember correctly. Chicago did some some of the Chicago institute of medicine. I might that might be wrong. But he was big in the well. Okay. So like putting this into real life perspective when you're talking about Lincoln coming home and talking about the different things that are going on in the shop. Just think if you didn't stop your emotions and you start calling up the guys. What's going on here? And you're like and you're stressed out because you're thinking you're losing money and you're doing this stuff and you're just riding them every day and every day you're listening to the reports and you're riding them every day. What are you going to cause? Yeah. They're going to quit. They're going to be like they're going to worry about you coming in. It's opposed to like the situation you have now when they call you up and they're like, hey, when you haven't been here in a while. They're like, hey, I'm just gauging to make sure you're not coming in so that they can be on their on egg shells. Right. No, exactly. You know, the thing is about it when I go there, you know, we usually bullshit and I usually interrupt my managers like you really cause us a couple hours a day because the guy sit around bullshit with you in the morning. I think that's kind of important like when I come to motor city here in the morning. Yeah. A lot of times we'll have a meeting and we'll spend next to 20 minutes 25 minutes. This is bullshit

54:40thing. Yep. It's okay. Yeah. It's okay. You know, in my mind, but there's guys that they expect there guys there to be 10 minutes early, dressed and ready to go and they expect on the work late and not getting, they just dollar-dining more and more and more and more and more. I don't really give that perception off to my people like, yes, we need to obviously make money. Yes, I know that we're 93% of fish in my shop. 100%. Okay. What I like to be 110. Yeah, I'm not gonna lie to you, but am I gonna kill people? No. Because in our business, it just doesn't happen that way. It's real hard to go back and forth a lot of this type of stuff, you know, to sit there and ride people. And you don't want to make people miserable to the point where they quit. Number one, or number two, you don't want to ride them so much that they stay with you because of a life situation or whatever. So when at the end of the day, when you're all done with your career, you can sell the shop, whatever, there's a bunch of broken people there. And you're super wealthy, you walk on say, thanks for your fucking lives. Okay. That's where I think where a lot of business owners

55:40miss it. You're dealing with other humans. You're dealing with other emotions. You're dealing with a lot of different stuff that goes on in people's lives. And you as a business owner, if you're an asshole, and we've seen a lot of them, they don't give a fuck. Absolutely. You know, and I have to sometimes watch the social cues too, because I'm fucking obtuse to them. As you see, with my whole situation of that, kids in the hall podcast, like it takes a few minutes for me to re-social cues and click. You're like, hey, I'm having a baby. Actually, that's great. We're very good to just don't. I don't sit there going, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's not that I don't care. It's not that I won't buy whatever, you know. But I think, you know, a lot of these business owners, they make everything stressful. And I was no different for a long time. The best thing that can happen at my shops right now is I stay away and let these guys do what they're trained by me to do and their policies are in place. If they need me, they'll call me. And I don't need to stress my self out not being there. I need to go live my life. Like Jason told me, I'm like, I don't like

56:44being here. It's like, dude, you're been in this building for 35 fucking years. It's your time to go do what you want. We got this gym. If I need y'all call you, you know, I miss you when you're not here to bullshit with us. But if I need y'all call you, I have a job to do. I'll do it. But here's the thing. Guess what I have working for you full grown ups. I don't have a guy's a bunch of guys that make excuses. We don't have HR problems. Believe that. We do not have guys. We do not attendance problems. We don't have problems with guys not doing their job. Like everybody that works on my company's, they do their job. Did they do it because I'm scared and they're scared? I mean, no, they do it because we treat them well. We say, take Friday off. Have a four-day weekend. We're not going to do this. Let's go out to dinner for Christmas. We go out and spend, you know, two grand and for dinner. Everybody gets bonuses. That's what you can do if you run your shop and you get everybody on the same page. Versus the guy that runs in is since there are screams and yawks. He's stressed out all the time because of money this and that. He doesn't have trained people. So he's always a ball of stress. And he's running around. He's over there trying to fix

57:46cars. Y'all, you're not fixing these cars fast enough. Going over here, I can't fucking pay this. I can't pay that. Think about it. Like we don't need to keep doing all this shit to ourselves as business owners. Well, I was telling you about the client that I had that I went out to their shop and the his salesperson, operations person went through my boot camp and like they hired me to go out there and look and sit with her and she's increased your your numbers. 35% this guy's gone in jail for three and a half years and he calls her up from jail every single day and like stresses her out and throw stuff at her and like is constantly like we need to make more money. We need to make more money just because of situations and problems he's created and she's like I'm man, this is like so stressful. She's like I feel like I got it. I feel like the day goes good and then I get this call from him and he's like ranting about all the stuff that's going wrong. And you know like you have somebody that's literally running your business and increasing the business and it's running better than when you were in it and you're calling that person up every day yelling at him. Well, I thought as you know you should do you should fucking we should

58:48run his numbers. Maybe he's she he he you're not doing this. Wait a second. Last year at this time with you fucking here we did X with me here and you not here we did why. So why are you going to call me if you keep calling me and doing this to me I'm going to fucking leave and then you're going to have nothing. You know, it was the most impressive stuff. I was like sitting down with her and I was like and she was like oh let me show you the numbers and she had them all printed out like she was like this is where we're at and she was like she didn't have any question on if I asked her question she knew exactly she's like oh let me go grab that and here's the where we're at and she was like spitting it all out. She knew exactly where she was. That's awesome and that's right there that's somebody you need to keep but instead he's going to call his stressor out. He's going to stress out to the point where she's like one day he's going to take a good employee and spinner and she's going to be a bad employee and she's going to quit. He's going to be like she fucked me. She ripped me off. She did this. She did do whatever right. When she's actually treating it like hers. Yeah and probably might not even make the money she should be making. She should be making probably more 5,000 percent but he's in a sense and because he made poor life decisions and he's in jail now.

59:50All of what you said is absolutely true. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. You know here's how I deal with the numbers and stuff at my shops. Every week when they do payroll they type into the AI the AI all their numbers come out where the parts markup was where their labor markup was where the sublet marker was how many hours return the efficiency the LELR and all that and they all have green arrows or red arrows up or down. My guys can literally tell me if I walked in there today was payroll if I walked in and said what happened with sublets last week they'd be like well this happened. They know. Yeah. So what I've done is by teaching these guys how to read the numbers they freaking monitor their own numbers. At the end of the month I look at the numbers like last month nothing we could do. We end up having to have some weird ass jobs and we lowered some of the prices on some of the maintenance items and stuff like that's our numbers are artificially low and the guys knew it. And they literally said to me yeah well

1:00:52last month we did this this and this and this affected this and this is why. Yeah. Like yep you guys are 100%. So can you imagine if they didn't have the numbers and they didn't understand the numbers and I call up and start screaming. Oh my god. What the fuck happened with sublets? They're like what is sublets? Who is that right? So they're not educated. So how can you sit there and have people have responsibility but they have no authority. Meaning the authority they would have was to go into the computer and pull the numbers out and say hey boss can you tell me what these numbers are? Well no you don't have the authority into program. I don't trust you enough to even look at the numbers right. So but I want you to hit the numbers. Who's numbers? Who's numbers? Like you talk to some of these shop owners and they're fucking cause their own stress because they don't even tell they don't even give their service advisors the lists of what to work in. They don't give them the rules. I've seen this for years business owners not wanting to share the numbers like the front end numbers with their guys like how can they hit the numbers if they don't know what they are. How can they hit the goals if they don't know what it is? Right.

1:01:54Yeah exactly and that's a big problem. So okay all this leads to what for the owner? Stress. And some of its self-induced stress guys okay I told you like perception is reality like me torturing myself oh my god the base is going on business we have no money we have no this we have no that you go there everything's just fine. Absolutely. So you run into this a lot where the whole the stress is the number one silent killer you know heart attacks whatever strokes. You know the other thing is you could cause undue stress on your employees like we were just talking about to the point where they all quit yeah like you can't go in there and go you know all guys like you know I'll use checks engine exchange it was across street from us from years and Friday to hills and anybody who's listed this podcast is in the farming scenario they were the premier engine builder they built some fucking engines like a lot of engines and you know it went really good when they were when at least on three the four mediums and stuff the at the

1:02:54style box were breaking they were back into the loading dock and it was a shock would break the crankshaft we were doing motors left the right like we're doing a lot of engine remands swaps and stuff like that they were selling a lot of engines they were doing good you know he's given you know hey Jason you and your family free health insurance like paying for this paying for that paying for this paying for that right and then you know he's buying snow bills he has to place up north he has all this stuff you know going on I've talked about it before and then you know business starts to taper down then he's like we got to do more we got to do more so he starts putting stress on the people you know instead of pulling back he keeps buying the snow bills having the sugar beats and everything delivered to the shop hey we can't pay for your health insurance anymore we can't do this we can't do that he puts so much stress on the place people one of the guys Harris falling out in clubs and she said that they were so stressed out about losing their job just think about there at the Golden Goose they worked at the pre-remeat place right yeah and he's under stress and he's smoking more and he's just like you see this and it's like okay there should

1:03:56have been a stop loss they should have stopped and said okay we need to reassess what's going on got everybody to gather hey this is the situation you know engines are lasting longer things are going you know blah blah blah blah blah and then kind of rained it all in and said that is kind of let the thing turn to a ball of stress that people started quitting they're doing you know what I mean it's just right and all these back to you know doing beer being irrational because the stress was getting the best of them you know he's thinking okay what the hell is going on here we're doing engines left the right I sit at this boring bar and do these engines non-stop and where they all at you know that he's you got the money stress you have the production stress you have the business stress you have everything has stress after it yeah and you know here's the thing guys you can't control stress but you can go ahead and handle it right right you can you can manage it you know it's it's so crazy because you're sitting and talking thinking of all the companies that have eventually went out of business have probably have been from like leadership that created a lot of

1:04:57stress you even think about like the big box retailers and you know we were talking about the uh the staples and stuff like that like look at the JC pennies and so JC pennies used to be like or the sears sears is gone that used to be the standard in an experience that's good to great the book he had if all the book all the all the companies he talks about are now like like Walgreens you know they're all like bad companies stressed and that created that that corporate stress that created that you get all these employees that are treating their customers bad yeah you know the thing about it you start to stop and think about it like it's not going to get any better no it's like you just said it yourself you got 10% of the freaking people in the world but doing a lot of the work I don't remember the sticks you just said like how many companies you know that like two or three of the guys do all the work and here's the other thing I've seen happening a lot now you get older leaders that don't want like change and things start changing so they don't start to roll with the punches like one thing people always say about me I pivot on

1:06:00my heel okay we did this tomorrow but guess what we got to do this today yeah I'll make decisions based on what's going on around me think about these guys that got college degrees that took over companies we came to CEO somebody else built the company and they came in okay here's a perfect example look at freaking apple from Tim Cook's leadership from Steve Jobs they said Steve Jobs is an absolute fucking asshole heartless prick whatever but least you knew you fucking where you stood with him yeah you're fucking job yeah okay they've turned that place into a fucking romper room over there we have software problems and all kinds of shit Google okay Android Android phone still have bugs you need to tell me that all these operating systems of the phones need to have these bugs in the world we're in today yeah it's a lack of fucking leadership these guys just get so far away from what they're doing they start leaving the talking the guys that are managers and charges stuff and the managers end up doing the way they want it feed the up their stairs a bunch of bullshit and then the stuff just doesn't work and then the business starts going then they don't understand why they're declining in sales like who the fuck at Staples decided

1:07:02that it would be a good idea to be an Amazon return center insane right the people that are literally eating your lunch when the employees see it and are commenting on it the employees are like yo we're fucking the Amazon side piece over here doing returns more the very people that can sell the office supplies cheaper and have them the next day they don't have to go to the store if they're fucking bullshit extended warranties and stuff like that right insane isn't it so you really stop and think about it like where do you want to be guys as business owners my suggestion to you is don't work the weekends fucking walk off the door Friday turn off your phone get a different phone so your shop phone number if people have your cell phone number turn the motherfucker back on I don't know my phone does not bother me my phone nonstop like you can look like yeah but I'm over in here it's okay I thrive I'm being busy so I'm okay with that but some people just can't handle it yep you know I take calls all day long with other shop owners talking about

1:08:02different stuff it doesn't bother me but it does not stress me out but my phone at 10 o'clock and that goes to silent and it turns back on uh seven o'clock the next morning usually yep yep so I don't deal with that shit now the weekends I don't even pay attention to my phone I'll answer people but I don't live it breathe it you know I don't do mobile repair like yeah if you're doing mobile repairing you're gonna do 24 hour repair is it really worth it for you to get out of bed in the middle of the night as a business owner to go work outside a road to get four or five hundred dollars what does that do to your mental well being yeah no shit is it really worth the stress of having your phone rang or you sitting or thinking before you go back sure to hope I wake up if somebody calls or you know I'm gonna go to sleep and you know I'm gonna woke up at three o'clock in the morning I have to go do this this and this and like that's not a really good idea in my opinion no now if you get a young guy that wants to make money and do that you probably it could trust him that'd be a good thing but as a business owner I don't think you should be doing that type of stuff unless you absolutely have to keep the doors open absolutely she don't I mean absolutely so I think

1:09:03the stress from a lot of these companies you know comes from the top and it just doesn't stop you know and then you gotta remember the top has its own stresses the top's going up you know he's ready to blow his lid then you go down and your stress goes all the way through people and you know let me give you the final example you know we had a bad month last month guys were behind the eight ball on some of these jobs and you know you need to do this you need to work like you need to do this you you you you you you you you you okay then you put stress all the way through your staff and then mistakes get happy you ever notice when you start the the term Chinese fire drill is so true like when you start running around and bitching and screaming at people watch their body they all start like I got a couple guys am I start bitching you can watch them they like start screaming yeah like think about that that's how shit happens yeah to put the stress I'm not saying you shouldn't correct your employees write them up and stuff like that but start to be a little bit cognizant when you start talking to these people and say man I probably shouldn't y'all think I or you know I'm saying the stress my stress shouldn't shouldn't rule my employees I don't need to come in

1:10:05under my one smack people you know that's where the whole stressful thing comes in this is a weird asset so when you really start talking about this out loud man I know it's the elements and to your point and that we've hit a couple times is like you if you're stressed you're all your stress is being carried over to your team you're seeing that and the results of your company if the stress is embedded in your company totally true it's just uh I don't you know the funny thing is like my shops aren't stressful so when Jim Gray a few months ago got to the point where he just could hardly take the stress I said you know what this is not fucking worth you having a stroke over the next day we had a meeting we're still we're not fucking doing this we're not doing this if somebody gets mad they have to pay for an estimate or whatever fucking let them leave okay I will not fucking run this business to the point where it's going to kill you yeah trying to find the policies and ever since then we do not have a high lot of stress what I have done now is I turn it I said you have to look okay here's what I'll tell

1:11:06I'll tell you guys I told you you need to look at businesses a video game okay we all want to win yeah we all do want to fail right like Charlie she said I'm over here winning drinking Tiger's blood bitches right um we all want to win so I look at everything is a video game I look at okay how can I win on this particular thing there I don't rip people off but I'm always trying to win and I told Jim I said you got to look at the whole state farm progressive all state every insurance company gives you a hard time you're taking a personal with their calling to be back when you don't know what you're talking about your estimates nine grand ours is three you're an idiot I go you're getting consulted instead of looking at that going fucking here hold my beer let me go ahead right back yeah okay we need to push back on these people okay when we started doing that he's like man this is kind of getting to the point where it's fun we used to flame out and you know I'd be all pissed off you be like now we're like fuck up this is this is simple yeah here's what we need from you if you can't do it the customer can pay at the customer can't pay you guys can go somewhere

1:12:06else guess what the stress is out of that here's the thing with these insurance companies you don't fucking think they do studies on these shop owners they get these shop owners that several of these guys that I've done their paint materials costs are making 8% okay the insurance companies freaking running them out of business you guys don't even know it till you hired me to tell you okay now that these guys are I got four or five of them body shops are they're realizing holy fucking shit there these people are stressing me out there you're trying to get me to put use quarter panels on cars with 30 fucking thousand miles on aluminum you know that for basically says no and they but the insurance company says they don't prohibit it and just all this crazy shit right stressing these guys out you guys don't need to look at it it has to be transactional yeah right take the stress out of it push back here's the facts you can say whatever you want you can spend what spin whatever web you want but the bottom line here's the facts here's what's gonna cost you can say whatever you want Mr. Church adjuster does not matter to me when you took that power away from him he's fucking useless think about it yeah he is a guy that wrote an estimate you don't like you say

1:13:10yeah I don't like it here's my back right yep it's it's negotiation yeah it's the stress is gone I'm not gonna say there's some things are gonna be stressful sometimes customers things happen to get a little bit of stress in the shop absolutely it's how you guys handle it is how you're gonna feel about the stress level the shop you know we've done things to keep the stress level down and this sounds really stupidly small we take pictures of intake we take pictures during the process why that takes a stress out of coming back when they call like we had the guy with the motorhome camera lens okay he called and said hey you know ever since I dropped that motorhome off the camera of covers been gone where we looked at the pictures well the camera cover was gone when it pulled in the time stamp was there think about how easy that was for us to diffuse that situation yep we did not have to do any fancy talking or anything we said well sir we're gonna go ahead and send you the picture yep here it is it was here at 732 this day look cover was gone we didn't

1:14:15walk out there with you take the cover off the take the picture we didn't have to sit there and try to to talk to this guy or anything it was there it was there yep so what did that do for our stress level when that guy called goes way down because you're not gonna win the he said she said battle thank you but I cannot get these some of these guys just to understand how important this is they always have a pushback well I don't think you should do I don't you fucking hire to me to be your consultant and you're sitting and I'm telling you how to recover your ass to keep the stress level down so you can actually function in your shop and make money but you're gonna argue with me they don't fucking do it don't do it you know I'm saying yeah but I do stuff like that I'm definitely a forward thinker but I do stuff like that maybe overdo it a little bit my terms of service all that shit is so important because when something happens I know if we follow procedure which 99.9% of the time we do everyone's wow there's a there's a stray Wrangler but but when I know when someone so calls up or gives me a hard time and I pull it out I go you covered we're covered yep but a lot of these guys won't even do that could you imagine running your

1:15:18business on a shoe string like yeah go ahead oh what do you want uh break job he has 462 dollars you're like go ahead and do it okay and I throw that away and then you come back this happened this happened this happened you're like I have nothing you go to court you have nothing so I try to mitigate stress for my people and for me yep by knowing my first thing is when did he say we have this problem when it happens once we're gonna credit card charge back right hey we got to charge back my wife will say we'll pull the repair order up make sure everything for the final inspection done boom it's all done we're good you covered yourself covered ourselves and that takes to stress level down because one of that problem comes up think about it a lot of these guys don't have four grand to lose right yep we could lose four grand it would suck but we could lose it it wouldn't kill us I don't care about that yeah but what it what happens if I couldn't lose it and I didn't have the paperwork and you're for sure a loser at that point for the credit card company because they don't go fuck it don't care it's transactional for them yeah yeah right it's a stop loss for them their customer got fucked here comes American Express that's in cheerian yep you know nothing no

1:16:21documentation but the Centurion Knox and Ardor were like there's everything well he said he said well he initialed that well he did he initialed that like we write it all up and we give it to we have not lost one yet because of the documentation I try to take all the stress out of all that yep and not to mention think about that would take all the stress out of the lawyer if it goes with law the insurance company anything here it all is man this guy's like trying to take the stress out all this covering your ass too obviously but it all leads down to stress yep worrying causes stress right would you agree with that five thousand so I get a charge back for ten thousand dollars when I start worrying it I don't even realize what does it do to me it stresses me out so we have to start thinking of ways guys how to mitigate that in our life and not be stressed out and not worrying about it yep and when you're not at your shop don't call your shop and ask how things are going trust me and I tell you this if the place is really on fire or something really Bob killed himself on the with the hoist cartbell on they'll call you they'll call you don't call

1:17:24them go hey what's going on well see there's only six cars here why is this don't start looking for your estimates don't start doing anything if you're taking the day off take the day off if it's a Friday in a Monday Tuesday the show still be fucked up if it's fucked up trust me and I tell you anything go out anything can go on for a day at a shop or at a business and that's what I always tell myself we close Friday anything can be okay for a day we have eight hours yep yes you might have some people that are pissed off because of phone rang and they need an answer whatever put put your music on hold so they were close today we're giving an awesome team the fucking four day weekends talk to you Tuesday yep if their assholes about it well they shouldn't be your customer absolutely so the bottom line is guys you know what most of you guys are already winning you just don't realize it because you're so hard on yourself you're over at cheaters when you're with your family be with your family when you're with be with your wife be present okay and don't worry so much about your business I worry about mine too just like I said earlier but you know I've learned to shut it off when I'm not there I can't even tell you what's going on the shop when I'm

1:18:27not there like years ago I remember waking up the middle of the night when I was attacked oh my god I tighten the parts during both did I do this I do that oh my god I torch torching myself so one time on a floor is so much that I had to trans I did a fly with I convinced myself I didn't tighten the flywheel bolts I took the fucking trans out the next day they're tight oh my god so that just goes go different yeah sitting there torching yourself that you have no money you can't pay your bills so you go there in the bank accounts are fine and everything's good yep so take a deep breath everybody and let this stress level go down in your shop thanks for listening all right that's gonna do it for this episode of Repair Shop Reckoning if this helped you please make sure to subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next we drop real conversations real systems and real solutions every week we'll see you back here next time on Repair Shop Reckoning