Ask the Coach

In this week’s The Digital Shop® Talk Radio, Tom Dorsey and Uwe Kleinschmidt join forces with ATI’s Mike Bennett to discuss Babcock Auto’s secrets to success by combining AutoVitals’ solutions with ATI coaching. Listen to learn how ATI and AutoVitals work together to achieve impressive ARO increases, no matter the circumstance.

Episode Transcript

*This transcript was generated using Artificial Intelligence. Errors may occur. If you notice an error, please contact [email protected].

Tom Dorsey (00:00:06):
Good morning and good afternoon. Welcome to this week’s edition of The Digital Shop Talk Radio. I’m Tom Dorsey, and today we’ve got a great show for you, so make sure you got a pen and paper handy. You’re going to want to take lots of notes, welcoming back to Digital Shop Talk Radio, and it’s been probably Mike at least, almost gosh, it seems like a year, although now in this Covid world we live in who has track of time anymore. But welcome back Mike Bennett from ATI to Digital Shop Talk Radio.
Mike Bennett (00:00:32):
Well, thank you very much. I appreciate coming back and seeing you guys. You’re right, it seems like it’s been a decade, but it probably has been something more like a year, although I’ve been telling everybody today is the third. So welcome to the third day of the 14th month of 2020. It’s
Tom Dorsey (00:00:49):
Just
Mike Bennett (00:00:49):
A year that keeps on giving.
Tom Dorsey (00:00:51):
Oh, that is, yeah. Unfortunately that is too true. And as always, welcome Uwe Kleinschmidt, our founder and CIO.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:01:00):
Thank you. I’m so stoked to have Mike on. It has been a while, way too long.
Mike Bennett (00:01:07):
It has been a while. We haven’t been able to engage each other in great conversation for a while, so watch out audience. That is true,
Tom Dorsey (00:01:15):
Yes. But hopefully this year’s Super conference is going to buck the trend and they’re going to go live event in Florida. So if you’re not signed up yet, you’re not, you got to start it I guess becoming an ATI member or at least a prospect. But you want to take a look at that. It’s going to be out in Florida. Where’s it at this year? Mike is it Amelia Island.
Mike Bennett (00:01:34):
So it’s Amelia Island. Yeah, Amelia Island at the Omni. So it’s a beautiful, beautiful venue and the time of the year is going to be absolutely fantastic March. Sometimes you just never quite know. I mean, I know I talked to somebody in Florida today, they were about 38 degrees, so that would’ve been not so fun. But when you’re there in May, it’s going to be absolutely spectacular. And ATI’s back to live this year, I think you can bank it and book it.
Tom Dorsey (00:02:01):
Yeah, that’s what I’m hearing. So a lot of people are excited about that, buddy. I know that it seems like it went fast, but it’s been a long time, which sounds weird, but just being away from these live events and really the networking and the one-on-one conversations that happen around these events is really what makes those events so worthwhile. And we just came off of our digital shop conference, well attended, great engagement, but boy, I tell you what, there’s nothing that beats a live event and we’re really looking forward to being able to get back out there and shake some hands and say hi to folks and get back to some of the normal normalcy as it was. So really appreciate ATI for stepping up and offering that event and really excited to be participating, that’s for sure.
Mike Bennett (00:02:52):
Well, we are going to welcome AutoVitals back and obviously all of the great participants and attendees. And you’re right, I mean, as I said, I’m not really kidding, although 2020 or the 14 months of 2020 has felt like a blink of an eye. It’s also felt like a millennia. It just isn’t stopping. So this is something that we as a company are really looking forward to. We think it’s going to be a great springboard into the back half of a phenomenal year and super anxious to be able to, as you say, make eye contact, have those intimate conversations and those networking meetings and opportunities for everybody to connect. So we’re all looking forward to it. And I know Kim had a fantastic time with you guys hanging out at the digital conference last week, so she was all giddy with that experience. So congrats on that one for you.
Tom Dorsey (00:03:44):
Yeah, I know Kim Hickey is always awesome and they did that in marketing. It was just fantastic. I mean, they’re solid gold. They should go on the road together.
Mike Bennett (00:03:54):
Oh, I’m telling you. It’s crazy, isn’t it? Yeah, yeah. I tell you what, it’s funny when you talk about these live shows, that’s one of the things that we’ve tried to really do is be there and available and make sure that every single day, since really this is all kicked off, so probably the better part of 11 months now, we’ve had a daily Facebook Live, if not one multiples, and Kim’s been the spearhead of that. So I know you’re at around what, a hundred, 405 episodes for Digital Shop Talk? I think Kim’s well over 200. She’s starting to hit the two 50 mark, the quarter century mark. She is an angel being able to put up with that for sure. I think we’re all zoom warn.
Tom Dorsey (00:04:37):
She makes me feel like a loser now. I better step up my game.
Mike Bennett (00:04:42):
Yeah, there’s probably certain titles you don’t want to go after.
Tom Dorsey (00:04:45):
Exactly. Yeah. Oh boy. And I crossed Kim early in our relationship and I learned a lesson. Never again, Kim. So if you’re watching, you got my full support and congratulations on your success.
Mike Bennett (00:04:58):
Yeah, we love her to death.
Tom Dorsey (00:04:59):
Yeah, no, don’t doubt about it. So let’s get into the episode. So today folks, we’re going to be talking, it’s Ask the Coach and we’ve got Mike Bennett on it, and then the first half we’re going to be talking about some examples, some real world examples. And this is really you want to pay attention because we’re going to be helping you to kind of identify where you are in your digital shop adoption, in your own fundamental best practice adoption. But most importantly is going to be kind of how to identify what to do to move to the next level. And we’re going to show you some real life examples of these situations and then how they overcame them and how they moved forward. So pay attention in the second half of the hour, we’re going to open it up for questions, right? Ask the coach. So hopefully you’re going to get enough information and enough some questions developed for your operation and then you have an opportunity for the second half hour to ask Uwe and Mike Bennett how to implement, how to go about it, that type of thing. So really looking forward to this episode. Let’s dive right in gentlemen and kind of get started. Mike, if you could start us off, who are we going to be talking about today and kind of give us an overview of the situation and what transpired to get them to the level that they’re at today.
Mike Bennett (00:06:19):
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. And so today with permission from the shop, I wanted to showcase an actual case study and I have a phenomenal shop that I’ve been working with. I think this year it’s going to be about 10 years. As a matter of fact, we’ve been working together and this is Babcock Autocare. Babcock Autocare is a great seven bay facility. It’s located in Rochester, Minnesota, home of the Mayo Clinic, which is a phenomenal place and as we’ll see a little later in the story here has been a place that’s been greatly challenged over the last 10 to 11 months as a lot of demographics have. But the story with Babcock here that we want to showcase today is a little longer and a little bit deeper than this. One of the things that from the coaching aspect that we really wanted to try and take advantage of was trying to get down to the operational, the implementation level.
(00:07:18):
And we’re really, really, really pleased that Gina and Jeremy agreed to give me some time to work with their sales manager, Ben and their shop form and Derek, and really trying to take advantage to the fullest of the inspection platform and just the digital shop experience. I mean, don’t get me wrong, as I said, we’ve worked together for a long period of time, highly successful shop, one of our top performing shops every year, year in and year out. But one of the things that we noticed when we started digging into opportunity, KPI, being able to look at some of the data that we collect on the ATI side and being able to have access to and compare it to information that’s also available and feedback from the AutoVitals side through my very favorite platform in the entire world, which is the BCP from a coaching point of view, I mean one of the most valuable tools that we have when we can kind of lay two sides of the world next to each other and see impact. And that’s a little bit of what we’re going to do today and I’ll play back and forth with this just a little bit, but just to give a little background on it. Again, very successful shop and I’m going to share with you in just a second here, an actual screenshot of their portal and kind of build the backstory. So if I can share my screen quickly, Tom. So you should be seeing now, Tom, my screen, my portal. Yes
Tom Dorsey (00:08:43):
Sir.
Mike Bennett (00:08:43):
Okay. Lots
Tom Dorsey (00:08:44):
Of numbers.
Mike Bennett (00:08:45):
Lots of numbers. We love for numbers, crunchers and report geeks. This is where we’re at. So this is a small little sample of the ATI performance report for those that are in the program or have been familiar with it, this is one of our main vessels to really be able to communicate and get feedback from the shop on how things are going and how things are that we’re working on. The timeframe that we’re looking at here for Babcock’s summary performance is we’re looking at a period of 67 weeks. So if I go backwards, this actually strings back into October of 2019. So jump back about a full decade. That was 2020 and it was the October of the year before. And so what I’ve done here is I’ve actually populated the portal there. If you can see right here where my cursor’s moving back and forth, I have 67 weeks worth of data open to the side.
(00:09:43):
That data all culminates in an average column that gives us an average value for any particular KPI across that 67 week period. And it compares it to the previous year last year, which in that case is the 67 weeks before the most recent 67 weeks. So we’re looking at a before and after because October is a period of time, as I said, when Gina and Jeremy were very gracious and allowed me some time to work with their level managers. And one of the things that we were really looking at at that time was trying to make a decision of whether or not we felt that although they were very good in using the inspection tools and an inspection process, we weren’t really sure that they were getting full impact. And this was data that we were getting on our side, some feedback and back and forth conversations we were having.
(00:10:35):
And quite frankly, some of the data coming back from the AutoVitals platform. And so one of the things that we look at very extensively as it relates to cause and impact if we have a very solid inspection system is we’re looking right down in this area. The statistic that we’re looking at is estimated average. An estimated average for us is a figure that we look at on a weekly basis. We take a look at, if you consider the inspection process, and we’ll go back and talk about kind of the layers of the inspection process. But if we look at the basic inspection process, the vehicle comes into the shop, of course we’re going to perform our vehicle health check or digital inspection on the vehicle. It’s going to result in technicians giving us observational recommendations. We hope that we get follow-up time and mileage based recommendations.
(00:11:25):
They’re turned into through the estimating process into an estimate that we can present to a customer. So it is that total that we’re looking at the total potential of estimated work for the week. It’s what we did sell plus what we did not sell. That ends up becoming, depending on your system and the verge either deferred work or declined work. But prior to really sitting down, we had a shop that was doing a good job, their average vehicle was producing for them an estimate value of about, excuse me, $915 and 56 cents total vehicle count across the period of time divided into estimate values. This is what we would end up with. On average service counter did a fantastic job. They were converting 49, almost 50% of the dollars that they were presenting for an average repair order value of and $472 and 89 cents. So in all accounts, a rather successful shop in its ability to communicate.
(00:12:27):
But when we dug a little bit deeper and we looked at some of the feedback we were getting from the digital inspection platform from AutoVitals, either through the inspection metrics or the BCP, what we realized is the inspections we were doing, we were doing good, but the problem was is we weren’t doing the inspections completely. This is really Uwe and I were talking a little bit earlier today. If you really think about the evolution of a shop through the digital process, there’s really probably three phases of evolution. Evolution. Our first phase is really about getting the inspection process drilled in, right? The effectiveness of being able to perform the inspections, making sure that we have a consistent inspection process, our technicians are bought into it, it’s being done routinely and regularly. It results in recommendations which turn into an estimate. And so it kind of gets us to the doorstep of phase number two.
(00:13:21):
Phase number two for us is really about the point at which we use the inspection to help engage the customer. So we have the inspection and now our sales process and the inspection engages that customer and we’re trying to create a dialogue and an understanding and a value proposition that obviously results in sales. And then of course the final piece, the final phase that we move into once we’ve got phase one and phase two really drilled in and implemented obviously, is then being able to see that scale up resulting in what we would hope would be increased levels of revenue, increased levels of satisfaction, and all the things that go along with the better customer experience. And so that being said, what we really started concentrating on is we wanted to make sure that we had the basics of phase one in place. And Uwe, I know we’ve got some stuff we want to share about current metrics, but I can tell you from memory a couple of the things that we looked at coming in the vitals at that period of time is at that period of time, if you would look up here in the last year column, we were working on about an average of around 115 vehicles per week across 67.
(00:14:35):
So from the 68th week out to what would be, I guess about 130 plus weeks ago, we were seeing about 115 vehicles a week. We were roughly inspecting 50%, let’s say 50 to 55%, and we probably had equal amount of inspections being sent, which resulted in an overall estimate value of about $915. And of course sales team did a phenomenal job, 49% conversion rate. So they’re selling about half the dollars that they present for a 4 72 point 89. Very respectable, very solid average appar order value. But we were concentrating on the inspection side and really trying to work on that phase one. So when we drilled into it, we actually ran into, we were having a conversation, it was me and the shop foreman and the sales manager, and we really started having a conversation and the conversation was based around belief systems. I asked the shop, Hey, listen, got 115 vehicles coming in the shop a week, why are we only inspecting 50% of those vehicles?
(00:15:42):
And I got the, well Mike, we sometimes get pushed by the service advisors. We got to get this vehicle in, we got a timeline, we got to get it out, we just don’t have time to get it done. Or gosh, we remember we just inspected that vehicle a couple of weeks ago and it was all of the belief systems that we typically run up against. And so I thought, okay, well if we’re going to talk to the shop side about it a little bit, let’s talk to the service counter a little bit. And I got the, well, Mike, we really know our customers and we know that Mr. Jones just isn’t a guy that appreciates that inspection. And we know Mr. Jones, I mean, my gosh, we’ve been trying to tell him about that leak CV boot for the last four visits and he’s just not interested in buying that.
(00:16:31):
We know our guys best. I mean, we just don’t want to waste the time when we know there’s no practical purpose for it. And I said, okay, I completely get that. But we’ve got an opportunity here to really kind of change the belief system and the mindset in the shop and as opinion leaders in the shop service sales manager and of course the shop foreman, if you guys are on board and you can drill that down through your staff, we’ve got an opportunity to potentially really kind of move some stats and we get a chance to see what the impact would be. So obviously the conversation with the technicians and the shop foreman and the sales team is we started talking a little bit about consistency and professional obligation. We can’t pick and choose when we want to pay attention to a car. We can’t assume somebody does or doesn’t want to do something to be a business of operational excellence.
(00:17:26):
We’ve got to be committed to a process and be willing to perform that process each and every time. What the customer does with it is their choice, but it’s our professional obligation and to make sure that we’re consistent with our customer and each and every time we give them the information they need to be able to make an informed and educated decision. So we had that conversation and cut into the chase, the technician shop foreman said, you know what? I get it. We’re going to go. And so then I turned to the sales counter and I said, listen, here’s the deal. If these service technicians and the shop foreman are going to bust their butt and get all of these inspections done and make these recommendations, you guys got to step up your game as well and actually do something with them. There’s nothing more demotivating to a technician who spends their time and invest in that inspection to not have the inspection realized and put forward to the customer.
(00:18:26):
So that means we have to edit the inspection to make sure we have a quality product we can put forward. We have to spend the time taking those observational recommendations and creating estimates for each of those items. We have to take the time reviewing vehicle service records for the time and mileage based, and we’ve got to create an estimate that then we can put forward to our customers once we’ve had an opportunity to share the findings in our digital inspection. And so I was very easily able to, we talked about in this particular case, sometimes changing a belief in a mindset is about trying to take things in a short period of time. We talked about what the winds would be. I mean, obviously this is a shop where the technicians are driven by their ability to produce hours. So the cell became easy. Listen, would you rather pull 10 vehicles in for an hour a piece or pull five vehicles in for two hours a piece or something less than that?
(00:19:20):
And so they kind of understood it and we got ’em to agree. We set a target of 80%. It was a short target. We wanted to do 80% inspections. And then the other half of that was going to the service counter and saying, listen, if they’re going to inspect the vehicles, you got to follow up on your part of the process. I got a little pushback. I got the, well, Mike, you don’t know Mr. Jones as well as we do. We need to make sure we’ll do this, but we know it’s going to be a waste of time. And I said, okay, I get it. But one, you heard what the technician said, they’ve agreed to do at least 80% inspection, so you got to live up to it. And I said, here’s the deal. If you’re right and your customers better than I do, your inspection value will invariably go up.
(00:20:06):
We’re inspecting more vehicles and hopefully we’re taking a little more time with them bringing your maintenance to the table as well. I said, but the ARO won’t change your customer better. I said, but if I’m right, we’re going to see the estimate value go up and correspondingly the ARO will go up. So that’s the basic story of how we addressed phase one, right? Obviously phase two kind of naturally occurs, and the interesting thing that is here, remember I told you we started this and it was every week I talked to ’em, we coach ’em, we talked about the stats, we deal with whatever the issue of belief system or pushback was, but very quickly what we started to see was estimate values went up, average repair order value went up, technicians hours went up. By the time we got to the end of the six week period, we no longer had to talk about this is what we agreed to do for six weeks.
(00:21:07):
It now became ingrained and they started telling me how successful it was. It was the change of belief system, and don’t get me wrong, very talented individuals that were able to take a little bit of coaching and really turn it into something great. What I wanted to share with you today has been the net impact, and I want to build on the story just a little bit and Uwe, we’ll be able to talk a little bit more statistically with some things like motorist engagement and stuff like that when we bring up some screen shares from BCP about what the impact in phase two. And really we went into phase three, which really about trying to use these tools to increase sales. But here’s the story and here’s where it takes a little twist. We had this funny little thing happen to us called covid. Now remember, we’re working on this in October pre covid.
(00:21:57):
This is October, 2019. We’re on a good path. We’re seeing these numbers come up immediately. We saw the 8, 7 50 to $900 estimate values going to a thousand to $1,300, right? We’re seeing that average repair order start to come up a little bit. They’re believing it and the momentum’s getting stronger and stronger, but then covid hit, and I’m sure AutoVitals could corroborate this from the data that they collect looking around the country, I can certainly tell you from the ATI point of view, and especially at least early on, our industry was hit and it was hit hard. Our customers in many, many markets were locked down. They didn’t leave their house, but we lost things like schools and offices closed and sports shutdown and camps for kids. We saw that vehicle mileage driven. Matter of fact, I’ve seen a report as recent, I think two weeks ago from Lang and Lang talked about they really believe when the December data is in, we’re going to probably be around 15% reduction in annual national miles driven.
(00:23:04):
That is massive. We haven’t seen that level in the reduction of vehicle mileage driven in history. There’s only been, I think five occurrences of a drop in vehicle mileage compared to the previous year. And all of the rest of them occurred back in oh 7, 0 8, 0 9, and I think 12 was the next year. They were all single digit reductions. We’re talking about a 15% reduction in some markets were hit exceptionally hard. I can tell you very deep white collar markets were hit hard because those were very easy jobs to become work from home remote. So again, leaning back on the market around Babcock Autocare in the Covid experience, that was a very white collar medical market. So a lot of the people that worked in that area were able to stay home. The schools were closed and just people stop driving. But another great driver is when you’re in the home of the Mayo Clinic, a lot of people come to the Mayo Clinic from around the country and around the world.
(00:24:05):
All of that stopped. They were hit very hardly very hard, excuse me. And if we look at it, if we look at it on an average, now again, this goes back in this average period actually goes back into 2019. Prior to that, they were averaging 114 vehicles per week through this period of time, which started in October of 2019. But really the drop started obviously in March they’ve dropped to a low of about 90 cars per week. So that is a loss of nearly 25 vehicles per week to any other shop in any other situation that’s debilitating to colossal. It ends up killing you. But I’m very pleased to say that when we look at it from a total sales point of view, you’ll notice we dropped nearly 25 vehicles per week and maintained within $600 weekly revenue average. So it’s the most backwards way of exemplifying phase three, which is the growth of your business.
(00:25:11):
In this particular case, I believe it’s one of the greatest factors in the preservation of a business. And if we look at it right down here is where we see what happened across this period of time driving in these principles. That took us six weeks to really convince, actually it was less than that. That’s not really fair. We’ve increased the average estimate at this shop from $915 per vehicle to over $1,518 per vehicle. We’ve added almost, well just slightly over $600 per average vehicle, same customers, same demographic, same mileage. We’re just being more effective and more consistent with a larger number. And it’s increased our average estimate value again, over $600 to nearly $1,518. Now, some people would look at this line right here, conversion rate. This is one of those stats that you’ll see just a ton of businesses, automotive businesses in particular and organizations really talk about conversion rate.
(00:26:20):
Conversion rate by definition is literally the amount of estimate dollars that we convert into sales dollars. So as a percentage, we would look at this and say, my goodness, we got a problem, right? We’ve seen a 12% reduction in conversion rate. And I would tell you from my personal and practical experience, I see that actually as a healthy reduction in conversion rate, it’s to be expected. And there’s two things that indicates that I think are really, really valuable, but obviously when you increase your estimate value by nearly $600, and in a lot of cases, some of that can come from the fact that we’re much more diligent about time and mileage based presentations. Oftentimes we’ll see that vehicle owners may have to be a little bit more cognizant, make some decisions based upon budgetary considerations. Yes, they’re declining some today, and we’ll talk about how that works into the future, but they’re declining some of that today. But even though the percentage is lower, look at the impact in raw dollars. Here’s the stat we care about, right? $915 was net in a $472 ARO $1,518 that increased. And remember my conversation with the sales manager, if I know your customer better by showing them more, they’ll buy more. Here it is, $121 per vehicle for 67 weeks.
(00:27:51):
If I had a MICA drop it,
(00:27:55):
That’s it. I mean, this is unbelievable success. Buy this shop and listen, it’s not me. It’s them embracing the system and really being able to modify the belief systems and very quickly grab it not just from production money point of view, but really the customer value and experience point of view. Because again, we use these tools to create a higher level of customer engagement, which is a higher level of resulting trust and value. So we talked about this increased value or increased estimate value, which got us a higher ARO. It’s really the thing that even with 25 less vehicles has driven us to nearly the same revenue. We haven’t seen the business necessarily grow. But listen, let’s get back to some natural level of traffic flow. Let’s open up some markets and imagine taking what this shop is doing now and escalating it back out through the next car count or through the previous car count. It’s insane.
Tom Dorsey (00:28:53):
Yeah, no, and that’s the key is to be able to be consistent after we get back to normal, after your car count comes back and not cut the corners and not get back to the old habits. And this Mike, really, it strikes me as when you follow this best practice, if you build this foundation under your operation, you’re actually storing money in the bank. That really is what this is going to end up looking like.
Mike Bennett (00:29:21):
So let me just so I can stop my screen share, I want to bring the last point into this. We talked about this estimate value. Yeah, I’m converting at 12% less, but I’m converting it 12% less on $600 shown to the customer, $600 shown to the customer that they didn’t buy all it. Obviously they only bought 37% of it. That means that we have nearly 53, excuse me, 63% of those estimate dollars, which are now in that bank you just talked about, it goes into deferred or declined services and now gets into your CRM system. And we’ve got our next visit sent, which is exactly one of the points that we talked to with the sales staff. Listen, you want to write a repair order and do all this work with an inspection today and have it be a one and done? Yeah, you sold 50% of it, but how much work didn’t we tell ’em about that?
(00:30:15):
Oh, by the way, we didn’t defer because we never talked to ’em about it. So it never ended up in our marketing system, and we never have the chance to now let our CRM system make the reconnections and start to bring those people back. There’s the money in the bank that you’re talking about. Not only were we able to weather this and actually see such an increase in the revenue base that kept us very healthy in a catastrophic, a generationally catastrophic period of time in business, and yet we’ve also then further increased our potential going down the road. So that’s one of the key pieces. That’s the unintended positive consequence that ends up happening here. So unless you have some questions on this, I figure I’ll stop the screen share and we can kind of expand the conversation maybe over to some of the metrics if wants to bring forward.
Tom Dorsey (00:31:04):
Yeah, no, that’s fantastic because I’m sure Uwe can give us stitch together. I mean, that was a great presentation, Mike, I got to tell you because I know a lot of people’s wheels are turning right now and they can see right in there those steps and how that comparison between Yeah, sure. I mean in one area, I think this last previous week, I mean their car count is literally down 50%.
Mike Bennett (00:31:29):
Yeah, by the way, that’s a snowstorm. But we won’t talk about the other thing that impacts Rochester, Minnesota.
Tom Dorsey (00:31:35):
The revenue isn’t down. I mean, it’s incredible off 600 bucks or whatever it was. I mean that really,
Mike Bennett (00:31:40):
It is nuts. It is nuts how successful they’ve been. And that’s a top down leadership thing.
Tom Dorsey (00:31:46):
Yeah, it really is. And you talk about, a lot of times you talk about a safety net or you talk about eliminating risk in your business. Well, there you have it. You need to develop the fundamentals to show that. Can you imagine if your Dr. Cherry picked what he was going to, yeah, you need a tetanus shot, but I’m not going to tell you about that colonoscopy you should be getting. You would never do that. And people trust their doctors and people appreciate, I mean, you give me the whole story, I can handle it and then at least I can figure out my action plan from there.
Mike Bennett (00:32:19):
I’ll take that one step further. We hear about this. Well, our customers get mad that we present so much stuff. Let’s use your thing. Listen, I would be thrilled if my doctor didn’t tell me I need a colonoscopy for time to time, but I’m going to be less thrilled if I end up having a problem down the road. If you don’t tell me about the leaking axle boot and now instead of a boot, it turns into an axle or instead of a transmission service or a leak repair, it turns into a transmission. I may not be mad on you at visit one, and I may not even realize I should be mad at you for visit two when it costs me eight times more. But the reality is, as a professional, that’s our responsibility. We drop the ball there if that occurs.
Tom Dorsey (00:33:02):
Oh, a hundred percent. A hundred percent.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:33:05):
Yeah. So
Tom Dorsey (00:33:07):
I’m sorry, go for it.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:33:08):
A small piece of a big pie is still bigger than a big piece of a very small pie. So our job is to identify what’s the right size pie and when do you eat what piece? It doesn’t need to be eaten in one visit. And so you really, what I’m hearing before we even go into more numbers, I don’t even know whether we need to because I was really super impressed by the way you brought front counter and back shop together. And so I believe being successful the first time around that showed them maybe there’s more it worked. So what’s our next opportunity to tap into? And the same with the customer. If the estimate is so high, high euro, are they seeing that as, okay, this is more a car care program. Instead of fix everything now and then come back when my next problem happens, right? There is a whole transition of the shop takes care of my car and I should follow the recommendations. And if I get something presented what we call the yellow stuff, I don’t need to do it today, but maybe next time then the relationship also changes dramatically. So I’m curious if you don’t mind me asking, how did that happen in the day-to-day change for the service counter to let go of the Mr. Jones belief?
Mike Bennett (00:35:03):
I think ultimately what ends up happening is proof is in the pudding. You can have some guy that calls once a week, and we have this conversation and trust me, I’m telling you how it’s going to be. But when they completed the phase one transition, when they really got themselves to the point where their inspection and recommendations speak for themselves because they now have a product that engages the customer. I mean, how many times have we presented that to Mr. Jones, the guy that denied it four times before when it was presented in such a way, it sounded like an optional, do you want sprinkles on your ice cream as opposed to, wait a minute, that’s a problem. I can see that doesn’t grease shouldn’t fly around like that. I can see there’s a problem with that. And the service advisor takes a different mindset and a different tact when talking to a customer.
(00:36:01):
They can actually talk about what they’re seeing and why that’s a problem and what the corrective action should be can help a customer work through the prioritization of what’s there. It becomes much more realistic and it became much more natural. The service advisors, I think for the most part, ran up against customers who felt more educated and were more comfortable with giving that okay than had they previously been where they were given a no, because that just seemed like the reaction you were giving it. I don’t want sprinkles on my ice cream as opposed to this is something that that looks like that’s really important and I can see with my eyes that doesn’t look right and what you’re telling me seems to line up with what I’m seeing. And it just created an entirely different dynamic to the conversation. I began to hear much less about service advisors complaining about pushback.
(00:36:58):
Pushback comes back in a lot of cases when a customer in their mind is saying, what you’re telling me, what I’m seeing and what I want to do, don’t line up, but what you’re telling me and what I see lines up now I realize I got to talk about it. And it’s much easier to have that conversation. We’re standing on the same side of the counter, not in opposing views. And what I guess I started to notice is I started to hear about much less pushback from customers that Mr. Jones was saying, okay to a lot of stuff, or maybe they said no to it but today, but was automatically, Hey, that’s something we’ll maybe look at next visit or something like that. It changed the context of feedback from Mr. Jones, if that makes sense.
Tom Dorsey (00:37:38):
Yeah, and it’s funny, I’ve had more than once, probably more than 10 times conversations with the writers who their epiphany moment is when Mr. Jones goes, Hey, where’s that boot on this report? You might’ve been telling me about it five, six times before. Where is it on this report? Oh, we thought you didn’t want sprinkles. Now I was saving the sprinkles for dessert. They still want that full and complete report and they demand that and they feel like they’re losing value or you’re holding something back from them if you don’t present it. And then people go, oh, I better do a complete and thorough inspection and present what we find.
Mike Bennett (00:38:15):
Yeah, it’s consistency. And I think that’s one of those things that as an industry understanding our model is operational excellence. Operational excellence is predicated 100% on consistency to best practice. And the more that we can do that, the more value our customers. We think we’re in the customer service business we are, but that’s a result of what we do very professionally and correctly. It should not be the driving force nor decision if we do what we’re supposed to do correctly. You’re going to get that in spades.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:38:53):
So maybe we look at the data, I hope you can see my screen share. Yep,
Mike Bennett (00:38:59):
Yep. We see it.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:39:00):
And what to Badcock, which is here compared with four other blurred out shop names for the last year. And what’s interesting to me, and let me try to use an error to point at it, is this number, and I remember looking at Babcock has been a customer for quite a while where we are hovering in the four or five recommendations and now in the 16 it goes back, look where their goal is. Their goal was five. Nobody up updated the goal yet. There’s nobody up to the call yet.
Mike Bennett (00:39:50):
I wasn’t going to point that out to you.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:39:56):
That’s incredible. That’s incredible. And that takes a lot of belief to go back to your belief system for the tech to do the extra work, right?
Mike Bennett (00:40:08):
Well, and your service advisor, quite honestly, I would tell you again my observation, looking at stats, whether they’re yours or ours and really figuring out the pattern, I would tell you generally speaking, and again this is just my observed stuff, is that an observational inspection, in other words, the stuff the tech sees, it’s worn, it’s broken, it’s leaking, it’s frayed. Observational recommendations tend to run somewhere between say seven and nine, right? That’s about what I see when I can really trust that that’s what we’re getting out of the back. The acceleration of seven to nine to upwards of 15 and a half or 16 as you see here is the addition of the service counter really following the due diligence of looking at the service history against Carfax, against today’s mileage, previous experience and so forth. And that’s usually that difference. So when I see the kind of back process in shape, that’s where you’ll see kind of that $900 plus or minus, I’m just throwing a number there, and you’ll see when that gets tightened up, it might get up into the thousand $1,100 range where you see that accelerate up to 15, $1,600 in estimate value is going to be that maintenance that brings to the forefront those opportunities as well.
(00:41:36):
And so this to me is a great example of the front and the back working together, each one understanding their responsibility in the process. This is how you end up with that estimate value, these recommendations, and ultimately all the things we saw as a victory.
Tom Dorsey (00:41:55):
Yeah, no, that’s really brilliant too because if you’ve already got the eight, right, that’s just natural, that’s going to be organic. You’re going to run around, like you said, the seven and nine range really you’re looking for is five six more, right? And we used to say that a lot when we were talking about best practices around number of pictures taken. Well, if you’re doing your four corner walk around and you already got almost 10 pictures or eight pictures, whatever it is, and you’re really only looking for four or five more to hit that kind of number, the sweet spot that we were looking for at that time. This is a really simple, and I think easy to understand and easy to implement. I think the question would be is because I thought Mike in your open when you talked about how you went and you got the texts on board and then you kind of leveraged the text to say, well, they’re going to do it. So why aren’t you writers? You’re just going to cut them off. How do you get those text to take that initial leap of faith? How do you get them to change that mindset and just try it even? Is it like you do it for a pay period? Do you do it for a day?
Mike Bennett (00:42:58):
We played a six week game and that’s really what it was. We put some targets out there, trust us, it’s going to be worth your while. We got enough conversation going about best practice and who we are as a shop and what our obligation is to be consistent with our customers. And then quite frankly, the other half of what really makes employees move in most cases is what’s in it for me? And it’s making sure that within these conversations where we talk about increased number of recommendations or increased number of inspections, here’s what I typically see occurs in labor hours per ticket, or here’s what happens in overall average repair order value. And when you can start showing some of the, this is what happens in the real world, it becomes much easier to get ’em to take that taste test and let’s give it a try. And if you really get, excuse me, the buy-in and they give it an honest try, the results will naturally drive it. It just is going to work. You do X, Y will occur.
Tom Dorsey (00:44:03):
Now that really is the rocket fuel right there. And so for folks that are struggling, maybe you’re trying to get your motorist research time up, maybe you’re working with your AutoVitals advisor and you’re working on these very specific metrics that really is the rocket fuel right there. Once you can get, you talk about having your techs on board, that doesn’t mean that they just complete an inspection, right? They’re, they’re going to follow those best practices and do ’em diligently and take the right pictures with the right lighting, but they’re going to hit that number of recommended action goal for you. And really everything builds off of that.
Mike Bennett (00:44:33):
And if everybody’s doing their part of the process, there’s a natural result and the result ends up being the payback back down the food chain, so to speak. You’re going to see the increase in average apparel order value. You’re going to see the increase in labor hours per ticket, and obviously your technicians are going to see for their efforts an increase in what the tickets. And that’s what we talk about it. Listen, would you rather pull a vehicle 20 vehicles in at two hours a ticket or an hour ticket, or would you rather pull half the number of vehicles in for two hours a ticket? It’s pretty simple.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:45:07):
It is. What I also love about this comparison is you can see that with Babcock, the certain KPIs really line up high inspection rate, high inspection center rate, high motorist research time only comparatively kind of matched by this shop where we have the same lineup except for the recommendations.
Mike Bennett (00:45:34):
Well, that’s exactly where we’re going to go. So if you pay attention, that particular shop there, phenomenal motorist research time, they’re doing the inspections, they’re sending the inspections, phenomenal motorist research time, and by the way, great ARO, you have to ask yourself what kind of vehicles are they working on? But that being said, if they’ve got their people engaged for nearly 500 seconds producing a thousand dollars in ARO on eight recommendations, imagine what it could be if it were 15 recommendations, right? Because those vehicles don’t need less than the ones do down the rest of the street here.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:46:10):
That’s correct.
Tom Dorsey (00:46:11):
And what would that weekly revenue look like once that deferred maintenance is coming back on a consistent basis too? Right. Real quick, Mike, Tony Berg is asking from your previous, when we were talking about getting all those recommendations onto the estimate, she’s asking, so are you suggesting having the service advisor input into the inspection, the maintenance items?
Mike Bennett (00:46:31):
Absolutely. My personal opinion, both as a shop owner and as a coach and ATI in general, we have several programs. There’s what we call the nowhere to hide, but that’s absolutely what I consider the best practice. And so if you really think about it, of sphere of influence, what can I do effectively, your technician is the one that has the technical expertise to be able to look at systems and see when there’s things that are wrong, right? Deviation, observable, recommendations. If it’s break fluid, it’s moisture color, copper content, frayed belts, wor brakes, that sort of stuff. Our service advisors don’t have that expertise. Our technician’s time is incredibly valuable and the most productive technician is the technician that either has a tablet or a wrench in their hand. If they have a mouse in their hand, they’re not being productive. So if they’re the ones that are digging through the service history, even if they do, it’s in the bays and oh, they can look up the service history one, they don’t have the total picture, they haven’t had the conversation with the customer.
(00:47:32):
And two, more importantly than not, it’s just not as productive. They can’t be as quick about it. And so we really propose and promote that your service advisor is the one that’s got the majority of the time and the information available to ’em, the access to data to be the ones that can take today’s vehicle mileage and reach out to the rest of the resources, whether that’s a conversation as a first time customer, Carfax, or we’re looking into our system for previously recommended or previously performed services. Because as professionals, most of our shops, they realize from time and mileage, and I don’t want to get in the conversation of what’s preventative maintenance versus what is a maintenance repair. But the idea is is that we know when we’re going to make recommendations for something say like brake fluid. And so there’s not just we do it at three years or 30,000 miles and you’re at three years, two months, and you’re at 34,000 miles, so you’re clearly due.
(00:48:34):
I mean, that’s condition number one. But the other thing is, is it at 64,000 miles and it was done at 30 and now it’s due again? Or maybe the first time they didn’t get it done until 40 and now we’re at 64. So there may be not today, but that they should know about for their next visit. So we’re already even starting the maintenance conversation for the next visit, the yellow, so to speak. So long answer that says, absolutely, please AutoVitals, tell me if you would have another opinion, but I absolutely believe that to be the most effective place that time and mileage and history data mining can occur.
Tom Dorsey (00:49:11):
Yeah, no, what’s right in front of ’em. And it’s definitely, it’s the service writer’s job or production matter, whoever you have doing that role to do the due diligence, to do the investigative work around the history and actually extrapolate, because I know this is something can speak to, is looking at that vehicle and your experience with that vehicle that you’re more prone to water pump replacement at this mileage. And you’re coming up on that. We know that because we do it all the time. I used to have a Ford Taurus that needed some coolant tube in the transmission and I didn’t listen to a guy and I ended up buying two of them because the first transmission I bought failed those Taurus were junk, right? But man, I wish I would’ve got that dollar 98 tube installed when the guy told me about it.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:50:01):
What I really like about what Mike said, it also puts the inspection in front and center. It’s not just the condition description of the car now, it also talks about what should happen to the car in the future to the vehicle. And one of my favorite topics is really to explore. Shouldn’t be placed the service in a wall as a CRM trigger by the inspection in the wall because the shop knows best what the conditions of the vehicle are and make recommendations and say, this is valid for the next six months, three months, whatever your inspection interval might be, and say, come back for an update of that. Yeah, your dashboard is going to tell you stuff, but it’s not complete. If you want to have a complete big health inspection, let’s just schedule the inspections out instead of,
Mike Bennett (00:51:10):
Well, don’t we do that now in medical, I mean dental. Exactly. You get your teeth checked every six months. It’s not like you wait till you have a cavity or a sore gum to go back, right? Your doctor, you’re on an annual physical, and Uwe and Tom, we talked about this a few minutes right before we jumped on. We’re in a different world for some period of time. We talked about the fact, I mentioned it earlier, we’ve seen a 15% reduction in overall vehicle mileage annually driven through 2020. The predictions are we’re not going to necessarily see that return to pre covid vehicle miles driven for several years. And if that’s, so we’re shop owners and we’re really thinking about a couple of the things that are necessary to keep our shop functioning. Revenue is one, but the opportunity of where it comes from. So number of vehicles in our shop, if vehicle mileage is driven and we’re an industry that’s focused on mileage intervals, we’re automatically going to see those intervals increase dramatically.
(00:52:16):
But what you’re mentioning is something that I think is huge just as we relate it to actual maintenance based items. We’ve always said time or mileage, and if mileage is extending, that doesn’t necessarily mean the time is going to extend as well. There are some things that conditions continue to occur even if the vehicle is being driven at a less rigorous pace. And so I think in a lot of cases, our verbiage and we’ve seen these mileage intervals increase really for the last 10 or 15 years in our industry. And to overcome that, you’re going to have to do one of two things. You’re going to have to try and go out and grab more market share. I need more new customers in the door to fill the gap of customers that aren’t coming back three times a year. Or we’re going to also have to augment that with the conversation switching from, excuse me, mileage to time verbiages like do by time or mileage have got to change to expired. So we used a funny analogy. My wife is one of these, she buys a gallon of milk and might have a half a gallon in it, but if that little date on the top met it’s dumped. Why? Because the milk has expired, it’s going to go bad. And if we take our minds as consumers are trained to an expiration date, we change that verbiage and start to think about it the exact same way. Your oil change interval has expired.
Tom Dorsey (00:53:43):
And I thought that was brilliant when they did that to canned soda. Right? How long ago was that now? Maybe 20 years ago you started getting an expiration date. Does a can of soda ever go bad? You probably, I don’t think, but boy that was, and a lot of people think, Hey, that was a marketing thing, so they just move more soda off the shelves. But no, I mean, if you’re going to get to the level where you think of your can of soda expiring, I think to your point, it’s brilliant. And to Uwe’s point, I think that is already starting to happen, especially when you talk to guys like Bruce Nation and some of these other operators that are really moving that conversation away from a mileage and time-based interval to an inspection based because hey, everybody’s situation’s different. You drive your car differently. It’s a different type of vehicle in a different, you’re driving in the mountains, you’re driving in the desert, but also type of fluids you’re running, you’ve got full synthetic, it takes a different interval than somebody who doesn’t have the synthetics. And so there’s just so many variables. It only makes sense to say, you need to come in for an inspection. Let’s see what’s going on. And then we can give you the recommendations.
Mike Bennett (00:54:51):
Yeah, bill, Connor actually just mentioned your vehicle health inspection will expire on month, day, year, and that’s exactly it. It’s no different than that little sticker on the side of milk. And if you’re like my wife, there’s people that anything food related that has a date, it’s gone. If we could just get ’em to think that way with their oil change or whatever. Right,
Tom Dorsey (00:55:12):
Right, right, right. Yeah, it is expired. New window sticker. That’s what Bill said. No digital need digital sticker back.
Mike Bennett (00:55:22):
There you go. There you go.
Tom Dorsey (00:55:24):
The digital sticker.
Mike Bennett (00:55:26):
So one thing real quick, Uwe, if you look on Babcock here, I think it’s really interesting. If you remember, our original goal for them was to go from that 50% inspection, 50% cent. I just said a number of around 80, if you can see it, is self perpetuating and driving. Now, we honestly haven’t had to have this conversation in, I want to say almost a year. Success breeds the willingness and the interest in doing more of that thing. And that’s where I think when we really were talking about those three phases of the evolution of receiving full value from the digital experience, it’s really that it’s, we’ve got to get past that implementation phase. In a lot of cases, we know there’s shops that are kind of half a toe in and a half a toe out. When you can get it fully vested, that becomes the natural transition to the phase two, that customer engagement experience point of view.
(00:56:26):
And then when you couple the two of those together, that becomes the natural phase shift, the evolution and progression towards that revenue base going way up. Like I said, this has been an odd year where we maybe haven’t necessarily target increased revenues. Some shops have been able to do that. Some markets that have been very badly hit, you’ve got great cases like this where literally they’ve been able to weather the storm with what would otherwise devastate, and in this case has kind of kept them right on pace. And I think that’s quite honestly because of the full acceptance and implementation of those three phases. And that was naturally occurred. We pushed them in the beginning, but it became a natural evolution. And I think that’s the important part. It’s not this, oh God, reset phase two. Oh my Lord. We have to chunk through that and oh Lord, we have to go to phase three? No, it just becomes a natural role.
Tom Dorsey (00:57:24):
Yeah, it becomes a machine and the machine runs. When you turn it on, it runs, right? And if any part of that machine functioning correctly, well you know about it, right? Immediately, and then you can correct it. And a lot of this becomes self-correcting, right? The techs are holding the service writers accountable and the writers are holding the techs accountable and the owner, and they’re holding the owner accountable and whatever role you’re in, if you’re part of that machine and you’re just not hitting what’s expected of you, the rest of the machine is going to come and tell you to fix it. Right? It’s like football, right? When you get in the huddle, you just didn’t always talk about the next play. You talked about how much this guy sucked on the last one, and you start telling him, you better make your block this time.
Mike Bennett (00:58:10):
Well, it’s accountability. It’s an engaged team will give you a high level accountability from all levels up and down. All too often, as I say, when the shop owner or the shop itself is a half a toe in and a half a toe out, there’s oftentimes a lot of disconnect. There’s really no one’s understanding what to do and nobody understands why it’s important. This is, oh my goodness, the owner went to another seminar and they’ve got some new tool they brought back for us. And it becomes that whole thing. When you can really get that initial push for engagement, it becomes that self perpetuating deal. And then it’s full team engagement. As I said, this thing is self perpetuating. Now we’re not having to have these conversations anymore. I’m not asking every week tracking how many inspections did we get done? What was our inspection? Did we get over that 302nd motorist engagement? It just happens naturally,
Tom Dorsey (00:59:04):
Right? Yeah, no, and that’s such a brilliant point, and that’s why we say bring that BCP into your weekly meetings because when you get to that level, that’s exactly what you’re doing. You’re just going, yes, the tank is full of fuel. Yes, we’re maintaining it correctly and we’re doing the things that we’re supposed to be doing. And we can go through really quickly and see, are we working towards our goal? Are we doing what’s expected? And if we are, like you said, then we have an expectation of the result, we know what to expect. And I mean, that’s a really good way to run your operation when you can start to forecast to that level.
Mike Bennett (00:59:41):
And Exactly. And the trickle back is when all this stuff is happening, your techs are winning in the production side of life. Your service advisors are winning on the sales side of life. They’ve got customers that are a much easier sell and a much less confrontation and discussion. I mean, the payback downhill is usually invaluable.
Tom Dorsey (01:00:02):
Yeah, Bill had a brilliant point earlier. He says that once this happens, it’s the ancillary benefits too. Less trips out to the parking lots, less rack and unrack, less tool swaps, less base swaps, just all of these things. Less spending time trying to fill gaps in the schedule by banging out cold calls or doing dials or whatever it might be. It all just now you’re just producing hours and staying busy and you’re making the most out of ’em. And it just becomes a much more seamless and consistent operation with consistent results. And I mean, that’s where everybody wants to be. And the fact that these folks are doing it through covid like this, and I think, and we’ve talked about this several times on the show, is to say, Hey, it gave me more time to sit back and really think these through and build processes around these best practices. But just to see it realized through in the 14th month, like Mike said, it really is incredible. And now the key is maintaining and growing it from there and continuing. Because like you said, I mean imagine what some of those shops could have done if they had that car count where they were post covid and they were running these same types of metrics. I mean to the moon Alice.
Mike Bennett (01:01:19):
Yeah. And we actually saw that in the fall and really the first couple of months prior of 2020, prior to the onset of that thing we call covid. But anyhow, yeah, we actually did see that where that car count was in a very strong place and just all of a sudden the revenue is just naturally being driven to places that we hadn’t seen it before on a regular basis. But the one last point I do is we’re talking about this reduction in vehicle mileage, and we’re really going to have to work and think about where are we as shop owners? Where are we going to put efforts to try and maintain census in our bays? As I said, a lot of shop owners are talking about, listen, we’re going to obviously have to start thinking about getting into the market share game, which I believe is an absolute truth.
(01:02:09):
But as I say, one of the simple little things, I’ll just use the stats we had there at $915, we have this much potential follow-up work to set the next expectation to create the next opportunity at $1,500. We have this much work that now drops into, we’ve already set the expectation for that next visit. And if you’re in the case of the digital inspection and the AutoVitals CRM that follows up, they’re going to get Reprep pinged on the way and just continue to build on the conversation that occurred at the drop. Yeah, you may own percentage not have sold everything, but what you did is you got benefit number one, ARO increased on that day. Benefit number two, we have marketing opportunity that sets up benefit number three, the next visit into the shop. And when we’re thinking about keeping census up, getting into a situation where we’re now selling by inspections being due rather than time or mileage, I mean, those are wonderful things to think about.
(01:03:13):
And obviously as an industry, we’re going to have to start looking at that up in our marketing budgets to go after brand new customers is fantastic, but nothing will ever be as easy and as cheap as tapping back into your customer. Who knows you, believes in you, has faith in you, and has already started to develop the value proposition with what you’ve shown ’em. Just because they didn’t buy it today doesn’t mean they don’t want it or doesn’t mean it’s not important. That’s the easiest next sell you’ll ever have, and I think that’s huge. And if you don’t recommend it and it doesn’t get estimated and it doesn’t get declined, declined is not a bad thing. If it doesn’t get declined, we don’t have that next chance.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (01:03:52):
I would even go that far and say, let me show you what the yellow items are going to cost. It’s not necessarily for today, but for the next visit, you just be completely transparent about what’s necessary and what’s not, and red, yellow, green do a great service in showing that in the most simplest way possible.
Mike Bennett (01:04:16):
I would agree with that. Uwe, one of the things that we think is, oh gosh, if we estimate too much or we tell ’em too much, it’ll scare ’em away and they’ll leave, right? So we don’t estimate it. That actually scares ’em more because in their mind, everything’s a $4,000 repair. If the stuff in yellow is $892, that’s much more stomachable. I can chew on that as opposed to every one of those is Tom’s $2,000 transmission, right? Because in their mind, that’s what everything is. So I agree with the transparency. Don’t run from the fear, walk towards the light. I mean, the more that you can tell ’em, the more likely it is. No one wants to hear they have to spend money, but I’d rather no only have to spend 800 as opposed to four items at $4,000 a piece.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (01:05:01):
Right?
Tom Dorsey (01:05:04):
Well, boys, we’re a couple minutes over. I mean, we could go on another hour, I’m sure. I think, Mike, that’s a testament to saying it’s been too long since we had you on the show.
Mike Bennett (01:05:14):
You’re going to have to keep me coming back just so we can keep the segment shorter.
Tom Dorsey (01:05:17):
Yeah, we have to reduce that interval, right? That’s a BCP goal that I need to set for myself.
Mike Bennett (01:05:24):
There you go. There you go.
Tom Dorsey (01:05:26):
Right. I had to reduce that service interval.
Mike Bennett (01:05:29):
Well, like I said, it’s only been a year. It’s 14 months. It’s only been a year, so
Tom Dorsey (01:05:33):
Yeah, buddy, that’s incredible, man. Time flies. But I really appreciate you coming on. For folks that want to continue that conversation, reach out to Mike directly. Keep it going in the Facebook forum. Make sure you look into that Amelia Island Super Conference. If that’s in your wheelhouse or soon to be in your wheelhouse, you don’t want to miss that. I mean, this is an all day everyday discussion, these types of discussions that ATI is having out there at SuperConference with those shops that they give guidance to, and you really want to be part of that. If you’re not already, you don’t have any experience with that. Of course. Thank you Uwe. Brilliant insights. I think as we were talking before the show started, I think be on the lookout for some new metrics that might be coming out around this conversation. Things that are really help you to identify where the opportunity lies and how to gauge how well your operation is taking advantage of those opportunities.
(01:06:36):
I’ll leave it there so that you have to tune in for that episode when we’re talking more about release and implementation. Again, tune in next Wednesday, same time, same place. Next week we’re going to be talking with Carolyn from Shop Ware. Actually, we’ve got some big news coming out there, so you’re not going to want to miss that. It doesn’t matter if you are or not looking at it. You’re going to want to find out what’s available and how that’s going to benefit you, and so we’ll have move on with Carolyn from Shop Ware next Wednesday until they get out there and make some more money. Put some of this stuff that you learned. Start taking a look at your number of recommended actions per inspection, and I think it’s going to open your eyes and then reach out and find out how to turn that from an opportunity into realized success. Have a great day. Thank you for your time. We’ll see you next Wednesday. Appreciate you, Mike. Thank you very much.
Mike Bennett (01:07:31):
Thank you. Appreciate it.