Rob Eskew’s Rollercoaster Turnaround - Bonus Zoom Episode 1

We've got a special guest this morning. Not really a guest. He's on every time. Mr.

Rob Eskew, are you on? Yo, yo. Good morning. Good morning.

I love Rob. Good morning. So, man, we're going to do something fun this morning. You probably start doing this going forward.

Really want to kind of pick the brains of everybody that's come through. And, you know, we share our journey quite often and kind of this carnival ride, as Todd likes to call it, with everybody. And I thought it'd be fun if we got some different perspectives, right? There's a lot of different situations and different companies, whether it be in size or location, demographics, all the different things that are applicable.

And you know when we come through key to key there's a lot of things that we'll hear from different people like. That won't work in my area or you don't understand my situation. Anything from rust to pits to demographics to, you know, you name it, it's hurt everything. But the cool thing about it now is I feel like it's been proven in all markets.

Kids and so we're going to start doing some interviews to try and get different perspectives of different people and so this morning we were going to start with mr rob eskew superstar good morning good morning superstar great news true let's go uh starting with true i got to spend some time with true um a few weeks ago it was just you know just a lot of fun and uh you know rob's obviously just an incredible uh good guy so uh so anyway good morning mr rob good morning thanks for having me on yes absolutely man so um i just want to kind of hear where it all start for you if you could kind of dive into that uh i know it's been several years of just kind of a. Yeah, I'll fast forward through some of it. So, you know, we started the business. I always say we started at the bottom with $100 mixed bag of tools in the basement of an out-of-business strip mall up in an area of the north suburbs of Atlanta called Lawrenceville.

In fact, I was embarrassed to tell people where my business was because everyone would say, where's Lawrenceville? And I'm like, it's Gwinnett. It's Gwinnett. So kind of quaint, humble beginnings.

Bought our first building in 2016. Got involved with the ShopFix people right around 2018 in which we bought our second location in Marietta, Georgia. Basically, it was a real estate deal. We bought the business for a dollar because it was doing about 40 to 55,000 in revenue a.

And the owner wanted out and, you know, none of his kids wanted it. You know, the typical really dirty, scary shop that had no legacy planned. We then bought two more stores as we were in ShopFix. We bought two more stores at the end of 2019, right before COVID, which almost wiped us out.

And then we got involved with some other people from ShopFix. We partnered up to make four of us as a group. and then we started buying stores like crazy. And I remember always kind of waving flags, being like, guys, we don't even have these set up yet. And they just wanted more revenue, more and more revenue.

Fast forward, we got to 15 stores across three states. And the most expensive deals we did, because we were just kind of high off our success, if you will, We did several deals that went really well. When we bought our Decatur store, we doubled it in a month and everything went well. No change in marketing, no change in a lot of things other than saying yes.

But we really did not have a system in place. So we finally did a couple of deals and the wheels just fell off the bus. And we ultimately did about $42 million in revenue in 2024. And as I said during the Adam Coffee event, we made no money.

In fact, we made negative money on $42 million, which is absolutely terrifying. And so I got to give credit where it's due. Aaron Stokes was like, hey, you guys need to break your business up. And I remember being a little bit nervous because I had been so far removed from the business.

I kind of helped do... Legal stuff and quote unquote, looking for acquisitions and then remodeling all the stores once we bought them and things like that. So I was so far removed from operations. You know, I would want to go in the trenches with the wrenches, but anytime I visited stores, my partners would fuss and say, you know, that's not how we want to do our, that's not how we want to run our operations.

You know, we want to have managers in place and regional managers and things like that. And I'm thinking, can't even go to my stores? That doesn't make any sense. And so we were amicably willing to separate the business.

We drew a line and I took Georgia along with my original partner and my ex-partners took what was west of the Mississippi in Colorado and Texas. And the business had gotten so complicated because of my original business partner. Absolutely brilliant soul, but just made everything 10 more steps, 20 more steps even than things needed to be. And so we really didn't have a framework like AutoShop Answers.

I had visited Todd Hayes way back when, probably five years ago when they did the trainings upstairs at 1010. And I remember being like, guys, this is the truth. this is where even all the shop fix stuff comes from. You know, this is it. Like we need to roll out this model.

And we sent several people and they would just want to pick and choose at it. And they weren't willing to surrender and go all in, which fast forward, And after breaking up with the old partners, I started taking over the company and my mission was to simplify everything. Simplify, simplify, simplify. In fact, I have a picture of a rocket booster.

It's the Raptor 1 versus the Raptor 3. And if anyone Googles that really quick, you'll see the Raptor 1 engine looks scary as all get out. There's hoses and pipes and tubings and all this stuff wrapped all around this engine. And you can tell it's probably powerful, but it's definitely not reliable.

And it definitely looks like a mess. And then the Raptor 3 engine is just like this smooth machine. And I remember going around all the stores being like, all right, guys, this is what we're going to do. We're going to simplify this business and we're going to turn it up.

And at the time, it was just a dream. And I was obviously quite nervous taking over as well as having to get in front of everybody and say, you know, we kind of went out of business. We didn't break up because money was good. Let's just be honest.

Yeah. And, you know, in fact, the accounting was so bad. We spent over a million dollars in accounting around about maybe 800, maybe up to over a million. Regardless, I just call it a millionth for the story's sake.

And we couldn't even get P&Ls in time. And the balance sheets were all a mess and things like that. And so I said, all right, look, everyone, Georgia alone did 15.6 million last year. And we still netted a million dollars.

So we're still good. Well, by the time they finished closing out the books, I said, they forgot to put the negative sign. So we still lost a million, which was a delta of two, right? So I thought we made a million, but in fact, we had lost over a million dollars in 2024.

And so we were in debt up to our eyeballs. Every line of credit was tapped out. We were in forbearance with the banks. They wanted all their money now.

And I'm like, holy cow, I've never missed a payment on anything. I've never missed payroll. I've never missed any of my personal payments on anything. Like, how could we be in this situation?

Well, they violated bank covenances. Even though we never paid late on anything, we were not in compliance with their regulations. And so we had real estate debt and they wanted all that money now. And I said, holy cow, like, I got to raise $9 million.

And so I ended up having to borrow some money from my dad. In the meantime, while doing all this, I'm like, all right, either... We got to break this business up. You can take three stores.

I'll take three stores or... I got to buy you out or you got to buy me out. And so my business partner agreed. Obviously, I didn't want to screw him over because we had a really long marriage.

And so he gave me a number, which the business was not worth at all. And I was like, all right, I'm gonna figure out how to get you this number just so we could part ways amicably. In fact, at the time, I was his next door neighbor, which made things even more fun. We had chicken coops together and a bunch of kids.

He had three boys under three and I had a daughter who was probably one at the time. And I'll never forget my mortgage payment balance. And that was pretty much my rock bottom. Sorry, I'm going to cry.

But yeah, I called Todd Westerlin with the same tone of voice I have right now, freaking out and said, Todd, I got to come back and see y'all. And Todd's, and I was like, I don't know. Todd's like, he's like come man we'll make it work you gotta come and so we brought Jordy and Kevin Lynch out there in May 2025, and the lights the light bulbs went off and we decided we're gonna go all in and, Ever since then, it's been great. We've been learning every day.

I think we got five or six or seven of us coming out this weekend. Try to not miss them. I have missed several, but I've made a promise to myself I'm not going to miss any more going forward because it's just so good. Still, though, in November, we were hitting records, but we weren't making any money.

And I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Bill Broussard and obviously Charlie. Love those guys. And they go, man, you're not parping? So what the hell's a parp?

They said, you don't know what parp is? How long have you been going? You don't even know what parp is? And so we did 1.38 million in November and only made about 12 grand after we had to pay six grand for a hood on a Range Rover that blew up.

Blew up and on a test drive. So I was like, holy cow, that's a lot of risk. I have a three-year warranty and da-da-da-da-da. And we had gone from about 47% market margin prior, we were up to about 52-ish, 53.

And they were like, you can't run world-class service on 52% margin. You got to make 62.5%. And I always thought some of the people's numbers on the Moneyball chat weren't accurate, or they didn't have their tech costs right and tech metric or what have you. But they were right.

You do need to make over 60%. So we got the whole company around it. This is where I got to give my team huge amounts of credit. I said, guys, we got to make 62.5%.

And everyone said, heck yes. And we've been putting attention on that. And we've made crazy money every month since. So I've paid back the loan to my family.

I, They're paid off. All of our lines of credits are all paid off. All the parts vendors are all paid off. We pay the credit card every week now, which is cool.

We got taxes coming up. Obviously, we had to file a little extension because of all the complexities of the old business that we're still working to wrap up. But I'm not worried about paying our tax bill this year. And I can send six people out to Texas confidently knowing that we can pay the bill as soon as Todd Wesselman sends it over.

But yeah, I'd love to get any more details than that. I can happily deep dive. But it's a dream come true, unintended. I appreciate you just being so honest about that because everybody sees you now NC is true, and it's like we're on Moneyball, and everybody's just cheering you on, and we see this happy smile, and, man, like, Rob's crushing it, and people just don't understand, especially people on here that want to run their business one day or own their own business one day or whatever that is, to understand, like, there's always a backstory.

Worry everybody sees you know it's kind of like they say you know it took it took tarley it took you 20 years to be an overnight success right yeah and so that's right and people don't they don't really see that understand that and so like i didn't we actually talk about that, yeah i didn't know any of that i mean you told you shared a lot with me when i was out there um when you took me back to my hotel and i was like wow man that's that's incredible i didn't know all that and we're just so happy. Go ahead, Charlie. Thank you. I just wanted to tell them thank you for being so transparent man because people gotta hear these stories you know it's not all uh roses right we all start somewhere and nobody nobody started successful nobody nobody started the big company nobody started successful it's just the way the world works but you got to stick with it it's impressive man what you've done, but i don't know how many owners are here even the known owners you got to hear this because it's hard to believe when you're not an owner how could you possibly get to work work your butt off all months right you see cars in and out parts moving this and that and then at the end of the month you have to pay money i was actually in the car the other day with somebody i'm telling him this i'm like no way i'm like yep the day you go through that it is the most painful day of your life.

You're like, I worked my bar off, you know, fixed so many cars. I dealt with so many people and I have to pay money. That's insane. You know?

So, so you have to fix that. But then once you get, once you get to figure out the system, like I said, and right now we all know your numbers are very positive, great job, but it just gives you this comfort level. It gives you this... This swag, you're actually able to make better business decisions too.

When you're under the gun and you have all that pressure, you make dumb decisions. We all do. So don't you feel like we're on? Oh, I mean, it was scary.

In fact, I had to, you know, personally, I had to cut all spending, right? And then in the business, I say, guys, like, and I still walk around looking in trash cans and say, hey, guys, these gloves don't have holes in them. Like, why are they in the trash? And again, I still want to keep that culture of not wasting stuff.

But under the previous administration, as I call it, I mean, we were just so wasteful. And in fact, you know, and I still remember how hard it was to earn $100. My goal when starting the business, if I could make $100 a day, I wouldn't default on my rent with my roommate. Because I told him, I said, hey, one day, because he had a really good job at the time, he made 70 grand a year.

And I said, hey, just in case I'm ever late on rent, I'll always pay it. Don't you worry. And he said, if you're ever late on rent, I'll kill you. So I was like, oh, okay.

Yes, sir. I will never be late on rent. And so I still respect that $100 bill so, so much. And getting back to our basics, our roots, whenever having to take this company back over.

And I appreciate everyone's buy-in to that. But now, you know, we've been upgrading the floors, upgrading the lighting, you know, all these kinds of stuff. So I'm trying to pay it back to the guys. You know, we just had an amazing celebratory dinner with our Sandy Springs store after they hit a record.

You know, we all went and ate, you know, one of the most baller steakhouses in Atlanta. Took the whole team there. So more to come for the other stores if you're listening. You know, definitely want to keep celebrating.

And we'll see you next time. Uh listening to jack welsh's book winning right now and uh he says most companies don't celebrate enough so we're definitely going to make sure we keep celebrating all these wins stuff you'd mentioned something uh oh go ahead charlie no i was gonna say it's very emotional man you kind of make me go back memory lane and it's scary i remember with bill once we visited a store and whatever store that was somebody else's story kind of reminded him of back of his days and he started like freaking out we have to live in a hurry i mean uh rob you bring it back memories we've all been there man we've all been there it's real and you know you love winning or you hate losing and if you hate losing a lot man it will push you further than you think so amazing absolutely and for anyone anyone listening who hasn't yet been through key to key i'll spot you the money. If you can't go, just call me. It's worth it.

I've got some first timers coming out this weekend. You know who you are. I've been telling you, you need to go, you need to go. Money's been tight for them.

And I just kept telling them, you better go. And they're starting to set records and they haven't even gone yet. And so anyone can do it. I like what Glenn said, you guys have implemented it now in enough markets to prove there's no excuses, if you just surrender to the process it's the best darn business model it's god given like Todd Hayes says it most certainly is yeah you had mentioned that.

You guys had a bunch of stores and some were really good and some weren't. And that's, you know, very typical of going multi-unit. You see that all the time. People that have a store and it's successful and then they start growing, overexpanding, and it can actually destroy your company.

Because we've all heard the story and I know it. Like I ask people in key to key all the time, hey, how many people are here in multi-unit? And then the hands go up. And then I say, so let me just kind of tell you, because I already know, you have a few stores that are really good.

You have a few stores that are just really bad. And the good stores take care of the bad stores. And then everybody starts cracking up laughing because they know it's true because they don't know how to scale business properly. They just think it's all about store count.

And at the end of the day, I mean, I was with the company that we were printing more money to the bottom line, six stores and 10 stores with way more exposure, you know, and so. Well, I got to say one thing real quick, especially about being able to go into your stores. So each of my partners had stores like they had one source, each of them that probably net a million dollars each. And they literally threw that away to try to do this big multi-unit thing, and you know it wasn't scalable and so someone at the Adam Coffey thing said well how many units do I need to be valuable to private equity it's like one, one yes, yeah and you know.

Sure. Yeah. People can do it with multiple location, but I jokingly say, it's like, hell, if we had half the stores we had, it would have been a lot easier to roll this out. But hell, we're sitting across six stores.

But regardless, my partners had stores that netted a million dollars. And then after we did all these add-ons, they weren't bringing home 200 grand. They'd probably bring home less than that. And obviously, digging themselves really deep in a hole with debt.

So, yeah, start slow, guys. Like one store is amazing. I love what Todd says, you know, one spectacular store a year. Don't move on to the next store until you've got that one absolutely dialed in doing 500K a month.

You know, Charlie's perfect example. Yeah, and be ready and be staffed. And so, like one thing that we do when we open up a store is we overstaff. I mean, I remember when we were opening up the Siena location.

I mean, I had 15 people at my store at 1010. And we're paying these people, right? And it's big money because it's still got to be A players. You can't start with B players and work your way up to A players.

So we start advertising immediately, $25,000 a month we're advertising. We've got all these high-paid guys at my store training at 1010. And so when we open up the store, we are staffed for success. And a lot of people...

They want to start with a couple of people and work their way into that. And I tell the story all the time. Hey, look, if we're going to start an NFL franchise, you're not going to start with eight players and say, hey, look, when we start winning games, we'll put 11 on the field. It just doesn't work.

So you have to be able to have the capital to be able to invest. You got to be able to go and lose some money for a while to be able to make big money. And people just don't understand that. And they can literally destroy somebody very, very quickly.

Um you know you said the land rover hood flew open and that's six thousand dollars right and that's a lot of money when you're printing twelve thousand to the bottom line for the whole company um and that's you know six thousand dollars is i mean that's like almost like a best case scenario for a catastrophe um you know you could have so many things happen um that could literally just uh just crush you so you've got to be prepared yeah you don't have to have a bunch of stores you just have to have um you know one successful store at a time and so it's very important so let me ask you this so when you started when you guys had the um you guys went your separate ways you had your stores um what what was your revenue uh basically when you said hey look i'm ready to come back to key to key what what revenue are you doing um i need to do the math really quick so So I would love even Jordy to chime in because he's super focused. I remember, I think, so I remember, this is kind of funny, but our goal was 47,000 GP a month because of Donald Trump. And that was like a wish list. And now our goal, or was that, I'm sorry, it was 47,000 a day, but we've hit like 100,000.

Actually, I'm misspeaking. I think I'm misspeaking. Yeah, our goal at the time was 47K. That's what we would post up in our Slack channels, thinking that that was so impossible to get to.

Now it's our average. So many stories like this, man. We have so many people like JJ. He nets more money than he used to gross.

Those are the stories. He now becomes normal. And you guys are really just finding your stride. So imagine where it's going to be in a year from today, right?

Well, one more cool thing too. There used to be such huge swings in the cash flow because we didn't have good cash flow management back then. And so, you know, we'd get a whole bunch of money and it's gone. We'd get some money and it's gone, right?

Like we just hit an all-time high score. I sent Todd Hayes a screenshot of my, you know, little cash flow spreadsheet. And then we did a huge $150,000 payroll. And it didn't really change the number because it just, because now we're paying credit cards weekly instead of every month.

You know, so it's just like this nice, smooth, linear curve now. Whereas before, it was just this rollercoaster of fear and uncertainty. In fact, when we took the company back over in January, my business partner took a HELOC out on his house to make payroll in January. I mean, we were...

Broke wow man you gotta everybody's gotta hear that so um you gotta make payroll man it's like man you're running a company and the employees you know they don't understand um they think if i mean you could be doing 150 000 in a month okay and your employees can look at that and go wow we did 150 000 this month or 200 000 this month or whatever it is and then um they think that you are just living the dream, man. And you're the owner and man, this guy's got no worries in the world. And meanwhile, they're taking out a line of credit on their house to make payroll. And people don't really understand that.

Well, we had a really good teammate who actually thought we made because they thought the gross profit was how much we made. They're like, we made a million dollars in gross profit last year. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You actually probably earned more as your salary than what we earned as the business.

You know, and I want you to earn a whole lot of money. But at the end of the day, too, the business needs to make money or it's just not worth the risk and, you know, can go do something else. But yeah, now we're trying to teach all of our people more. We've got a completely transparent, open set of books.

And, you know, we're getting the P&Ls done by the 9th or the 10th of each month. And hopefully out to all the teammates before the 15th. So going from spending a million dollars in accounting to having two and a half kind of teammates in accounting to getting P&Ls accurate and on time is also a dream. Yes, sir, Charlie?

Let me back up one second, Rob, what you just said about the swings in the cash flow. Yes. Because I've been there and it's the scariest thing. So what happens is if you have a good month.

Now, the next month, you better follow it up with another good month because what happens, all the bills from the previous month come in and it sucks away all your cash flow. Now, if you have a bad month going and there's not enough good cash flow, your bank account just gets drained so fast. And you're like, what's going on here? So wherever you ramp up your numbers, make sure they're sustainable numbers.

And pay your bills. Yeah. Yeah, you know, it's a you know, it's a funny story about that Like when it comes to like man wanting to pay your bills and pay them on time Like, you know, like with me, I know at our shop I have vendors that sometimes are a little bit lackadaisical on collecting their money, which is crazy to me Um, whether like if I do a job and I owe somebody something for that job I sometimes have to chase them down to pay that bill and you might think that's crazy But I want that off my page. I want that bill paid because it's going to hit me at some point.

And a lot of people hold off and probably think that that's great. Like, Hey, I just had this service done, right? Like I just had my, uh, like my, my lift fix or something. And it was two grand.

And, um, like the, the vendor's not even like sending me a bill for it yet. Like just kind of, I'm calling that vendor. I'm like, Hey man, I want to pay my bills as they happen. Like, I want to pay this.

Like the day you do the job, I want you to charge my card because i want it done i want it off my page it's done it's accounted for and so that's a really good point charlie yeah these bills they will uh they will come in and they will definitely pile up oh yeah on taxes too uh just a little nugget um i know penland takes notes that you can actually have like a separate bank account take like 10 of your income of the business income and just put it in an account. Just save that for taxes so then at the end of the year or quarterly, however you do your taxes, you're not struggling to find the money. It's a little nugget. You know you're going to have to pay taxes, right?

So just prepare for them. You cannot avoid them. Yep. Two things you can't avoid, death and taxes.

There's a great book called Profits First by Michael Michalowicz that if you're small, that's a great book to kind of get you going. So that way you're putting those monies aside because you definitely never want to get blindside of a tax bill. Yeah. Now let me ask you this, Rob.

I know you've been to the accounting first, the fraud and prevention program. And that's something that not nearly enough people sign up for, I think, because they're probably a little bit intimidated by it and scared about it. But, you know, and so can you share anything about that and maybe what you took from that and what you've learned from that? Yeah, absolutely.

And I got tripped up on my numbers here a second ago just because I'm pacing outside and it's cold. And I'm all excited on the call here. But yeah, if you don't know your numbers, if you don't, if you're not counting your money, someone else is. And it's really, it is definitely intimidating at first.

But as soon as you start really learning it. So yeah, definitely everyone needs to go to that class. It's a shame that more people don't know more about their numbers in our industry. And be humble.

You can always learn and get better every day. I'm certainly learning every day, but I've definitely made sure to put a lot more emphasis on that. In fact, my dad was really fussing at me a lot. I'm like, because he's a big kind of just run your business from your numbers kind of guy.

I'm more of an in the trenches with the wrenches kind of guy, but you still need to know your numbers. And you can look at your numbers from Bay 1. Go figure. Yes.

Let's go. You nailed it. Let's figure and go. That's what me and Jordi were talking about.

Yeah, me and Jordi were like, all right, from now on, we're not hiding up in the loser lounge. We're going to get our printouts and we can look at them in Bay 1. So, yeah. Full transparency too.

And if you think anybody online that owns the business and thinks that nobody is telling from them, You are in a different planet. You're not living in reality. I am telling you the truth. I'm not trying to scare you, but it's just the truth.

But you should be scared, by the way, anyway. And even sometimes not maliciously. I was sending back some parts, and I saw Worldpack gave us a $16 credit for a $300 battery. And I was like, oh, my God, they just took that as a core.

I caught it real time, but that's also happened across six stores. So that's that's gonna be my next goal is parts yes and i know we're losing a lot on parts right now man it's so much ask uh your guys came and visited me as jordy how's my parts in utah i i got rid of the parts off we're like man there's no stuff for course and returns there won't be any money getting lost so we got rid of it we just have a little like two by two area that you can put parts on, so you can only have a couple of parts. That's it. Everything else has to go by now.

One funny thing, and Glenn, you might be about to say it. So obviously, we knew Glenn was coming. It was a short notice, but everyone stayed late. Everyone cleaned up.

Everyone sent back or hid all the parts at Lawrenceville. And the first thing that Glenn said when he got in my car was, Rob, you got to get your parts together, man. I was like, oh, crap. You don't even know.

We got it cleaned up for your visit. He said they cleaned it up for you. I was like, oh boy, man, that's, that's rough, dude. So here's, and let me, and I'll chime in on parts because I'm going to tell you kind of what happened with us.

So, um, as we grew, we, we had a parts person and, um, I kind of gave up that control of parts to a parts person. And, um, you know, even though they were monitoring everything, incoming, outgoing and all that, I felt like I had no control over it. Okay. Um.

Because it's a lot. It's a lot to handle. Now, I've switched it up where now I have my parts shelf in bay one. Okay, right next off to the side.

It's a very little small cart or a little small shelf. And I manage it all with a couple of team members that we hawk it constantly. Okay, and so same thing for me last week. um two batteries that i got cores for that should have been uh you know full credits for um sent back three parts got credit for one sent back two parts same part number got credit for one i mean uh combined probably five five hundred six hundred dollars that i was able to find in real time that money will walk out your door and and knowing where every single part is and i'm you know working on training the entire team to to understand and know this i'm kind of rotating through people to just run parts for a day because it can be overwhelming but if you are down to and this is if you get here rob this will be great and this will be great for everybody any freaking part that's in your shop send it back if it's not accounted for if it's a part that you think is going to be something you're going to use one day because you didn't get credit on it for some reason or what just freaking get rid of it and just move on and start with the clean slate with every single part being either a return or an active part and then it becomes way easier to manage so when i took over the parts essentially what my last parts guy that i had here was pretty much slacking i'll tell you i'll tell you something you have a parts person and you're not paying attention to this let me tell you what was happening with my stuff uh. Um, I'd have a technician that maybe misplaced a part or something like that.

Well, my parts guy, and this is why it's so important to know your stuff, like, and holding people accountable. Like I have a parts guy that was, um, taken apart. He couldn't find the part for whatever reason. And then instead of bringing it to me and saying, Hey, I couldn't find this part.

Okay. Um, he ran it through the system. Like we got credit for, okay. Pushed it through because his kind of, you know, performance review or, you know, like the visibility we had to like his job performance was, what's my return screen show?

Like how many returns do I have coming and how many parts that need to go back? And so we look closely at that number, right? That number should be very, very tight, like under 10 almost at all times in the middle of a busy day. And by the end of the day, there should be like a few parts, maybe left carried over that should go back.

And this is, I'm gonna tell you, this is us. We just did, we just wrapped up a million dollar month, right? And at the end of it, there was no parts left over, right? It's all accounted for.

What's that? I said let's go that is perfect yeah let's freaking go and so what i found out was i was losing money on the back end because this guy was pushing stuff through but we were actually never getting the credit for it and it creates an accounting nightmare upstairs so when you have control of it in bay one and you see every part that's coming in it gives you a much more it gives you so much more control over uh the parts and an awareness of every single core that's out there on the floor. Every single defect that you're waiting to come back to, you know, where everything is at throughout the day. And so it, it, it, um, you know, we came up with a system, which is at my shop, we have, each technician has a rolling basket, you know, and it sits by their cart.

And the top shelf is just all incoming parts. And the bottom shelf is, uh, all their parts that need to go back. So we can walk through the shop several times a day and we just hit that bottom shelf and we know everything that needs to go back. I don't need the tech to bring the part to me or anything.

They know my new parts are up top, my return parts are on the bottom, and we just make those sweeps through the shop and we're looking for them. And then they're in tune with Techmetric knowing, okay, this part has a core or this part doesn't. Plus we tag them all. When they come in, we put this has a core or this doesn't.

This is a defect. And so they know. And so having control over that it at first it can be overwhelming i was overwhelmed in your parts room that day and that was after you guys cleaned it up and i'm like man i i can see i see i see money right i see it i could just see it i saw an alternator there i saw a headlight there i could just see money just. Sitting there um and you had brought up something to me uh rob about an 800 headlight that you had sitting on the shelf uh i remember and it was sitting there and um i don't remember what the situation was but it was literally just sitting there right and you just went and took it back and it was 800 yeah we're lucky we got credit for it because you know those those little timelines will run out um yeah 800 bucks yeah 800 man and so um which could could you know anywhere that'll um You know, equal anywhere from, you know, depending on your gross margin.

I mean, that's, you know, an $8,000 boom, a $4,000 boom, a $6,000 boom, a sale that it takes for you to make that $800 back. And the employees just don't get that. So open book financials is super important. The employee thinks you're making six times what you're actually making if you don't tell them.

And so it's super important to have that open book, you know, open book financials. So, OK, so I know we're running out of time here. But one other question I want to ask you before we jumped off was when you guys made the made the switch and the commitment, what was it like from like your staffing as far as like the buy in from the team? And what did you have to do to get everybody on board?

And maybe probably something I would imagine. Yeah, absolutely. I think, what was it? Say the last part of your question, sorry.

And I was saying, I would imagine some people probably didn't make it. Absolutely. We actually wanted to kind of stick it to Todd or whoever said that we would have to turn over a lot of our team because we wanted to prove that we can do it with our teammates and get them bought in. So yeah, we've definitely had to turn over some people.

I'll say, I think at first, a lot of people probably thought it was just that next flavor. I'm not trying to say anything negative about ShotFix. I love it, but it has its limits. So it was kind of like back in the day, it was like, what's the new color of the month?

What's the new little shiny object that we're going to try to implement today? And then there wasn't really a lot of follow up, or something else shiny came along. And we're just putting our attention on that. Right?

So, I'm sure a lot of the teammates that were with us through the previous iterations of the business were worried, okay, you know, we've heard this before. Okay, you know, here it comes again. But what's been so great is that we've just been committed to this. And you don't have to do a lot of the thinking.

I remember Bill Lewandowski getting so excited when he finally understood what paint by numbers means. You know, we're just executing now at this point. We don't have to, you know, redesign anything. We're putting something in place that already works.

And frankly, I just don't think the other people have figured it out. And if they had figured it out, they'd be doing the numbers that all of you guys do. And hopefully that I can probably say that we do. We had four of our stores over 300K.

I think it was Charlie or pardon me if I'm mistaken who was telling me this, but someone at the tech conference was talking about some of the other coaching groups. Like not even hardly any of their companies do 300k and i feel like we got four of our stores doing 300k and that's just getting started right we'll be doing 400 here soon you know and ultimately 500k per month per per location so um definitely want to keep everybody i think just submitting to the process is huge and obviously once they go through key to key and they actually see it themselves, you know, that's, that's definitely usually a game changer as well. You know, you can start seeing those light bulbs go off. So I want to keep getting everybody in my company off the key to key.

We still have to run the company while, but I'm like, Jordy, shut it down, baby. Send them out there. Yeah. It's super important.

It changes. It's changing, you know, especially now with AI, I tell people all the time, look, if you were at the last AI class. Um, I'm sure it was amazing because I know they're all amazing, but you're, uh, you're way behind now because it's happening so fast. The stuff that's happening, um, like Joe sent me this report last night on the inbound call center and some of the numbers, uh, breaking it down through codecs of, uh, all of our calls, thousands of calls.

And then, uh, level one, absolutely is now the time level two, um. Uh, anytime presentation level three new customer introductions level four still pushback he had the he sent me over me and mike quinn uh thousands of calls with all of the data on the uh close ratio conversion ratio on each level of each call okay to just understand if they say hey can i do this and we're like absolutely now a good time is now a good time we know what the conversion ratio of that we know if they want to price, what the conversion ratio is on that. And we know where there's some opportunity for us to, uh, to look at. And so, uh, if you were at the last class, you're way behind.

Uh, if you haven't been back in six months, you're, I mean, you're like pre-internet basically based on what's happening right now, uh, with Codex, it's like insane. Um, the stuff that we're able to do with it and we're just getting started on it. So, um, Rob, I know it's, we're about up on time uh thank you uh so much for jumping on and sharing your story uh we'll have another one next week we'll have somebody else featured next week to kind of hear their story so uh man great job i love you guys thank you for everybody else there's some echo here um you have to go all in if you have way you're never gonna make it like to this level of success and just to be confident that it's going to keep getting better, right? So you have to go in and just surrender.

I keep telling people every class I start, I challenge this enough for everybody. You don't have to challenge it. Just go dive in and let some things go, some old habits, and trust me, it's just going to work out. Boom.

Sign up, man. There's some spots available. It's going to be fire. So anyway, get with Todd Westerland.

Got some great stuff coming up. Thank you, guys. Y'all have an awesome day. Let's rock.

Thanks, everybody. Thanks, man. See ya.