The AI Audit: What Really Happens on Your Phones

What's up, players? Long time no see. This is Joe Adams with Adams Automotive, the number one shop in America. This is Master Tech to Millionaire, presented by Autoshop Answers, where we talk about the transition from technician to business owner CEO.

We are here once again. It's been so long with the GOAT, the CEO himself, Todd Hayes. Good afternoon, Todd Hayes. How are you doing this morning?

Joe Adams, what's going on? It is always great to be able to do a podcast with you. Give it up for Joe Adams. We're a rock star.

I'm clapping for myself in this room. Hey, so one thing- Stop it, stop it. Before you get going, I want to hear the debrief of this Key2Key weekend. Can you tell the people why we are not releasing as many podcasts as we should?

It's almost like we're, it's almost like you get pretty busy. It's almost like we're really busy. I know, we got to fight. I know, we got to fight.

Yeah, it's, you know, to the, we have so many people listening to our bods. It was so fun. I was in the, obviously we had a Key2Key last weekend, AIX on Friday. Just a great program.

We were standing room only, literally standing room only at our key-to-key Saturday and Sunday. Our owners, you know, really, they had come through. They're so generous and they kind of will stand up and go outside when their new team members are in there. And, you know, we'll be sold out for December.

It's just, you know, the reason we're sold out is because I love on our key-to-key money ball feed for anyone who comes to Key2Key. As you see guys now who are doing 40,000-hour days, 30,000-hour days, 50,000-hour days in sales. And it's just transforming the industry for real. This isn't talk.

It's real. And when you sit there, Joe, and Joe unfortunately wasn't here this past training program, so I'm debriefing him. I'm actually really debriefing him. It was spectacular.

You were missed. Charlie Zalakos, the great Greek. Wow, he's so good. He steps in and fills the void.

And we actually saw his P&Ls yesterday. How were those P&Ls? They were they were pretty good uh yeah yeah i mean a million a million 54 000 and you know like 23 percent combined net that's uh and i have a rookie quarter million bucks that's pretty good four you did 427 out of watertown and it was like 96 to the bottom line so we're can you imagine two days before lifts yeah i can recall when um charlie and i first met and by the way that's a lot we got a lot of corporate overhead for hpp stuff built into that oh yeah people don't know And then I'm curious what the EBITDA number would be. So anyway, keep going.

Yeah. Yeah. Again, when we talk our numbers and we share our numbers, we're transparent, which I always tell people, look, be very careful. You let whisper in your ear because ask them, I want to see your transparency.

Who are you? You know, what have you done? And I want to see your numbers. If you're running stores, I really want to see your numbers.

I want to see your revenue. I want to see your gross profit. I want to see your net operating income. Not only that, we let you come and work in our stores, which is amazing.

But think about Charlie, which, you know, so many, you know, Charlie's got his own fan club now because he is a, he's an auto hospitality rock star. Along with them, Joe Adams and Glenn Piccolo, Mike Quinn, Michael Floyd, Matt Keyes, man, new to our team as CFO. Man, he was up there spitting fire on me. Here's a guy who's been involved with our company now for four months, total consumed with our private equity side, gets the concept, gets it quit, does a great job.

And that's really who we are. we are very different and and the good news is we share it with anyone listening sign up to key to key to callbacks who are shop answers talk to todd westerland who is another rock star again you know since we started training years ago i always made an offer hey man if you're not completely satisfied just give your money back do you know i've never given a dollar back i mean there's no way we change your life within the first two hours first hour actually just a rack attack day. Oh my gosh, the bays were packed on Friday night. We had our AIX day, and it just blows me away. I'm sitting there during AIX, and you got Michael Floyd and You have Mike Quinn Kupine, who is just a rock star.

We had Charlie Zalakos up on stage, you know, really going through a day of AIX. And I really am in awe of what God has allowed us to build. I don't take it for granted. It's like, wow, wow, look at this.

This is amazing. And see, when you talk about AI, you know, I always love the part I get to do. Which is really the opening, you know, which is really fun, though, because it's all the defining moments. These three major defining moments of the business that who would believe that in 1986 was.

You know, when I was listening to phone skills in 1986 with a radio shack recorder and found out how bad our industry was on phone skills and then found out how bad I was at phone skills and started writing these presentations any time. The ISO, the additional concern, all the objections, you know, invoice reviews, just amazing stuff that we do. That there would be this deal called AI. And so instead of it being a Radio Shack tape recorder, it's now AI.

And the fortunate thing, unfortunate, you know, fortunate, unfortunate, you cannot hide from AI. Not even us. Yeah, not even. Which we will get into, but you ain't going.

We will. But boy, you gotta hear that, not even us. And I think that's why we're game changers. See, the reason we're game changers is we do not bury our head.

We're not frozen in time. We're very, very, very aggressive and progressive. There is no one with a full AI automotive service facility without a hospitality like we are. But in doing that.

Yeah, we found some areas we can improve on like, uh-oh. Yeah, you just can't hide. You know, something Todd always says is AI is kind of just like a good analogy that I've heard is it's like a 22-year-old intern that is just super excited to work for you 24 hours a day. They're just ready to go.

But you have to give them a tremendous amount of context because they have no idea what they're doing, you know, unless you tell them. So Todd's got a concept that we're able to point AI towards. You know if like michael he's our superstar you know chief ai director for our business and he's he's yeah cluck cluck cluck he is a monster but he's never been in a shop a day in his life you know before he came into our world so if he were to go try and build some you know software they can augment auto repair centers and then present it to auto shop owners they would be like well this isn't really how it works now so so you team him up with people that have a lot of experience in shops todd's concept then now you're talking about some supercharged really really really powerful things, which we'll get into. We're going to talk about, you know, this call center that we're developing, uh, that's AI powered.

We'll talk about that later in the, in the pod, but we are extremely excited. Would you say that, um, if my other defining moment was pictures, obviously most people out there know that I started in 86 with a Polaroid camera, ensuring total integrity, saving old parts. Well, that has now turned into what we call our AI button so I can shoot a video. I instantly attach a MotoVisual to it and get it sent through TechMetric to my customer in really seconds, minutes.

It's actually crazy. You would have never, when you took that first Polaroid of the intake on the Ford Econoline van, I can see it. I can see it in my mind. When you took that first picture, would you have ever imagined that in the future there would be software to where you can get an edited, compressed, you know, you didn't even know what compressed mean back then, probably, with a mode of visual animation to a customer in like 30 seconds.

Yeah, who did? You know what I mean? Like literally. We talked about that on The Defining Moment because it was like, okay, here is a picture, a Polaroid picture.

And now look at what we have done. And you would just staple it to the invoice and show them when they pick it up. That's all you could do. Oh, so you would just sell it through the phone and be like, hey.

Yeah, I'll turn it on the phone, but I have taken pictures and I'm going to save your old parts. I'll explain it to you when you arrive. Now, a lot of that also had to do with, you know, if you remember, you see that picture of me in 1986 when I was young, had hair, skinny. But, you know, my teens were hot.

Now that and hard. It's hard for me to picture that. Yeah. I'll show you the past.

Hey, you're getting in here. Hey, sound out Todd. He's down 80 pounds. Carnivore diet.

Let's freaking go. Anyway, keep going. A new lifestyle. But when you think about the image that I was putting out there in 1986 was not car repair.

It was auto hospitality. But that still sounds hard. Like they didn't even see the picture until after. Yeah.

Now they get to see. But still, who was doing it? Yeah. Nobody was doing it.

No, but I'm saying now it's so easy. It's like literally. But still, people don't do it. Or they do it wrong.

Yeah, yeah. You know, and so it was like, wow, wow, wow. And so, yeah, you know, we would take a Polaroid picture and then we'd save the old parts. And so when I would do the presentation on the brakes, I would say, you know, I'm going to save your part.

You save your old part so that you can see the brakes were worn out. And I'm also going to take a Polaroid picture so I can explain it to you when you get here. Well, that scaled my first company. And who would ever imagine this thing called AI, digital video, iPhones?

Oh, my God. You know, and that just made it so much, it just makes it so easy. And I mean, seriously, it's very, very easy. The technology side of it, that I can not only shoot a video of the breaks that are bad, then I have a MotoVisual that I can attach to my video compressed into the customer.

And so, wow, you know, and then not only that, I can see them open it up and watch it. And then I can call them up and actually then describe exactly what they watched. Although I'm describing it to them, I just am closing the sale or I ain't even calling it a sale. You know, we really don't sell tickets.

We tell them what's wrong with their car. They come in for a brake concern. I'm not selling them brakes. I'm just telling them in a very professional presentation.

What's wrong with total transparency. And it has been a remarkable, it's been really remarkable with our image, with Polaroid pictures to saving the old parts to the total transparency. And one thing that's really wild is when you're sitting with that big group and you're a packed house and the number one issue we have in our industry is trust. People do not trust, Auto repair shops, do you understand that?

They do not trust auto repair shops. So the good news is I'm not in the auto repair business. I'm in the auto hospitality business. Well, right there is a, you know, does that differentiate our business?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and see, it does. See, there's, and someone goes, well, there's auto repair shops all around me. Do you know the shop I'm sitting in right now and every shop that we have has auto repair shops all around us?

There's probably 23 shops or something, I think. Right here, right around. In North Long. But how many auto hospitality shops are around us?

Exactly. Yeah. See, and we own the market. That means auto hospitality says, wow, we're open seven days a week.

We are a yes company. We say yes to all of our customers. Total integrity. You know, man, total integrity.

We walk you through our shops. I mean, and we can go over that also here in a minute. But, you know, the difference between being in the auto repair business versus auto hospitality, there's just no comparison to the two. And so speaking of people who adapt to technology and people that are not even in the auto repair business, you know, Mike Quinn, he's our operator at the Woodlands location.

Everybody knows Q Pine. Shout out to Mike Quinn. I hear we have a new offering in Key2Key. We've got a new training facility being built at our Woodlands location.

You know, a lot of people come through Key2Key and they kind of get enamored with Glenn Piccolo. What a rock star that guy is. They get enamored with his like 50 bays. You know, we've got the recruiting company upstairs, all the corporate team, you know, there's like the call center.

Yeah, the whole thing. It's like we got the fish tank in the waiting room. It's like hard to really wrap your head around how it applies to your shop back at home because you're like, oh, well, of course, if I had two and a quarter acres of parking, you know, like I could I could do these numbers, too. Or just it's harder to it's harder to connect the dots.

So we've got a new offering, which Todd's going to tell you about, where, you know, Coupine, he operates out of a nine-bay Goodyear facility in the Woodlands. And Charlie, what a stud he is, he operates out of a frigging two-bay facility. So Todd, you want to tell me a. This courtside operating.

Oh, yeah, I hear you all done. I hear it. Well, first, again, I always have to shout out to Charlie because, you know, we have been together for 14 years now and watching him transition into the COO of this company. He is that good.

It is amazing to just watch him as an operator and take a store that was doing $20,000 to $30,000 a month to over $400,000, two bays, four lifts. And it really is one of the most important stores on the planet. And again, I will never take anything away from Perry and the Adams family. This place is amazing.

It is a gift to be here. Perry's vision for, you know, the industry was spot on. And, you know, I'm so glad God delivered me here to be able to now take it to its full potential and be able to mentor Joe Adams, who's an absolute phenom rock star in the industry and really the future CEO of the company. I've given, I got four more years than me, kids.

And that's it. And so that just means I'll sit on some board somewhere, but I'm putting in really good hands. But, you know, that biggest little store in the country is something else. And then Mike Quinn, you know, we buy this Goodyear.

Out in the woodlands is doing about $135,000 a month with like 700 cars. Yeah. And Mike Quinn. And so that was one of the takeaways.

I knew I had good car counts. We're going to drive, you know, big revenue right away. And so, you know, that store, we doubled the revenue in 30 days. I mean, that's plugging in our system, not only the key to key to callback system, you know, our operating model, but then our callbacks.

We were able to take data files and download those and attack a customer base, introduce this auto hospitality versus just a Goodyear tire store. And, you know, Mike was able to take that up to, I think it's records, 680? 681, yeah. 681,000 there. Cracking a little under 7 million this year, which is just. Yeah, which was crazy.

You know, that's amazing. Nine bays. Yeah, nine bays. And what's happened, though, is, you know, we bring Mike into 1010. 1010 is actually our laboratory with Glenn Piccolo, just an amazing guy who's able to take these guys.

We took Mike Quinn, who has no automotive experience whatsoever. I love telling the story of Mike because it's such a valuable story. And you compare Mike to Charlie Zalakos. You know, when Charlie Zalakos wakes up in the morning.

He works out. He's listening to the podcast. He also listens to the Joel. Shout out to Joel Osteen.

We love him. Charlie got his faith the other day. Wasn't that the other day? I spent two or three months ago.

It's just so beautiful. And we are very blessed to have some great access to Lakewood and just to see how beautiful Charlie is. Wow. I just have this grin on my face because our business is a ministry.

And then to take a guy like Charlie and just see what the operator he is and then to take Mike Quinn, who did not know what a brake rotor is. Nothing. He's never done anything on a car whatsoever. Well, it was the same deal.

He drove one hour from the Woodlands to 1010 in a Tesla, self-driving car, watching MotoVisuals, listening to our past Take Fives that we have, about a thousand of them now recorded, watching every. Piece of content he could get on the business model, plus being mentored out of 1010 by Glenn Pecklow. If anyone's gone through training with Glenn and Joe Adams, again, it's a life-changing opportunity. And when I pulled the trigger on giving him that store, you know, we believe in this principle on people, find the right people, make it a great place to work in the financial stake in the outcome of the business and train them.

Well, we certainly did our part. How do you know you have the right people? It's an immediate impact on sales or customers love doing business with them. Their employees love working for them and they make money.

Wow. He's certainly done his part. Now we gamified our business. Moneyball is the great game of business.

Well, Mike is taking it one step further. That's all there is to it. And he is a rock star. We now have the Q cast. which is phenomenal.

It's like, it is fantasy sports of our industry. Is it not crazy? Yeah, I mean, don't catch me at the bottom of that leaderboard. Well, I got, I know he's throwing some roasts out there.

Yeah, I love it. And so you'll learn more about the QCAST if you come to our courtside program. But the courtside program is hosted by Autoshop Answers at Adams Automotive Woodlands. we had built about a I guess there's about 30 seats or something I mean we have a jumbotron in there it's so magnetic go ahead so, Okay, so courtside, I want you to paint a picture. Basically.

You come through training, you learn the key-to-key model, it's in a classroom, and the number one question we always get is, where do I start? How do I implement this? How do I get my team to buy in? How do I find the right people?

How do I manage them? Typically, super high-powered, talented people are difficult to manage. How do I get the most out of my team? How do I know who's get a buy-in how do i use technology all this stuff so the our vision i think for coupon and charlie's class is and i don't even want to call it a class it's like a class man a new vans on me yeah it's more it's more hands-on for like okay and how do i implement this into into the actual shop into a more realistic shop you know most people they'll listen to this podcast i bet do not have 56 lifts so todd can you paint me a picture for what you like what do you envision I think, is it going to be two days, one day?

Two days. How many people? Yeah, two days. Again, I do believe we have about 30 seats getting in touch with Todd Westbrook and it will sell out.

It's going to be a phenomenal class. You have to have gone through key-to-key to go to this client. Oh, okay, gotcha. Yeah, because I can't really be explaining to you key-to-key.

So you have to have gone through key-to-key to actually do an in-shop key-to-key. And so for example you know we're going to start our day out with a take five and the take five is the player's lounge over at the woodlands which is phenomenal and reminder it's in an shop. We're open seven days a week. And so it'll be like during breaks, you're in the shop watching it.

Oh yeah. You're in the accident. So take five, keep going. Yeah.

So it's a whole different level of take five. You know, he's got a player's lounge. He's got video training, Rilla training. He's got, he has our tech metric up on, up on a big screen TV.

When I say intense training it is intense take five that is so fun to watch when you go out to his presentation station he's got shot clocks up there for the 15 minute timers that go off you know whether it's a fast play state inspection oil change timer goes off i need that car pmi'd you know on this speed rack you know and under you know really i need to find a guy to have an under four to six minutes 10 minutes you know a full pmi is going to take about 15 minutes and you know when you perfect it you know it's 15 minutes a car thousand dollar ticket average four cars an hour 10 hour days 40 000 i mean that's really you know and shout out to you know man chris you know and or is that in the new broswell's from um christian brothers yeah i mean he's in these 40 burgers like it's insane you know these these companies are open five days a week even 500 right Just crushing numbers. Just crushing numbers. You know, Lynn Massingale, five days a week, two units, has doubled his revenue. You know, sitting there at $1.1 million.

What did he do last month? $1.1, yeah. Yeah, $1.1 million. I mean, this is huge. I think he made some money on that.

Yeah, he made some money. Yeah, he made some money. Yeah, we do like, we understand how to make money. And that's very important.

So we can pay our technicians. Just hearing these numbers, you know, you can pay your technicians more. You can give them more benefits and you can provide for families better. And that's what we do.

And so on. But anyway, when we talk about doing a shop tour, you'll physically be able to do a shop tour. When we talk about how to do a take five, you'll actually be part of the take five happening at the players lounge. When we walk out and we're doing, I mean, we only have a limited amount of time doing a rack attack here.

It'll be all day, not only breaking out, listening to phone calls, being participating by groups, role playing, everything that we do, just to a different level in the shop. I mean, it is in-shop training for two days on Key2Key, and you will see us execute at a super high level. You will see us using AI at an amazing level. You know, again, Mike Quinn...

Is actually like a phenom with technology between Michael Floyd, Mike Quinn, and some others that we have on our AIX side. It's just phenomenal what we're doing. I mean, when you think about every single trust point, which again, a trust point is actually a touch point. From the minute of that phone rings, it is being analyzed by AI.

Did you use the anytime presentation? Did you set an appointment? Did your shop tour go out? It is crazy.

And then when they come in, I can do AI live through Rilla Watch or a wearable where I'm recording it, getting data, data, data, as I'm doing the shop tour. And, you know, just something so special is when someone calls their car, my baby. I'm looking, I will never forget this. I'm looking for a shop to take care of my baby.

Well, that goes into a data file. And so now I know when I'm talking to her, I'm going to take care of her baby. Yeah, I'm going to talk to her about her baby. Man, I know you love your car, your baby.

Man, I'm going to take care of this. We'll take care of her brakes. We're going to get it taken care of for you. And so, you know, that information, the gathering of information And then when you start talking about Matt Keyes coming in with the integration of NetSuite and Cloud AI.

Oh, my gosh, you know, to our accounting system. Well, now you have full integration of AI. So every single touchpoint, trust point, all the way down to an invoice review, all the way down, all that information is being recorded, gathered, recorded, gathering. And it's so much information that if a person had to actually analyze it, Couldn't do it.

I call it my seven seconds. So, you know, with AI, seven seconds, you can analyze so much data. But now you're incorporating your operational data with your accounting data. Any type of data that we have, inventory data, sales data.

And now I have this machine called Cloud AI, which everything is in this data bank. and I can start asking questions. I mean, crazy questions. And it gives you answers. And you're like, wow, here's some examples.

I mean, an example we're dreaming about is like, you know, we obviously love Rilla. You know, we use that a lot for coaching and, you know, people training themselves on how to get better listening to themselves. Well, maybe explain Rilla one more time if you don't mind for people who don't know it. Yeah, Rilla is a sales coaching software that is, you know, records all the phone calls.

It's plugged into our concept. So it sees, you know, what percentage of the time you're hitting certain metrics and, you know, your talk speed and how often you interrupt customers and how often you are talking, et cetera. And it's also got clips of all the best, you know, closers or whatever you want to call them in our business. And so you can listen to those guys.

Anyway, what if you put all that data into an AI warehouse and then you plugged in all of our tech metric data into the same warehouse and you could ask you questions like, hey, what does 10 hours a month in Rilla convert to ticket average? You know, what would the increase be? And it could spit it out and it could be like, hey, you know, these people spent this amount of time in Rilla and their ticket hours went out this much. You know, how great would that be, you know, to have an insight into your business and the number of the number of applications?

I'm really excited to get into that once it's all integrated, but it's going to be a whole lot of fun. So again, we can't hide from it. Yeah, we can't. Yeah, yeah, we can't.

And see, that's just it. You know, think about, you know, an industry. You know, I love this industry. I have such a passion for it.

And I hope that the industry can hear the passion that we have for the industry. Joe Adams loves the industry. I love the industry. My team loves the industry.

You know, Charlie Zalakos, all of us, we're passionate about it. And the industry is going to change because it's so frozen in time. But this is so good. It makes your life so much better.

I mean, think about it. You know, we have a chain of tune-up centers that the number of record stores last month, do you remember what it was, about 35? Yeah, 35. 35 units broke all-time records. Out of like 100.

And one store broke the all-time record in the history of the company. And this is wild. I don't care if you have oil change pits. I don't care if you have a combination of oil change pits and bays with lifts.

Joe Adams, did you work a pit? Joe Adams for the first time. This is really a great story. We don't have pits, but it was, yeah.

No, but we flew out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We flew out, and because it's like, well, I'll show you guys how to really make these pits rock. Not only did they transform the image of the store, then they transformed the image of the pit.

By painting it, man, sealing it, light shining up under that car so that you have actually 33% of my PMI is done by lifting the hood. You're down in a pit. You wire them up with headsets so there's better communication. You have video pictures, everything going on underneath that car.

How successful was it? It was so fast. I mean i think i looked at they said i looked at about 10 cars that day or something and out of the 10 cars we found nine got a halves and one had nothing on it but fluid exchanges oh well how great was that but that store ended up i mean it was like phenomenal and joe adams it was his first time ever in a bit and joe's like man what is this and the car comes over your head joe's like what the heck you know i mean it's just a different experience but it's the same 66 percent of the inspection is done very fast it's actually quipper you don't have a set of rack they just drive right over you you got a guy on top a guy on the bottom wow you got them wired up with headsets i mean they're communicating better you know videos going out chat gtp moto visual show sale right at the car. Man, it is so fast.

And then you take your pits and they sealed them up just like when they redid the floor. And that store had an all-time record for the entire company ever. Last one. So congratulations, Joe Adams.

You had a hand in that. All right. The team had a hand in that. They're just an amazing team.

And so, you know, it's just it's just phenomenal what we can do. But but the in-shop training, I can't fly into every store and do that with Joe. I wish we could, but we can't. But that was really an interesting opportunity because not only were we flying out to look at Premier, which is another spectacular company, part of our Houston-Boston Partnership private equity offering there.

It's just amazing. I mean, here's a guy who has two stores, Lynn and his family. They joined our team, you know, whatever it was, maybe a year ago. And they're breaking all kinds of records.

I mean, 1.1 million, two stores combined, huge net. And those stores are amazing, are they not? And people go, well, we're in rural America. Well, he's in rural America.

Chattanooga. Chattanooga, Tennessee. You know, I mean, man, and just beautiful facilities and they're amazing people. But back at Courtside, it's just a different offering.

Key to key to callbacks, live in a working shop for the weekend, Saturday, Sunday, key to key going on, hands on, in the trenches with our wrenches, life changing for two days. You will go back changed, period. you can't unsee it. Now, that means you've already gone through key to key. Now we're going to show you how we operate day to day.

It is amazing stuff. And when I say you can't unsee it, that's not me saying that. That is everyone that's ever gone through it says, oh my God, you cannot unsee this because it is the truth. And I'm just honored that one God allows us to be stewards of what we're doing, but to be able to truly change an industry like this.

Wow. It is, it's absolutely very emotional. You know, if you guys have an opportunity, shout out to Techmetric, one of our sponsors, but you know, Techmetric did a video on Perry Adams and the Adams family. And Adam, please go over to Techmetric's website or Techmetric on YouTube and watch this video.

That is Perry Adams' dash. Here is this brilliant technician who went from master tech to millionaire, who now, with his son, second generation, has built the largest single automotive service center in the country. But you have to watch it. He is no different than every other technician out there.

He's not. I can't say he's not because he loves construction, so this place is absolutely gorgeous. But Charlie Zalakos was a technician, a master technician, Bill Broussard, a master Toyota technician to millionaire. And that's what this podcast is all about.

But go over to TechMetrics website and watch the video on Adams Automotive. I can't watch it because it makes me cry. It is because Perry and I are about the same age. Perry's a couple years older.

I'm 66, Perry is 70, but that's our dash. We're looking at what have we done in the industry? Well, then, you know, God is so generous, put us together. Well, now we've been able to scale with these great partners, a $100 million company with massive infrastructure through the Auto Shop Answers family of businesses that truly changed an industry.

And I tell you, every single class, you hear the same thing. Oh my gosh, if I would have known this 20 years ago, well, don't look back, look forward. Don't you hear it every class? Yeah.

And speaking of the dash, you know, I just can't imagine not having fun at work, you know, not being excited to come into work every day. Like we get to come in, we get to take care of customers, we get to win. You'd be surprised. Well, maybe you're not surprised, but maybe you're listening to this podcast.

You'd be surprised what just winning, being on a winning team will do to a person's life. It will literally transform their life. You will get a text message from people's wives saying, you changed my husband's life. You'll watch a 22 year old general service technician literally change his life because he's been abused by some big box chain who pays him way less than they should be paying him.

And he's part of a losing team, straight up, part of a losing team, lots of turnover, bad management, selfish people on top of him versus. You know, you put a guy, we got this guy, Lewis, man, he's such a rock star. I hope he listens to this, that he's new, he's new here at 1010 under Glenn's leadership, you know, and David's leadership and the whole team. I've literally watched that guy just shift.

And now he's training new team members. Like he's been with the company just a few months and he's 22 years old and his life has transformed because now he's on a winning team. He loves coming into work. He's excited.

He started coming to the Take Fives. He's like, can I come to the Take Fives? Absolutely, you can come to the Take Fives. Absolutely, you can come early to work and learn about how we run our business.

That is awesome. Who else can offer that? And that's not to pat myself or ourselves on the back. Thank you, Todd, for teaching us how to give this to the next, I guess, generation.

But it's really, really exciting, man. And who, like, it is thrilling to me. It is thrilling to be able to offer that and to be able to come into an environment where we get to play the game and we get to take care of customers with integrity and provide blue collar. I watched that video.

I cry too, Todd, because it's like. You know, one of the parts of the movie is, you know, I grew up at a private school and all the other dads were, you know, these white collar jobs, doctors and lawyers and et cetera, bankers. And my dad's a blue collar. He's a mechanic.

And it's just you could feel it. You know what? He was never really part of the club or the group. And so, you know, for us to be able to provide a platform to take people from a blue collar industry and put them on a winning team, they make more money than they've ever made in their life.

They love coming to work. Their wife starts to notice or their partner starts to notice or whatever. You know, seeing how winning changed my dad's life, what a privilege it is to be able to offer that to team members and to have a platform for people to win and to have total integrity in the meantime. So thank you for saying that, Todd.

We all have a dash. You know, I can't even imagine spending. I'm excited for, you know, my dash is, you know, again, I'm 66. You know, I have worn my dash out.

Man, boy, have I gotten a great dash. But I do have to say this. I'm excited about what does your dash look like? Something else that, you know, my father-in-law just instilled in me, he was such a great mentor, is our job is to mentor, to teach.

You know, and you said, hey, these big box changers, there's a lot of bad owners out there, guys. Sorry. You know, when you look at a rap sheet resume, well, that's a technician who's had to go through a lot of bad owners. But have an industry that won't really self-police or even look at themselves and go, wow, maybe it's me.

Maybe my shop is dirty. Maybe I shouldn't drink. Maybe I should show up on time. Maybe I shouldn't have cash flow problems.

Maybe I should be a better owner. And see, that's what we are. We are great owners. I mean, we educate our team every day.

Take five. Online training. Slim Piccolo's commitment and Joe Adams' commitment to online training. Four days a week online.

Seven days a week in shop. Seven days a week, we are training our people. We take five, do hands-on in-shop training because we are in the trenches with our wrenches. And then we have online training for clients to auto shop answers four days a week.

Is that crazy? I mean, it is really, man, you can, and think about it. Isn't it your responsibility to give a great working environment and train these young guys? See, we have very little turnover.

Do you know why? because, man, it's not a job, it's a career, you know, and you just can't offer someone a job. Who wants a job, a J-O-B? You know, God, that's miserable. We have so much fun.

We gamified our business, and it is fun. I mean, Moneyball is so much fun. You'll learn more about Moneyball. Again, for all the people who've come to Key2Key, they're on Key2Key Moneyball.

It is so much fun. I mean, I think of JJ's down. Not only our partner, JJ, who's crushing out 40s, 50s, massive numbers, just killing it. You know, he just crushed his first $500,000. $50,000, I think.

Yeah, $550,000. I met him at ASTA a couple years ago. Oh, my gosh. You know, tripled, quadruple revenue, $500,000, netting six figures in Maryland.

You know, wow, JJ's. How about them Jax boys? Woo-hoo! Different JJ's.

Yeah, different JJ's down in Jacksonville. Shout out to Shallowhead. Shout out to Dave Murray. Yeah, Dave Murray, man, being coached by, again, Hollywood.

Dave is just a great coach. You know, we had this, our phone skills presentation on the Anytime presentation. It was anytime anti-iso, wasn't it? Oh, my gosh.

The first three guys were Jacksonville guys being coached by David. Oh, my God. Were they phenomenal? They were insane, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, they just did 450,000 five days a week. They're nuts. They're literally nuts. And they talk trash on Moneyball all day long.

I love the trash. Oh, yeah. We are trash talkers. Yeah, the Larry Bird.

You know, Larry Bird was such a trash talker. That's the Larry Bird of the industry. But I will tell you, they delivered for what? 59, I think. And they sold over 500.

They just couldn't get it out. Why? Because they're not open seven days a week. I'm just kidding.

All right. Shout out. Shifting gears here. Speaking of changing an industry, we're going to talk about this call center idea that's been found.

And how fun is this? So where do I start? Basically, we train on phone skills all the time. It's the number one thing in your business.

If your revenue's down, what is it? It's not the time of year. It's not tax season. It's not the rodeo.

It's not, you know, Christmas time. It's not spring break. It's not back to school. It's not, you want me to keep going?

There's a million excuses. It's not anything. It's not, it's literally, you're not answering the phone and saying yes, and you're not having intensity to give customers great customer service. So All right.

So let's say you have a record month and, you know, you have an all-time record month, revenue is great. And then the next month sales goes in the tank. What changed? The advertising didn't change.

The demographic didn't change. The location of the shop didn't change. You know, your team probably stayed pretty much the same. The time of year probably didn't change all that much.

What changed? It's an internal execution of the concept, answering the phones with intensity. You know, are you answering the phone like it's the first day you're in business? So that's what we train on.

Okay. And we're really good. And here's how I know we're really good. I listen to phone calls all the time, including last week, which is last week, I listened to a little over 200 calls manually.

And I know we have AI to do all this, but I just wanted to really get in the trenches and see what's going on. We sound great on the phones. We are reading the scripts. We're saying yes.

We're saying it's now a good time. We're booking appointments. However. Todd.

I don't even want to hear it. Is there a lot of meat left on the boat? I listen to a little over 200 calls and here's generally the breakdown. Okay.

So, and I promise this will get to a point where it makes sense. Generally about, of the 215 calls I listened to, 89 of them were leads, meaning it's a car that's not in the shop and they're calling for a price or they want to, you know, make an appointment for whatever. It could be anything. And then the rest of them are pretty much majority customer updates and then a handful of vendors, solicitors, spam, robot calls, et cetera.

Okay. So 89 opportunities. Todd's, what's my ticket average? A thousand.

A thousand bucks. So $89,000. We converted, drum roll please, 35 of them. I think 35 of them.

Does that math sound right? It was 46%. So we converted less than half of the, oh no, 39, excuse me, 39, that's the math. 39 out of 85 inbound calls at all locations in Houston, despite say, you know, executing on the phone, oil change script, you know, customer says I'll be there in five minutes. They just don't show up.

It's mind blowing. You know, some of the, some of the presentation were good. Some of them were not so good. You can't hide from AI.

You know, it really, it really figures it out for you. How many, how many you're converting and how many are not. So what I'm, what we're looking at is a system that is the way that it's always been, which is service advisors. You know, this is what I'm talking about changing the industry.

Service advisors answer the phone at the shop, which converts to a car that shows up. And Todd found the arbitrage almost instantly back in the eighties. That is if you answer with intensity and with phone skills and with predictable scripts, your booking ratio for cars that are calling the shop will go through the roof. Does that sound about right?

So here's how I know that. And I haven't even told you this, Todd. I learned this morning from Chaz, shout out Chaz, that Firestone tracks their booking ratio. And guess what the number is?

Oh, it's got to be 26%. So that means if a call comes into a shop and it goes to any Firestone in the city of Houston or whatever, that counts. So call comes in, they convert 26% of cars. Well, we are converting almost 50%.

So that corroborates our pretty much anecdotal data, which is if you just start saying yes on the phone, you'll double your car cap. You know, that's pretty much, if you just start saying yes, you will pretty much double, which 26 to 50, that sounds about right. But there's a whole bunch of leads that have come- And we're really good. And we're really good.

Like stupid good. Oh my God, we're really good. We sound good on the phone. But I just think it's a system that we, it's first principles thinking, you know, like question everything.

That's what Elon Musk does. That's what we're doing. In home service, they have a full-time call center where people are paid commission to get that freaking appointment to book and make that truck go to that person's house. for us, it would be get that car over the curb. You do not have anything.

One of my dad's rules, you do not have anything unless you have a car, right? So we are going to be beta testing an inbound call center, which is just electric. It's going to be people's full-time job. Imagine if every car in the shop or every call coming into the shop could be answered as good as Glenn Piccolo answers it, as good as I answered, as good as Todd answers, as good as all of our top people.

Right now we have, a hundred different people answering the phone and they all have to be constantly trained. And then it's very difficult to follow up when a car doesn't show up because guess what? We're slammed. You know, there's a million other cars.

So we're very, very excited about this. It's something we're going to be trying. Todd, do you have any thoughts? Yeah, we've been, you know, Joe Adams has been so instrumental.

You know, when we rolled out Rilla. You know, I am very pro-technology. Again, if you start with a RadioShack recorder, you're pro-technology. And any of the progression from RadioShack recorder to digital call loggers to now AI, you know, well, this is just the next step of AI is analyzing all these calls and data.

And I'll never forget, you know, when Joe talked to me about Rilla, I said, yep, take one store, test it. And we obviously tested that out at the woodlands. I went up, looked at it, and I went, wow, he's AI my company. Let's go all the way out.

And so they did. It really did. It AI's all these touch points. Well, now as we get better and better at analyze, and again, don't forget guys, when we talk about these percentages, you're talking about a hundred million company, which is great.

You are taught. Yeah. We're talking about an average unit of well over $500,000. See, that's how good we are.

I couldn't believe it. And then we go, oh, my God, looking to meet on the bone. Joe goes, Todd, you're going to believe this. We got a lot of meat on the bone.

And he sent me over a couple of examples. And I was like, oh, my God. We're talking about, and we're talking about like. They're really good.

Really good scripts. You know, freaking a shop tour goes out. They book the appointment. And then it's just, they just fall through the cracks.

They don't show up. I don't know what it is. So it's like, you guys are literally going to, and we're really putting ourselves out there. You know, you guys are going to watch us try to execute on this.

But it's like, man, what would it look like? If, you know, those 40%, 30% of the calls that are inbound leads literally just don't make it to the shop floor. They just get booked by an appointment booking call center that we have internally. And then it is that person's job who's sitting in that chair to just follow up and follow and like really just execute.

This means that you don't have to train 100 people on how to answer the phone anymore. You just have to train a handful of people that it's a full-time job. A service advisor has so many things that they do. They have to update customers.

They have to do a strong meet and greet. They have to be able to communicate in a waiting room. They have to be able to write estimates. They have to be able to freaking shoot videos and PMI cars and know their way around a vehicle and sell.

They got to be able to do all that. And then you got to teach them how to answer the phone. And sometimes, believe it or not, sometimes the best and most talented sales advisors, sometimes they're hard to train on how to answer the phone right, you know, like because they want to go sell that $3,000 coolant leak that's on the rack. They're busy.

And here's a part of the system that I noticed, Todd, after listening to all those calls. No matter how much we train it almost always sounds like. I mean, maybe not to a trained ear, not to a customer, but to me, you can kind of tell that advisors are typically in the middle of something because they are, because we're saying yes. We're really staff.

We staff for success. Can you imagine a shop is understaffed? Correct. And they're slammed.

So it's like they got 15 cars on the whip and you got to be able to drop everything. And you got to be able to execute because it's $1,000 and it could be your next lifetime $100,000 spend customer. So, man, we're going to try it. We're going to see how it works.

We'll report back. We will execute. I promise you. We're going to execute.

Yeah, I put Joe Adams on that, and he's the pit bull one. I mean, seriously, I went over to the call center yesterday because, you know, I am a guy scaling a billion-dollar company with this phenomenal team. And we will do it. It's really fun, and we're having a great time doing it.

And, you know, when we sink our teeth into something, it's massive execution. And, again, the beautiful thing about our world of training is we're in the trenches. is we don't make this stuff up. You know, I mean, man, you can come in and we show you what we're doing. Now, you know, and that is truly the difference between, you know, auto shop answers in any training company out there.

But will we execute? You bet we will. Now, and don't forget, we run a hundred million dollar company with 15 stores. Is that crazy?

So we have 15 units with this Fortune 500 infrastructure. And the industry normally has to have 100 stores to do 100 million. Is that insane or really somewhat that number? Who wants to manage 100 units?

Oh, my gosh. I mean, can you imagine that, doing $100,000 a month or $150,000 a month? We don't make enough money. The margins are so skinny as that.

You can't really employ people. You can't train them. Oh, my God. I mean, you hear stories of putting notes in the window to use the bathroom.

That's insane. You know, someone gets sick. You don't even got a technician now answering the phone. And, you know, one thing, you know, good to great, the book, good to great.

You have to have the right people on the bus and sitting in the right seat. Technicians do not want to do DVIs. They want to do what, Joe? Fix cars.

Hey, there you go. So we let our technicians, we almost spoon feed our technicians massive hours. And they love fixing cars. You know, service advisors love to do what?

Sell jobs. They really do. It's almost like the same. It's like, really, it's almost like, wow.

And so we're really analyzing, you know, Lee Iacoga years ago said question everything. And we still question everything, making sure that the right people are on the right seat on the bus. And let me just give you an example. And I'm so curious and just excited.

I mean, it's thrilling. It is literally thrilling to just think about this, about what the downstream effects of this are going to be. Because I was in the shop two weeks ago with Glenn, typical Saturday at 1010. And... 50 calls or something, dude, in three hours.

I think it was 37 calls from 8 a.m. To 1030. And I was in the shop and it was literally ringing off the hook. It was so many calls.

And Glenn looks at me, he goes, dude, can you figure out the inbound call center? Because he took about half of them because he's kind of like at the speed rack sitting by that phone. And when it hits that second ring, it's like the guys are in the waiting room, they're checking in cars, et cetera. He looks at me, he's like, can you please figure it out?

So I went and manually listened to them all. Yeah. All day. You know, 30 about Joe, just real quick, Paul from that one thing about Joe.

I'm nuts. And she honestly, when, when I put him on an assignment, it's not only in the trenches with the wrenches, but you know, man, he spent a day at the call center doing inbound calls. And that's what I love about Joe, man. He is obsessed just like I am.

And, and man, And just that day was a game changer. I can't tell you all the secrets come to him, I will. But wow, man, he found some game changing stuff. And then, you know, his connections again, we started, you know, working with Tommy Mello.

It allows us to not only have him as a friend, but to call his call center. Yeah, we literally I literally text Tommy and say, Tommy, you know, can you hook Joe up my team up with? Your team, because we're doing a call center, and what does Tommy say? Oh, absolutely.

He sends it out, and you were on the call with him yesterday. And so, see, there's this network. Of high-performing companies, you know, and that's just the difference in us. You know, we perform at such a different rate, but it's because Joe Adams also spent a day answering phones in the call center.

When we launched our pre-booking call center, Joe spent a day pre-booking and doing follow-up phone calls just so he can say, yeah, I know how to do this. And man, when you're in the trenches like that. It's a game changer. Well, thank you, Todd.

Thank you for that high praise. And then thank you for giving me a lane. You know, he told me something five years ago. He's like, Joe, you're 22, all your buddies, they're trying to figure out what they're going to do for their life.

And they don't know where, what lane they're going to be in. Once you find what lane you're in, it's thrilling. It's the most fun thing in the world. And it took me about two years, but I will say it might sound like I'm working super hard, yada, yada.

It's so fun. It's literally so fun. It is so fun to be listening to calls and one after the other is not showing up at the shop and you're like, damn, I'm really, we're really good at this. And they're still not showing up.

Oh my gosh. Oh. And then you just like spin and I get these shit, you know, beautiful. And you get to just figure out how you can move the business forward.

And it's, it's really a tremendous amount of fun. So back on my story, 37 calls in two and a half hours, I went and listened to them all. And, you know, it was an hour and 20 minutes total out of two and a half hours of somebody's on the phone of total calls. That means you're man down, dude.

And a bunch of them are leads, you know, one of them, it was like a sweet lady and she's just, you know, Glenn answers it and she's talking for like seven minutes, you know, or something. And I want to be able to spend the time with that customer because she's probably in panic mode because her check engine light just came on or something. And you don't want to rush a customer off the phone, obviously. But Glenn is at the speed rack in Bay one quarterbacking the store.

And he's like kneecapped. He like, can't, you know what I mean? Like he literally, he said, he literally spent like an hour out of those, like half the day, just answer the phone. How are you supposed to PMI, you know, 25 cars in eight hours or in four hours or whatever we do, you know, when you're constantly having to ring the phone.

So it's like, man, imagine you just take 30 or 40% of the calls. Put them in an inbound call center. You're going to book a higher percentage of them. The customer service on the shop floor goes up because you're not getting inundated with tons of inbound leads.

You know that they're getting booked and your customer service goes up. You update the customers faster, less of those calls anyway. Man, I just can imagine, I can see the vision. I can't wait for us to execute on it.

I know we will because we're obsessed. We're psychos, if you can't. We're very passionate about it. And I can't wait to see what the data looks like, man.

If there's a considerable or demonstrable increase in either car count or ticket average after we execute on this. I mean, that is so fun. That is like literally the most thrilling. Fun thing in the world, you know, to be able to be in the sandbox and play in it.

Hey, man, just real quick. What are we doing this weekend, Joe? Oh, my God. What are we doing?

Oh, it was such a fun. I'm Houston-Boston Partnership as I'm hosting an annual football kickoff for the University of Texas-Harkansas game. And this is really fun. You know, so Joe Adams was a member of a Christian fraternity at the University of Texas.

And so, you know, I was looking for people as he started scaling. And Joe goes, hey, you know, I have a guy who is in my fraternity you might be interested in. And he goes, but I don't want to, you know, recruit him. You'll need to recruit him.

And that's where Matt Keyes came from. And then our AIX, Michael Floyd, came from there. And so it just, it just turned into this amazing deal. So we're flying up to Austin tomorrow for a board meeting and the entertainment is University of Texas, Arkansas game, big Airbnb and on Lakeway, you know, with boats and just fun stuff.

And see, think about it. We're in the auto, we're in the auto hospitality industry. And I'll never forget Joe going. I go, Joe, so if it wasn't you.

And it was, say, Matt Keyes and I, would you want Matt to recruit you into your company? And Joe goes, oh, yeah. And I said, that's why I have to recruit these guys. And it's so fun.

So now you get to, you know, scale a company with these friends. Y'all got Charlie Bill, you know, they're just such great friends, Perry. And then you turn around, you got Joe's got this younger generation. And I just think, wow, what does the next 10 years look like?

And guys, I'm telling you, we're really good. And we're here to help you guys. Auto Shop Ants from this family of businesses will transform your life. And, you know, this weekend, it sounds like it's a big party, but it's, I'm literally, it's going to be so fun.

I'm literally going to spend 12 hours on Friday and Saturday, just besides the game. We're going to be focused on the game when we're in the seats, but just riffing in like a think tank, just like, just like, man, like game planning. You know, we're going to be talking about growth and strategy over the next few years. We're going to be talking about the call center.

We're going to talk about our, you know, updates on the finance department. And it's just going to be like, man, how can we just really focus and put, you know, two days of just quality, quality, high level thinking to really see if we can move the business forward. There's just nothing more fun than that. It's like, I think as humans, I think God designed us literally to work and to enjoy our labor and to have fun while doing it.

And I know not everybody on this call can is in that position, but it's like, man, I'm literally watching people. I am literally watching people like look at Glenn Piccolo. Look at Mike Quinn. Look at Jose.

Look at Charlie. Charlie was doing nothing. Charlie was doing... He laughed.

We were looking at the P&Ls yesterday, and he was like, man, the net at Watertown is way more than the total revenue it was like 10 years ago. Wow. You know, and it's like he was putting gas. He was literally driving customers' cars to and from his house because he couldn't afford to put gas in his car.

Should have rode a tank. And now... You can't keep them out of a shop. It's so much more fun.

It's like, I mean, you can't help anybody. Can I mention one more program we're going to have? We've been doing these 20 groups all last year. We're going to put four 20 groups together, which is very exciting.

Our next 20 group is going to be first quarter of next year. We're going out to Bartell's three stores, which is amazing. You'll be able to fly into Chicago. We'll host it out of the Holiday Inn.

Carroll Stream right there next to their Carroll Stream original store, which is again a wonderful store. And then we'll bus ride to three stores. So again, get in touch with Todd Westerlin on that. That's going to happen.

I don't think we have confirmed the date in January. I mean, I'm sorry, in March, but we'll be doing four 20 group programs are key to key every week. I mean, once a month, plus now our new court side wants them. And then again, all the other, you know, I have to talk about who sponsors us.

The Auto Shop Answers family of businesses from media called, wow, we just did this shop tour for True. Is that crazy? True Auto in Atlanta. Isn't it gorgeous yeah great job rob yeah boom boom and how about josh yeah great job josh well anyway players this has been i think we're up on the hour this has been master tech to millionaire with joe adams and todd hayes at adams automotive the number one shop in america thank you guys for listening in man i am so excited it was not a natural don't give it up joe whatever anyway thank you todd it's been a great chat i'm so excited for the end of the year and just man in 2026.

Let's go. To God, be the clerk. Thank you guys. We'll see you guys next time.

Boom. Boom.