Your Best Service Advisor Might Be Bad on the Phone

- Price shoppers don't care about the price. - AI can literally listen to every single call. - 63% of cars are making it into our driveway and most of those calls start with, how much do you charge for blank? - I had the opportunity to have dinner with a billionaire and he goes, did I hear you correctly? The service advisors are answering the phone. He was like, Joe, that is a major failure point in your business and I think it was 85 of them were actual leads and guess how many came in? 47%. Oh my gosh, we're doing $80 million and we're missing half. - I'm at a shop and they're quoting me X amount. Can you beat that? 56% of those customers, that car ends up in our shop. - And what's the ticket average? Give me a drum roll please. - $2,800. (upbeat music) - What's up players? Another episode of Master Tech to Millionaire with Joe Adams from Adams Automotive. Today we're gonna be talking about none other than phones.

We're gonna be talking about the same thing that we always talk about, which is how to say yes on the phone and how to answer the phone with a smile. We're here with none other than Josh Northup. He is the director of our inbound call center and has probably listened to, I don't know, a hundred thousand phone calls. So Josh, how you doing this afternoon? - I am doing good man, I love what I do. - So it's about a hundred thousand. People probably think that's a joke, but if I had to guess it might actually be a hundred thousand. What are you at? - It's over a hundred thousand at this point. It's crazy how many calls. - How? How is that even possible? So you gotta be listening on 2.5X or something? - So my agents as a team, we do about a thousand calls a day. Give or take, it's probably less, a little more depending on the day. And I just listen to a bulk amount of them, 2X speed, and for hours on end for the last six and a half months,

I have just been burning through these calls. And for a while I was at a hundred percent and now I've got so many team members, we're on 14 stores. I just cannot keep up with all the calls, but that's where AI helps me. - You're slacking dude, you're slacking. It's gonna be, you're only at a hundred thousand, you're freaking slacking. Anyway, for those of you listening who might not have context, so we're Adams Automotive. Look, last year we were really, really good at answering the phones, but we were answering the phones at unit level. We run auto repair shops and traditionally in the industry, service advisors answer the phones at unit level. So a customer calls in and they say, how much do you charge for breaks? And it's our job to convert that customer from a lead into a visit. And I would have said a year ago that we had a 95% arrival rate. Like we're just really good at answering the phones, we have scripts, we were so much better

than all the other shops in the industry. So I'm gonna go on a little story time here. It might take me a minute, but we'll try to get through this. Last May, I believe, April or May of 2025, I had the opportunity to have dinner with a billionaire. Shout out Tommy Mello, he's a freaking beast. The guy's doing three or $400 million a year in garage door repair. That's crazy. He's in 40 markets, 22 states. He just sold his company for a second time for $2 billion to KKR. He's a beast. So we're sitting at a dinner with him. We just toured his facility, his training center. He's a great guy. Shout out Tommy if you ever get a chance to listen to this. And we're talking to him and I'm like, I used to think to myself, man, Tommy, 'cause we used to call him in our take fives. I used to think to myself, man, Tommy could learn a thing or two from our anytime presentation. He could learn a thing or two. And I see you cringing, Josh.

It's like literally hilarious. Guy's a freaking billionaire. Success leaves clues is one of the things he's talking about. And we're probably at $50 million in revenue at that time. We hadn't done some of our bolt-ons. And I'm talking to him about the differences in our business model. His, he has trucks and technicians go to the customer's house. And for us, the customers come to us. It's kind of like the exact opposite. But at the end of the day, it's still like a customer raising their red flag or white flag, I need help. My XYZ is broken. Will you fix it for me? So yeah, our leads are generally, well, I didn't even call them leads back then. He called them leads. He goes, who answers the leads? And I was like, well, the service advisors. And they're really, we're really good at training. We're really good at the phones. He goes, what's your booking rate? And I was like, I don't know, really high. Like, it's probably like really good.

It's probably 90%. And he was like, no, no, no, okay. Like he could already tell, I didn't know. He was like, you should know it to the decimal. And he goes, did I hear you correctly? The service advisors are answering the phone? And I was like, yeah, but we're really good. That's what I said. And I was like, and he goes, I'll never forget this for the rest of my life. He was like, Joe, that is a major failure point in your business. Like that, like in this guy's freaking, he's done it. You know what I mean? We're trying to learn a thing or two from him. We want to be the dumbest guy in the room. We want to look up to people that are smarter than us and are good at business, right? So he literally says that is a major failure point in your business because in hindsight, they got to do a million things. They got to order parts, great customers at the counter. They got to go to the bathroom sometimes. Most shops only have two service advisors.

They got to build estimates, sell jobs. They got to talk to technicians, dispatch parts. And the most important part of their job maybe is booking the car over the curb. Curb selling, you know, whatever you want to call it. So what do I do? I go home and this is like, you know, we didn't have the AI tools that we have now. Josh, I remember literally manually listening. You know, you're at a hundred and something thousand. Well, you know, you have AI, so relax. No, you are actually like physically listening to them, right? Like it's, you're crazy. - I hear every single word. And let me tell you, there is this growth process with every fresh team member, right? Where every single call, 'cause you can only hit so many things at a time. And as soon as I hear it, I go, I know exactly where this call is going. And it goes there every time. And I bring up the calls and I'm like, how did you know? I've heard too many of these.

I just know at this point. - Yeah, so pro tip, if you're listening to this, hire people that are smarter than you. Josh is an ace, freaking hundred thousand. I thought I was impressive with my, so my story, it's 225 calls I listen to. Now granted, we're in Ring Central and we've got like this archaic, like I'm literally manually listening to them on One X. I'm clicking through calls. Most of them are vendor calls. And I think it was 85 of them were actual leads. And I put them in a spreadsheet and then I open Techmetric on the other tab. And I was like, did they come in? How much did they spend? And guess what our ticket average was? Ding, ding, ding, 1,000. It was like 1,050 on my small sample size. And guess how many came in? 47%. And some were like, yeah, your head just went down. Like some of them were like lay downs. Like, hey, I got a freaking misfire. Can you guys fix that? Or, hey, I'm hearing a clunking noise on the front end.

Can you fix that? And I actually called these customers back. I was like, why did y'all not come in? And it was a combination of a whole bunch of different things. Some people just got busy and they went somewhere else. And so the idea is, holy. I thought, we're doing a whole bunch, you know, this is in November when Todd gave me the go ahead to build the inbound call center. I go, oh my gosh, we're doing $80 million. And we're missing half. Dude, we're missing half. Like, that's crazy. So down the rabbit hole we go, I gotta build a call center. My whole playbook in business is Elon Musk. Identify the bottleneck in the business. Throw your entire, my personality is very obsessive. I know I've been talking for like five minutes straight here, but this is the story. - No, it's fire. - This is the story. Like, throw your entire body weight and focus. 99 percentile Belker focus at the issue and unblock it. Build the system.

And then hand the ball off to somebody smarter than you who knows the system and owns the outcome. And it was hard. I mean, we launched Ring Central virtual call taking at Siena and I took the phone calls. And then it was like, okay, we need a studs. We hired somebody. And then the most crucial day was two stores at once. It was like, man, can we do two stores at once? And then slowly but surely, you know, we got Josh in the call center. We recruited him just as a call center agent, former service advisor. And then I remember in March, we had all five in Houston on the call center. Ring Central accounts consolidated. It's all this work. The phone numbers are all call tracking numbers are in there. And it's time for, you know, eventually Josh, we elevated you to the director of the call center, but I'll pause there. That was a whole lot of work. Josh, where are we at now? What is our booking rate? Like, tell me about do shops, are shops missing calls?

I mean, I know they are, but tell me how many they're missing. What's the capture rate, define terms here. So tell me a little bit about your background, your career, seven and a half minutes into the podcast. It's first time I let you talk. And just, yeah, just give me the juice, man. - Absolutely. Yeah, so I've been in automotive for a few years. I've been in multiple different shops. Didn't really know what I wanted to do, but one thing that was clear to me was when Joe Adams and Glenn Pickle give you a call and say, hey, we're starting a call center. What are you doing right now? - We paid you to say that by the way. - No, the answer is you stop what you're doing and you go, whatever I'm doing right now, I'm going to go do a call center with Joe Adams and Glenn Pickle. - Let's go. - But overall, I mean, the growth, the journey in this call center, right? I just knew there was something there, right? There's a diamond here for you guys

to be exploring this avenue and you're absolutely correct. So the two main pieces of data we have is booking rate and arrival rate. So booking rate is important to distinguish from arrival rate because unlike home service world, right? If you book the appointment, if you don't show up to the house, what's wrong with you, right? You have an appointment booked, go to the house. You have it set up. The difference in automotive is we can book as many appointments as we want. I can book a million appointments, but it doesn't mean that someone's going to walk in that door, right? So the difference there is we have a 83% booking rate. - That's sick. - That means that people on the phone that we speak to, that is a lead, specifics on lead, 83% are committing to an appointment and we are booking them a time. They're receiving a text message with, you are booked for this time at this shop. We will see you then and then they're introduced

to our followup process leading up to the arrival and then if they don't arrive, they receive followup communications. The arrival rate means that they stepped foot in our shop. That lead is captured. What happens from that moment forward is entirely dependent on our store team and the incredible process that we've built off of the back of Todd Hayes. But getting them in the door is the big change that had to happen and that is currently at this day, 63% on the road to 70%. - That's right, dude. Next stop, 70%, 63%. So you can do math if you're listening to this, 47% to 63% in a year. How much enterprise value was created? Josh, how many days off have you taken in the last six months? - I had one day off in, I believe, August. I got a concussion and I still was there for the morning meeting. - You're sick, dude. - But the rest of the day, I took off. - Dude, find people who are freaking smarter than you and give them AI.

See, that's one of the, you know, this is a tangent, but like, you know, we're so obsessed. Shout out Michael Floyd with AI. Like, Josh, you're like a 23-year-old kid and I started to reveal your age. You didn't go to college for running an AI call center. You didn't do that. But like, man, AI and high agency and somebody who's highly intelligent, don't get your, don't make your head blow up too big. But like, somebody who's, you know, got high agency and can solve problems, it's like, do you wanna talk about that a little bit? Like, it's, to me, it's thrilling. Like, I never thought that I would be like learning how to hack the LinkedIn algorithm, but that's just like a fun problem that I happen to be focused on right now. Do you have any thoughts on that? Like, converting to, man, I had no idea I was gonna be in a call center for my career. - Yeah, absolutely. I think it's so easy to see people that are advanced

with AI or really any technology, right? And to look at how much time does it take to get that, like, man, they must have put so much time. They're just smart. But the truth is, I knew nothing about AI in February. I knew nothing about AI in March. - That's crazy, like nine months ago, dude. That's crazy. - I knew nothing. I had used chat GBT once or twice to, on my car ride home, practice phone calls when I was at the store level. Other than that, I knew nothing about AI. And now, I have a full system. I have call tracking. I have all of these different pieces. I have a full tool for my team that streamlines everything in the process. And all I knew was I took a coding class in high school and I flunked out of it. I didn't stick with it. I learned JavaScript, but I don't need to know that. And that's what's so great about AI is it's so palatable that with a little bit of time, a little bit of just working through the friction,

some high agency, anyone can become an A player if they just chase it and you have to put that time into it. So have I had no days off? Of course, but that's my choice because I see there is an incredible amount of opportunity and not only learning these skills and these tools, but there's so much opportunity for the business. If I take my sweet time to get to that 60% over two years, of course it's gonna be easy. But the faster I do that, we make such a game-changing impact to these stores immediately. And that's not gonna go anywhere tomorrow. We've built those skills in my team. And as we add new members, we've solved calls and we'll get into that, but we can repeat this until the end of time. And every improvement we make and that I've made crunching this time, it changes for the future. It's not just gonna go away tomorrow. And all these systems, I mean, it's empowering the future of this company. - Yeah, and we're really proud of you, Josh,

'cause we took a bet on you. We're like, okay, 22, 23 year old kid who knows nothing about call centers, but we're just gonna bet that this guy has a higher growth trajectory than maybe some average person who's been doing call centers for a long time. And the idea, our thesis at Auto Hospitality Group is the moment you take over the phones, and if you've listened to our podcast before or been through Key to Key, you probably left Key to Key and you did better on the phones for the week following and you had a record week. And even in our own company, I remember we took over for Charlie and Pleasant Car Care and he was at 41% booking rate. And it's like first week, 60%, or like, you know, once it was consolidated, 'cause we had worked through the kinks in Houston. And guess what? All time record month, June 460,000. I can't point exactly to the call center, but I know Car Count went up 30%, like all time over the previous year.

I know Car Count was up over May, the month before, and it's obviously a combination of everything. It unlocks like more operating time on the shop floor. It operates a whole bunch of things, but, you know, it's our thesis. It's like, okay, if we're acquiring shops, we're rolling up shops. Like day one, we're tripling the call volume leads that are being booked. You know, day one, it's going from 15% to 50 or 60 or 70%. And so the better and the more speed in which Josh can get to 70%, you know, that just like unlocks our thesis even more. It's like, okay, that's even more like, like it just compounds so rapidly. And I'm such a numbers guy, I know you are too. It's like, okay, why look for a guy with a call center experience on his resume? I'm actually going to look for somebody who's like me, who's like a psycho, like you're low key, like obsessed. You know, it's like obsession, you know, you just want to keep it going.

So anyway, let's get into the numbers. Let's give the people what they came in for. I could ramble all day, but first things first, I want to ask you how many calls are leads? Because I think when I was listening to this, these calls a year ago, it was like vendor calls, customer calls, updating themselves. It was, you know, employees calling for a ride back to the shop, stuff like that. How many are actual leads and how do you define a lead? - Yeah, absolutely. We've broken it down into a couple of funnels now. We have inbound versus outbound calls. Inbound obviously being customers calling in, outbound being the store team members are reaching out, usually about service updates, things of that nature. We do also have outbound followups, which is its own realm. But as far as calls that come into us, the rate of them being leads varies based on the store, but it's about 20 to 30% calls. - I was gonna say that, yeah.

- It's about 20 to 30%. - In my head, it's like 26.9 is the number I remember, like 27%. That makes total sense. If you're listening to phone calls, you know you're supposed to listen to phone calls, depending on what vendor you're using, we recommend Avoca, shout out Avoca. You know, I used to do this like four years ago. It's like, okay, let's listen to phone calls. And it's like, well, that was a vendor call, okay. That was a customer sales call. That was not a, like, I couldn't even, I couldn't even make the difference between inbound and outbound. So some of them were outbound sales calls. Like it's just hard to identify. Like if you're gonna actually do coaching, which we'll get into later, like it's hard to actually find good calls to coach on. So AIs just totally unlocked that. So it's all math, okay. So we advertise on the free market. You know, we pay $25,000 a month to buy leads. Those leads call us, they text us,

they fill out our appointment forms. 26.9% of them making up that number, but something like that are leads, okay. And you're telling me that 83% of them verbally commit or like the call agent, and we're using humans. You know, we have AI, Avoca's helping us for overflow and after hours, which maybe we'll talk about later, but 83% of them you're saying verbally commit to coming in and we get an appointment on the board. And then 63% actually show up, their phone number shows up in tech metric within a three day time period after the appointment or something like that. So let's break that down. What do you think the 17% of people who don't commit is? Is it, is it price shoppers? Is it people that are just mean? Is it our execution? What do you think that spread is? - Yeah, it's a mix of things, right? And what my job has been in listening to the calls is finding where the biggest window of opportunity is and maximizing our impact on that category, right?

So our biggest one right now is commodity items. What that means is tires, brakes, fluid services, things that people have done before on a vehicle and they have a general idea of, I have a feeling of what this is worth. Commodity items are also typically services that if you call an average shop, they're probably gonna throw a price at you and say $4.99 click, right? And they're just gonna give you that price. Alignments is another really big one. Alignments is a great example where I saw a very large window of opportunity. I brought it to your attention and what we devised was a plan where we would give them the price. We would take the three swings for anyone that's not familiar with our process, right? First question is always, is now a good time to bring in your vehicle, right? If they give pushback on that, we ask them what kind of concerns. We're really digging into what that pain point is and then based on the pain point they give us,

we're gonna tell them anytime you're experiencing blank, you need to have that inspected by one of our master certified technicians and it no charge to you will provide you a free written estimate is now a good time to bring in your vehicle, right? By that point, we know what the pain point is. If they continue to give pushback, on alignment specifically, we took an additional approach where if they continue giving pushback, we say, hey, I see it's your first time in with us. We actually have a promotion going on right now for our existing customers. That alignment on your Honda Civic is actually on special right now for $99. I'll give you that promotion just so you can see what we're about here at Adams Automotive. Can we see here next 15 to 20 minutes? And our capture rate, our rate of customers walking in the door, shot up overnight. - That's sick. - It doubled on alignments. And the truth was that it was such a commodity item.

If you didn't give a price, you weren't in the contention. They didn't care. They didn't want to hear someone run them around. They wanted to hear a price because the last three places they called, gave them a price. And as soon as we became the loss leader on that service, they come in and the average ticket for a customer that comes in for an alignment at one of our shops. - Can I guess? I bet it's high. It's gotta be high. I'm gonna guess like 1100. - $1,700. - No way. Okay, that's so sick. So yeah, exactly. 'Cause it's a freaking alignment, dude. So I'm gonna check your suspension. Why is your car out of alignment? It's probably 'cause you got steel showing on your tires, your ball joints loose, or your control arms are ripping apart. So man, that's okay. I mean, I'm so excited already. This is gonna be sick. So here's an analogy I want to make for everybody out there. So how do I break this down? Todd had his mantra that he identified very early on.

And he was a very, very smart businessman in the 1980s. I'm only saying that so he gives me a raise when he's listening to this podcast. No, I'm kidding. I love you, Todd. Shout out. This mantra that say yes on the phone, use the anytime presentation, wrap cars around your shop. It's not hard, just be nice. And he didn't have the data back then. He didn't have AI, but he had Radio Shack recorders. He didn't even have spreadsheets back then. He had the accordion file, right? So he didn't have the data, but he instinctually understood that when I say yes on the phone, my lead booking rate and capture rate goes through the roof. And the industry average, if you're listening to this, the industry average is 15% of the leads that actually show up at the shop. And for an auto repair, for an auto hospitality shop, for us, it was 47%. I would venture to say that most auto shop answers shops probably do the 35, 40% range first week after training,

and they get cars around their building, and it's awesome, and that's it. And it's like, they're so happy. And like, you just go to 200K, 300K, and that's great. But, you know, the analogy that I'm gonna make is Todd had a pirate ship back then. Like, it's in the 80s. It's like, man, pirate ship works. It's like, great. We've got like a battleship, cruise ship, rocket ship level of system, because AI can literally listen to every single call. And so, I can literally listen to every single call, and I can transcribe it and be like, this is an alignment inquiry. And traditionally, because we have to train 50 plus service advisors, we can't train on specific categories because it's too difficult. So it's just like, okay, anytime presentation, try to get them over the curb, don't give them the price, don't give them the price, don't give them the price. But, unfortunately, and this is my thesis, our defense is the other cruddy shops.

Excuse my language. And so, what happens is they call our shop, we don't give them the price two times on something simple, like an alignment. And they just call the place down the street, and they just give them a price at face value. They don't ask them the type of car. They don't ask them anything. Even on like, actual repair items. Like, if you're getting an objection and the customer's trying to get a second opinion, they call another shop. The other shop is just gonna give them a low ball price, and the customer's not gonna ask any questions. If you're listening to the Overcoming Objections podcast, Glenn was talking about like, the customers just take them at face value. They don't ask the what kind of parts are you putting on the car question. Call your competition in front of them and say, well, what parts are you putting on the car? And then the other shops just fold. But, unfortunately, we have to deal with that

on booking leads because the other shop's just gonna literally throw a price out there. And like, we're competing with Mavis, we're competing with Sun Auto, these like, consolidators with really low prices. And it dawned on me, and the team, like, oh, we don't charge 100 bucks for alignments for $99, we charge 1,700. You know, like, we literally charge 1,700. So you could dang near give it to 'em for 10 bucks. You know, and like, so $99 is, so you're telling me that that's a good price where it's not too cheap or it's garbage, but it's like, we're gonna get cars in over the curb, and it went up overnight. Is that correct, am I understanding? - Yes, it was overnight. It's immediate impact. And we're concerned that for other commodity items, the difficulty is obviously, every market's a little bit different. And at the same time as well, we are having, even on commodity items, we're having an incredible amount of success

with building value in what we are. The biggest argument that is hardest to get across to new team members is that price shoppers don't care about the price. There are going to be your specific customers where their pain point is price, but just because someone asks you the price doesn't mean that's their pain point. A lot of times, people are gonna ask you a question out the gate. They're gonna have the intensity, they're gonna have the strength, because automotive has such a bad reputation and stigma that people come out on the offensive. Really what it is, is they're trying to survey, are you gonna try and take an advantage of me? Show me your colors. And the truth is, more often than not, they just wanna be helped. They just wanna know what's wrong with their car. And that's why we ask the guiding questions that we do, is because if we can find that pain point, then that's how we're gonna help the customer.

If their pain point is that I just was at a place and they didn't help me, I didn't trust the guy at the counter, and you are battling them on the lowest price, you're not helping the customer. You're shadowboxing with a villain that doesn't exist. And so, really what it comes down to is, if you can find out that they're a pain point, and if it is price, then we know that's what we have to do. And we have a handoff process so that we can handle those calls. But the majority of the time, right, 63% of cars are making it into our driveway, and most of those calls start with, how much do you charge for blank? And we're not throwing out the price on those, because the customer doesn't care. What they want to know is, I'm gonna send my daughter into your shop, are you gonna charge her an arm and a leg? What are you guys gonna do? Are you gonna look it over? Are you just gonna take at face value what I say? Are you gonna copy the last shop's diagnosis?

Are you gonna charge me an arm and a leg for diagnosis? There's so many pain points. What are you gonna do to help me? And we're gonna find out what that is that the customer wants to hear, what they need, and we have an answer, and we have a solution, because we're in the business of auto hospitality. - That's fire, dude. And in clarifying, we're taking a couple swings first, just in case anybody missed that. Like, we're not just throwing price out on alignment inquiries. We're still building value, being very kind, second swing, new customer intro, and then if they still are just like adamant about price, then we give price. And that's what the booking rate has gone through the roof. Because remember, these customers are pissed. Like, they are literally so angry because they fired their last shop. They fired their last auto service provider and every single one that they've ever done business with since they started paying for their own car repairs.

Like, literally, they're a 47-year-old lawyer, let me paint a picture, they've been driving a car, fixing their own car since they were 23, 24, and they're coming to you for the first time. Well, that means, unless they just moved here, they've had somebody working on their car or 10 different shops working on their car for the last 20 years, and the reason they don't have a guy or have somebody that works on their car is because the other providers sucked. And we know on the podcast that most shop owners, most service advisors are mean, or like, they just don't do a good job. The industry is not very sophisticated and we're working to make it more sophisticated. Hopefully, this content is helpful, but the customers are coming in with pain. They're like, dude, you're gonna freaking take advantage of me just like every other dang shop that I've ever been in, and I am looking for any reason to validate my thesis,

which is shops suck. Like, that's literally the mindset, and it's Josh and his team's job to break down that barrier in like 10 seconds. And I think our service advisors need to hear this. Like, you guys are cranking up there. Like, and I think we all respect each other, like the unit level and the call center. Like, we were working as one team, we were so grateful for each other, but sometimes there's some miscommunication, and what people need to hear is like, you guys are doing a great job being so nice and breaking down barriers so quickly, because what we're trying to do is identify the pain, make a customer for life. We are building customers for life, unreasonable hospitality. So I'll ask you this, like, I think there's different data on like existing customer booking capture rate versus new customers, right? I mean, I'm assuming that existing customers has to be way higher. - Yes, and that's where a call center pulls ahead, right?

Obviously we could pad our stats with existing customers. If someone's been to you before and they're calling you, they're most likely, I mean, they wouldn't be calling you again after they've been to you if they didn't appreciate your service and if they didn't intend on coming in, right? And also because we operate a certain way, people that have been to us before already know the way their process works. So when we tell them that we're gonna look over their car and need to provide them a free written estimate, we're not having to sell that value because that's already been earned. We've already kind of earned that trust. So there's a lot less leg work to do. We're at about 80%, I think it's 81 or 82% arrival rate on existing customers. The difference is gonna be the new customers and that's where call center really pulls ahead from the store team is that, I mean, everyone that's ever been in a shop knows this situation,

right? You're about to present a vehicle in the shop if you bring customers out in the shop at your facility or you're about to call about a service, right? You've got it all laid up, you've got your presentation, you're about to reach for the phone, it starts ringing. You do that quick look around, is anyone gonna pick it up? And it's, I've seen it, I've seen people do the, yeah, the quick pick up and the, thank you for choosing a blank automotive. - Please hold, and then they say please hold. - Yes, exactly. - Or something, oh my god. - And then the customer just says, I'm not gonna wait, and they click. Or you can tell they're just trying to get off the phone, yeah, we're gonna have to take a look at it for you to get it checked out. Oh, okay, I'll call somewhere else. Okay, click. And that person is content with that 'cause they're like, man, I gotta lock in this two grand deal. I can't waste my time with this price shopper.

They ask me how much spark plugs are, and our company is different, right? But even then, right, they have the process, they're running it. The difference is that even though they have the right culture, and that's why we're hitting 47%, the difference is that there is so many micro-decisions in such a short call that my team is taking over 150 reps each member every single day at just calls. If anyone has ever done role-play in their shop or trained on calls, you'll notice the immediate impact. Imagine if your team members were doing 150 of those every single day, they would be night and day on the phones. But the argument is usually, well, there's a lot of different reasons people don't train or role-play on calls. Sometimes they don't even see the value in it, but we do at our company, and we see 47% versus the 15% average. And the gap between that 47 to 63 is that every single day we start our morning with role-play calls,

we coach on them, and I'm listening to that absurd amount, the over 100,000 calls now, and the moment I hear something that we need to coach on, I save it. I save every single call that can be coached on, and we go through them rigorously, myself and my team, and we work through those. If they run into a new circumstance, they're calling me. If they run into something where, hey, I feel like this could have landed, we're going over it in a one-on-one call. And that is what makes that gap. It's that there is so much nuance to each pain point, and how do you get to that pain point? Someone's asking about price, how do you get to the point where they say, hey, I was just somewhere and they didn't have time for me? Like, that's such a drastic change from what's your price on this, and getting there without making them bothered is a very difficult thing to do, and that's where my team is a bunch of just absolute hammers.

- You know, I was thinking just about your, man, they're about to sell this $2,000 deal, time to lock in. It's like, I think it's even simpler in most shops. I think they're just understaffed, and they have two people, and they're in the bathroom. They're just literally in the bathroom or talking to a technician. You have two service advisors. It's not enough, because they have to talk to technicians. Most people can't have a call center, but you've seen in the data that most of the phone calls are between 10 a.m. and 11.30 central, or wherever the local time is, and then like, 1.30 to 3. So the waves of calls all come in at certain times, like it's just human nature, I guess, across the country, and you have two service advisors, and seven leads call in a three-minute window, and I think it's like 20% of calls just go straight to voicemail across the industry or something like that. - Yes, yeah. It's a staggering number.

I mean, I can tell you firsthand being in a shop, even a shop that's well-staffed, there's times where someone's talking to a customer in person, you're on the phone with a customer, and the phone rings. - Yeah. - What do you do? - You're done. - Are you just gonna stop your presentation call where you're telling this person about their vehicle? No, you stop real quick. You go, hey, sorry, give me just one quick moment. You put the other one. Thank you for choosing Blink Automotive. Please hold, right? I hear it all the time. There is no way you're gonna get to the pain point on that customer. - You're done. - They're gonna sit there for a minute or two. It's done. The lead is dead. - Yeah, I think we're at 99.7% answer rate, and I think the point three is like, I don't know, like it's very rare, maybe spam, I don't know. But I think we're actually at like 100 because we've got three layers now. It rings twice, and if the call center is queued up

like they are all currently on the phone or in the bathroom, it rolls to the shop floor, and all of our service advisors, if you're listening to this and you're a service advisor, you still have to practice at any time. We still gotta wrap cars around the shop. That's our second layer of defense. And then our third layer of defense is Avoca. That's just like an AI that answers the phone. It's really powerful, actually. Shout out to Avoca. They can book appointments for you. They can put the transcript, I believe, into Techmetric. They're integrated. They can pretty much do whatever you want. They can send a text message automatically. The AI can. We're primarily using them for after hours, and we book leads after hours, but where the industry has to gain is 20% higher. So what would you rather do? Hire three more service advisors to handle the calls, or just literally pay, I don't even know what we pay Avoca,

but it's AI. - It's a steal. - They're booking leads. They're literally booking leads that are going to voicemail. Your voicemail booking rate is probably zero, or it's probably 1%. People probably just show up. 'Cause some customers, like my wife, for example, she's reasonable. She's like, "Oh, they're probably just busy. "I'll just go show up." But most customers are unwilling to do that. And so I'm gonna put a graphic up on the screen. Shout out our YouTube channel if you're listening to this on Spotify. I highly recommend you get on our YouTube channel 'cause we're gonna increase the production of our videos. I'm gonna put a funnel on the screen. I'm gonna put an image of a funnel on the screen. And what most people don't understand is that the business is just math. Like the business is literally math. And at the very top, it's marketing. How much money do you spend on making the phone ring, on making the website click happen,

on making the inbound text happen, on making a customer show up at the front counter with a mailer that they didn't even call in at all? How much money do you spend on that? How many new customers do you get per month? That's gonna be the cost to acquire a customer, but it's actually way more complicated than that because you're not paying to acquire customers. You're paying to acquire leads. So the leads, that's where most shops just blow it. They say, I need to spend more money because my mailers are what gets me customers. And I'm like, no, they don't, they get you leads. And you are booking 15% of the leads and you wanna spend double the mailer budget because you wanna get, it's like, there's so much, such a simpler way to do it. And that's what Todd figured out all these years ago. So number one, spend money on advertising. Number two, generate leads. How many of those are you converting to an actual customer?

Okay, how many of them are so, and we even break it out further where it's booking rate and then capture rate. So how many are verbally booking? How many are actually being captured? And we're working on outbound, follow-up, missed appointments, we're working on everything, texting them to make sure that they actually show up just like a restaurant. And then the rest of the business is like, we've been training this for 40 years. It's ticket average, gross profit. And then what goes down to the bottom line, like your overhead and the whole business is a funnel. So how do I increase my revenue? The entire business is car count and ticket average. How do I get more cars? Book more leads, get more leads. That's it. How do I increase my ticket average? Like 10 billion different things. You have to do 50 things to get higher ticket average. You have to do new customer intro. You have to train on motor visuals. You have to train on rack attack.

You gotta have stud technicians. You gotta be working on gravy. You gotta train on warranty and seven days a week service and raise your labor rate. Like you have to recruit hammers. It's freaking hard to double your ticket average. It is almost mindless to double your booking rate if you have a 15% booking rate. Like put a VOCA on the phone so you'll get a freaking, not that they're bad, but it's still AI. Like I think they have like a 45% arrival rate, like which is triple industry average. They're literally getting shops. I'm on my soapbox, dude, I gotta relax. My blood pressure is going up. Like they're literally getting shops, calling them saying, stop, you're sending me too many cars. And I'm like, you need to tell, I'm telling a VOCA, we have a partnership with them full transparency. I'm like, you need to just send them to auto shop answers and Charlie needs to teach them how to do a rack attack. Like a robot is outbooking the industry.

Think about that. Like a robot is outbooking the industry. And we fundamentally believe that hospitality, humans want to talk to humans, AI is not there yet. A VOCA can help us, but what am I getting at, dude? The whole business is a funnel and you can look at it. The better you get at this and you can be like, okay, where is it leaking? Where is the revenue leaking? Where is the profit leaking? Is it my leads? Is my advertising not working? Should I switch something up? Is it my phones? Am I not booking enough leads? Are my customers not showing up? Even though they're saying yes. What about my ticket average? What about my gross profit? And that's it. Those are like the only KPIs that matter. And if you give me any shops data, I can look at it and be like, oh, yep, 22% booking rate, done. $1,200 ticket average though, all you need is more cars. Or I can look at, we have shops in our platform, but you know who I'm talking about.

I have a 52% booking rate at shop level and a low ticket average. That's a lot harder of a fix, you know? So anyway, I'm on my soapbox. I can't believe people are still listening to me. I've been talking like six minutes. Josh, take the mic away from me. Let me ask you a question. So totally transitioning here. We have so much data, okay? It's not just even one funnel anymore. It's like 50. It's literally like 50 different funnels. Brakes, tires, alignments, oil change, state inspections, ticket averages on all of them, booking rates on all of them. Give me some of your most interesting takes on what the data has said about various categories and average tickets and booking rates. - Yeah, absolutely. One of the most sung songs of Automotive is I'm having blank problem and I don't know why. And Automotive industry has a major data gap. And what I mean by that is there are so many questions you can ask about is blank happening in my business?

And in most shops, you're not gonna be able to know because Automotive is still a business that is fundamentally on software that most of it is just updated from 20 years ago. - Archaic, yeah. - Yeah, it's fossils. And so in this age of AI, and one of the most valuable things I've been able to do is we've built the tracking for every single nuanced piece of data, right? Getting to that standard that other industries have because these massive tech conglomerates have just walked in and painted every picture for them. We don't have that in Automotive. And so over these months, we've built that and we can see into specifics, whether it comes down to make, model, amount of visits, we can see what changed in terms of our pricing, we can see what concerns they originally called for, how many times they've ever called us. Every single piece of data is all there. So as far as some of the biggest pieces we've seen, my favorite is the biggest winner.

So sometimes you'll get a call where a customer says, hey, I'm at blank place, I'm at a shop, and they're quoting me X amount. Is that fair? Can you beat that? Is that reasonable, right? And we've measured, so I can go as specific as customers that specifically say they're at a dealership. And even further than that, I can see that not only that they got a quote, but that they are physically at that establishment. Their car is there as we speak. - On a rack, second opinion, is basically what you're saying? - Yes, on a rack, second opinion, how much is this? And all they're checking is, am I being taken advantage of? - Yeah, pain. - 56% of those customers, that car ends up in our shop. - That's so freaking hot, dude, okay. And what's the ticket average? Give me a drum roll, please. What's the ticket average? It's gotta be a million. - $2,800. - So dude, okay, oh God, it makes me so happy. Because it's validating the thesis,

which is customers make buying decisions based on pain and your ability to remove that pain. And a customer who calls from any old shop, but specifically a dealership, it's like clearly a good customer. You know, a 2001 Chevy Malibu with 350,000 miles on it is probably not going to the dealer. You know who's the dealer customer? A 2018 Lexus with 80,000 miles. Or a 2022 Suburban with 46,000 miles. And they're signaling I am in pain. Because this freaking dealership just recommended me $5,800. Because why? They're trying to sell me a new car and the customer doesn't know that, but they're literally trying to flip them into a new car. And I remember the first anytime call I ever took, it's just dawning on me right now, this is what happened. He said, how much do you guys charge for cam phasers on my Ford Raptor? Now, we don't work on cam phasers anymore because it's not gravy. But point is, he got a $6,000 estimate, you know?

And what did I say? What type of concern are you having with the cam phasers? Anytime you're having a second opinion from a dealer, great job, you know? Like he just needed a second opinion. And big cash, shout out Michael Felix, he converted that to $5,800. Because the second shop always wins. Because they're like, oh, I'm so sorry, you're in pain, Mr. Customer. I'm gonna remove that pain. I can't believe they took advantage of you. Did they take pictures? And nine out of 10 times they didn't. So what policy, we're getting 56%, which is crazy. You have to offer a good deal to get that car off that rack. What do you, how do we do it? - Yeah, so what we tell the customer is, first we identify the pain point, right? We ask what kind of concerns like you mentioned. Sometimes they'll mention, well, I'm not really having any concerns, but I came in and they told me I need this, right? Boom, right there, that's the pain point.

They're not even confident in the diagnosis. That's why they're calling, right? So it's not even a point in tackling price at that point. Let's build value and hey, anytime you're experiencing this, you need to have one of our master certified technicians inspect that concern and at no charge to you, we're gonna provide you a free run estimate, see if you even need that service. - Yeah. - Right there, we've spoken to their heart of that's what they're worried about, right? And if they say, hey, this price seems outrageous, I was looking it up, the thing that every shop has heard now is, I asked chat GBT, it said it was kind of expensive for the area. What we do is we tell them, if it's a price concern, we've determined that that is their pain point. You say, we can guarantee we'll beat that by at least 15%. Let's get that vehicle in our shop, verify that concern, how soon can we expect you, right? We'll go pick up that vehicle,

we'll bring it to our shop, we coordinate that with the store team. When that car comes in, we have plenty of these cases, it doesn't even need-- - Dude, it doesn't even need it, yeah. - What the dealership said. And of course, you know, they're in here for a drivability concern and during that drivability concern, they're being told about their brake fluid, they're being told about maintenance services and right now we have a major safety concern and they're getting kitchen sink with 50 things all at once and some of those, we end up looking at the car facts and they just did them on the last visit-- - Yeah, it's crazy. - Three months ago. And they're just, they just checked boxes, no care, no thought put into it and they just built the biggest estimate they could and like you said, they just wanna put them in a brand new car. And so we get them in, find out something else, sometimes what it ends up being is way more expensive

but we take pictures, we take videos, we walk them out to the vehicle and we prove to them exactly why their car has experienced this issue and what it's gonna take to fix it and they want to do business with this. - They buy, $2,800 average. - It's not about the price. Even when we need price as a pain point, really what it ends up being is it's still a trust issue because these people are ready to spend money on their cars. They bought a car, they're servicing their vehicle, they're at the dealership, they're a paying customer. If they're concerned about price, more often than not, it's a trust in the price issue, not an issue about paying the price. So if you're not doing this, I hope you guys are, this is a strategy I've used. I was actually in Atlanta working in the call center virtually and shout out Bartels, Carol Stream, customer called, second opinion from a national brand, which I won't mention, just an aftermarket shop,

not even a, it was a national brand, it wasn't a dealer though. And I didn't even get to the half to give them a price part. I just, you can just undercut the shop, like not like an undercut, but you can usually cut their legs out 'cause I can just be like, oh, well, did they show you? Or did they actually take pictures? And then nine out of 10 times, it's like, well, no. And I'm like, oh, oh my gosh, let me tell you about us. Man, my family's been doing this 46 years, we take pictures and videos, you should clearly be able to tell. So great job getting a second opinion, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna make you an appointment and you just assume the close. If they still give back, push back on price. What we've been doing, and correct me if I'm wrong, is we just offer 15% off dealership estimate off the top, off of anything because it's a $2,800 ticket average, so I could dang near give it to them. And because, because reminder,

they probably don't need it anyway because there's technicians on accident taking advantage of customers. They don't even mean to be having an integrity issue, but it's a service advisor sending a DVI to a technician. Technician puts his camera in the wheel well and takes a picture of brakes that are like six millimeters and says they're red. And then the service advisor says, yeah, they're really unsafe or whatever. So it's like a game of telephone. So anyway, they don't even know. I mean, like the, the, the DVI's are terrible. Like, and maybe on the YouTube video, I can like put some, I'll put a graphic up here of like some of these horrible DVI's that we've seen. They are terrible. Like literally they're terrible. It's because technicians don't actually like doing it. They like fixing cars. Service advisors, sales people like doing it. So I'll give you a story. Why do we give the 15% off discount? 'Cause we did one one time and it was slow day.

Mike Quinn shout out, happened to be in, I do a lot of shout outs. He happened to be in the trenches at the Barker Cypress location. And, you know, customer calls in, quote on a condenser. Hey, dealership's telling me 1700. And whoever the service advisor was, he, he was like, Hey Mike, like, I think we can get this customer, but like, I want to give him just a price over the phone. Like they're saying it's condenser. If you can beat the price, I'll come in. And Mike, he just goes, you know what? Screw it. Tell him 1400. And he goes, Mike didn't even know the car. You know, like he was like, just tell him 1400, we'll beat it. And customer comes in, guess what? Doesn't need a fricking condenser. Needs an evaporator core. She spends $3,200 and she's happy. And she's happy. Like she is literally happy because she's like, I can't believe they were trying to take advantage of me. And that is like a perfect example of like 15% off of what?

Like it doesn't even, it's $2,800 average. If you can get that car out of the dealership and into your shop, you know, and shout out my dad. He used to be like, he would just minimize back in the day before we had scripts. He'd be like, look, just bring on, just swing it on by. It won't cost you anything. Sometimes it's only a little, little, little small deal. Sometimes it's just a loose thing. Let me just take a look at it, no charge. And he didn't have the scripts for it, but like it's the same idea. Oh, I love it. I fricking love it. Any other categories? Like I know brakes, we were low. It's a commodity. I know alignments, we were low tires, we were low, but they were high ticket average. Do you have any thoughts on that? - Yeah, I think tires and brakes are really powerful ones. So many shops now just have brake bundles. And then tires call into any major tire retailer. You're gonna have a price in a minute.

Sometimes they don't even need to look it up because they do so many of these. We, shout out to Kyle. What a stud. He was doing call center for us for a while. Now he's on the advisor team at the main location. He, off the top of his head, had to learn not to tell the customers tire details because they would name a size and in his head he's like, oh yeah, that's the Goodyear, this brand. That's the Kumo, this brand. He just knew because he had worked with tires so much. These guys just, it is second nature. They know what the price point is that's competitive in the market for a specific size. They know what the leading tire is. They know you've been quoted somewhere before you even tell them. And that's just the nature of the tire world. And that is definitely a commodity item, but you have to ask yourself, what is the average ticket that gets tires? - I'm gonna guess like 1200 or so. It's gotta be high, right?

- Yes, it's about 15 to 1600. So you're almost right on the money. And so-- - Because of our PMI process? - Yes. - Like that's not across the country, like for us, because of our rack attack. So I interrupted, keep going. - No, you're okay. But you hit it perfectly, right? You hit the nail on the head. And it's that, what we've realized is that oftentimes these commodity items, it's not about the commodity item, right? And just like the dealer quote, it's, listen, it is great that we have a 2800 average ticket. But at the end of the day, that customer coming in is so high value. You have just rescued someone that is now firing the shop that they were at. What is the lifetime value on your customer? For us, the average lifetime value within their first 365 days on a brand new customer is 17 to $1,900 on our first brand new customer across our 14 locations. And so you have to ask yourself, yes, if we're offering on a commodity item like tires or brakes,

which we may do here in the near future, - Yeah. - What is the lifetime value on that customer in just their first year on average, they're spending $1,800 with us. What does that mean for the next five years? And it's such, like you can't even put, well, you can measure it and we're starting to-- - And we're starting to, the rocket ship, right, yeah. - But currently you can't even measure it because it's such an unfathomable amount of value creation across a series of customers that ended up going with the lowest bid shop. And I can almost guarantee you that they did not have even an ounce of the quality of service in the hospitality that they would have had here. They fired that shop and next year, when they need a service again and they call around, we're gonna get another swing at it. And it's gonna be whatever commodity they're calling about that time and we're gonna lock them in because we're constantly adapting our process.

Data, data, data, data is everything and we have so much now, it is just a matter of time. Road to 70%, I can't say it enough. - Road to 70%, dude. Yeah, and what I'm thinking it is, is 1,800, that's like basically our ticket average 900 or so and they come twice a year for their oil changes or state inspection combo, like that makes sense. Our lifetime value is $1,800 for the first year and then hopefully 100,000 for the lifetime of their vehicle, right? The lifetime of all their vehicles. And so, tires specifically are a commodity and it's weird at our Goodyear store. I mean, all of our stores in Houston have Goodyear non-sig numbers. Great job, Mike Quinn, Todd Hayes, but like specifically the Woodlands has been a Goodyear for a long time. Customers will literally call in and be like, no, I know the exact tire I need. I know the exact number on it, exact size, what's the price? And so, for some reason, and I was listening to a podcast,

Discount Tire actually realized this, that Tire Rack was gonna be a huge competitor. It was a huge competitor because tires specifically were very conducive. Consumers seem to know the exact model that they want before they order them. And I've seen that anecdotally at the Goodyear store, at the Woodlands store, like there is a percentage of customers who literally just like, and we do it. Like the service advisors, they know like when they call, when it's a Goodyear customer calling for the exact model of a tire, like you give them the price and we just have a policy now, like we just match Discount Tire because we have, it's like a great way to do it. Like, especially on a first-time customer do if they're calling on tires. And especially if it's a good car, I'm also cheating a little bit. If it's a freaking Range Rover or a Escalade, that's a bit different than, you know, I've taken the, we can't pick and choose,

but I've been guilty of it too. I've seen the tire calls where it's like, do y'all sell used tires? And I'm like, ah, I don't really know if that's what I wanna do, but we still always gotta run the process. But point is, we found that in very rare instances after multiple swings at the Anytime in New Customer Intro, we're just giving price and we've gotten more leads in over the curb. So that's so awesome. I want to keep it moving. And I wanna ask you, because we're coming to a close here, Josh, you have been coaching 100,000 phone calls. Like, and you weren't kidding when you said that at the beginning. Like, you've literally listened to all these. Do you have any advice for owners that are coaching their service advisors? Because it's one of the most important things you can do. - Yeah, absolutely. We talk all the time, we love the term hammer, right? But what makes a hammer, and especially when it comes to calls,

everyone knows that high-value, high-leverage salesperson that is just the absolute best hammer in your company, and then you hear them pick up the phone and you wanna just like tear your ears off, right? - Yes, yes, yes. - It's so real, we've all seen it, right? So it's like, this guy, he's a hammer, but man, like just the phone's like, it's just not their realm, right? And then we've got people that cannot sell, but they are just incredible on the phone, right? So where I land with my team is it's down to a science now. It's I need people that are intelligent, that can adapt, and that can take the coaching, and as long as we do that, that's all they need, and the rest falls on my plate. So I'll give a very quick background story. So I was really big into running, right? And every single race for three years, my best race was getting second to last instead of last. Like, I got one. And I remember just thinking to myself like,

wow, what a waste of time, I'm gonna quit this, I'm never gonna do this again. I had signed up for the next year for one season, I was just gonna do that and let it be the end of it. I moved up, I had a new coach, and for people that know Houston area, Hurricane Harvey took a really big hit to our area, so all practices were canceled. My first meet, I had no training, no practice, but this guy walked up to me, and he said, I know you can do this, you've never run this amount of distance before, but I know you're gonna do it, I'll be waiting for you at the last corner, and when I tell you to go, you better go. And I came around that last corner, and he said, you gotta go. And I ended up getting like fourth out of like 200 people, and it was just a life-changing moment, and I did the next season, back to back first place, and what I'm getting at with that is that it's not always about walking in and being able to do what it is day one,

but what I'm able to find in these people is that they know how to talk to people, and sometimes, I have a varying amount of skill in automotive and the people that I hire. Some of them have never been in a shop in their entire life, and I've got people that have been in a shop for years, and the difference is that I see it in the first interview with them, can you talk to people, can you adapt, and if I tell you about our business model and what we do in these stores, does that click for you? If I see that drive, if I see that fire in their eyes, that's all I need to see, because the rest of it falls on my plate. How can I put a goal post in front of you, and how can I get you to that goal post? It's not a matter of letting them figure it out on their own, like, hey man, it's not working, you gotta figure it out, that's on me. And when my team members are falling in a certain category, that tells me I need to go listen to as many calls

of them taking this specific kind of concern, until I can't handle that call anymore, and I do that, and I spend all night listening to those calls, and the next day I go, listen, I've heard a ton of calls, here's the three I wanna hit, we're gonna listen to these together, and we're gonna work through them, and we just hit on that, and for a week straight, well, obviously I'm not gonna overload them, right? But we space it out, and it never is a problem ever again. We're all of a sudden at this high level of echelon, in every category, in every member, and that's how we're gonna get to 70%, is I know where people have the room to grow, in what categories, and I study their calls, I study what are they doing differently than my other team members, and a lot of this data, we didn't have six months ago, because we didn't have enough calls to base on, but I've heard so many now that I can hear the call, and I go, that's it, this is what they're missing,

and I play a winning call for them, and it's game changing. - What are they usually missing? Do you think it's scripting, or is it the empathy, the tone, like, what do you think it is? - I think it's empathy, but I think it's also being able to recognize. So the same way that people can hear a call and go, man, that was a good call, or man, that was a bad call, right, that calibration, that feedback, it comes with the experience and the familiarity with it. It becomes intuitive, and so what I have to do is I have to make the calls intuitive for the customer. Just simply saying that price is not the concern in the majority of calls isn't enough. We have to hear the call and hear what the customer says. So if the customer says, hey, how much are spark plugs? And you go, absolutely, what kind of concerns are you experiencing your spark plugs? Ah, I don't know, I was just out of place, and they told me I need them.

Is there a concern price? Are we going to try and skirt around building value and price, or do we need to build value in what's actually on the vehicle, making it feel safe? And that's where we find the value, and when we hear that, I give them winning calls, but I also walk them through it of how we can approach it, but more than anything, it's listening to the calls. Almost nobody actually goes and listens back to their own calls. If you go through the industry, they're not hearing their calls back. Most of the time, I hit play, and they go, oh, I hear it. And it's because no one has stopped to hear the call. And I'll jump in for that extra piece, but more than anything, it's usually just hearing the call back, it clicks. - Do you think shop owners even know how to coach phones? - I would say if they listen to enough of them, yes. I think that you have to be in the trenches to really understand, you have to have that experience

of hearing them, because just like anything, if you don't get reps, how can you expect to be good at it? - That's the key, and that was kind of a leading question. I think most owners do know how to do it, they just don't. You know, that's the thing. And I remember at the beginning, five, six years ago, Todd would just say the same things over and over and over again, and I was like, man, dude, he just says the same thing. But, you know, Claude Hopkins, he's a scientific advertising, he was a book that I listened to a summary of recently, and he said, you're not marketing, you're not advertising to a standing army, you are marketing to a moving parade. And it's the same thing, Todd was training a moving parade of people. Like he has to, the skill that's so valuable to him is he literally just says the same thing over and over and over and over and over again, and he's unwilling to just give up. It's like back to the basics, polish the crown.

And I couldn't believe it. Some of our veterans, three year service advisors were answering the phone like they were, like they had no idea what they were doing. And I was like banging my head against the wall. I go, oh my gosh, this is gonna change our company. And back to Tommy Mello, he was like, this is a major failure point in your business 'cause it's not their job. Their job is to hit bombs and score touchdowns and catch freaking touchdowns. Like, and dance in the end zone and do their Antonio Brown stuff. Sorry, and guess what, blocking and tackling, like those people get Super Bowls too. And in the call center, like that's blocking and tackling, dude, we gotta get the cars over to the curb. And yes, there are role players in the NBA. Yes, there are MVP superstars. They all get a ring. And you know, everybody's got their seat on the bus. So man, grateful for you, bro. You are the man. So happy to have you in the call center.

I sleep perfectly well at night. Knowing somebody smarter than me is literally analyzing the data. I don't even know if you sleep. But you know, a couple of nuggets, do you have any nuggets for, I got a nugget, but for the owners as they leave, what they could check on to hopefully get more cars over the curb this week? - Of course. Listening to more calls is the biggest, right? You don't understand calls until you've actually sat down and listened to your source calls. And it's gonna be very difficult, especially when you're in that first phase. The calls are hard to listen to. - Yeah, they're literally hard. - It's very difficult. I can tell you, I've had moments, especially in that transition phase where we kind of changed to me taking over the call center. I had moments where I had to step away and do something else. Like the calls are difficult. But once you develop that sense for it and you've gotten used to hearing enough of them,

it's so empowering to know that, hey, this is frustrating to hear, but I can impact that. I can change that. I can make the difference. And I know how to guide to that goalpost. The other thing I would say is, obviously we preach it all day in this company, but saying yes on the phone, you don't have to have a perfect script today, but if you say yes on the phone and if you find their pain points, they will come in. On average, a customer just wants to be helped. They just wanna know that you're here for them. And if you can say yes on the phone and find out why they're calling you, that's everything. That's the main thing to listen to. And then role play. Role play is the biggest thing I can advocate for as far as developing the team. Once you have that sense of what to hit, what a good call sounds like, role play. Role play with your team members. One of the best things I've seen at stores is someone will be like the champion of phones, right?

Where you've just got your best guy on phones and they will do the role plays. They will do the back and forth with the other team members. If the store is slow, we've all had those days where nothing's happening. If you're not role playing calls during that, what are you doing? And it's the perfect opportunity to just sharpen that skill. And as your team does that and you bring in new people, when new people walk in and they hear people pick up the phone like that, they catch on so quickly. It's a lot of people get scared of training, especially on something like phones that take so much time. So it's like, well, what if they leave? You don't have to start all over. It's this frustrating process. But the truth is if you build that culture in your shop, when new people come in, it's so much easier for them to get to that level because you've already hit that point. And it's just a constant cycle of growth. - Yeah, you hit the nail on the head.

Just be nice, you know, it's not hard. Just be nice to customers. Don't get mad at them when they ask questions. They're in pain. You know, my nugget would be check your no shows. I think most people don't even look at that. Just go into your Techmetric shout out. We're also sponsored by Techmetric. I should be probably mentioning that. But go into your appointment board and like just check the appointments. I guarantee you like a bunch of them didn't show up. And Todd, he was shocked that a bunch of hours weren't showing up. He goes, we aren't calling those people. And I was like, no, like we haven't trained them. We forgot to train on that part of it or something, it somehow fell through the gaps back when we didn't have a call center. And he goes, oh my gosh, those were my highest ticket averages. Like instinctually, he just knew. He would call a customer. He'd be like, hey, you missed your appointment. Like, is there anything I can do?

Can I help you? Are you okay? You know, and they would always go, oh, I'm so sorry. Now they're like apologizing to you. You know, like, I'm so sorry. I missed my appointment, man. I just got busy with groceries and Todd would say, no problem. Like, no, we're gonna be here for you late. Like, don't worry about it. He said that was always his highest ticket average because he was signaling, like, I'm gonna take, I'm here no matter what, even if I'm flexible for you, like I'm different. And so, man, word of advice to people listening to this, go check your appointment no shows and go check how many, make sure your service providers are putting it in the appointment board. Like, it's shocking how many times, and you get busy. You forget to click save and the tab, you change tabs or whatever. It's like, make sure that lead goes in the appointment board and follow up. And we have Slack integrated, like I know Slack integrates a tech metric.

Like when those, when that customer doesn't show up, people get a message. We have call center people reaching out. It's amazing. So, I think that's it. Josh, thank you for your time. We rode to 70%. I think that's the pod. We'll see you next time. Boom. If you got something out of today's episode and you wanna hear more, make sure and look us up on YouTube, like and subscribe. Follow us on Spotify. And if you're ready to take what you're hearing and put it into practice, check us out in Houston, Texas. Adam's Automotive, how do we run our million dollar a month shop? We've got our class next month. Key to key to callbacks. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out to Todd Westerland. 702-325-9971. Look us up, autoshopanswers.com. Call Todd Westerland once again. That's 702-325-9971. I can't wait to see you here.