Interview with Father Bob Cawley

Father Bob and the Saturn days 0:00

Steve Shaw: Welcome, everybody. It's great to be here with you today. For those of you who don't know, my name is Steve Shaw, and I am one half of the team at Fixed Ops Focus. America's fixed ops director, Dave Rogers, is out on assignment right now. But I'm here tonight with one of my best friends, a mentor, a fixed ops director extraordinaire, you name it. We just call him Father Bob. Father Bob, how are you today? It is so great to be on the air with you. And everybody, just in case you don't know, Bob and I go back farther than I care to talk about, which probably means I'm getting pretty old. How you doing, Bob?

Bob Cawley: I'm doing all right, Stevie. We go way back. We go back to your Saturn days. That dates you like crazy, brother.

Steve Shaw: The good old days of Saturn Corporation, when I was brainwashed.

Bob Cawley: That's all right. You brought some of that Saturn crap with you when you came over to work for me, remember? So we kind of used Saturn crap at a Ford store.

Steve Shaw: That is a true story. We've got so much we can talk about today. I'm thinking maybe we'll do a series of interviews, because I've got a lot of questions to ask you, and I know I probably don't have to ask you a whole lot, because you're a pretty good talker and a preacher. But I want to make sure we cover some ground. What's on your mind tonight? What would you like to talk about with the entire population of fixed ops managers and the business?

Connected leadership 1:55

Bob Cawley: Well, I'm going to take a very defined look at something. You and I have talked about this a lot, but I feel sometimes like our managers out in our dealerships, and it doesn't matter whether it's fixed ops or sales, seem to have a problem connecting with their people. I don't go around publicizing this, but I've even gone so far as to say to you that I honestly feel managers are sometimes a little bit afraid of their people. They don't want to get them all together and get a lynch mob started or something. I've always felt managers sometimes struggle with their relationships with their people.

So what I've brought to you is something I call connected leadership. You've got it in your lovely little hands right now. I like to talk to people about the importance of connecting. You don't have to go drink beer with them. You don't have to get into the football sweepstakes. You don't have to get into all that. But the problem is not actually getting to know the people you work with. I like that phrase much better than "the people who work for you."

Steve Shaw: I think that's pretty interesting. Speaking of connected leadership, and we can get into it a little deeper: how do I draw the line between "I'm going drinking with my friend" and "I'm connected to my associates," the people I work with, not the ones who work for me? How do you draw that distinction?

Bob Cawley: Well, the funny thing about it is that if you work with people long enough, you get to know each other pretty stinking well. I had two positions in my career, one that lasted 12 years, and one that's still going on at 17 years, because I'm still working with the same company. When you work with people that long, you see each other at your best and your worst. You live through things together, you learn your boss, and you get to know things about him. But I think there's a difference between knowing each other on a very positive level and socializing together, and it makes a difference in how you're viewed and how people respond to you. If you make yourself one of the guys, you're one of the guys.

Steve Shaw: Well, that's true. I've never had a job that lasted 17 years.

Bob Cawley: Well, I don't know how long you've been working for yourself.

Steve Shaw: The one thing I've learned in the 15 to 17 years I've been working for myself is that I don't work well for others. I work well with myself, and with colleagues and great people. But I don't work well for anyone. That's certainly true.

Bob Cawley: Do I still hold the record for the longest time you've worked for anybody?

Steve Shaw: Yes. I worked for you and Mr. Primo for 27 months. And the truth of the matter is we became pretty good friends in those 27 months. We were probably friends the first week, because Brenda makes one hell of a dinner, and that was the easiest way to my heart. What was it? Green bean casserole?

Bob Cawley: Thea calls it white trash casserole, but that's all right. We still like it.

Steve Shaw: White trash casserole, green bean casserole, and bread pudding. That's what she used to make for me many moons ago.

Grow with your people, and earn their trust 6:40

Bob Cawley: That girl knows the way to your heart, there's no doubt about that. But what I'm talking about when I talk about connecting, Steve, is that through giving direction and teaching and watching people grow and move forward, if you keep yourself in the right position, your relationship with them will change as they grow. That kid you took on as a service advisor might end up being the guy who takes your job someday.

In fact, Ron Kepke, there you go. That kid came to work for me as a parts guy while he was still in high school, at a different store. Years later, I'm in California hiring him as my parts manager. Now he's my cohort, and we have a different relationship. And when I got ready to leave, guess who stepped into my office? So if you stay with people and your connections with them are positive, they trust you.

There's a question you could ask yourself if you're a manager: do my people trust me? Do I have integrity? Do they look at me and know I'm going to do what I say I'm going to do? I remember going to work at a store for a short period of time, and I was telling one of my technicians, "Well, the GM told me we could do this and this." And he looks at me with this grin on his face and says, "Did you get it in writing?" Do you think maybe I had a question about the integrity of the gentleman I was working for? Those are the things no amount of money and no amount of lip service can fix. Do I care? That's part of the relationship. Do I care enough to listen to you and to care about what you care about?

Steve Shaw: I always tell people that when I came to work with you, I understood the numbers, because my mentor, Jim Floodman, taught me the numbers. Jim had his way of managing people. We grew up in the union world in St. Louis, so all the things you're talking about weren't really big on his agenda at that point. I know Jim now, and it's a totally different situation. But back then, he taught me how to build a spreadsheet and manage the numbers. Saturn certainly talked to me a lot about culture, but Jim taught me the numbers, and I thought, well, that's how you do it. I can manage the numbers.

You, on the other hand, taught me how to work with people. As a young person in the business, gung-ho and ready to get everything done, I remember comments you made to me: you've got to slow your roll a little, because there are a bunch of men out there turning wrenches who are going to make my paycheck. There are men and women out there who have families, and we have as much of an obligation to them as we do to the owner to turn a profit. That was huge. And I like the way you say it, connectedness. I don't think anybody's ever really said it that way.

Bob Cawley: One of the things that matters to me is that we take the correct view of what we're doing. When I talk in training about the view from the other side, Steve, one of the things you learn when you move from being a worker to being a supervisor or manager is that you're not really contributing directly anymore. Your guys are doing it for you. Your team is doing it for you. The only way we can succeed as managers is by making sure our people succeed. If my techs are making a living, taking their kids to Disneyland and having a ball, A, they're not going to wander off too frequently, and B, as long as they're making a ton of money, so am I, so is the owner, and so are the service advisors.

It's that whole concept: connect with your people so you can help them produce, and train them, teach them and develop them so they can produce at a level where they can do those things. What's the story I always tell you about South Bay Ford, when I'd have my PIG meetings? When the boys were pushing back on me and didn't like my idea, I'd always ask them, "How many of you are better off today than you were the day we met?" That was my credibility.

What PIGs are 12:12

Steve Shaw: Absolutely. That is your credibility. Certainly if I'm making more money, I'm going to listen and be much more open-minded. But you just said the one thing I have on my list to talk about too: PIGs. I know you're world-famous for that acronym. Maybe you could explain it a little bit. What are PIGs?

Bob Cawley: Well, it's not as bad as it sounds. PIGs was the result of me revolting against Ford Motor Company. At the same time, you brought this Saturn thing with you, and we started talking about meeting with people. We wanted to start a system where we had lunch and conversation with our people on a regular basis. And Ford had this new thing they called PIT crews, process improvement teams. I'm sorry, but that's just too sweet for me. I can't take that. I don't want PIT crews. So we had process improvement groups: PIGs.

I ran PIGs for 11 of the 12 years I was there. Every week I sat down with everyone in fixed operations. That means cashiers, porters, advisors, techs, parts people, parts drivers. Everyone in fixed came into a room, and we blended them. We brought in advisors and techs and mixed them together, and we started every meeting with a phrase. Do you remember the phrase?

Steve Shaw: I don't know. It's something like "What can I do for you?" But I don't remember exactly.

Bob Cawley: We welcomed our guests to their lunch and said, "This meeting is your meeting. You are our guests, and we'd like you to tell us: what can we do as the leadership of this organization to make it better for you? To make your job easier and lift your production?" In other words, what do we need to do to get you to a place where you're making more money?

Steve Shaw: Absolutely. From a service manager's standpoint, coming from Saturn and learning that culture, I remember PIGs, because I did PIGs long after I left you, and I still do it today. If I'm in a consulting situation... in fact, last year we started it at a dealership in the Midwest that had a really difficult culture. I said, "You guys need to sit down with your people every other week, have conversations, and ask what you can do to help them." What we put together back then is probably shared credit in some respects. But most of it was under your leadership, getting everybody to buy in and getting ownership to buy in, and it came from people believing in you long before I got there. Sitting those people down, I know we literally changed the world in 1997.

Vise grips, flip charts and three answers 16:00

Bob Cawley: Well, here's the beauty of this thing, and I never realized it at first. When we started out, remember some of the goofy stuff they brought up? People telling us, "It'd be nice if I didn't have to use vise grips to close off my air hose." And I'm like, you're using vise grips? Technicians never tell you anything. They just suffer in silence and cuss you all day long. We had guys raising their hands: "Yeah, there are no bits for the brake lathe." When were you planning on telling us that?

But here's the thing. If you recall, we used flip charts, and everything was written down. Why? Because when things are written down, they gain weight. They have value. Then we took those sheets, and you'll remember this because we shared an office, and papered the wall in our office with them. As we dealt with them, we crossed them off. When we got back together the following week, we gave them answers, and there were only three answers. Yes, this is what we're going to do. No, we can't do that. Or, we can't do it right now, but we're going to put it over here, and when we get to a better place, we'll come back to it. So they always got an answer.

Steve Shaw: And I remember when I first started, we'd have those meetings with 25 Ford technicians sitting around the table, and they'd leave our conference room an absolute disaster. It was a bunch of renegades. We had Carlos the Butcher, all these guys, and they'd leave their stuff everywhere. It would take an hour to clean the meeting room afterward, because they just had no care. Then, as the culture evolved and got better, you'd look around and the conference room was clean. They started to respect the environment they worked in, because we respected them and took their words and turned them into action.

Bob Cawley: Absolutely. I had a guy one time, and you were still with me, I think it was the old boy from Midway Chevrolet in downtown LA, at one of our parts and service meetings. He looked at us like he could not believe it: "Wait a minute, wait a minute. Your owner lets you take your techs off the floor for an hour every week? You lose an hour of production every week, times 52 weeks? That's ridiculous. How are you ever going to make that money back?" Through proficiency. Our people became productive. And if you think it was tough when we had the little store over on Hawthorne Boulevard, think about when we built the new store with 69 bays and still had PIG meetings.

Steve Shaw: It was amazing. Just so everybody knows, that Ford store had maybe 20, 25 techs in the beginning, in a run-down building. Picture the most run-down Ford store you could go to. Over time, and I left before the move, it turned into the store that's on all the TV commercials. It became the world's largest Ford fixed operation. Would you attribute that to PIGs?

Bob Cawley: Well, let me put it in a smaller frame for you. Reynolds and Reynolds was our DMS back in those days, and Reynolds would bring management teams from other stores to come watch how we did things. One of the things that always came up was, "Who's in charge?" I'd say, "What do you mean?" "Well, we're out here on the service drive watching the morning operation. You've got a lot of traffic and a lot going on, but I have yet to hear anybody tell anybody what to do. Who runs the service drive?" That was when I first realized that because of PIGs, my people knew everything. My cashiers knew what my service advisors did. My porters knew.

Steve Shaw: Remember the cashier? We had a little tiny office, and that cashier was in there, and she solved some funky problem we had.

Bob Cawley: Well, that happened to be the oil change in 30 minutes or less.

The 30-minute oil change banner 21:08

Steve Shaw: That's right. It was the 30-minute oil change.

Bob Cawley: That's a great PIG story. Let's tell it real quick. We were challenged by our owner, who ordered a banner to go over the service drive while we were sitting in the room. He didn't tell us about it. He brought us in, and whenever your owner brings you in and looks unusually cheerful, it's usually a bad thing. You're about to get your butt reamed for something. He sat us down and dialed the company he used for his banners: "I need a banner to go across my service drive." And he even had the unmitigated gall to look at me and say, "Bob, how wide is the service drive?" I said, "I don't know, it's about 35, 40 feet." And he goes, "I need a 40-foot banner." And the guy says, "Mr. Primo, that's a big banner. I'm going to have to special order that."

He goes, "Well, how tall should it be? It's going to be eight foot high. And I want it in the most horrible colors you can imagine. I want people to look at it and not want to look at it, but they can't help but look at it." So it's going to be a yellow background with orange letters and red outlines. "What would you like it to say?" "Oil change, 30 minutes or less, or it's free." "How long is it going to take?" "Ten business days." And Primo said, "Great, get it on the way." He hung up the phone, looked at the two of us sitting there with our mouths open, and said, and I can't use all the expletives he used, "Looks like you've got 10 days." We walked out of there thinking, wow, we're going to have to find a job somewhere. Nobody can do this. This is crazy.

PIGs. We took it to our people. One of us had the brainiac idea: let's write down all the steps it takes in our store.

Steve Shaw: I remember that, the steps to do an oil change. How many were there? Two pages' worth?

Bob Cawley: When we got to nine pages, we finally finished. The techs and the people in the room were laughing, because it just kept going and going. We had single-person dispatch back in those days. Everything was parked in a parking lot that could be half a block down the street at the old store. Remember, it could be down at the apartment buildings.

Steve Shaw: Which parking lot was it? There were many of them, that's for sure.

Bob Cawley: People will never believe this, but we actually had a parking lot at the dialysis center. It was a building Primo bought that used to be a dialysis center. Anyway, you've got to go find the car when it gets dispatched to you. Nevertheless, we set times for all the different steps, or groups of steps, and we came up with 90 minutes. It took an hour and a half to do an oil change on our best day, if nothing went wrong.

And we asked the question: how do we get from here to 30 minutes? And the little cashier, God bless her. Sometimes genius just shows up in the greatest places. Who would ever have gone to the cashier and said, "Man, I've got this problem. Can you tell me how to get an oil change done in 30 minutes?" Nobody. This little lady raised her hand and said, "Why don't we cross off all the things that aren't directly involved in getting the oil change done?"

And you and I looked at each other, and excuse me for this, because you just said I'm a preacher, but we looked at each other and said, "No shit. Let's cross off stuff." So we started crossing things off, and we ended up with the 30-minute oil change in seven steps. When we put a time to each step, it was 26 minutes, and we had a 30-minute oil change.

Steve Shaw: I would like to clarify that we're not bozos. We pretty much had an idea of what we wanted to do, but we had to get somebody to tell us. It wasn't us telling them, "This is how we're going to do oil changes." Just in case anybody was thinking, "What are you guys, idiots?" The goal was to get everybody to tell us the answer. So I can keep my reputation intact.

Bob Cawley: OK, you can sell that all day long, but both of us were scared shitless we were going to lose our jobs. But here's the beauty of the PIG meeting. This was the whole thing: they saw how absurd and dysfunctional what we were doing was, and we didn't have to convince them. After nine sheets on the wall, they were like, "This is crazy. What are we doing?"

And if you want to talk about crazy, let me finish the story. We implemented it, the banner went up, and Steve Shaw was such a brave little boy at that time of his life. Stevie, my Saturn service manager, bought these little timers. One was 30 minutes, and a different-colored one was 45 minutes. When a customer signed an RO, our service advisor started the timer, gave it to him and said, "If it goes off before I get back to you with the RO, your service is free." Stevie said it wasn't enough to just tell them we were going to do it. "I want them timing us."

And lo and behold, whether anybody believes us or not, and people call us liars all the time about this, we ran 30 minutes or less for an oil change, 45 minutes or less for a minor service with tire rotation, 90 minutes for a 15K and two hours for a 30,000-mile service. And we ran that service time guarantee the whole 12 years I was there.

Steve Shaw: We probably didn't give many away.

Bob Cawley: We gave a few away in the beginning, until we got the bugs out and everything started clicking. How we did it, I'm not going to bother to tell you, because you're all going to tell me it could never happen, so whatever. But at the end of the day, it got to the point, Steve, that people didn't time us anymore. Why would I time you when I can get in and out of here in half the time it's going to take anywhere else? You're the fastest service in town.

Steve Shaw: I think that's the key. The dealership went from 3,500 or 4,000 hours, whatever it was, to the largest Ford fixed operation for years and years. If I look back, the dealership obviously moved to a great location right on the freeway and so on, but the people bought in because of the process improvement groups. The people bought in and made it happen. And the 30-minute minor service or it's free was just one of the key components.

Bob Cawley: So many. But here are the side benefits, Steve. First of all, we wouldn't have been in the mausoleum, the new building, if we hadn't done this in the old beat-up dealership. I often tell people I'm more proud of what we accomplished with what we had there than I ever would be of what we did in the mausoleum. But we were the largest retail parts and service center in Ford Motor Company. We sold more customer pay business than anybody.

And the whole thing for me, and I'm going to get real here: my people owned their store. When they talked about South Bay Ford, it was "my store. This is what happens in my store." They owned the process. They owned the success. They felt good about the fact that we were successful, because they participated. Have you ever put a process in place and beat people to try to get them to do it?

Steve Shaw: That's what happens every day, all day, right now.

Bob Cawley: But when you do it in PIGs, you put it up on a board in front of them, you go over the outline, and you've got porters raising their hands: "That won't work." "Why won't it work?" "Because we've got to move the cars." "Oh man, you're right. How could we get around that?" And somebody does. So we start moving things around, and when we get from point A to point Z and everybody says, "Yeah, that looks OK," you don't settle for bobbleheads. You ask them, "How many of you believe this will work?" And they all raise their hands. Whose process is it now?

Steve Shaw: We always wanted them to tell us, "Why won't this work? Tell me why it won't work, so we can fix it in here." It was amazing for people to be able to challenge us and have their input, like the cashier or the porters.

Shane's schedule and full-staff Saturdays 31:23

Bob Cawley: Absolutely, because they're the ones who have to live with it, Steve. And I'll scare every service manager watching this to death right now: in one of those PIG meetings, I was trying to come up with a work schedule for my technicians. I showed them what I had, and I got all kinds of whining and crying. Finally one of our boys raised his hand and said, "Why don't you let me see if I can do something better than that?"

Steve Shaw: I think it was Nick who did that, right?

Bob Cawley: No, it was our little guy who eventually left us and went to work at the tech assistance center at Ford. I can't think of his name. Wasn't it Shane?

Steve Shaw: Shane. Shane did that.

Bob Cawley: I said, "Fine, bring me what you've got." About three days later, he walks in and hands me this thing, and I'm looking at it, and at the next PIG meeting I put it up in front of everybody. Everybody said, "Yeah, that'll work. That'll work." Raise your hands. "Yeah, that'll work." So it became one of my techs' schedules. If you want to bitch, go talk to Shane.

Steve Shaw: I remember it was the four-10s schedule, and then we had a five-day rotation because there were four teams, not three, so the four-10s didn't work perfectly. We went to lateral support groups. The PIGs were full on with lateral support groups. And that's when Shane came up with the four-10s with a hybrid week. We should call it the Shane schedule. That was probably 1998. And just in 2025, we did that at a Honda store, a similar-size store doing close to a million dollars a month. We took the four-10s with a five-day rotation and implemented it, and it's amazing. Shane doesn't know it. If he were still out there, he'd probably want some royalties. I don't think we would have thought of that one on our own, and it's definitely a tribute to getting everybody involved and letting everybody have a say.

Bob Cawley: Before I let you get off here, I want to do one more thing. You and I talked about this last time. There were things in PIGs that people told us we were crazy for. "You don't have a brain in your head. You're going to destroy that store. It's going to fail. What are you doing? This is the craziest stuff." And that was when we decided to open on Saturdays.

You must have thought I was insane, because I sat down with you and said, "If we're going to do Saturdays, I'm not doing this bull crap half day, a third of the crew, don't even get anything done till eight o'clock, everybody leaves at 11:30, and I don't even make enough money to pay for the electricity to turn on the compressor." I told you if we're going to do Saturdays, three things: we're going to work a full day, we're going to have a full staff, and we're going to be full service. I don't care what comes down the drive, tow trucks, check engine lights. Saturday is another weekday. We're going to work six days a week doing the same job.

That's what forced us to come up with four rotating teams, so we always had a full staff. We did all these different things to get there, and everybody told us how crazy we were. "You're nuts. Everybody's going to quit. Nobody's going to work that shift." Well, we ran that system for five or six years, until we moved into the new store and had a little more room.

And if you recall, the very first Saturday, everybody told us nobody wants to service their car on Saturday. Our little store was on the corner of Hawthorne Boulevard and 139th Street, and we had three exits: the front exit, which was the service drive, another that went down between two sets of bays, and another in the back where fleet was. If you remember, the cars waiting to get into our service drive went all the way down Hawthorne and around the corner onto 139th. We were landlocked. We couldn't even get cars out without asking people to move, and we had to put cones out to keep people from blocking our driveways. 200-plus hours on the first Saturday.

Steve Shaw: I remember that, absolutely. We both worked that Saturday. That was before I was the sole Saturday guy, but that's a whole different story. I remember you and I looking out of our teeny tiny office, down that row of bays, and the whole crew was still there at five o'clock that night working on cars. You said, "Look out there. Look what's going on."

Bob Cawley: Steve, it was insane, and our people learned they could make money. We're trying to make people productive. If I drag a tech in for a half day and he flags six hours, do you think he's excited about being there? But if he still gets two days off every week and a three-day weekend once a month, and he's flagging 16 hours on Saturday, what do you think it does to your people? When I did away with that schedule because of some changes in how we were going to do business, I had more people pissed off at me for doing away with it than I had when we put it in place.

Steve Shaw: Boy, some of the things we did at that store were absolutely hysterical. And the people who were there... some of them are still there today, 25 years later.

Why not? Pulled wheels and everyone paid on hours 38:06

Bob Cawley: Absolutely. And the thing that made me bring this up is that you and I were talking about "why not?" People talk themselves out of doing something all the time because nobody's ever done it that way before. "I don't know if I can make that happen. Can you really do that?" Well, there's only one way you're going to find out, and that's by doing it. Either you're going to succeed or you're going to stumble a little. But what you end up with will probably be better than what you had, even if it isn't quite what you thought it would be. If you don't pursue the dream... and I know I'm preaching now, but I'm a preacher, so that's what you've got to live with.

Steve Shaw: That's your job.

Bob Cawley: Those were things, Steve, that you were young and didn't know couldn't be done. And I was so pumped to be in charge and build something that I was ready to do things that hadn't been done.

Steve Shaw: I didn't know any better.

Bob Cawley: But Ford Motor Company took our Saturday business plan. You remember that? They distributed our Saturday business plan to every service manager in Ford Motor Company.

Steve Shaw: I do, absolutely. I think it's on my resume.

Bob Cawley: That's what we should have copyrighted right there. And with the success we eventually saw, Ford came out to film how we sold batteries, and wanted to know how we sold so many tires. Well, we pull the tires. How do you sell so many brakes? We pull the tires off every time we do a car. We measure brakes accurately, and when they need to be replaced, we tell the customer.

And here's the deal with that 45 minutes or less. Before Ford ever came out with quarter time, South Bay Ford was pretty much rocking quarter time. We were in front of that customer 15, 20 minutes into their stay, letting them know their brakes were down to whatever. Back in the day we didn't have the Steve Shaw method of failed inspection, but we'd tell them, "It's down below three millimeters. That's the national standard for replacing your brakes. We need to put brakes on your car." And what sold the deal? The car's already on the lift. The tires and wheels are already off. "If you'll give me an extra 45 minutes, I can do your brake job and still get you out of here." Because what's the new currency? Time.

Steve Shaw: What I find interesting, thinking about it, is that we accomplished a lot. We tried a lot of crazy things, and I'd guess we failed at a few, but I don't particularly remember the failures. What I remember is the success, and I think that's what most people would remember.

Even as a young guy back in the day, I didn't even know how you ordered a part from Ford. They had the special order part, and this part you had to get in by two, and this one by three, and this one came tomorrow, and if you emergency-ordered it... there was so much nonsense with Ford. I remember having to sit down with the parts guys and ask, "How does this work? If I'm going to order a part, how do we do it?" Tommy had to teach us how Ford worked. I came from GM, which was a much simpler system, and Ford was always complicated. I think it's still complicated to this day. Tommy taught parts in our PIG meeting, and he taught everybody. That helped the group leaders dispatch work appropriately, so the complicated jobs got dispatched in time for the parts to get ordered. That process improvement group solved so many problems people may not have even known existed.

Bob Cawley: Back in the day, when we had weekly stock orders, if you were in Southern California or Arizona, parts came from one of three depots. Our feeding depot was in Los Angeles. Our secondary depot was San Francisco, which serviced Northern California. And if they didn't have it, it came from national, which was in Livonia, Michigan. So you had parts coming in, and you had your stock order, and then your interim order, a little gimme order you could tag on if you forgot stuff in your stock order.

Steve Shaw: I still don't understand it. But I know Tommy did such a good job explaining it: get your special order parts in by this time, and we'll get your parts the next day. And parts got their act together too, because they bought in. I think at one time we might have paid them on the hours the shop flagged.

Bob Cawley: Well, that's another thing everybody doesn't understand or will never totally grasp. At one point I paid techs off hours, service advisors off hours, and back counter parts guys off hours. I used to call it the triangle from hell. Service advisors get paid on sales. Techs get paid by the hour. Parts guys get paid on gross. You think they're excited about picking up a part for you, when they lose 10% because they had to pick it up? But the minute they got paid off billed hours, which means cars are done, gone and collected for, money in the office, suddenly they couldn't care less about picking up parts. They'd pick up parts for you all day long. It was the most amazing thing. But nobody does that. I used to tell people, if I could figure out how to pay my porters off hours, I'd pay my porters off hours too. I put everybody in fixed ops on hours.

Sow good seed 45:26

Steve Shaw: That was amazing. We're running up on about 45 minutes, and I think this is a good time to pause and circle back, because I've got a lot more I want to talk to you about. We've got to talk about some of the people who were there. I know you probably want to talk about Augie and that situation. Not a lot of people in the world know the Steve Shaw stabbing story, so we might want to share that. I have a whole list right here for our next round. So why don't we take a pause?

Dave always gives a GM tip of the day. We're sitting here reminiscing about 1997, so how would you relate all of that to today? I can tell you how I feel about COVID, and I can think about the progression as an outsider, because I left and eventually started my own company. People listening today might say, "Bob, that's fine, great, but it was a different day, a different era. That was 1997." And I know you're still consulting for the group you've worked with for 17 years, so technically you're still in the business. How do you relate all of those things to today?

Bob Cawley: Let me preach to you, brother.

Steve Shaw: Please.

Bob Cawley: In the scripture there's something called the law of sowing and reaping. You've probably heard the phrase, "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." That's the old King James Version. The law of sowing and reaping applies to so much of what we do in fixed ops, because here's the bottom line, and it's so simple it's a no-brainer: whatever you put in the ground is what's going to grow. If you put good seed in the ground, you're going to have fruit. You sow corn, you raise corn. You sow peas, you raise peas.

There would not have been a mausoleum at Rosecrans and the 405 if we, and the people who came after you, hadn't sown good seed in the ground. All those things we did back then in those PIG meetings stacked one upon another and made a group of people we could move into that new building and see success.

Just a little story. We had a group from Brazil come during NADA. The dealer kids came first and took a tour, and then the parents came and took a tour. They sent a guy ahead to go through it, because we'd been suggested as a store they should see. I always did the tours, the ten-cent tour. And the man said something that will stay with me forever. He said, "You know what I see when I look at this building? You had the luxury of building a store based on the way you do business. That's why this place works like it does. You're not fighting the building and the structure and the parking lots. Everything here flows and moves the way you set it up, because you built it to fit your operation."

When you put good stuff in the ground and you teach your people and work with your people and help your people, you grow them. You're putting seed into people. Buy into that. Sowing and reaping is you putting seed into people and it bringing forth fruit: them being successful and building the success of your dealership and your name. Because your name is the only thing that's going to matter when everything's said and done. Dealers will come and go. But when they say your name, it's going to stand for something.

So to me: be careful how you sow. Sow good seed. Build people. Give them the truth and the help they need to succeed more than they ever dreamed. I'd talk to kids, and they'd say, "Bob, I got a new house since I came to work for you. My wife and I bought a home. I'm driving a nicer car. My kids are in dance." That's good seed. And if you put that good seed in the ground, you'll be in a mausoleum someday at Rosecrans and the 405, with a 605-square-foot sign on the freeway telling everybody how wonderful you are. I'm just saying: sow good seed. Put good things in the ground. Don't beat your people. Don't scream at your people. Help them be better. Build people. Put good seed in the ground, and you will have a harvest.

Steve Shaw: I don't think there could be a better way to end than on that note. So I'll say amen, and I look forward to catching up with you, Bobby, for part two of our series.

Bob Cawley: All right, sir.