My Uber Driver's Story Made Me Rethink Everything

A two-hour Uber ride to Waco 0:00

Dave Rogers: Welcome, everybody, to Fixed Ops Focus, the podcast that talks a whole lot of nothing. No, we talk about the car business. And with me I have my co-host, Steve Shaw. How you doing, buddy?

Steve Shaw: Dave, I am doing great. I'm a little wired today, I've got to tell you. I've been on about a forty-eight-hour trip, and I'm not sure I've had much sleep since Sunday afternoon. We're recording on a Tuesday, but I don't even know what day it is. I've been up for about forty-eight hours straight, I'm pretty wired, but I'm having a good time.

Dave Rogers: So you were going to Waco, Texas, the last time I talked to you, and you said in our brief conversation the other day that you had an interesting two-hour Uber ride, and that we would be inspired, like with our previous guest, Ed Roberts. So please enlighten me with this inspirational story.

Steve Shaw: There are a lot of ways this story could go. We could even talk about how the rental agencies have no cars anymore, but that's a side note. I'd been trying to get a rental car for over a week for my trip. I've got to do a seminar in Waco, Texas. Never been to Waco. So I'm going to fly into DFW, pick up a rental car and drive down. No rental cars available at all at DFW.

So I'm like, all right, I'll get an Uber. I don't mind taking an Uber. My rule, and the company rule, is you take the first flight out and you get to your destination, because we get paid to work. We don't get paid if we don't show up, and I've got fifty people waiting for me to speak to them. So I get to the airport in the afternoon because of a meeting, the first chance I get. Flight delays in Tampa, Dave.

Dave Rogers: Shocking.

Steve Shaw: I get to DFW around 10:30 at night, get out to the curb, call my Uber, the Uber shows up, and I get in the car. Now I've got a two-hour drive from DFW down to Waco. And this gentleman is really nice.

From Cuba to America on foot 2:25

Steve Shaw: We start talking, and I could tell he had an accent. I asked, "Where are you from?" He says, "Cuba." I love talking to people about Cuba. I love everything about it, and I really can't get enough. So I ask the typical questions you ask to get to know your Uber driver, and we've got two hours, so I'm glad he was nice and pleasant. "How long have you been here?" He says, "About seven years, give or take."

I said, "Do you mind if I ask how you got here? Did you take a boat? Did you float across from Cuba to Key West?" And he says, "Can I tell you a story?" He tells me that in the families in Cuba, and again, if you're Cuban and I'm wrong, please don't chastise me in the comments, somebody in every family has to leave and go to work to take care of the family members who are still there.

I was blown away by the poverty and some of the things he described. It was an incredible story about his life there and life in Cuba right now, and according to him, the stuff we're fed is all hooey. He says, "I was able to scrape enough money together to get out, and I flew to Venezuela." And from there, this is where the story gets good.

He walked. He walked eleven countries or something like that to get to the United States. I said, "What?" He says, "I walked." He flew to Uruguay, then went to Argentina and then to Venezuela, and he kept going. And he says, "I walked the Darien Gap." I don't know if you're familiar with the Darien Gap.

Dave Rogers: No.

Steve Shaw: It's a stretch of jungle where much of the world's drug trade goes through, and it's where every migrant goes. It's the place where people go to die. It's the worst place on the planet, and it's the only place where there are no roads. You can't drive from the United States to South America because of the Darien Gap. You're literally walking through a jungle. If anybody wants to look it up, there are great documentaries. I've studied it.

So he's in the Darien Gap, and it's flooding, it's raining, and there are mudslides. He says, "When you get about halfway through, you have to go over a mountain, and it was so steep we had to crawl on our hands and knees to get up it. Three days on my hands and my knees. You know what we ate?" Lollipops. They ate lollipops, because that's all they could carry. It was three men and four women walking through this area. I'm listening to this story and I'm riveted. You can see it in his face. He was probably a forty-five-year-old man telling me what he did.

He's telling me the whole reason. He says, "I've got to get out, I've got to get to America, I've got to get a job, and I've got to take care of my family." His daughter and his father are still in Cuba. "So I walked." It was a two-hour, riveting story about walking through the Darien Gap and getting from Colombia into Panama and on from there. I'm sitting in this car at midnight, now 12:30, listening to this man talk, and I'm thinking about us.

"Do you think we could present a multi-point?" 6:15

Steve Shaw: Do you think we could present a multi-point? Do you think I could say Pass/Fail? This man spent a year getting out of Cuba and getting to the United States. You know what he does now? He drives an Uber eighteen hours a day so he can make enough money to send back to his family and get his kids out.

And here I was, during Fixed Ops Focus streaming live on Fridays, going, "I don't really want to work at three o'clock on Friday afternoon." This guy is working seven days a week, eighteen hours a day, and I'm not willing to work Friday at three. It was just a compelling story.

Then I find out something even worse. He tells me the driver gets about 30% of the fare. My ride cost me two hundred bucks. He says, "Steve, I might get fifty dollars for this drive, and I've got to pay tolls and gas out of that." His name is Yolando, and I tell him I'm going to make sure I give him a big tip. So I ask him, "How much does it cost to get your daughter out of Cuba?" He says, "Five thousand dollars a person."

And again, I'm the one asking the questions. It's not like he's scamming me. So I get on the app and I'm going to give this guy a big tip, because I want his daughter to be with him. The most the app would let me tip was fifty dollars, so I tipped him fifty. Yolando was absolutely amazing. If I could start a GoFundMe just for this guy to get his family out of Cuba, I would.

Dave Rogers: You are too funny, man. I love it: "I can't get an advisor to present a multi-point." I was actually sitting here trying to calculate the distance between Caracas, Venezuela, and the border of Mexico, and Google Maps is telling me I'm an idiot for even trying. It'll tell me it's a long plane trip, but it won't tell me how long it is to walk or how many miles it is. That puts everybody's story to shame. Can you imagine? Where there's a will, there's a way. You think about how spoiled we are. You're right: you can't get an advisor to present a multi-point, you can't get them to ask for the sale, they can't talk about financing options. It's astonishing, the things you hear when you get out of this spoiled-brat area we're in.

Work ethic and the 18-hour day 9:17

Steve Shaw: I ended up with another gentleman on my way back from Waco to DFW. He lost his job a while ago, and he too drives eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, to make a living. He drives a nice Honda, and he says, "I have to drive about eighteen hours a day to replace the income I used to have to take care of my family." That's some work ethic.

Dave Rogers: That is. You know what's funny? I was talking to Carm today about work-life balance in the car business, and it's a lot different than it used to be. Now we're bell to bell three days a week for sales. If you were a manager and you didn't work sixty hours a week, you couldn't be a manager. Now everything's trimmed down to forty-five hours, and you're asking too much. God forbid somebody works a Saturday.

But these guys are doing eighteen hours a day, based on the money they want to make. I don't know what that equates to in annual income, but now you're a 1099, you've got to pay your own taxes, it's probably not as much as you think, and you've got to hustle to get rides. You don't just get handed rides. So what does a two-hour Uber trip cost?

Surge pricing for an oil change? 10:38

Steve Shaw: Two hundred bucks. And I'll tell you what, if we want to talk about pricing, what do they call it now? Surge pricing. Imagine if a car dealer did surge pricing. We're busy, so an oil change that's normally fifty bucks is a hundred today. I landed at DFW and pulled out my phone to make sure I could get an Uber, and the price said $139. Thirty minutes later, because it took thirty minutes for the plane to taxi to the gate, it was $189. By the time I hit the button, it was $199.

Now, I was happy with it. I didn't have to drive, I got to relax, and I didn't know where I was going. But it was surge pricing. Could you imagine if we tried to do that?

Dave Rogers: Well, that's why they'd go to the independents. That's part of the problem. You can't do it unless everybody gets on board, and then we'd be fine. If we all got together, we could come up with some kind of surge pricing like Uber and Lyft both did. It wasn't just one of them, they both did it. It reminds me of the old days when Reynolds and Reynolds decided to get hostile about their DMS contracts, and then CDK decided to do the same thing. They all just follow suit. As long as you can get everybody on board, you might as well just do it.

Steve Shaw: What you're saying makes me think of an idea I've always had about express. We go to the convenience store, and a bottle of water is five dollars because we're paying for convenience. So why can't we have a real express? The regular line is our regular price, $49.99 or whatever the price is. But if you want express, come on over to this line, and it's $79.99, and we guarantee you a thirty-minute oil change. It costs more money. What's wrong with that?

Dave Rogers: I think you could probably get away with that in certain areas, if you're set up and geared up with an express. To get in and out in thirty minutes, a lot of people would pay extra. But don't expect any additional work, because you just capped yourself. If you picked and chose what it was, the five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five-thousand-mile services, you might be able to bang them out in thirty minutes, and maybe people would pay a little more. But you'd better stand behind it. It's got to be one of those "thirty minutes or less or it's free" deals. You've got to put your money where your mouth is.

Steve Shaw: We could do it, if somebody was willing to pay for it. It's not something I'm going to go promote, and I'm not going to write a book about it, but I think it's a great idea to pay for the convenience. We pay for convenience for everything in life right now. Why wouldn't a customer pay to get an express oil change done quickly?

Dave Rogers: I'm sure there are people who would, and people who wouldn't. Time is definitely important to a lot of people. The people with real money, though, send their pool guy to get the oil change, so they don't really care. When I was up in New York and Connecticut, the people from Greenwich sent their butler, their maid or their pool boy down to get the oil changed, if we weren't picking up and delivering for them.

Service hours stopped being convenient 14:01

Dave Rogers: It is all about convenience, but I think the other thing is we're not open enough hours anymore to be convenient. Since COVID we've squished the hours down. I don't necessarily think dealerships should be open Sundays. You can't sell cars, so opening up for service is kind of pointless. My group tried it years ago and it failed miserably, most likely because the employees didn't want to make it work. But why aren't you open at six or seven o'clock in the morning, especially in the summer? Get everybody started early and get them out early. If you need to be open until seven o'clock at night, then you should have another shift. But nobody wants to do it. It's too difficult, and they don't want to do it for their own comfort. Like you, Steve. They don't want to work after three o'clock on a Friday. It's hard to get these guys to stay.

Getting past the hourly mentality 14:56

Steve Shaw: What's funny is that I've been on the road since I was about forty years old, so almost seventeen years now. My first gig was right after I turned forty. I was in a hotel room in Delray Beach on my fortieth birthday, the day I bought glasses. That's how I remember it.

As a fixed ops director, I put in the time. I worked hard at the dealerships I was with, and starting out in the business. But people only see, "Steve, you worked for X, Y and Z today," or "You only worked for a half hour today." I did not get paid a nickel to sit in the airport all day on Sunday. I didn't get paid to stay up all night, and I didn't get paid to be in an Uber. I got paid for the window that I work, which is great. I'm not complaining. I kid around about it all the time, that I work a half hour a day. But there's a lot of effort behind the scenes that goes into coming out and working that half hour.

Craig is at a store this week, so he's working, and I'm back here running numbers and doing whatever needs to be done behind the scenes. There's a lot of work that goes into not working a lot.

Dave Rogers: It's not an hourly mentality. You're not getting rewarded for each hour worked, and a lot of times people base it on that. When I first became a service manager, I started in June, and in December I looked at my paycheck and did the math on how many hours I was working a week. I realized I was being paid less than the valet. I never did that calculation again in my life. Who wants to be a manager for seven dollars and forty cents an hour?

But you have to get past that when you're in this business and you have incentives and commissions. You can't be an independent businessperson or an entrepreneur and think hourly. You can bill somebody by the hour, you can have an hourly rate for your training or your services, and you can punch the clock like a lawyer or an accountant. But you can't think to yourself, "I'm only making $130 an hour, this isn't worth it." That's the mentality. And to piggyback on your Uber story, that guy is working eighteen hours a day to hit a number. I'm sure he sits home and does the math every once in a while, but he took a $200 ride and got a $50 tip. What did you say, he gets 30% of the money?

Steve Shaw: So he probably made a hundred bucks for those two hours.

Dave Rogers: And then he's two hundred miles away from where he normally works, and he's got to figure out how to get back.

Steve Shaw: Right. He's got to drive two hundred miles back, pay his tolls, pay his gas and pay for the car. Even if you think, "I got paid a hundred bucks to drive two hours, that's fifty bucks an hour," you've still got the return trip and everything else. I didn't know these guys even had to pay to get into DFW and out, even if they just do a loop around. Two bucks, five bucks. That's a great scam DFW collects on all of us. It's all those little things.

Dealers bring in millions and keep pennies 18:50

Steve Shaw: And if you really think about it, what's the margin a profitable dealer actually makes? It's a very skinny margin. When it's all said and done, we bring in a lot of money, and then we keep so little. That's why there are so many nickel-and-dime charges we get hit with as a dealer. It's all glamour on the surface, with somebody's name on the sign. But there's a lot of effort that goes into bringing back that little percent at the very end, and I think sometimes that's forgotten too.

Dave Rogers: I agree a hundred percent. The thin margins, you have to watch them. All these things add up. And the poor Uber driver, I was just thinking, whatever money he made, he's got to divide by four hours, unless he got somebody to ride back with him. And what's the chance somebody's going from Waco to DFW?

Steve Shaw: At two in the morning.

Grateful for the car business 19:53

Dave Rogers: We're at the twenty-minute mark, so we'll wrap it up. There are stories like this in every dealership. There are people in every dealership who came from nowhere. Ed Roberts was a great story on that, and so is your Uber driver. There are millions of people out there with stories like these, and sharing them is worthwhile. If you're a general manager and you've got good stories, share them to educate and to train. Sometimes you have to knock people back into reality.

I've said for years that a lot of people need a little tragedy in their life to get a grip on things. We could talk about the customers screaming about little stuff, but that goes for your employees too. If you have it too easy, you don't respect it. So take stories like that and use them. I had a technician one time in Jersey City who came to this country from French Guiana in the back of a Nova. That must have been a hell of a trip. So let's not take it so lightly.

Steve Shaw: I was just going to say, and I'll let you wrap us up, we have a pretty good gig. Working in the car business, whatever position you're in, we have the ability to make a lot of money. Yes, we work a lot of hours, and we probably could work a lot smarter. But we should think about what we have, and the opportunity each one of us has in front of us. Having a job at a car dealership is probably one of the best opportunities you could get. I couldn't do anything else. I wouldn't even know how to do half as well in life as I do here. And that's something we should all be very thankful for this coming Thanksgiving season.

Dave Rogers: That's awesome. I'll leave it at that, man. Great tip.

Steve Shaw: All right, everybody, it was good to see you. Here we are starting our second century, headed to two hundred. We'll see you next time.

Dave Rogers: See you later, bud.