Can Triage Solve the Technician Shortage?

Triage, MASH and the dentist's schedule 0:00

[Steve Shaw] Triage. Dave, I think we need to talk about triage. You've been on the triage bandwagon for a long time. So let's talk about triage, Dave.

Dave Rogers: Listen, I think it's the way we have to do it. Urgent care, the emergency room, doctors. If you're an old guy like me, you used to watch MASH, right? That's what they did. The people come in, somebody looks it over and says, "All right, this guy needs a couple of stitches, put him off to the side. This one's got a limb that's cut off, we're going to have to put a tourniquet on, let's get this guy into the operating room." And I think the car business, and the cars nowadays, need that. I've been saying this since 2005, I think it was, or 2003, my first job at a Mercedes store.

I came up with that idea because I thought it was ludicrous what we were doing. The Mercedes cars were complicated. I made the mistake. We talk about mistakes we've made in the car business. I'm in a Mercedes store, the phone rings, some lady tells me her headlight's out, and I said, "Well, bring it down. We'll fix it." And everyone there is like, "What are you, an idiot? You don't just bring them down." I'm like, "What? It's a headlight, right?" "Yeah, well, it's a Mercedes. It could be a wire harness, it could be anything." I'm like, "Shut up, just bring it in." Sure enough, it wasn't a headlight bulb, and it turned into a nightmare.

But it was one of the reasons why I said, well, maybe we should start bringing these people in, give it to one of the senior guys, let them diagnose it, and then go from there. The other analogy I'll use is a dentist's office. You make an appointment to come in for your six-month teeth cleaning. They set you up for one hour, you get your teeth cleaned, you get an X-ray, and then they come in and tell you that you have four cavities, you need a root canal and all this other stuff. And they don't do it that day. They reschedule you for a week or two down the road, and now they have a two-hour time period blocked off where they know they're going to do a root canal or fill some cavities, whatever it is.

So they turn that normal one-hour maintenance appointment, like a quick lube, into a two-hour repair job filled in later. And if you ever look at their scheduling, they've got it filled in. There are no blanks. They know exactly what's coming in and when it's coming in. Like I've said, we should do that for oil changes and tire rotations. Just book it, do the multi-point, and then schedule people for a different day when we have all the parts and everything else. There are a lot of different ways to go there. You had said you were going down that path with AI and a book you had read.

Multi-point first, then the master tech 2:29

[Steve Shaw] So you've talked about it a bunch, right? And I've been focused on a couple other things. So I go to lunch with a group down here locally, and I meet a fixed ops director. He's like you, he's a pretty smart cat, and he starts talking about triage. This gentleman, and we're going to have him on the show sometime, wrote a whole book about triage. He called it blueprinting, which is the body shop term. After I listened to him and read his book, I was like, fuck, that's amazing, right? It's brilliant. It's fucking brilliant. Why aren't we doing that?

The whole concept is exactly what you said. And you know me, if I hear something, I've got to take it a hundred degrees further. I've got to put it on crack. But the whole idea is not letting a car touch a bay, right? His concept is that the bay is the holdup. My vision may be slightly different. You said you could go down a ton of different ways. I'm not a Toyota level one, two, three, express type of thing. I don't like that. If it's a maintenance type of thing, I've always said bring it into maintenance and light repair, you've got the kids, and I have my way of doing that.

But I love the idea of a triage environment, right? You've got the maintenance situation, and there might be a couple levels of maintenance, and then I like the idea of light repair, and then diagnostic or heavy diagnostic, right? And I remember, a long time ago, some dealer where the car would come in and go onto a rack and get the multi-point inspection done, and then it would go to the technician. I remember thinking, okay, that's an interesting concept. I never approached it that way, but what a brilliant idea. Maybe it was the right time, right place.

But now, if my car shows up at the dealership, maybe the multi-point is always supposed to be the first thing. You pull it in, do the multi-point, and then the customer either approves it or doesn't approve it. If they don't approve it, it goes to the quick lane guy or the express guy, and they move on with a normal oil change. If they approve it, maybe it goes to the master tech. Every car gets a multi-point first. That multi-point is handed to the master tech, and then the master tech diagnoses whatever it is.

And I was thinking, the master tech diagnoses it and gives it to his parts guy, and the parts guy gets all the parts and all the prices, the service advisor sells it, and that car immediately goes outside. It never sees a tech turning a wrench whatsoever, because all you're doing is clogging a bay, right? So when it's sold, the parts guy puts the parts on the ticket, takes the ticket and drives the car into the stall with the parts on the fucking front seat. That's when a car gets to the tech, right? I could see that. And as I was doing my research, me and my buddy Claude, there was a whole bunch of research about at least one hour per day a technician wastes going back and forth, doing all those things.

Dave Rogers: Easy.

Steve Shaw: There are actual publications where this is being done, and the research came from heavy trucks. Volvo heavy trucks and Freightliner heavy trucks are doing triage, and they promise at Volvo and at Freightliner that your truck will be looked at within two hours, no matter what, right? So you go into triage, and within two hours you'll have an estimate and so on, and hopefully they get you on the road. There are so many great concepts along that line. We have to have John on so we can talk about his ideas. But maybe it's the right time to start doing that, right? Maybe it's the right environment now to bring about triage.

Young techs set up to fail 6:13

[Dave Rogers] Well, yeah, I think it's definitely the right time to do it, because there are different levels of technicians out there. You have the top guys, the advanced guys and gals, and then you have the entry level, or the C technician, or the light duty repair technicians. They don't have the experience. A lot of them can't diagnose. They don't have the skill set, they haven't done it long enough. And one of the biggest mistakes we make in this business is you take these hourly kids, the trainees and apprentices, whatever you want to call them, and you give them work that's above their head. So you give them the car, and they struggle on it for two hours trying to figure out what it is. They finally get somebody to help. Now they've wasted two, two and a half hours trying to figure out what it is.

Steve Shaw: And his time, and the other guy's time.

Dave Rogers: So at the end of the week, this entry-level technician turns twenty hours, let's say. They're looking at this pay plan and going, "I can't be a flat rate technician. I'll never make money doing this." And that's why they're bailing out of the business so early. So why not run it through the diagnostic bay, or give it to a master tech first? Why let the kids struggle for two hours before you send somebody over to help? You're not learning anything by struggling. And I used to laugh, because it wasn't even diag time, it was survey time. They'd actually walk around the shop and ask everybody what they think it is, right? "Well, I think it's this, and that pays two hours." "Well, I think it's that, and it only pays one hour." "Well, I like the first answer better, so that's what I'm going to tell the writer," right?

So why not give it to the diag tech? "Hey, this car needs a fuel pump. Give it to the kid, put the fuel pump in, call me when it's done. I want to make sure the gasket's not pinched, and I want to help you reprogram the computers or do the software download, whatever it is, and we'll make sure it's good, and you take it for a road test." Now the kid didn't waste any time trying to diagnose it. If he's a real student of the game, he'll ask you, "How'd you come to this conclusion?" Maybe he does, maybe he doesn't. But now at least he's on the car for an hour and a half, and he flagged an hour and a half. And now at least he thinks he can make a living doing this, right?

He's going to be oblivious to the fact that he didn't really diagnose it, but that comes with experience. You don't know how to diagnose things because you haven't seen it all yet, right? So we're chasing people out of the business because they can't do it. And you're getting jammed up with the work, you're flooded, you're dispatching by desperation, you give it to the wrong guy, he's a kid, he can't do it. And that's why I think triage is definitely coming along. I think it's even more important now.

And I'll remind everybody out there, Pep Boys has been doing this for fifty years. They have one senior tech in their shop and a bunch of parts swappers, and that senior tech checks every car out and then hands it to someone else. Now, that person's paid a salary, whatever he's paid, and I understand that's a little bit of an issue. But you know what? Most of our shops now have salaried people. We have shop foremen. We have diagnostic techs with some of these car lines. You have the people there. So why are they working on the car after somebody lost their shirt on it for five days? Why aren't they getting the car first, to decide we shouldn't give this to one of those guys, and let those other people be more productive in the meantime? I think we've been doing it ass backwards for a long time.

Three unpaid days on an O2 sensor 9:16

[Steve Shaw] I can remember, when you were talking about this, when I was a kid I worked at a Jeep Eagle dealer, right? AMC Jeep Renault is where I started. I'm working on this four-liter Cherokee. I might have been 19 years old, I don't know. I had just come off my mentor, and he was not there that day. So I'm getting into the flat rate deal. I put an O2 sensor on this four-liter Jeep Cherokee. It was simple. Get the DRB, the code comes up, it's an O2 sensor. I went and put it in.

Fuck if it didn't fix it. It did not fix it, right? Same code. I'm like, what the fuck do I do now? I had no idea what to do. I get the manual, everything I learned how to do in tech school, and I fucked around for three days. Three days I looked at this car. I had zero idea what to do. I finally went over to John Paul, the electrical guy, and he wouldn't talk to me for a long time. I'm like, "JP, man, you've got to fucking look at this car." He brings his DVOM over, walks over and goes, "You put a fucking O2 sensor on it, Steve?" In seconds he goes, "You got a bad one out of parts."

I got a new one out of parts, put it in, and the guy drove away. I was like, I've spent three days, I didn't get paid for three days, and you walk over here and in seconds it's fixed, right? So you're right, it's crazy. Again, I didn't get paid for three days, and I stood around like, would somebody help me out?

Where the B techs went after COVID 10:32

[Dave Rogers] You know, I was talking to somebody about this recently, and it refreshed my memory. One of the things that happened in the car business, and I'm sure it happened other places, was when COVID happened and we were doing furloughs and splitting our shifts and all these things, I know our group lost a lot of B-rate technicians. They voluntarily terminated themselves. These were your meat and potatoes guys. They were turning their forty, fifty, sixty hours, whatever, making eighty-five, ninety thousand a year, right in that range, eighty thousand, let's say. And those technicians disappeared after COVID.

They disappeared because they found out they could wake up whenever they felt like it, because they didn't have to get up early. They could do a couple side jobs in their driveway during the week for cash work. They could drive Uber, DoorDash, whatever they wanted to do, right? And they could make eighty, ninety grand a year, half of it unreported because it was cash. They could stay up all night gaming, right? And they didn't have to be at your store at eight o'clock in the morning listening to your horse shit, you telling them they're late, right? That's what happened to a lot of them. They disappeared. I noticed it when it was happening.

And you couldn't get them back. After COVID ended, you just couldn't get them back. They were done. They were not in the car business anymore. So we have this big disconnect between the experienced guys that stayed with the business and a new, fresh, young group of apprentice technicians. You don't have those people in the middle anymore. So now you have to grow your own, and it takes time. Those guys weren't where they were after two or three years. They were where they were after five or ten years, right? So what better way of doing it? The young ones are never going to be as proficient as an A-rate tech at diagnosing work. That's what makes an A-rate an A-rate, right?

And after we talked to Carm, I shouldn't be using "A-rate" anymore. I should be using "skilled." I've got to get back into that. But if you think about it, you don't have those people that are proficient at diagnosing cars anymore. A lot of them, anyway.

A career path for Johnny 12:49

[Steve Shaw] Yeah. And we don't have a system in place that allows these people to grow. They come in, and like me, I was a nineteen-year-old kid living at home, so whatever. But bottom line is, I stood around for three days, right? And they're standing around trying to figure out how to make a check. Our processes and our systems in our stores don't allow for that technician growth. And this would be a great system. And we don't have anybody anymore.

I wrote a class on a couple of different things to teach shop foremen and driveway managers about production and so on. That's kind of why I started working on that. When John got me all fired up about it, I started working on some material. But somebody's got to run the shop. We've got to not be afraid to run the shop so that our people can grow, right? I just think that's the whole thing. What's the career path for Johnny when he comes out of tech school or high school? How do we get Johnny groomed so that he becomes that five-year tech?

I think it goes back to what we always say. We kid that he wants to be the vice president in six months, but I think he really just wants a path to become vice president, right? And if Johnny can start here and you can show him how to become an A tech, with money all the way up the chain, you've got a tech for life, right? And none of our stores have that progression anymore, the progression we had, I guess, when we were kids.

The Ferris wheel: how a great flat rate tech works 14:16

[Dave Rogers] Well, to piggyback on that a little bit, I had a guy working for me years ago in the Chrysler store, Rob Hickey, and he was probably one of the best flat rate technicians that ever worked for me. The guy turned a hundred hours a week, week in, week out, during the nineties, when it was tough to make money at Chrysler. And he worked his hours. He worked eighty hours a week. It wasn't like he was only there fifty or sixty hours. He worked his ass off. He had a key to get into the place, and he'd close up sometimes.

He's the guy that taught me, and somebody had taught him, if I remember correctly, a guy named Big Don, how to flat rate cars. And when I talk to people, there's no comprehension of what Rob taught me. He doesn't work on a car. He has a car on his lift, he has all the parts, he has all the approvals and everything else, and he doesn't touch that car unless there's another one behind it that has all the approvals, all the parts, everything ready to go. He just doesn't. He'll keep going back up to the desk and asking for another car to diag, or another used car, or something, until he has another car. Because, he said, when he works on that car he has all the hours there and all the parts, and he's ready to go. But when he's done, he has nothing else to do, right?

He used to refer to it as a Ferris wheel. He said, "Dave, you empty one car and then you fill it, and you take the thing all the way around, and I have to have another car ready to go." And that's the one thing I think is missing in the business too. It's hard to get a master tech or an experienced flat rate tech to spend time training one of these young kids, because basically you're training them to steal your food, right? You're training them to steal your money. In your case, you struggled for three days, and the other guys were sitting around watching it. That was three days of you not coming up to the desk getting work, three days less of you taking their work. So what was their incentive to come over and help you? There was none. And I think we have to change that mindset.

I bet you there are people out there listening to this, or people in the business, who have come up with better ways to do it than the typical one you see. It's just not as widespread as it should be at this point.

Steve Shaw: Could you imagine, though, if I said, "I'm going to have a class on how to be a flat rate tech," and my class was, "Go hoard the work"? Get one, diagnose it, put it aside, get the next one. If I said that, I would be drummed out of business, right? As smart as that idea is, people couldn't hack it. It's like when we were kids dating. You had the girl you just stopped dating, the girl you're dating now and the girl you're getting ready to date, right? You have this cycle. It's like flat rate. That's exactly how it is.

Dave Rogers: He used to make it work. He drove me crazy sometimes. It was easy for him because he had a good memory. He was just a really, really smart guy, and he could remember all this stuff. When I was dispatching, or when I was a service manager, I had my route sheet so I could keep track of the stuff so he didn't lose track of it. But there were times he'd have ten jobs juggling. And we used to have to reel him in and say, "Rob, we've got to get some of these cars out of here." And he's like, "Well, you've got to get some of the parts." We came up with the expression, go to the parts department and eat metal and shit me a part. We've got to get some of these cars out of here. But in hindsight, I had nine other jobs that were diagnosed behind it.

He was doing what we needed him to do. He was taking the load off the store. It's the keeping track of it that would stop some people from doing it. But just think about the extra volume you could get in the store. Think about it if you had every tech doing that with some skill. I could get a lot more throughput, because what are they doing otherwise? They're just going to sit there and not do anything while they wait for the parts to come in? He finishes the one car, he makes his four hours, but then he's got nothing else to work on. What is he doing? So it makes more sense to do it that way. And I think triage is the logical way to go with this stuff.

GM tip: move the cars that are ready 18:32

[Steve Shaw] To bring it full circle, I'd like to talk on a next episode about how to track it, because I've been doing a lot of research with AI tools and things like that. So let's talk about that from an AI perspective. I think we should have an episode about AI in the shop. Personal AI in the shop. I think that needs to be our next episode. But you probably ought to wrap us up and give us a GM tip of the day.

Dave Rogers: Well, GM tip of the day, I'm just going to liken it to the sales process. You've sold a car and you've got a couple of them in the showroom. Which ones are going into finance? The ones whose paperwork is ready to go. You're not going to be sitting around jerking around with somebody, bringing them into the box and wasting an hour of their time getting everything ready. You've got to try to get the guy into finance who's ready to go, right? Whether it's a cash deal or a lease, whatever the case may be.

We're trying to do throughput in the shop. I do think there's a little nuance to it when you get to triage, but if you have a shop foreman, if you have an hourly guy, if you have somebody that can do the diagnostic work, why not just give it a shot? I love your idea: run it over the alignment machine, run it on the rack, do the multi-point, and then figure out what's going to go on with the car, right? I think that's the way to go with this stuff. In the old days I would say put it on the rack, drain the oil, do the multi-point and hand the multi-point in before you start doing the oil change. But I love the idea of doing the triage first. And these cars that are older, the more experienced guys should be looking at them anyway. These young kids shouldn't be working on a car that was built ten years before they started in the business. They shouldn't even be looking at that car.

Steve Shaw: Well, yeah, because nobody's training those kids, right? I don't know where I heard it, but it was years ago when they were talking about the multi-point first, and I think a couple of people built a dealership in that fashion. That is absolutely fantastic. You're triaging the oil change. I think it's absolutely brilliant. We've got to have John on to talk to him about his vision for that. Awesome. We better get out of here before we lose everybody at our twenty-minute mark.

Dave Rogers: Let's get him on, man. I want to see what the book is. I want to see what it says. All right, brother. I'll talk to you.

Steve Shaw: See you, bro.