The Truth About Being an Auto Technician With Joshua Taylor

Meet Joshua Taylor of the Wrench Turner's Podcast 0:00

Steve Shaw: So, Dave Rogers, what's going on? Dave Rogers and Steve Shaw with Fixed Ops Focus. Dave, we've got a guest tonight. How did we pull that one off?

Dave Rogers: We do. We have Joshua Taylor on, from the Wrench Turner's Podcast. I stumbled on him a couple of weeks ago, maybe a month ago. I saw him on LinkedIn, saw him on Spotify, started listening to his podcast, and I said, you know what, this guy comes across as the tech guy. I was expecting somebody to be screaming and yelling and throwing the F-bomb out and being all angry. And he's actually a realist. So I really wanted to talk to him. Joshua, thank you for joining the show. Glad to have you on.

Joshua Taylor: You're most welcome. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Dave Rogers: So tell me a little bit. I looked, and you've been doing podcasts since December 2022. I tried to talk Steve into doing one a couple of years ago, but he was too busy having a brain tumor removed and stuff. He just had other stuff to do. But you've been doing this for a while. I looked at your LinkedIn, I looked at your profile, and you started as a tech, same with me, same with Steve. Tell us about your journey and what got you to where you are today.

From pushing a broom to 700 stores 1:16

Joshua Taylor: Well, I would suggest that it probably started when I was about three, when my grandfather had me standing between his knees on a big old square-body Chevy, pushing snow with the plow. Then it evolved slightly from that to being about eight or nine years old, pulling the carb off that same plow truck, and then at fifteen, sixteen, him helping me buy a CRX to fix, and then him helping me buy five Neons to fix and turn into one.

Professionally, I started back in about 2001. I think we're going on 25 years this year. I started professionally at a CDJR store up here in Canada as an apprentice, pushing a broom. Several years later I got my ticket, or Red Seal as we call it up here, so I'm a journeyman. I did that for a whole bunch of years, lots of years. If you do the compound math, as many of us blue-collar folks do, I probably put ten years in in four with the amount that I worked.

I've been a service advisor at a CDJR store, I've been a fixed director at a Mitsubishi store, I've been administration and dispatch for the flagship Mercedes-Benz store here in Canada, and I've been a GM at a collision center. I've worked for digital marketers, and I now work full-time for Fixed Ops Marketing, doing data analysis and reporting for our enterprise clients and stores across all 700 stores. So it's been a journey in the last quarter century. It's been a ride, it's been a rip.

Along the way I found media and understood that I wanted to give back to the community for lots of reasons, but most importantly because mechanics need a whole lot of help, especially mentally. We're in the top three, hopefully now the top five, professions for suicide. That's a number we don't want to be number one at, and we're bringing it down. So that's why the Wrench Turner's Podcast exists: helping technicians live happier, healthier, more productive lives.

Why technicians need to learn to communicate 3:26

Dave Rogers: So you started the podcast to help other techs. What made you start a podcast? I never really listened to podcasts until about three or four years ago. I was never into it, and I didn't know anybody who was into it. So what took you down that road?

Joshua Taylor: Well, one of the common challenges of every person, but especially of us as technicians, is that we get zero education in communication. There's none. If we have great mentors in the shop, they can teach us how to fix things and they can teach us how to diagnose things really well. Unfortunately, even those really great mentors, the ones I've had in my life and the ones I've now had conversations with, don't necessarily teach technicians how to speak.

So one of the first things I wanted to do, after reading that article about mechanics and suicide, was have conversations. Not the negative, complainy "I hate the world, flat rate sucks, blah, blah, blah" conversations that are typical in the marketplace about mechanics. Or the opposite: let's turn this square-body Chevy into the biggest monster truck in the entire world. That's entertainment, or that's complaint and drama and drivel. That's not what I want to do. My grandfather taught me better.

I want to provide solutions, learning, education and content, especially for that mid-level technician, the senior technician, the shop foreman. Teach them how to lead, teach them how to communicate, teach them how to lead a team of people so they can make money for themselves, their families and the people they lead. That didn't exist in the marketplace as far as I could tell five years ago. Five years on, I think there are a few more people doing something similar from a slightly different angle. But I'd like to think that the purpose of everything I do is not money, and it's not fame or fortune. It's to really focus on the technician and how to help you guys live a happier, healthier, more productive life.

Mentors and high-value leaders 5:46

Steve Shaw: Amazing. I was watching a couple of your episodes, and you were talking about communication, and one of the technicians was talking about how your life is kind of dependent on your mentor. If your mentor gives you a good path, a good attitude or a good direction, then you generally stay in the business, or you stay in that technician role. And I reflected back on my life as a technician. I'm not a technician any longer. I really liked my mentor, but it wasn't "Hey, Steve, I'm going to help you become a great tech." It was, "I've got about six months with you, bro. You're either going to make it or get out." Well, I ended up getting out, and the rest is history in my life. But you're right, it does go back to that one particular guy. That's your mentor. He's your entry into the automotive space. And I love that conversation.

Joshua Taylor: I appreciate it. It really does have a big effect on a person's life. Irrespective of the industry and the trade, if you have a mentor, you're a lot more likely to be successful in a lot of different ways, whether it's life, business, profession, career, sports, whatever you want to call it. Having a mentor, period, can really change your life.

Having a mentor who's actually good at what they do is also a great way to take the next step, because I've heard a lot of people talk a lot of smack for a lot of years and say they're really great. Unfortunately, there are a lot of naive young folks who listen to that "I'm really great," and all they get is negative energy and negative attitudes, and that fosters a whole lot of negativity in this industry.

When you look outside the box, you understand there's a difference between a mentor and a high-value leader. I want to go wherever the high-value leaders are: the ones who know how to communicate, the ones who know how to lead, the ones who understand the business as well as what actually goes into the business. Understanding how to read a P&L and understanding the accounting and the business acumen part of the business is one thing. But if you don't understand the people and what they do every day, from the drive to the floor, you're not going to lead very well. You can be the greatest businessperson on the planet, but if you have no real understanding of what it's like to live on the floor and be in the drive, you're not going to be able to lead those people.

Dave Rogers: That's true. A lot of times people move up the ranks and get to that general manager or manager level, and they forget everything about what came before. They forget what it was like being a tech or a detailer or whatever it was that got them there. And it's a shame. You mentioned communicating. I was a technician, wound up having a motorcycle accident, couldn't turn a wrench anymore, had no idea what to do, and started taking some classes at college.

I realized I wasn't a negative person, but I wasn't a social person. I didn't want to talk to people. I was kind of introverted in the shop. And the whole idea of being an advisor, moving up the ranks and doing something other than what I was doing probably scared the crap out of me. So I started reading books, went to college a little bit, and started working on things. And then I did have some great mentors along the way, just like you said.

I'm sure there are a bunch of technicians out there who just don't see a path, or don't have anybody bringing them up: "Here's a book to read. Here are some coaching tips." It's definitely a concern, because we all know technicians' bodies give out at a certain point. We used to draw this bell curve about earnings for a technician. They go up, and then you get to about forty-five years old and you're at the peak of your earnings, and then your back starts giving out and it fades back down. I think it's great that you're doing this. That's kind of what Steve and I have been trying to do, pay it forward and teach some people along the way. But I give you a lot of credit, because not a lot of people went for that angle with the technicians. So kudos.

Caring for technicians changes the bell curve 10:04

Joshua Taylor: I appreciate that. I really want to change that bell curve, because at this stage there's no reason for it to bell curve. You illustrated one of the things that's really important: there aren't many people who understand that there are paths, let alone how to communicate to technicians that there are alternatives. And sometimes it's not necessarily stopping being a technician. One of the challenges this industry faces right now is that we have a lot of people who don't know how to lead technicians, period.

When you don't know how to lead technicians, you don't know how to care for them. And when you don't know how to care for them, they get hurt. When technicians are literally and figuratively breaking their backs for a shop and aren't being taken care of, they end up bent, broken and out of the trade early. But if they're taken care of, more than likely their backs are going to be okay.

Let's give an example. Say a service manager went out to the shop three times a day to walk the floor and saw everybody working. Instead of chirping about what's going on with the New York Mets, or the latest FIFA game, or "Hey, how was your weekend?", they start saying things like, "Hey, Bob, lift with your knees. Take the squat properly and lift it up with your knees. You do that again, I'm sending you home without pay." Not because he was doing something inefficient, but because he wasn't taking care of himself. You start chirping at a technician for not taking care of themselves, and that starts changing the culture.

We got into this a couple of episodes ago with Kelly Verdi: the level of care equals the level of culture. When leaders don't get into the granular stuff about how technicians treat themselves day to day in the bay, that's a really big problem. We end up with broken technicians, literally speaking, from a physical standpoint. And unfortunately, the physical brokenness of technicians leads to the mental brokenness of technicians, which is the problem I've found and am trying to correct. When you start doing that, you start affecting the whole shop, because now you have a leader who cares about the people. That's what we want to influence our leaders to do more of. Care about your people.

It's hard to quantify those things. You both understand what it's like. It's very difficult to quantify on any business sheet what care actually does for you, because it's measured in decades. It's not measured in days or weeks or months or quarters. It's when Bob started with you at 18 and now he's 48, thirty years later, and he's still wrenching, and he doesn't take any pills for pain, he doesn't see the chiropractor three days a week and the physio three days a week to try to stay standing, and he hasn't asked to come off the bench to work at the desk because his back hurts, his knees hurt, his hips hurt, his shoulder hurts, or he's got carpal tunnel. That's the thing we're looking for.

And the flip side of that, really quickly, is the path. You mentioned path. I think part of the problem is that there are so many paths that nobody knows what to do. I have seen about six technicians this year, year to date, take a GM role. Started as a technician, now a GM. I personally know at least a couple of technicians who are now fixed directors. Not service advisors for a long period of time: fixed directors, by choice. There are people I've had on the show in technical support, and not just technical support, but national technical support for brands. We have people outsourcing into other industries, using the critical thinking, the problem solving, the brain power that you've spent the last twenty years building. The challenge is options.

Too many paths and nothing written down 14:11

Steve Shaw: Well, it's funny. I spent very little of my life in an independent shop, because ultimately I was not a good technician. So I spent most of my career growing from technician to advisor all the way up to fixed director. I couldn't make the jump to GM. Dave was a general manager of a dealership for a while. I was never able to make that change. So I went from fixed director to starting my own company, a training company.

I always look back at the things that were important to me. I was in the union as a tech, and as I was growing, I was doing a thesis or something for college, and one of the guys said, "Steve, never forget your roots." That always struck me as profound: the leader of the union saying, "Steve, you were one of us," even though I was on my own path. So I always try to look back at that. And I think there are a lot of options for people.

What I'm hearing is that there are a lot of paths, but nobody knows which one to take, because there's nothing written down anywhere. It's like, "Well, I'm a tech, I'm super smart, I could become a manager." I've seen techs go from tech to service manager, and they sit down in the chair. It happened with one of my trainers in Idaho. A technician got promoted. Wonderful man, 25 years' experience, went from tech to shop foreman to service manager. He looked at my trainer and said, "What do I do now?" In 25 years of working at this Chrysler store, an amazing man had zero idea what to do when he sat down. He literally said, "Now what?" Fortunately, the dealer was good enough to have hired somebody to come in and teach him that role. But what did we do for 25 years of this man's life? That absolutely drives me insane.

Those options are available, because you're right: technicians are some of the smartest people in the world. I can't take a car apart and put it back together. That's just not in my wheelhouse. I can talk to people. So I try to communicate what the real path is. My passion is putting that in writing and sharing it with my stores: what is the career path for somebody? Because at 48 years old, I don't want to be turning a wrench.

I've got friends in their seventies still hopping a plane every day, and I go, "You guys are freaking crazy. You're going to break your back hopping an airplane," let alone trying to fix an engine at 45, 50 or older. So part of the message I try to share with my clients is: create it in writing and give these men and women a real clear direction on where they can go. And one of your podcasts was about how there's not a technician shortage, there's a retention problem. Like the gentleman said, we can go find techs all day long, but we can't keep them in our industry. And that's criminal from an organizational standpoint. That's my rant today.

Dave Rogers: Well, I think it goes back to what Joshua said before. It's the caring. It doesn't matter what the position is in a dealership. If you see somebody limping, if you see one of your employees having a hard time, it's your job as the general manager, the leadership of the dealership, to ask them what's going on. A lot of times they avoid these conversations. But there have been plenty of times in my career, when I was a service manager running stores directly, that I'd pull a tech off the line and say, "Here, sit at the front desk today. Watch the advisors, help them out. You look banged up. You need a little rest. I'm just going to pay you for the day, average hours, don't worry about it." And they thanked you later on. "Yeah, I just needed it today. I just couldn't do it." Two or three days in a row of back-breaking work, whatever the case may be.

If you're not aware enough, that's part of the problem too. Steve said it: people get promoted and there's no one there showing them what to do. In the group I'm with now, we've had a couple of technicians who were promoted to manager retire or leave us. And I say this kidding around a little bit, but there is some truth in it: a lot of times your best technician, your best advisor, your best salesperson is a greedy, selfish MFer. They really are. They want all the work. They're greedy, cutthroat people.

That doesn't mean it's a bad thing, because that's how they make their living. Same with salespeople: they're very aggressive, they want to earn money. But then you promote them to manager, and that's not a selfish spot. It's a selfless spot, and there's no one there to point it out to them. The few people I've seen fail going from technician to manager failed because they never developed that thought. They were always still selfish people. That's a message I've tried to get through to people for years. You've got to take this next step. You've got to stop worrying about your paycheck. Now you've got to worry about ten other people's paychecks. That's the big transition from being an individual performer, a producer, to being the leader you want to grow into. So how do you help people take that step, Josh? I'm sure you've run into that as well.

Joshua Taylor: There are a couple of things in there. First and foremost, to double down on it: my wife's a chiropractor. She's been a chiropractor for sixteen years. And the one thing she has said, and we've said from a business standpoint time and time again, came from an extremely wise, extremely amazing chiropractor who taught her at school: if you take care of your patients, they will take care of you. She's been in business sixteen years, and in sixteen years she has never put out an advertisement or any piece of marketing material. She's never done a campaign. She wouldn't even know what one looks like. And here she is, sixteen years later, with a full day every day she wants to work. The same applies to the shop, in terms of having a full set of bays and being profitable as a business. If you care for the technicians, they'll take care of you.

The pushback I hear about caring for them on a regular basis is, "Well, if we care, they'll take advantage." No. Caring for your team means that if the team is suffering because of an individual, you're not caring for the team. You're caring for that one person. That care needs to be a promotion to customer. Care means care for the team as a whole, not for an individual. So, technicians: if you're the toxic person in the shop, you're probably going to be asked to leave by a high-value leader.

I say that with as much respect and care as I possibly can. You don't rise to the level of effort; you fall to the level of tolerance. In a lot of circumstances, there are a lot of shops out there with way too tolerant a service manager. They tolerate everything because they're scared: what happens if I lose this top performer? That's the "mine, mine, mine" person. I use the word "seagull" with my son on the soccer field. You've got to be a seagull out there. That ball is yours. If you don't get that ball, you're not going to get a chance to pass, shoot, score, nothing. But you can't have those in the shop, because it just sucks the energy out of the rest of the shop. So it's contextual. It's still caring for the team as a leader, but you've got to understand what role you play in caring for the team. If that means getting rid of somebody who's toxic, get rid of somebody who's toxic.

And the flip side is, we're talking about shortage and retention, and shortage and trust. We can find technicians to bring in, for sure. There are ways to do that. Retention still leads back to tolerance. If you're tolerating stuff in your shop, you've probably got a churn rate you don't want. You're not caring for them enough. So retention still plays a role. And we're talking about it from a 30,000-foot view of the industry: trust is a problem. If the parents of families don't trust us with their vehicle, to buy a car, let alone service it, they're not going to trust us with their children. I've said it a lot in the last year. So those 18-, 19-, 20-year-old kids who used to come in droves, banging on our doors every day, with a stack of resumes to be an apprentice or aspiring technician, we don't have that as much anymore, because not nearly enough people trust us. So again, it comes back to care. When you care for the community, your team and your customers, they take care of you.

What training level says about technician pay 23:21

Steve Shaw: From the physical side of caring, I get it 100%. Speak for a second, if you wouldn't mind, to the financial side, because I'm speaking to Dave's group next week. We're doing a financial class for managers, a two-day seminar. I do training for advisors. We always want to improve the repair order, but my whole thing is your behavior. How do you change your behavior so you change your life? How do you improve your RO performance?

A big thing I talk about with the managers is the production side and the caring. I say if you don't care enough to talk to your techs five minutes a day about the money they made yesterday, it's almost dereliction of duty. So I'd ask you to speak a little to that financial side for the technicians, because I'm going to carry this message next week. I love hearing what you're saying and trying to put it in a different way, because managers hear it, but sometimes it goes in one ear and out the other. I think it's just as important to care about a guy's paycheck. Maslow's hierarchy of needs: if my needs aren't being met, I'm going to go somewhere else. And a big part of that is, I've got to pay the bills.

Joshua Taylor: I'll try to keep it short, because I've got about seven different things I can speak to about that. The most important one came from the survey I did many moons ago. It was the very first thing I did. The podcast wasn't first; the survey was. I surveyed about 30 stores, give or take, and the numbers are starting to get a little fuzzy on that end, but about a thousand technicians across thirty stores in about thirteen states, I think.

The overwhelming thing that came from that for me was this: you can have a $150,000-a-year technician who's extremely unhappy, and you can have a $50,000-a-year technician who's extremely happy. Opposite ends of the spectrum. So the money isn't necessarily the thing. It really comes down to a lot of listening by the leader. But the flip side of that is the training side. When technicians regularly complain to me about money, and they want to talk about pay, this, that and the other, I say, "Well, what level is your training?"

Every industry has some kind of training, especially ours. If you talk about brand training at franchise dealerships in North America, most franchises have a beginner, an intermediate and an advanced level. Every one of them has a slightly different name, but it doesn't matter. The survey said if you're level one complete, you're going to make $40,000 a year and no more. Forty thousand was basically the cap. If you have level two, your intermediate stuff, complete, you're going to make $60,000 a year, but no more. It didn't matter whether it was hourly or flat rate. But if you had your level three training complete, your advanced training, and obviously not everything, because there are literally thousands of hours above advanced for the specialist stuff, you were making $80,000 a year to start, and the average of those technicians was $110,000.

So the first question I have for every technician who complains about pay is: where's your current level of training? And I look at that based on their level of experience. If you use the standard 2,000 hours a year worked, and obviously technicians work way more than that for the most part, then after ten years they have 20,000 hours of work time in. At 20,000 hours, you should be an expert. But if you're at a dealership and you've been doing the same thing over and over again, you're probably not an expert. You might be an expert in one thing, but you're probably not an expert in anything else. You might have dabbled in the other things. The only way to get better at all the other things is training, so you can take on more work.

So if I have a ten-year technician who is an intermediate-level trained technician for one brand, and is only working for that one brand, they are dramatically undertrained. They should be nearly a doctor of the house after ten years. I use the phrase "doctor of the house" to mean basically as much training as the OEM can possibly give you as a technician. After ten years, you should be damn near complete. So why not get your training done? "Well, if I have more training, they give me harder work." Well, that's how it's supposed to be. That's the whole deal.

If you want to make the easy money and do the easy things, you're going to make easy-thing money. And that's where you're sitting right now. You kind of top out at, say, $25 an hour, but you're working 5,000 hours a year. You're going to max that out, and you're going to break yourself trying to accomplish it. But if you get your level three, and you get the really cool stuff and the really challenging stuff, you can make $65 an hour, maybe plus a bonus, maybe plus production, maybe plus everything.

Because if you've got all of your level threes and your doctors and so on, all kinds of really cool stuff comes up. Do you want to go to a national championship to be the top technician in the country? I've interviewed a whole bunch of those on my show. If anybody's watched Josh Arnold, he's now a two-time back-to-back champion for VMPI. But that's not just because he's good with video. It's because he's mastered his craft and what he's doing every day. I have a technician who recently placed second on the planet, if I recall, for Hyundai. I've had enough of them that I can't remember them all.

These are people who find the hard things that nobody wants to do or nobody can do, get the training on them, and figure out how to fix them on a regular basis. That's how you make the really cool money and do the really cool things. So if you're complaining about money: do you want to do the really cool things? If you don't want to do the really cool things, you're not going to make really cool money. I think that's the synopsis.

Steve Shaw: No, it's awesome. Dave?

Dave Rogers: You've said that before. I heard one of your podcasts where you talked about it. I don't know if it's a generational thing, I don't know what it is, but there are a lot of people out there who don't want to train: individuals, managers, stores. Steve and I talk about this all the time. Some places just aren't equipped for it. I mentioned one time that we're using the podcast as a training tool, and the snarky remarks you get back... I don't really care what social media people say, but it's "If you're not paying me to listen to the podcast, I'm not listening to it. Why would I train driving home or going to work?" There's just a culture of some people out there who don't want to do it.

Like I said one time when we talked: when I was younger, my boss sent me to school. I went to school. I drove my car. I bought my own lunch if they weren't serving lunch. I paid my own tolls. I never thought of asking for reimbursement for that stuff. Dumbass, I never thought of it. But now it's, "I don't want to go to school, I don't want to do this, who's paying for this?" It is a challenge. But I like what you said: pride in what you do, pride in your position. "I want to be the number one tech when I go to that tech contest." That's got to be the culture you're trying to grow, because without that, you're right. Why do you want to be an A technician and get all the shit work? Why not stay a B tech and just get all the gravy? That's what happens sometimes.

$150,000 aspirations and $50,000 effort 31:02

Joshua Taylor: Well, I think that's one of the biggest challenges, Dave, and I think both you and Steve probably see it on a regular basis. One of the challenges a lot of leaders are facing right now is that they don't know how to manage expectations, and they don't know how to help technicians, or advisors for that matter, manage their own expectations. It's very difficult as an individual to have $150,000-a-year aspirations but put in $50,000-a-year effort. That's one of the challenges we as an industry have to coach to.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with this. In fact, I love the folks out there who say, "I want to come into work at 7:30 in the morning and start at eight o'clock. At ten o'clock, I stop for 15 minutes. At twelve o'clock, I stop for 30 minutes. At three o'clock, I stop for 15 minutes. And at five o'clock, I go home. During the time I'm punched in on a job, I'm working to the best of my ability and capability. Then I want to go home to my family, see my wife and my kids, play and have a good time. And on the weekend, I take the weekend off." I love those people. They understand what they want. They understand what they're capable of doing. It doesn't matter whether they're capable of more or not. They understand what they want, and they're doing it.

The challenge you and Steve and I have on a regular basis in this industry is that we have a lot of people, way more than we should, because we're not managing expectations. We have way more technicians and advisors who desperately want the $150,000-a-year paycheck but only want to put in the $50,000-a-year effort. From my standpoint, that's a leadership failure. One hundred percent, that's a leadership failure. Because that's an onboarding failure, that's a lack of coaching and development failure, and then it's a lack of courage to say, "You don't work here anymore." At some point you need to recognize your own failure as a leader: "I probably shouldn't have hired this person in the first place." Promote them to customer.

Steve Shaw: That's very true. Very true.

Dave Rogers: It is true. I had that conversation with somebody the other day. I didn't use the $150,000-a-year job and $50,000 effort line, but I said, "You're making $125,000 a year, and for the amount of effort you're putting in, you should be a valet." I'm going to steal your line going forward. I like it.

A five-minute habit for every general manager 33:37

Steve Shaw: Well, I was going to ask Joshua if he could give some advice to our managers and general managers about their technicians. Because as you're well aware, Joshua, what general manager loves going out to the shop and talking to techs? How many of them just avoid it, avoid fixed ops as much as they can and defer to their directors? That's our whole goal. We love our world and where we're at. We want people to be more appreciative of fixed operations, especially the shop and our parts department. So my wrap-up ask to you is: talk to our general managers. What could our GMs do better to promote that livelihood to their technicians? Because you're getting to speak to a bunch of them right now.

Joshua Taylor: I think the best possible thing, and I've shared this a couple of times, but I'm going to be a little more tactical with it this time: I avidly say that one-to-ones are the most beneficial thing you can do with technicians. But because that's so time-consuming, and I've had feedback since I've said it a bunch of times in the last six months, think about something you can do tomorrow. Instead of walking into the building from the front, walk in from the back.

When you walk through the service door from the back, the same door everybody else in the shop uses, take five minutes with the first face you see. Not 15. Don't set up a meeting. Take five minutes. Somebody you haven't talked to in a while, maybe in months, but you know they're there. It doesn't matter whether they're a high producer or a low producer. Have five minutes with them. And at the end of that, ask the question I'd say you need to ask on a regular basis: "What's something I can change in the next 90 days that's going to improve your life, your wellness or your productivity here with this business? What's one thing I can change in the next 90 days?"

Then finish that conversation, and most importantly, remember the thing they told you. Maybe they showed you, maybe they walked you across the shop. It could be super big, it could be super small. It doesn't matter. But in the next 90 days, do something about that thing. Do something, anything, about that thing. And when you finish doing that thing they asked for, go out and ask them the same question again, so you have another thing to do in the next 90 days. And do that with everybody in the shop.

Not pay, not benefits, not time off, none of the stuff that's common in the market, like "they're not paying enough." No. Something in the shop: tactical, tools, floor, walls, paint, sound deadening. My goodness, I had feedback from a service manager that the general manager of the store refused to replace the seal around the man door. The reason the techs in the shop wanted it so badly was that when the wind came from a certain direction, it whistled every time it was windy. And it was loud. If they were trying to listen for a noise, bouncing the tie rods around, they couldn't hear it because the whistle was so loud. And he refused to replace the weather strip on the man door to the shop. Little things go a crazy long distance. So that's as tactical as I can make it in as short a time as I can give it. Five minutes is all it takes.

Steve Shaw: Awesome. Dave, you want to wrap us up?

Dave Rogers: No, man, that's the greatest GM tip of the day, or tip of the week, in a while. That's good. One thing for one individual in the shop. And you're right: it's not pay, it's not vacation, it's not days off. It's always those little annoying things that just drive people crazy. And you know what the other thing is? Maybe they'll think you care. Imagine that. I think with that, we've got to cut it. Thirty-seven minutes in. We kept Joshua a lot longer than we said we would.

Steve Shaw: Joshua Taylor. His podcast is the Wrench Turner's Podcast. We'll have it in the show notes below. Everybody, tune in to Joshua Taylor, hit like and subscribe, go visit his podcast and tell everybody about it, because I love it already. Joshua, again, thank you so much. Dave, I'll see you guys next week.

Dave Rogers: Yep, talk to you, Steve.

Joshua Taylor: See you later. Thank you very much, Steve. Dave, really appreciate it. Fixed Ops Focus.