#86 Part 3 PDR Shop
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Speaker: [00:00:00] One, two.
Welcome back. Another episode of the All Access podcast from Dent Repair Now. This is my first official one from the Atlanta airport. We're on our way to Rome. Melissa is sitting off camera over there, smirking at me, and, uh, I'm gonna try not to be an idiot and mute this this time. Um, anyways, cool terminal here.
Got a sweet GT3 race car down there. Uh, so that was cool. I was trying to figure out how to make that my background, but I didn't bring any tripods. So this is, uh, part three of the shop versus mobile, like shop life. Um, [00:01:00] we talked, we started in episode one or part one about how comparing and contrasting shop versus mobile.
Uh, session two, we talked a little bit about some of the, what it looked like to open it, open the shop, uh, some of the pitfalls, some of the wins, and everything like that. Now six and a half years in, uh, I'm gonna talk about what it has evolved to, what the new shop is like, some of the things that we've tried over the years that worked and that have haven't worked.
Uh, give you a little insight there. And, uh, our flight is delayed by, like, an hour and 40 minutes. We have plenty of time. There's no rush, so I don't have to blow this out too fast. Uh, and we're just gonna go get dinner when I'm done.
So the evolution of the shop Where did we go? How did we get to where we're at today? Uh, the first big step post having a [00:02:00] shop was getting Dave, right? Adding, adding a shop tech while I was out doing a bunch of Hiko trainings and everything like that, and trying to work on the business. Uh, having another technician in the shop to free me up to work on what I wanted to work on on the business was amazing.
Uh, I'm really bummed that we lost Dave, but we're really happy that Dave's still around. So it's a, it's a catch-22.
That was one of the more freeing things that, that we've done while having the shop, uh, was, was adding that employee to help take some of the load off. Now, fast-forward to now, uh, and we are still down a tech, uh, which is why we are looking for apprentices, et cetera. Uh, and John, we're gonna talk when I get back.
Um-
As we've grown, uh, we've [00:03:00] tried to supplement some stuff because no matter what I do, what I've found, whether it's mobile shop, uh, when the weather turns bad, right, if we have a horrible, wet, messy, snowy winter, it doesn't seem to matter how much I advertise, nobody's looking at the cars. So we've tried, uh, a couple of things to supplement the shop, right?
To, to have more, uh, channels of, of repair. Uh, and for the most part, unsuccessfully, right? So we're gonna talk about what those look like, what we, what we tried to add on. Um, the, the first add-on we looked at doing was ceramic coating, right? Good, high profit margin, um, short learning curve to get into. The downside o- of why we d- we ended up not even pulling the trigger on it, but, right, went down, pretty far down the rabbit hole, tested coatings, tested installs.[00:04:00]
Because the first shop was so small, right, ultimately it had three bays, but really only two were working bays. The third bay was sort of storage because there was zero storage at that shop Because of the turnaround time on the ceramic coatings, right? Like, the, they had to cure for 24 hours or whatever it was.
I don't even remember all of my numbers. At the end of the day, because of the bad weather, especially in Pittsburgh, we were gonna be stuck with keeping these cars inside, uh, and tying up a bay, which was the exact opposite of more production that we were looking for. So first step into that was, was ceramic coatings.
Uh, and also, I never really found a company that I truly believed in their product, uh, and the warranty, I suppose, that, that they, uh, offered. Like, none of it made sense to me. But anyways, that was a no-go. The next add-on [00:05:00] we looked at was PPF. Now, I personally tried to do PPF in Pittsburgh back in '06, late '06, early '07.
Mack was just a baby. Probably early '07. Um, went, found a good product. Got pretty good at installs. Man, I don't know if it's head trash or if it was my inability to sell. I couldn't sell it to save my soul, right? It just was, it was a struggle. The cost was expensive. You mess up one piece of a bumper, you're recutting the whole bumper.
Paying to recut, losing all that film. Like, we struggled. But in trying to build the shop out, I talked to Dave and Jake, and we sort of powwowed around and, like, patterns had gotten better, materials had gotten better, and we decided to take another swing at it. Sent Dave and Jake out to, uh, training. Uh, Jake never really got into it.
Dave, man, he picked it [00:06:00] up pretty quick. His installs were great, uh, right out of the word, right from the word go. Um, but man, I came back to that same issue where selling it was difficult. Like, people here, and I d- again, I don't know if it's ... I think I'm way better at sales now, but I don't know if it's a- value proposition where people are like well I know I just paid all this money for the car but I'm not gonna pay 2,000 bucks or 3,000 bucks or whatever a full front wrap was man that's crazy I'll just get the car painted like and it was struggle struggle struggle and then like the downside of that was because the learning curve because there is a learning curve with it and you get a difficult car and it kicks your butt and do a bunch of film Dave was struggling because uh we weren't doing enough cars right so we got a little rusty so we fought through [00:07:00] that and then just scrapped it right like uh cost to do the car it was just too much it was no good funny turn of events at one of the round tables we've done at MTE uh Matt Moore being the uh spreadsheet master that he is uh actually mapped it all out and surprisingly the lead time or the runway to get from you know starting PPF to proficient and profitable was almost the same amount of time it took to get a technician up to speed on PDR right so in my mind like just do another PDR tech and find more work instead of battling all the um hiccups that come with with PPF right so that was our struggle as well fast forward a little bit further down the road and we um Had hired some more people to help [00:08:00] try to grow the business and, uh, one of the employees was really interested in not doing office work and she wanted to get her hands dirty.
Like, get into something and do a skill, like have a skill, look for that kind of career. So we started looking outside of what we can do. She tried PDR and just didn't have the attention to detail, I think, to, to get it. Like, the, the, the focus wasn't there and I, I don't think I was sure that she was gonna be around long enough to invest in teaching PDR.
So we started to look at window tint Reached out to some trainers and actually ended up finding a trainer that we do business with regularly now who was about two hours east of us. Uh, came in, did a training. We actually pulled Mac out, uh, to let him check it out as he was getting a little bit older.
And, uh, man, the window tint made a whole lot more sense. It, it became more like a [00:09:00] commodity decision. Like, people weren't overthinking window film the way they were overthinking PPF. Uh, and went through that, and Dana and Dave took the full class, Mac took some, and we started that. And with just a little bit of practice, we were up and running and doing, um, tint jobs pretty quickly.
Like, comparatively to all of the other services that we tried to build with, window tint was the easiest. The, the learning curve was short. The cost for the film was short. The install was pretty easy. And when you messed up, like you were throwing away dollars, a couple of dollars, not tens or hundreds of dollars, right?
So pretty simple to move into that. Started to do that, um, and we were looking for a way to grow as we were moving into the new shop, right? We were going from a 1,500 [00:10:00] square foot building altogether to a 17, 1,800 square foot shop, plus a customer area, plus a studio, um, with more parking in a better location, right?
So we were looking for something to bring on there. The window tint was a great fit. Uh, we lost that tint employee that we were concerned with. Uh, and then Mac stepped up and went right into tint and learned it very quickly, sort of kept the tint side of things going. The only reason we stopped tint was it was, like, called an add-on service, and Mac picked up PDR so well that I didn't have enough tint work to justify bringing an employee.
So we just let it go to let Mac focus 100% on PDR. Truly believe that that was the absolute right play to, to make that move and just get away from tint. Uh, and we've got a couple of people who we refer out to [00:11:00] now, and it's nice and simple, uh, and we don't have to worry about it
Let's talk about where we've evolved to, how the new shop is working out. Well, I said in the last episode that the shop location was, I thought, fantastic, and for reachability, it really was fantastic. For walk-in ability, it was absolutely not as fantastic as it looked. But I figured, and I always sort of had the, um, thought that even if you have an off-the-beaten-path shop, you can advertise your way out of that bad space, right?
You can throw enough money at Google Ads or Facebook or YouTube that you can pull people in, and you don't need to worry about it From the word go when we moved into our new location. We're now on the main secondary north-south route from Washington, PA to Pittsburgh. But we're really in the South Hills.
We're in a, a better [00:12:00] demographic, uh, higher income, great school district. Most importantly, I think We're on a stretch of road that people are going to places on. Nobody... It's not a commute through, it's not a pass through. It's a we're going somewhere. We're in the same parking lot as a big gas station. Uh, we're right next to a Sherwin-Williams Paints.
Uh, there's a little car dealer next door. There's restaurants, uh, two doors down, a new place opening up three doors down. If you remember last episode, I talked about how it took three or maybe four years before we really started getting good walk-in traffic. This new location, from week one, as soon as we put the signs up and opened up, the walk-in traffic was already as good as it was at the first shop after six years.
Like, we already had that kind of walk-in traffic, and now we've been there [00:13:00] for two, a little over two years. The walk-in traffic, man, there are days where you, like, can't hardly get anything done because there are so many people stopping in to get quotes. Uh, really seeing how that worked changed my, my thought or my philosophy on can you just advertise your way out of a bad location or out of a less than ideal location?
I really don't think you can. Just seeing the, the magic of good location, good signage, good traffic, good demographics, man, that's the answer. You have to be there, uh, to be able to, to make that automatically happen. Like, it's just sort of unbelievable. Uh, me and Melissa the whole time have been like, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe the traffic we get from having that location[00:14:00]
Another evolution of a new shop. We were ready, or I don't know if we were ready, we were at least prepared for a build-out, uh, on this one. You know, I said that original shop was like target of opportunity, short-term lease. We always had that one-year window of like, "Oh, you can, you're gonna get it." It's like that State Farm commercial with the carrot.
They were like, "You can stay for another year. Oh, you almost had it." And you keep going. Here we, we were able to sign a long-term lease, so five years with, uh, first right of refusal for another five years. So that gives us, uh, if we want it, a 10-year runway to operate on, right? Not a 10-month questionable runway to operate on.
So we were able to invest a, a little better, better in the shop, right? We went in... Well, actually, Melissa went in and spearheaded this because I ended up out on the road at a hailstorm helping a buddy out. What's up, Dan? Um- [00:15:00] When we talked about the last place being filthy, this new place was like the dirt wasn't just on the floor, like the grease had made its way up the walls.
You know, I think the building is not quite 30 years old, and it's been a mechanic shop the whole time until we took it, and I think that there was 30-year-old grease on the walls. When you walked in, man, you could just, you could smell that like old mechanic greasy... You should see Melissa's face off camera.
That old mechanic just greasy, dirty smell. In fact, probably the first year we were there on the hot days, the shop would get hot and you could like smell it wafting up through the floor even though we put the plastic decking down. Like, I mean, it was everywhere. There's one door frame that is still, we've scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed and like I think the grease has somehow embedded itself into the aluminum.[00:16:00]
It was, it was a mess. But we were ready for this build out, right? We wanted to come in and make a great first impression, and we realized that we were, we didn't know how good it would be, but we knew we were going from regular, uh, demographics to a higher end demographic, right? There's a, I think it's an eight or 10 acre, uh, BMW store across the street.
Like, we're sitting in a good spot. We laid out the floor, we painted the walls. We got all the banners up. Um, beautiful. We were able to have a beautiful customer waiting area. Uh, Melissa picked out some nice, uh, like bar height tables. Uh, we got Wi-Fi, we got some comfortable chairs. We've got plants. We've got a nice big, um, commercial desk that we bought.
We didn't have to build and chop it up with a circular saw and a Sawzall to make it fit. Like [00:17:00] it just went in and bolted in. Um, spots for artwork. Uh, really truly changing the customer experience. Air conditioned, right? Real fancy. We're bougie now. Um, walls that go all the way up. A big beautiful picture window that looks into the shop.
I, I still feel a little nervous when customers are sitting there like, "What's he doing to my car? What are we doing?" Um, but they love to be able to watch and see what's going on in the shop. In fact, had a customer yesterday that came in, uh, Mac was supposed to do it. Little bit over his head. It was just one of those sharp, like, you put a light on it...
It wasn't real big. Like, it actually was a one-inch dent, but you put a light on it and you can't see the bottom of the dent. On a Atlas where the door, like, comes down and then it reverses in at an angle, not a concave. I guess it's concave, but it's like a reverse angle. And it was s- the door opened up into something.
Mac was like... He, I could [00:18:00] see the panic in his eyes. Anyways, I'm like, "I got it, bud, I'll do it. I don't really have time to do it, but we'll do it." Also, part of the reason of how I ended up here, right, recording in Atlanta, is I had an extra hour or so on that door yesterday. So I'm in, and man, I'm sweating it.
The customer's waiting. It's the end of the day. I've got a nasty car sitting in the other bay I still need to finish. Gotta go on vacation. And, uh, I'm back and forth. So it's sharp enough that you bring it up. At the volcano is you knock it down. I probably fixed the dent 15 times to get it flat Every time I look over, the dude's like crowing his neck, looking through the window like, "What's going on?
What are you doing?" He was like, "I'll pull the car in the shop for you." He does that. "No, you're not doing that." But that kind of guy. So I go up and grab him, or I open the door and I'm like, "Hey, Bob, do you wanna come back?" And, uh, he's like, "Man, I know you did a good job on that. I was watching you work." And you're just [00:19:00] back and forth and back and forth.
Like, him watching the repair, it could've been not a perfect repair and he would've been stoked to go get it because he got to sit there and watch, uh, the whole time. Um, we added the studio. You guys know I do trainings, uh, and, and seminars. Having the studio space in the shop is so nice because, well, when I'm not working like a maniac , we can go back and film and create content away from the shop.
You know, at the old shop, we'd work all day, or Dave would work all day, and then if we wanted to do content, we'd have to move all the stuff and set all of our stuff up and then film, and it wasn't air-conditioned or anything. Now, with the studio space, we can do that. I can hold classes and teach while repairs are still going on in the shop.
It really has been an amazing evolution into the bigger, better shop. Now, [00:20:00] if you can swing it and you wanna do it and you're thinking about a shop, I say go big. I think had we tried to come into this shop with the expenses that this shop comes with six and a half years ago, I don't know that we would've made it.
I don't know that we would've had the runway to get it off the ground and up. Um, or we certainly wouldn't have been profitable. Like, I, I really don't think that we could've pulled it off back in 2018 With the trying to learn the ropes and figure out how to do the repairs and get the insurance, um workflow down.
Like things have changed a lot, but it's been amazing. Now, I can't remember if it's in part two or if it's in part two that was muted. Uh, but I talked about, uh, you know, we talked about mobile repair, mobile service fees, company policies to make them come in [00:21:00] When we moved to the new shop, Jennifer chose not to continue with the company, right?
She said she didn't wanna come into work. She didn't wanna be there every day, which is cool, like it wasn't what she signed up for. But now I had new people. At first we had one employee step up, and then we had a new hire, Shannon, uh, that took it over We tried to, because they weren't good at phone skills yet, right?
They hadn't learned how to do the phone skills. We tried to switch the initial close to, "Great, let's schedule you an estimate at the shop." Right? More body shop style. Like body shops don't give a quote. They say, "Come in and get an estimate." We tried implementing the, "We don't wanna give you a quote over the phone.
We just want you to show up and get an estimate." That was like the second-biggest [00:22:00] train wreck in the shop history, right? Since we started in the shop. Number one was letting somebody else come in and try to do our Google Ads, and that like drove that into the ground. I don't even wanna think about how much we lost.
I think Melissa just got a gray hair when I mentioned that. Um, the second-biggest mistake was trying to switch the close to, "Hey, just come on in and we'll get you a quote. It's no sweat at all
We were trying to schedule them out. People weren't coming the same day. The cancellations, the no-shows on those were absolutely ridiculous. If you've got a tip on how to get people to stop in for estimates instead of just over the phone, I'd love to hear it, but I can tell you that we totally failed at that, and quickly studied up, right, re-studied up on, on how to do phone skills, sent them all back through Keith's phone skills course, worked through it.[00:23:00]
We do a good job that way. We get lots of customers coming in. Um, but the... Man, we've not got that down to a science yet. Now, my buddy Dan up in New York, the dent guy, he currently also going through some employee loss, is testing out, and so far seems to be doing well, with a scheduling function where he's setting windows of time where he'll do estimates, and when somebody wants an estimate, he's letting them go in and book available times on his schedule.
Pretty new. Um, maybe we'll get him on to talk about it. In fact, he's been on here before. Um, anyways, we may look at opening something like that up, uh, as, as chatbots and AI becomes more, um, customer-facing. Although I don't love it, it, it may be an evolution, just like I fought text [00:24:00] messages forever, uh, and we're cooler with texting now I think there may be some- something to letting the customer sort of walk through a, um, qualification chat and then get in and schedule their own, uh, meeting to come in and get the car looked at.
We'll see. I'm not sold on that, especially with as poorly as it went to try to close to estimates only. Like, that was bad. 10 out of 10 would not recom- or zero out of 10 would not recommend that. Uh, but if you have tips, I'd love to hear them. And other evolutions. Oh, w- another thing we've done, I think, and I think this originally was a holdover from being mobile, where we were trying to do, other than, like, hail claims, we were trying to do, uh, all cars in a day, right?
Like, we're trying to fill the day up and [00:25:00] just make it happen. We, over the last 18 months, 20 months, have started holding cars longer, right? As we get into these more difficult repairs, uh, instead of trying to do them in a day, and I may have a less than a day of time into them, straight through or when they're done, we're holding them for multiple days for a few reasons.
One, we still get the occasional cancellation, no call, no show. If I had my whole day booked out for a big job and then they no show, I could have a $0 day, which is bad. Uh, if you're not good at accounting, that's not good. There's no money coming in the door So if we do cancel, at least that car was spread out, pieces of that car were spread out over multiple days, not one full day, and then we have a chance to make up the next couple of days.
I've also noticed that my repair quality on [00:26:00] smashes has gone up because I'm not trying to grind it out in one day, and I'm not trying to finish exhausted. We're able to come back in the next day with a fresh mind and look at it or jump off and do a smaller job, sort of reset your brain that way, and then come back into the car.
As we're getting into bigger dollars, more insurance claims, there's no reason to try to turn that in a day. Body shops don't turn it in a day. Body shops rarely turn it a week. So why kill ourselves to try to do that stuff in a day when we have the shop, and we have the space, and we can spread it out, and make it a less stressful, uh, repair, right?
So some things to think about there. Hmm. I think that's a pretty good update on the evolution of where we're at. Currently, just busy trying to get it all done, uh, which is good problems to have, uh, albeit still problems. Um, anyways, [00:27:00] I think that's it. I think it is time for vacation. I will find strong enough Wi-Fi somewhere to get these uploaded, or you won't see them.
So these may be uploaded from Rome, uh, while we're out and about. I'll just set it in the corner, and it doesn't matter how slow the Wi-Fi is. Um, I'll give you a tool of the week. Since, since I couldn't do it, I thought we were gonna scrap it. I've got a little extra time, and we're currently using the tool of the week, so let's head over to this.
All right, so my tool of the week is actually my mic, my little DJI Mic Mini right there, and receiver. You gotta have good audio, especially if you're gonna unmute your mic and actually use it. Um, but anyways, on our content, I keep this on my workbench. Um, if I need to do a run-and-gun video, I don't need to go set up big mics or [00:28:00] certainly not the podcast mic.
But the phone mic is just not that good, and if you get a little bit farther away from it, the audio gets pretty terrible. These little Mic Minis, you've got the receiver plugged into the computer right here. It plugs into the computer, it plugs into your phone. Um, comes with a pair in this little handy-dandy carrying bag with chargers, right, and magnets, and dead cats.
That's what those are called in case you didn't know. In case you're out in the wind or a noisy shop, these little things for $60 on Amazon pack an amazing punch. In fact, Fab, I know you watch this 'cause you seem to watch all my episodes. Your dad makes some great videos, but he's a little bit too far away from the old phone.
Either buy him a set or tell him to hop on Amazon and get a set of these and up his audio game on his videos. So, there is your tool of the week, uh, live from the Atlanta Airport on our way to Italy. [00:29:00] All right, let's switch back here. Uh, screwed that up. There we go. All right. Guys, thanks so much for watching.
Uh, again, I'll get these published... Well, I guess they'll already be published or you wouldn't be watching this. I will talk to you when we get back, uh, from our trip, and, uh, really look forward to giving you a little download on how all of that went. You wanna say goodbye? Mm-mm. All right, she doesn't wanna say goodbye.
All right. Well, arrivederci. We're off to Italy. We'll see you guys.
