Episode Description
Any business owner knows that their livelihood is largely dependent on having quality staff. As the independent auto repair industry evolves, it becomes increasingly difficult to staff roles in your shop properly. Changes in technology and the workforce have forced some shop owners to get a little more creative when it comes to hiring staff and what roles are present in their shop.
On today’s episode (LIVE on Facebook at 1p ET/ 10a PT) we have Digital Shop Conference 2020 presenter Fred Gestwicki (Fix it With Fred, Canton, OH) on the show to talk about how he uses some tried-and-true methods as well as some forward-thinking techniques to successfully staff his shop.
Episode Transcript
*This transcript was generated using Artificial Intelligence. Errors may occur. If you notice an error, please contact [email protected].
Tom Dorsey (00:01):
Ho ho. Welcome to this week’s edition of twas the Week Before Christmas Digital Shop Talk Radio episode. I’m Santa Claus and I got Fred Gestwicki from Fix-It with Fred in Canton, Ohio here today to talk to us about how do we attract, recruit and retain the very best elfs for your toy shop Fred up here in the North Pole. Santa’s got it easy, right? I got mean once an elf makes it up here, where are they going to go? There’s not a lot of employers at the North Pole, so they come to work in Santa’s toy shop and I just want to be on, up and up and make sure you tell you that Santa follows all federal regulations when it comes to employment practices. I’m not running no sweat shop up in the North Pole, but Fred, for an automotive repair shop like yourself, you probably don’t have it that captive labor pool like Santa does. How do you keep your shop running? How do you find those perfect employees for your operation?
Fred Gestwicki (01:04):
Well Tom, interestingly, the analogy you gave is perfect because it’s the opposite of automotive. Santa’s got it on lockdown. If he fires elf, they’ll come crawling back because they can’t get a job anywhere else unless they’re testing kids’ bikes or checking waiting pools, there’s not much they can do. So he has lack of the entire elf community to work for him. And we have the opposite problem as every shop owner knows there’s a tremendous shortage in all the blue collar industries including ours, and that shortage is getting worse and it’s going to continue to get worse for at least the next five years. So finding employees is hard, finding the right employees is hard and keeping them, so I’ll give you a very basic version because at the ATI super conference, I taught a one hour class about our hiring practice. And you attended that Tom, if I remember right? Sure did a lot of good information. So when you go to hire somebody, you have to first decide who you need because your shop’s busy, all the shops are busy and don’t have enough mechanics. So you’re going to hire out a desperation, take this poor guy or girl that applied to shove them in your shop because you need a body and then they hate it and your mechanics hate it and you lose two, they quit and somebody else quits. Worst case scenario, right?
Tom Dorsey (02:19):
Yeah. And it snowballs, right? It snowballs,
Fred Gestwicki (02:21):
It snowballs. It’s a terrible effect. We include our staff with the hiring process. First we sit down and figure out what do we need? What kind of technician and not an A tech, a B Tech, a GS, do we need a tech that is money hungry? Do we need a tech that focuses on quality? What are some characteristics and qualities that all of our techs in our culture have? So when we look for somebody and we’re desperate, we compare that applicant to the fictitious applicant we built. And then
Tom Dorsey (02:54):
So you create an ideal candidate profile. Yep.
Fred Gestwicki (02:57):
You profile, you build who you want
Tom Dorsey (03:00):
An
Fred Gestwicki (03:01):
Interview Tom, before you even put the ad out, figure out who you want, not their name, everything else about them.
Tom Dorsey (03:07):
And then you’re getting input from the rest of the crew. The techs are telling you kind of who they want to work with and what’s been working and what doesn’t work. And the service writers are giving some input. The boss I’m sure is giving some input.
Fred Gestwicki (03:18):
See, what’s interesting is, and most shop owners know it sucks when you’re the boss because you walk in a room and say, Hey guys, I think we should close tomorrow. What do you think? They’re all going to agree with you. The boss just talked. So when you build fictitious employees, these model employee, what do you guys want to see me hire? And you don’t say anything and you listen and listen and even if they get it wrong, you’re the boss, you’re going to hire who you want to hire in the bottom and the end anyways. So you got to listen. And then when you get those two applicants, because you’ve been running an ad for six months and only two mechanics applied, you bring them in, you interview and then you go, yeah, let’s hire ’em. Bad idea ’em, talk to your mechanics, let ’em talk to your advisors. I mean if you have a really close customer, let ’em talk to a customer. And if you explain to them in the very beginning, here’s what I’m going to do, clearly you’re a mechanic, clearly you qualify for our position. We want to make sure you fit our team and our culture because we want this to be a long-term career for you. If you explain that in the beginning, even a mechanic can understand that
(04:35):
And 20 plus years as a mechanic, I’m allowed to say that because I am
Tom Dorsey (04:38):
One. Exactly. No, that’s a great point, right? Is that you got to have that cultural fit. So what about this, right? And of course it depends on your insurance regulations and whatever, but do you ever bring somebody in and just put ’em into, give ’em some small job to do in your process in a busy day to see how they interact and do they have the skills?
Fred Gestwicki (05:04):
We do it because of the insurance In Ohio, I can’t have ’em touch the car. But what we offer, it depends on the level of tech because if it’s a master tech, you’re not going to get ’em to come in and hang out with you. They’re not going to do it. They know what they’re doing.
Tom Dorsey (05:18):
But
Fred Gestwicki (05:18):
You get below those MacGyver superheroes with the M on their chest for Mr. Mechanic, we offer a job shadow. We get closer to the end of our interview process because our interview process is between four and seven interviews long. And we make that clear to the applicant you’re going to spend time interviewing because when we hire you, you’re the right guy. We’d like to offer you come in for two or three hours in the morning, hang out with the mechanics, kind of see what it’s like at day here. And the mechanics, we give ’em an hour with each one half hour with each one. Here I’m inspecting a car. This is the app we use. And you show ’em and then you say, Hey, can you mark this while I check the car? And you see how well they take direction, give them a little exposure so that they’re not imagining because most shop owners don’t remember what it was like to apply for a job.
(06:08):
They just don’t. Their name’s on the sign, they’re the boss. They don’t know that when you walk into a place filled with total strangers, you’re considering changing your life, changing your income, changing everything you know about work and you wonder about all this stuff. And if you can remove that wonder and give them some concrete answers, here’s how they do stuff. I really like that these guys look every car over because they look out for the customer, they sell work. I don’t like that this place, they don’t have a really crappy parking lot. And if I wouldn’t have hung out with the mechanics and went out back, I wouldn’t have saw, it’s like a minefield. All those things. You give them a little taste of what it’s like and then at the end sit down with them, talk to ’em, what do you think? And then listen. And they’ll let you know what’s going to be the problem. If you hire them at that time, their initial instinct, they’re going to say, I didn’t like this, I liked this. And you’re going to know what you’re going to have to overcome and you haven’t spent any money, you haven’t started giving ’em a W2, you haven’t turned all those things on that are a pain in the butt when you hire somebody and then have to fire ’em a week later.
Tom Dorsey (07:17):
Oh yeah, yeah. That’s just incredibly expensive. And then like you said, it’s just the amount of candidates out there so thin to begin with when you’re, you’re spinning your wheels and bringing them through like that is kill you. We talked, gosh, it’s probably six, seven months back, we were talking a little bit about best practices in hiring and we were talking about developing a deep bench and I think that, I’m pretty sure that you had had somebody, maybe you just recently had hired ’em off the bench or you got somebody on the bench, but what do you doing there and how’s that been working out for you since last time we talked about it? Have you been able to get some prospective people that you can just keep on the shelf and then have a well to go to when you need to?
Fred Gestwicki (08:01):
So this year has been interesting for us because it’s been a really good growth year on both sides of the count, the customer side and the employee side. So I had a plan for all of 2019 of staffing and who I was going to need and when we were going to need him. So I filled my bench and I actually used my last bench person next Tuesday as his 90 days. He’s actually been with us for 90 days and I haven’t filled my bench again and I have a reason when you hire three people in one year in a shop that only has seven employees total, that’s a lot. That’s a huge change. I don’t know what we’re going to need next because our newest employee hasn’t fully settled in. He’s just at the end of his 90 days, he’s kind of figured out his place, but he’s not ready to give us input And going into the winter like we are, we’re finding our groove and we’re going to try in the month of January to establish what is our plan for 2020, what kind of tech do you guys see that you’re going to need as we increase our car count, you become overwhelmed.
(09:12):
Are you going to need a B tech? Are you going to need a C tech? Are you going to need another A tech? What are we going to need to bring you in? And then my advisor bench, I had a couple and I stayed in contact with them. They actually found employment elsewhere, which is okay because one of them is an advisor. One of them went into a whole nother field. But imagine if you had an advisor on your bench, you communicate with them regularly and then they end up needing to get a job sooner and they find another job, but you’ve been talking to them. So they work at a shop dealership with other advisors and one of the other advisors is like, man, I kind of hate this place. Do you know anybody hiring? I actually turned a bench candidate that got off the bench themselves into a staffing advocate for us.
(10:00):
They were on board with joining with what we’re doing, but my timeline and their lifetime line didn’t match up. And that’s okay. So now I’ve got somebody working at another dealer or at a dealership that thinks the world of us, they were going to work here someday. And it’s basically a recruiter out there in the world. That bench concept is so hard for people to think about, but it’s most shop owners are either my generation, generation X or baby boomer generation. And those two generations don’t know what it’s like to be a millennial. We think they’re lazy and stupid and we just don’t understand them. Millennials are good with waiting. You just have to understand what motivates ’em. So when you get a millennial and you put ’em on your bench and you just talk to ’em about it, they’ll go, okay, I’ll just stay where I’m at for six months.
Tom Dorsey (10:49):
Yeah, man, that’s really brilliant if you think about it because most people probably don’t do that. They’re like, Hey, I really don’t have a spot for you now I’ll keep your resume on file. And then when that guy quits or something is going to drive an action and now I’m going to reach out to this guy after six months, who knows? The guy’s like who I’m working over here, blah, blah, blah. You weren’t really keep him in the loop. Talk to him, be transparent, build a relationship and just like that. Now all of a sudden you’ve duplicated your effort. You got a guy out there talking good about you at a dealership, dealerships pick up a lot of the guys coming out of school. I mean the first place a lot of these guys go to wants to be that dealership. And if you got a guy right there on there and you’d steer some folks your way, I mean, hey, that’s just going to benefit you. And we did a show not too long, we were talking with Russ and about networking and we were talking about driving new customers, but man, that really brings another side to it, Fred, is to say that networking through prospective employees to gain quality prospects for your business is a genius idea.
Fred Gestwicki (12:00):
And as unique as it is, just yesterday, there was a lady about it, two years ago I interviewed you for an advisor position and she wasn’t the right fit for us. And I told her that. I said, I think you’d be a great advisor and I just don’t know that you would click with the team that we have and the culture we have, but I really think you’d be a great advisor at the right shop. She’s like, are you not hiring me? I’m like, no, I’m not. But I want you to know I don’t think you suck. I think you’re good. I just don’t think you fit here. She’s like, that’s interesting. Yesterday she messaged me because during the interview process, I show them the TVP, I show them the tablet. I don’t want them to go through shock. Like What? You don’t use pens? No, I don’t use pens.
Tom Dorsey (12:42):
What’s a pen? She
Fred Gestwicki (12:44):
Messaged me because the shop she’s at now, she wants AutoVitals and I just got her as a referral for AutoVitals yesterday because she wanted goes that really cool program where you’re texting your texts and messaging your customers. I’m like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I thought that was pretty unique that in the last couple months I’ve talked to several people that were either on our bench or were applicants that didn’t make it. And here’s the mindset I use Tom when I’m talking to an applicant, whether I’m telling them no or I’m telling them yes or I’m telling them not right now, but later you got to think about when you’re done talking, what are they going to do next? So if I say you’re hired, I know what you’re going to do next, it’s easy. If I say, you are not hired, you’re going to leave, but whatcha going to do right after that?
(13:34):
How are you going to feel about the situation? I don’t want to make enemies. And when you say, I think we’re going to need you in April of this year, and here’s my plan, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they go, okay, what are they going to do next? What you said, Tom is where I’ll call you in the future. I’ll keep your resume on file. That guy’s not going to go home and sit there and wait for you to call him. He’s not. He’d give him a reason to. The method we use with the staffing bench is if we give them a reason to wait until we’re ready to take them on and we incentivize it with, Hey, during the next four months if we have a team event, I offered that you could come along, we’ve had bench candidates come to team meeting before, include ’em, give them a reason to wait for you if you just think they’re going to sit there and live life at a job they hate or unemployed and waiting for you to grow your business
Tom Dorsey (14:26):
Red line,
Fred Gestwicki (14:27):
Right? So that’s the mindset is you got to think about what are they going to do when you’re done talking and set them up to do what would be best for you and them both.
Tom Dorsey (14:37):
No, that mean that’s awesome, right? Because where else can you get a better advocate for your business? If somebody be like, wait a second, you don’t even work there, but you’re telling me, oh man, I can’t wait to go work there. I’m calling you up that day. If it’s all that good, let’s talk a little bit about where do we find that. One of my tricks I like to do, right, and it’s funny is because you start to get a lot of returns. Now I like to go on Indeed and then they have the little resume search function, and you can type in AutoVitals in a skill and boop, all of a sudden there’s 50 60 returns of technicians and service writers that have AutoVitals experience right there. Maybe they’re not down the street from you right now, but hey, you know what?
(15:20):
It might be not a bad idea to just reach out and say, I’m an AutoVitals shop. Where are you at? Are you willing to relocate? Maybe we can come to some subsidization of relocation if that’s going to be in your plan. Maybe they know somebody who also has AutoVitals experience or who wants to or is a good worker employee and a lot of skill and experience that’s in your area, you never know. And so it’s a really neat way to use that kind of search function. And I do it on LinkedIn also. You can get in LinkedIn, find some really good employees that way, some really good prospects that have the software that you’re looking for. You can do that with your point of sale RO writer experience or whatever you need to find. Just do searches that way. What are some of the other ways that you’re using to kind of headhunt?
Fred Gestwicki (16:08):
All right. Some of the ways I use people will start to frown when I say it, but the ways that I use, I welcome people to try it on me in the technician shortage. We’re not open on Saturdays. We do five days a week. So go find the closest dealership that’s open Saturday tire store, whatever you want to farm a tech out of. I
Tom Dorsey (16:31):
Love it.
Fred Gestwicki (16:32):
Park in the parking lot, two buildings down, get your binoculars and watch the shop for 15 minutes. Just watch ’em. And if somebody goes, what are you doing? You go, I’m watching that shop. Why? Because I’d like to talk to the mechanic that’s the most motivated in that shop, but I don’t want to stand at the door. They’re going to bug me. So I’m sitting down here with my binoculars watching them figure out the guy that’s the go-getter one you want and just walk up to the shop. Hey, you got a second? Sure. And then I’ve used a couple techniques at this point, hand him a business card with your cell phone number on it and say, if you worked for me, you’d be at home with your family today
(17:11):
Or ask him if you can’t get to that guy, grab a lube tech. Just grab whoever that you think you can get their attention and say, Hey, who’s the best guy in here? And they’ll tell you, oh, it’s him for sure. He’s the best one. All right. I want to talk to him about getting him a different job. I want him to work for me. Like what? Okay. And then just give the kid a handful of cards. Go what? Give this to all the techs. And I’ve had shop owners go, that’s wrong. So here’s my saying to shop owners have trouble with that. Do people quit their jobs because someone came to them and offered to them another job?
Tom Dorsey (17:44):
No. Sometimes
Fred Gestwicki (17:46):
They quit managers and they quit. Companies go to one of my guys. Go ahead, go approach ’em because they’re not leaving. It’s my job as the owner to make sure my team is happy and secure where they’re at, where they’re not going to leave. It’s the owner’s job. It’s literally the owner’s job to make sure that if someone came to one of your employees with a job offer, that your employee would be able to come up to you and say, Hey man, somebody came up to me and offered me this job. It was quite a compliment. See? Yeah, it is. And if somebody offers ’em triple the money, it’s kind of hard to say no to unless
Tom Dorsey (18:24):
You just the interest. A lot of times just the recognition. And what’s funny is when you’re talking about that lube tech, if you did something where, hey, this guy, he’s asking me to come, all of a sudden there’s kind of a jealousy, why didn’t that guy ask me to go join his shop? Let me find out more about that. Who are you? Why is he asking you to go join his shop and not me? So then there’s that takeaway and then you get that reciprocity. They call you back to find out more information. Right?
Fred Gestwicki (18:51):
Now, another hunting technique I’ve used is break your car. Okay, take your car or your motor car. Okay, take, you got a Chevy truck that the closed valves buried up underneath the tank and you aren’t going to get to it. Get under your vehicle and put a little note by the closed valve and cut the wire and bug your own car. Put a note. I really want to talk to you about a job. Here’s my cell phone number. Give me a call. Thank you for taking care of my truck. Engine light comes on, go to the dealership and say, you know what? We’ve hung all these parts. I really need your master mechanic on this. I’ll pay extra if I need to and have them give your vehicle, have the service advisor be the delivery bird to take your note. That’s a technique or getting a recall done on your loaner cars or your personal cars. Go to the dealership, get a recall and just look in the shop. And if they don’t have a sign that says, don’t come out of here, just go out there. Worst thing to do is tell you don’t do that. And you go, okay, if there were, let me back up. I hear so many shop owners, how do we find good techs? I’m having trouble finding texts. Do we think there’s this huge pile of texts in this spot that we don’t know to look? There aren’t any,
Tom Dorsey (20:06):
Somebody turn on the light, can’t find them.
Fred Gestwicki (20:08):
I also, I can’t find a money tree. I can’t find technicians. I can’t find air that’s heavy. There’s all these things I can’t find. So we’re going to have to not use the same staffing techniques that have worked for the past 70 years. The ways we’ve done it has worked really well. And in today’s market where there’s less workers than what we need to just put a net out in a lake where there’s only 18 fish in Lake Erie, you’re not going to catch a fish. You’re going to have to get sonar. You’re going to have to get a spear gat and you’re going to have to swim around and find them, man. And that’s why I’m using these non-conventional methods because the hiring where you go on Indeed and you go on Facebook and you go on ZipRecruiter and all these websites, there’s not enough mechanics for them to be waiting looking for a job. So if you’re hiring with ads, I mean that’s where they may go to look if they were going to look for a job. But the problem is they’re not looking
Tom Dorsey (21:02):
Ones you want to get recruited.
Fred Gestwicki (21:04):
Well, in the past, Tom Mechanics, were looking for jobs and employers were looking for mechanics. So indeed is where it puts the job seeker and employer together, right? So we’re taking the job seeker completely out of the equation. All we have is people that want, but there’s no one looking. So where do we go to find mechanics? You have to go to where they work and ask them if they want a different job because they’re not looking for another job. So hiring with an ad has the lowest success rate it’s had in a very long time because they’re not looking on these websites, they’re making good money at their job and they don’t know there’s something better out there. So that’s why we have to go a little extreme with it, Tom,
Tom Dorsey (21:47):
Man, that is brilliant really because I can see it, right? I can see the process is you build that ideal profile and that tells you where to go, right? You want a guy who works on BMWs where you’re going to go over here, buy this BMW dealership or you guy who has this, and then you can actually, I never even really thought about it, but you can run several tests if you as a customer and you can interact with those people. If it’s a rider and you see how their customer service is, do they have empathy? I mean, hell, you could stage you broke down on the side of the road on the way that they drive out of that shop and see if they stop to ask to help you or just drive by and you could
Fred Gestwicki (22:23):
Make your car have an intermittent noise, make it have an intermittent noise that’s super hard to duplicate. And then talk to the advisor, see how they handle. You go for a ride with the tech for a ride, you get everybody, man, go
Tom Dorsey (22:34):
For a ride.
Fred Gestwicki (22:36):
I mean when I say it, come to fix it or Fred poses a customer and ask to go for a ride with my mechanics. Go ahead. I am comfortable with the staff that I have. I chose them based off of what we need and I know what makes them happy, and I do my best to keep that happiness full.
Tom Dorsey (22:56):
So if you’ve got that strong culture, you got nothing to worry about. And then all you have to do is just expose prospective employees to that culture and let ’em make a decision. They’re adults. Everybody’s adult here. Nobody’s chained to a wall. I’m free to go where my passion takes me or where I feel like I’m going to be the best employee I can be and leave those decisions up to them. But I really think, I mean, just the ideas behind that Fred is really brilliant. It’s not sit down and complain. That’s the thing is we find ourselves so easy to go, oh, there’s a tech shortage and it’s nightmare. What do I do? I’m running all the ads I can think of on Googles or whatever and it’s just not working. It’s just not working well because you’re not working. And we hear that right here is that if you’re going to succeed, you got to get out there.
(23:56):
You got to tighten your boots and you got to go do what it takes. And I mean, you might as well do it smart. You can go out there and scream into the wind or you can go and find out who you want to work with. What do you really need from a business perspective and a culture perspective, how are they going to fit? How are they going to dovetail with the rest of the crew? And then just go out there and identify that person and go court ’em. Right? You figured out how to get married. You can probably figure out how to attract a good, strong, solid employee through the same way and build them up as part of the team, right? Part of the family.
Fred Gestwicki (24:33):
Tom, I have something that it’s related to this, but there’s going to be at least 5% of the shop owners out there watching. I don’t need another tech. I’m not listening to this. I’ve got enough, right? Well, no, there’s plenty. There’s some that they have enough technicians, right? I’m sure some shop owners that way
Tom Dorsey (24:51):
Today, right?
Fred Gestwicki (24:51):
So I don’t need, well, yeah, but it could be today. What if they’ve got a shop that everyone’s under age 40, they have their dream shop, it’s pumping what they want, and I don’t need any more mechanics. I don’t want to even grow anymore. I don’t need this. So let’s say one of your mechanic’s wives gets a job in California working for AutoVitals, making all this money. So you’re leaving now you need a tech instantly, or there’s shops closing all over the place because of the staffing shortage and because the baby boomers are getting too old to do this anymore. So what if the shop across town closes down and you’re like, Ooh, I could buy that cheap and have a second location. Now you need an advisor. Two tax, you suddenly could need staff. Or if you’re so comfortable with having all your techs and everything’s cool and great and somebody does what I described and takes one of your techs from you,
Tom Dorsey (25:44):
Exactly.
Fred Gestwicki (25:45):
There is no scenario in automotive where a business owner can say, I’m completely, I don’t need to have anybody on my staffing bench. There’s no scenario for that. Zero.
Tom Dorsey (25:56):
Yep. Life happens, right? And that’s the thing is that
Fred Gestwicki (26:01):
Car wreck, man, somebody could get in a car wreck and die tonight. I hope that doesn’t happen. But a technician could be out with another tech and they get in a car wreck and both die and now you’re down two techs. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, but it happens, man. You got to be ready.
Tom Dorsey (26:15):
And that’s probably, that’s part of being a business owner. You have to be prepared. It’s great when the good times are good, but your job is literally to prepare for the bad stuff to prepare for the emergencies and bad times. And if you can do that effectively, you weather the storm. And that’s why you get a guy who’s been in business 20, 30 years because they were prepared, same as your oiling your tools and maintaining your compressors and paying your insurance and all that stuff up to date. Same thing with the internal structure of your business. And just like you said, you couldn’t put it any better when opportunity comes and presents itself to you. Are you ready to accept that opportunity or where do you go, darn, if I only would’ve did this and that. I could have took advantage of that, but now I can’t because I just wasn’t prepared.
Fred Gestwicki (27:03):
Right? For sure.
Tom Dorsey (27:06):
That was awesome, Fred, man, I really appreciate you coming on, buddy. I know you got a hard break and we got to get on and we’re going to see you next month and we’re really excited out a digital shop conference and we’ll be talking a lot about these kinds of things. What it’s like to make that transition become fully digital like Fred is. And there’s these types of concepts. I know everybody’s looking forward to getting some time with you out there. Not only seeing your breakout, but getting a little sit down time with you. Pick your brain. And that’s one of the great things about coming out to conference is that you get the opportunity to do that and it’s really a shared experience. And then you slice that up and see what’s going to fit for you, and you get to go back and you get to take advantage of that, and it saves you a lot of trial and error time, and it puts you on path much faster than you would of trying to stumble around in the dark. So we really appreciate Fred coming on the show and helping folks out, talking about these really important topics like staffing and also just the work that you do coming out to digital shop conference and helping people being active on that Facebook forum and really helping each other out. And I know a lot of folks probably looking to come up and say thank you to you when you get out, and so I’ll just give you a little pre tastes of it right now and really excited to get to see you and Jessica next month
Fred Gestwicki (28:18):
For sure. That’s as weird as it is. I get my happiness from helping people. That’s why I have an auto repair shop. I see people with the problem and it’s evolved from fixing the car to fixing the person. So I get a lot of satisfaction from getting that good feedback. I truly do. It’s kind of like when somebody says, I read your book and I really loved it. You’re like, oh, that’s why I wrote it.
Tom Dorsey (28:39):
You know
Fred Gestwicki (28:40):
What I mean? So when somebody’s like, Hey, that really helped when you commented, I’m like, that’s kind of why I did it. Thanks for feedback.
Tom Dorsey (28:45):
Yeah, no, but it’s great, man. I’ll tell you, in automotive industry, there’s a lot of people that are just willing to give and they’re so busy and they got so much stuff on their plate, but they’re still always willing to lend a hand and just take a minute, man. And it’s just impressive to see. I mean, that’s what I get out of bed for. It fills my heart, just like you said, is it really? It’s fulfilling, man. When you can just change lives and help folks like that and just be willing to, and you can’t help everybody, but if you make yourself available and they want to take advantage of it, then good stuff happens. Agreed. Yeah. So we’re not going to be having a digital shop talk next week because I’m going to be busy out there delivering presents on Christmas. But until then, be on
Dustin Anaas (29:26):
Thursday, Tom.
Tom Dorsey (29:28):
Huh? Be on Thursday. Yeah. Thursday. Alright. You didn’t
Fred Gestwicki (29:32):
Get the memo.
Tom Dorsey (29:33):
I’m still having it on Wednesday, but I’m having it on Thursday. Thursday
Dustin Anaas (29:35):
The next two weeks we got Christmas and New Year’s back to back. We’re gearing up for the big 50th episode at Digital Shop Conference, right? We’re going to be live on stage. Fred, we’ll pull you in there. Big 50th anniversary celebration. Big party for Tom. Hey, another quick note here is if you guys are celebrating this next week, Merry Christmas to everybody out there and thanks for joining the show and being a part of our lives during this season. So this is just a good time of year to say thanks to everybody. Yeah.
Tom Dorsey (30:00):
Hey, and I want everybody to vote on my Christmas ugly sweater. It’s Donna and Blitzing taking the shits in.
Dustin Anaas (30:08):
Love it.
Tom Dorsey (30:12):
Thanks a lot, Fred. We’ll see you buddy. See.