Episode Transcript
*This transcript was generated using Artificial Intelligence. Errors may occur. If you notice an error, please contact [email protected].
Tom Dorsey (00:00:06):
Good morning and good afternoon. Welcome to this week’s edition of The Digital Shop Talk Radio. I’m Tom Dorsey, and today we’re going to be talking TeE Times and that’s not Turkey Times. You got to save that for tomorrow. Today we’re going to be talking technician equivalency times, and it’s another one of those episodes where we’re kind of digging into the tool. We get a lot of questions and a lot of times some of these benefits that are included in your AutoVitals digital shop solution are oftentimes overlooked and underutilized. And so today we see these posts quite often reoccurring kind of theme in Facebook, people asking questions about what is TeE Times? How do I use it, how do I get the most out of it? And you might’ve seen recently Tony Zanders post in there. And so I’ve asked Tony to come on talk about it is kind of new to implementing TeE Times. So welcome Tony Zanders from Heritage Automotive in Meridian, Idaho. Appreciate you coming on buddy.
Tony Zanders (00:00:57):
Thank you. I’m glad to be here. Look forward to the conversation.
Tom Dorsey (00:01:00):
Yeah, I know. It’s great. And I really want to get your insight because you know what, a lot of folks are in that boat with you and it’s a shame because this can be a very powerful tool. And we’re going to talk, we’re dig in and we’re going to talk about exactly that. And that’s, I’ve even kind of titled the episode. It’s not just a time clock. And so it really isn’t. And we’re going to get some insights there. And so when I’ve got Frank Scandura, welcome back, Frankie from Frank’s, European in Las Vegas, Nevada old hat, been around since two times was born and really helped us to make it a better tool, more usable tool. And Bill Connor, of course, part of our expert panel of experts and Bill has spent a lot of time doing the training on TeE Times and helping folks implement and ramp up and learn those best practices. So we really appreciate Frank, welcome.
Bill Connor (00:01:55):
Thank you.
Tom Dorsey (00:01:56):
It’s good to be here. Yeah buddy, glad to have you on. And Billy, welcome back buddy. It’s a real treat. We’ve gotten to have you on two weeks in a row now.
Bill Connor (00:02:04):
Don’t get used to it. I got work to do.
Tony Zanders (00:02:08):
You’ll have more work to do when we get done here.
Tom Dorsey (00:02:10):
Yeah buddy. Yeah, we all do. I got to work on getting some Turkey congested. I know that tomorrow. So then it’s also our Thanksgiving episode. We really appreciate you tuning in and hit that like button, hit that subscribe button and most importantly hit that share button because we try to bring you every week a valuable episode that’s going to help you. And if it’s going to help you, it’s going to help folks, your peers and other people in the industry that you may want to help. So don’t be shy. Share this link to the show with those folks and we really want to get your input and feedback. Help us to help you with topics that you’d like to see on here such as this one that help you to not only get the most out of the product, but learn from the wisdom and training from the shop operators that come on and share their wisdom and knowledge with us every week.
(00:03:01):
It’s almost like an ongoing conference really, if you think about it. It’s like I have a breakout session every week. That’s what I strive to do. And normally you got to pay a bunch of money and get on a plane and go someplace and get a hotel. It’s hard to bring the tax and the crew to get the most out of that. Well, guess what? You can come here every week and have that breakout never ending. So, okay, off my soapbox, let’s dig in and get your questions in here. I know a lot of you folks out there might’ve been looking at TeE Times, don’t even know what TeE Times is, don’t even know you have this tool available to you. Ask us those questions in the chat and the q and a button there and we’ll be happy to knock those out right here live on the show. So Bill, if you could kick us off, tell us from the thousand foot view, what is TeE Times? What the heck are we trying to do with this thing?
Bill Connor (00:03:49):
So TeE Times is a very efficient way to gather information from the technician with them just using the tablet properly and having the tablet open when they’re working on a repair order, marking jobs complete as they go along. And when they’re not working on something that’s productive, being able to choose something else from a dropdown list so we can measure the other things we do that may not have a direct way to measure on a repair order, but we can actually track their efficiency and so on through the shop and we can get a ton of information just by them using it. So a lot of your management companies are asking you about technician efficiency, productivity proficiency, service advisor efficiency. We can gather all that information just by performing a few simple steps
Tom Dorsey (00:04:39):
And make all that information available. And including things like finding out who is the most proficient on a job by job type basis or maybe even make model specific productivity and proficiency as well.
Bill Connor (00:04:57):
So that can, if they go ahead and clock individual operations, which a shop can do if they want to. But again, to go ahead and look at it from a higher level is what kind of information can we go ahead and get from the technician without having to have them do any additional work other than use the tablet properly. And so we have a lot of shops they talk about I have a shortage of technicians and what we found is that if we can actually measure what’s going on efficiently, we find out that maybe the processes are lacking. We also have a lot of shops that a technician may have dual roles, they might go ahead and be a trainer for the shop, they might be responsible to go and clock a certain number of hours for themselves, but we didn’t have before this a really efficient way to see how many hours they did in-house training for other techs.
(00:05:48):
Or they might even go ahead and be a part-time dispatcher an estimator, how much time do they spend in the shop? So in the past we didn’t have the ability to accurately measure that and it’s a great way for us to understand how to staff. So if we find out that that guy is spending 40 hours a week working in the office and another 20 in the shop, maybe we should find a person to walk in the office that would go ahead and maybe cost less and let that technician go back and do their thing.
Tom Dorsey (00:06:19):
Yeah, no, that’s fantastic. That’s a great introductory overview of what it is and that’s why I’m saying it’s not just a time clock. It’s really going to give you insights into your operation. You can’t really find anywhere else and allow you to at least understand that that situation exists. What you do with it is up to you. Tony, why don’t you give us a little background on where you’re at, what drove you to make that Facebook post and what solution are you looking to? What challenge are you looking to solve?
Tony Zanders (00:06:50):
Sure. I appreciate that Tom. So Bill, I want to say first thing, just pivoting off what you just said. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. And this is the whole TeE Times idea is that we’ve got to be able to measure what we’re doing. I remember years ago when I started looking at our inspection process and using the digital inspections and I had my staff members saying that it’s taking me 45 minutes to an hour to do an inspection. So we measured it and we found that it was actually consistently taking them 30 minutes, 35 minutes to do an inspection. And we found a way to improve it. We measured it, we found that it needed to improve, we wanted to get it down into 15 to 20 minutes. And so we modified how we did our inspections and we got it down into 18 minutes and we measured it so we could improve it.
(00:07:37):
So the same thing with technician time tracking. We’ve been doing time tracking for years. People are familiar with the sheets, the little time tracking flag sheets. We’ve been using those and the whole idea is that we’ve got to be able to measure it so that we can improve it. And so this is what it looks like when you use the time tracking on the back of an ro, I’ve got 16 hours worth of punch time and how much time does it actually take the technicians to go through there and calculate each time and walk back and forth to the time clock and is there a way to make it more efficient? And so I look at the TeE Times and I say, Hey, that looks great. This is a way that they’re already at the tablet, they’re already interacting with the tablet. Can we use that feature to expedite the process and we can. But then the problem that we experienced was how do I read that? How do I extract that data? How do I simplify the process? And we found that it’s kind of complicated. I’ve got two pages of documents where we’re trying to correlate the TeE Times versus the shop management times and don’t understand where to get the right information. How do I make sure it matches, make sure that we’re not losing data. And that’s kind of what drove me to make that post is how do I measure this? How do I find the right information?
Tom Dorsey (00:08:51):
Yeah, exactly. And I think Bill kind of gave you, and I posted the link to the document in the chat for folks that are in the audience right now. And if you’re watching this as a recorded version, well reach out to your advisor and they’ll share this information with you and it’s on the AutoVitals website as well. You can search that just by searching for TeE Times. But Bill, why don’t you give us a little insight on picking up from what Tony said, putting your trainer hat on. Where do we go from here and what’s the most important information for somebody in Tony’s situation to be focused on and where do they find those resources?
Bill Connor (00:09:34):
I guess the first thing is make sure the technicians know how to use the tablet properly, having it open on a repair order when they’re working on it and marking jobs completed as they finish ’em up at least several times per day. And then if they’re not working to go ahead and make sure you’ve got the appropriate list of TeE Times that are actually built into the dropdown so they can select them. I always tell shops when they go ahead and build that list to make sure that they go ahead and get all the information they want and then when they enter ’em into the settings there, make sure they put ’em in a logical order in order a technician would most likely use it so they don’t have to scroll down a long list. I also like to go ahead and make sure that there’s only really three times that we really want to go in and have a technician punch on and off an individual labor line on the tablet.
(00:10:29):
And that is if it’s a time and material type job, if it’s a job that requires any kind of testing or diagnosis, because normally the service writer’s got a block of time authorized and the next thing they’re going to ask the technician after he turns in his story is how much of that time did you use? So you might as well clock it. And then anything you’re going to do a labor time study to go and find out are you charging the customer the right time for a job and are you reimbursing your technician right for menu price jobs. From there, after you make sure that you’re getting the right input and you’ve got it set up to go and get the right data, then it’s time to go ahead and go into the different reports and examine the different reports to see what data that you can get out of it.
Tom Dorsey (00:11:13):
Yeah, because it’s the old saying, right, garbage in, garbage out and it is critical that we have the processes down and that it’s being implemented correctly and it’s just like, but why would you do that? Well, it’s just like a pro athlete. A pro athlete actually get some of these guys, they measure how long it takes to get out of bed and put their shoes on or how long it takes to eat a bowl of cereal and they’re going to compete against those times and they’ll write that in their journal or they’ll document this information, well what for that seems irrelevant. Well, it’s not because they’re trying to reach a goal, they’re trying to achieve that pinnacle of productivity success. And so Frankie, I’m sure it didn’t happen overnight and it’s not like turning on a switch. How did you get your technicians to adopt? Because that’s a very critical first step. They have to use the tablet, right, to put good data into the system so that you can then use it and extrapolate it. How did you get your text to follow those best practices?
Frank Scandura (00:12:17):
It started with this is how it’s going to go and it gets tied to regular meetings, regular discussions and what’s working, what’s not working, why, what do we need to change, how do we adapt? It is so easy to bring a new technology to the shop and say here, and I did that at first and I told this story many times where I said, Hey, we’re going to do everything on a tablet now guys, here you go. And I walked away. They had no clue what to do. And that’s a lot of the development that went on on my end that we brought to AutoVitals. This is how to implement it, these are the steps we need to take. I remember saying, okay, I’m not getting enough pictures. I want eight pictures on every inspection. No lie. I had one guy give me four shock and four tires on every car he inspected because he didn’t know what to take pictures of.
(00:13:06):
So it’s a matter of this is how we’re going to track it and like Tony said, we have a time tracking problem in our minds and I put a link to an image in the chat for the things that are on my TeE Times list that Bill referred to cleaning the shop. I need work. I’m on break waiting for parts, waiting for, okay, helping another technician. I have a tech who gets paid to help other technicians. So he said, one day I spend a lot of time helping other techs. I says, okay, let’s measure it. Right Tony, you can’t manage what you can’t measure on a road test training in a meeting. We pay our techs for our weekly meetings. If they’re in a meeting 15 minutes or 30 minutes, that’s what they’re getting paid for. We don’t guess we track it, shop work, washing cars or whatever they’re doing.
(00:13:58):
So I’ve done this exercise a bazillion three times. So now it’s a bazillion and four coming up. My revenue per minute is $5 and 50 cents per technician labor rate times two divided by 60. So if I got six guys running around the building looking for the AC machine, or if I got six guys running around the building, where’s the drain plug washer? If I’ve got six guys running around the building looking for clean rags, I’m losing $5 and 50 cents per minute of potential revenue. I’m not trying to grind every dollar out of every guy. I’m trying to be as efficient as possible. There’s no system on the planet that does it better in my mind than AutoVitals because it ties it directly to the repair order. And by being on the TVP and seeing that I got no activity on a technician and I’m going to keep an eye on that because he might just have closed the ARO, he’s getting the next car, he’s going to open the next ARO.
(00:15:04):
If that goes more than one or two minutes, I’m messaging somebody, Hey, what’s going on? And for me it’s usually the manager, right? I’m blowing up his inbox, I see no activity over here. I see a guy needs work, what’s going on? Got 117 sold hours to get done today and somebody says they need work. So that’s the tool, that’s the part that I love about it. Being able to manage workflow, being able to manage customer expectations and tracking the technician’s actual time on a job. We don’t do so much job individual jobs. I leave that up to them. Some shops micromanage. They want to know, I want to know how much time you spend on a water pump. I want to know how much time you spend on the fan belt. I want to know how much time you spent on rotating the tires. I treat my guys like professionals. They need to know how much time they’re spending on it. They need to say, let me track the time. I think I’m going to lose my butt on this. I do not under any circumstances want anybody going over sold time. Right? So how do you know that? Well, here’s two hours on a job. I expect you to stop an hour 45 minutes into it and ask for help information or more time.
Bill Connor (00:16:17):
I’d like to go back to the Tony’s punch card that he had just a minute ago because I’m very familiar with it coming out of the industry forever and
Frank Scandura (00:16:25):
Basically, Hey Bill, wait a minute, wait a minute. You and I are old enough to remember we used to have to lick the stickers to put ’em on the ARO.
Bill Connor (00:16:33):
Okay, you speak for yourself Ryan. But anyway, so you’re much older and more handsome than I am. But anyways, what was really good about those cards is that it gave us the ability to go ahead and measure things really precisely in the past and they actually were used more or they came out of the dealership environment where they had to track every operation so they get proper warranty reimbursement and really they slowed down the process a lot of times because the technician was really required to punch on and off into each individual operation. And so they could use that to go in and tracking and get their amount of time that wasn’t productive and how much for each operations. But I promise you, working in cars for many, many years, no technician works on anything in a linear fashion. If they’ve got five different items on there that are break related, they’re going to tear that whole sucker down and work on at the same time. So to me, after 40 years plus in the industry, the overall efficiency on the repair order calculated automatically is a higher value to the shop than knowing individual labor lines with the exception of the three times that I just mentioned earlier.
Frank Scandura (00:17:43):
And those time sheets too, don’t forget there’s three copies. One went to the order, one went to the technician, one went to human resources or accounting or whatever the case may be, and that got lost, Tony, right? So when we go digital, it’s like okay, technician doesn’t truly have record of what he did. We’ve actually got them writing down their jobs. So that writing down, I did this job from one two, I did this, I did that. And while it may seem a waste, I want them to have a record of what they did to verify against the accounting. Because the problem is there’s human beings in the building, technician messages, a service advisor, Hey, I don’t need an hour for that, I just need a half an hour. Technician goes, okay, our advisor goes, okay, I got it. And then forgets to adjust the ARO.
(00:18:32):
Now it doesn’t match or it’s the other way, Hey, I need another half an hour to bolt broke. Okay, go for it doesn’t adjust the ARO. So those are the checks and double checks that we have to have in place to make it all work. So when we do payroll, if it matches done, send it off. If it doesn’t match, then it’s a hunt and destroy mission trying to find out why. And it’s complicated, but I don’t know of another solution right now other than technician keeping track, point of sale keeping track and AutoVitals, does it all add up? And if it does, we’re done and if not, then we have to have a solution for it in a new process.
Tony Zanders (00:19:07):
That’d be the next question I would put out there is Bill or Tom, do we have a mechanism inside of AutoVitals that does that keeping track? Does the technician have some way to know that he’s got these number of hours on a job and verify electronically that those things match? Because what I’m looking at new to this system, what I’m looking at is I’ve got Ros and I’ve got two on this last week’s sheet that I’ve got ROS that don’t match the number of hours that we build. They don’t match in AutoVitals. And so how do I find that? What is the mechanism? Is there a best practices method? Do we have to go back to a piece of paper and go back to what we were doing before to duplicate what we’re doing electronically to make sure it matches? I mean is there a better solution?
Bill Connor (00:20:03):
So the solution in my opinion actually comes from teamwork. So if the technician is asking for an adjusted time on a repair order, they know whether it’s been adjusted by the service writer or not because it’s going to show on their tablet and it’s their job to go ahead and verify everything is correct before they do their final submit marking all the jobs complete. And if there’s a problem, they have full complete ability to go ahead and send a chat message as a service writer before I sign off on this, I’m missing 0.5 here or whatever. So again, by everybody working together that and everybody really truly has full visibility because it’s right on the tablet and the service writer can see on today’s vehicle page and so on, anything they change in the point of sale system is going to go and update through to AutoVitals and push all the way through to the tablet.
Frank Scandura (00:20:52):
I like that. So if I understand correctly, and I just wrote it down to implement it, my son and my wife are sitting here listening. So technicians shouldn’t even be submitting his repair order. If the time needs to be adjusted, it should only be submitted after the time is adjusted. That should create that balance check and double check that balance. Thanks Tom. Your zen should
Bill Connor (00:21:17):
Be so it actually starts a little bit sooner than that in the process also. So if the technician is saying that this is what I’ve found, they should be providing the service writer a list of parts in the shop buys and only note area along with their suggested time,
Frank Scandura (00:21:32):
We do that, they do that, but it’s not uncommon for something to change in the process. A bolt broke, I got a hangnail on my pinky something, right? Something happens and we need to make an adjustment and I believe it’s those adjustments that aren’t getting caught. And here’s something I discovered yesterday that immediately got changed was the shop foreman would say, go ahead, I’ll cover your time on that. Tech would write it down and now he’s got to sit in the office for an hour on Wednesdays to go, oh yeah, I said that was okay. Oh yeah, well that shouldn’t be oh, oh oh whatever. And that’s going to be changed immediately. If it’s not on a ticket, it’s not going to happen.
Bill Connor (00:22:14):
So let’s go ahead and cover the best practice that I would suggest. And I tell people this every day, if there’s a labor line on a repair order that needs additional time on it or any change whatsoever on the shop eyes only note area on that labor line, the technician should go ahead and add that note in there, what needs to be changed that way they press the bell icon it, that message goes directly to the service rider right on the exact line that it needs to be adjusted on. And then the technicians should go ahead and be able to see shortly thereafter, especially if they’re using TVPX, a nice yellow box come up around it showing that it’s been changed and on the old legacy platform, they should go ahead and get a black highlight with white letters on it showing something’s been changed. So there’s always kind of a two-way feedback or kind of a closed loop system. And so in the past, I agree, we used to walk up to the service writer, stand behind ’em and hammer ’em and say add another hour to this, and then they print out another piece of paper and off we go. In today’s time at $5 and 38 cents a piece per minute. In Frank’s world we just don’t have the time for that. But again, just adjusting some processes to the digital world, it just makes it a lot easier
Frank Scandura (00:23:26):
And we’re still missing the element. How does a technician know what’s his record? And I’m going to work on that. We’ll work on that as a team to see how we can do it. That’s just about the only piece of paper we have floating around anymore is the technicians log of what he wrote down and all that data is in there, right?
Tom Dorsey (00:23:44):
You download the CSV and it’s all about building out a spreadsheet that’s going to extrapolate that with the formulas and the individual columns for individual technicians. And yeah, it’s a manual exercise, but what it allows you to do is put a little common sense to it as you’re doing that, right as you download and you build out, you populate your spreadsheet and then you can put conditional formatting to say, Hey, is this thing kind of like how the pencil whipping report works? It color codes red and yellow. You can do the same thing. So something’s out of a boundary. You can flag it right there in that spreadsheet as soon as it populates the data and then boom, you go right to that flagged area and start to dig in. And then from there you can just distribute the individual technician reports however you see fit once you’ve compiled them
Bill Connor (00:24:41):
On a legacy platform. There was a way that we showed some, I’ve run into some shops where the service riders have a tendency to, after the repair order is done by the technician, the service riders, were adjusting the labor times to go ahead and satisfy a customer, which is not a good practice. And what the technicians did in that case is on the legacy platform, there’s a summary on the tablet that’s got all the jobs on there. What they were doing is taking a screenshot of that going ahead and putting in a file, and then when their payroll come up, they could actually go ahead and verify it and make sure it’s the same. And if it wasn’t the same, then they had an audit trail, they could go ahead and go back. And again, it still goes down to it has to have the right labor time on it, which the service writer and technicians can verify that and then they can use that summary. Just take a screenshot of the tablet, put ’em in a folder, and then every period they can pull up each one, make sure it matches, and then delete that picture. They don’t need it anymore.
Tom Dorsey (00:25:36):
That’s great. Yes. A lot of ways to skin a cat. And then it’s also record recorded right there in their tablet that they carry around. So
Tony Zanders (00:25:44):
It’s Tom, I wanted to comment a minute ago, Tom, you started talking about the CSV files and I don’t know how many people are listening to this, but I know that there’s 50 to 75% of the people that just their eyes glazed over said, what is a CSV file? And I lean towards, and I know what a CSV file is, I know how to work that, but the trouble is we’re trying to build efficiency and the more boundaries or the more barriers we put in the way, the less efficient the broad majority of shops are going to be. And so what I’m trying to find are the most efficient ways to extract the information on the reports page out of the AutoVitals. We’ve got a payroll report and I want to be able to hand that to my bookkeeper and say, here’s what you’re going to pay the team.
(00:26:35):
And that needs to be accurate. It needs to be consistent. And so the least efficient thing I can do is to start digging through CSV files and extracting from seven different sources and trying to compare. And that’s the least efficient way I can do that. What is the most efficient way to verify that that time? Bill, you were talking about taking screenshots. We’re back to an efficiency problem. We’ve got to stop, we’ve got to make sure we hit the right button, we’ve got to make sure we’ve got the right information on the screen, we’ve got to take it and we’ve got to put it somewhere. We’ve got to go find it. There’s an efficiency problem. And Frank, you’re all about efficiency. How do we make this whole process more efficient so that a simple guy like me and 75% of the other shops out there that are trying to use this, how can we make sure that it’s efficient and we can actually get the job done without burning off a bunch of extra time and paper?
Bill Connor (00:27:24):
So I go ahead and we actually adopted a process in our shop that every day we would go ahead and pull up the TeE Times for that particular day. We would go ahead and get that selection up there. Then we would go ahead and hit the button that says manage inconsistencies. Actually we’d say update from POS first. Then we’d look at the managed inconsistencies and the reason why we did that on a daily basis, especially until the technicians got used to using a tablet properly, if there was an inconsistency, everybody remembered what went on and you could go ahead and adjust ’em at that point after there’s no more inconsistencies left, then you’re ready to go ahead and print that off and use it for a true payroll report.
Tony Zanders (00:28:07):
So you’re doing that every day or that was the strategy
Bill Connor (00:28:11):
On the inconsistencies until I proved out day after day, week after week that the technicians weren’t making mistakes on the tablet. Everybody’s working together as a team. I would go in every day. I would look at the inconsistency. So you got a management system like NAPA tracks, we used to go in there and at the end of every day before we’d run our reports, we would go in there and look and make sure is there a technician on every item and so on. So I think they used to call it activities or something, it’s report. We would go in there. Report, yeah, cost and report. So we would go in there and we just got in the habit of doing it every day because it’s easier when they’re learning to do it every day than it is to wait two weeks for a pay period and then all of a sudden decides something’s off and nobody remembers anymore.
Tony Zanders (00:28:55):
Exactly. So we need that simple procedure of looking at that every day. Do we have a document? Do we have a best practices procedure on that?
Bill Connor (00:29:06):
I’m sure we can go ahead and look it up and go and post it when this gets posted. We can go and post this at the bottom of that article. But again, on a daily basis I like to go and look for inconsistencies. That way it’s fresh in your mind and then manage ’em, get ’em cleared up or whatever. Then when you do your payroll, reports are spot on. I guess some of the things that cause inconsistencies is you could go ahead and dispatch a technician to repair order to a technician. They could go ahead and clock 25% of the time done on it or whatever and then they could decide, well this job isn’t for me. I got sick, I got home, I went to lunch. Now the whole job went to somebody else. And now you’ve got to go ahead and you got an inconsistency you’re going to have to reconcile. You might say, Hey, the guy’s sick, I’m going to pay him for his 25% anyways and let that go through payroll and I’m going to go ahead and make sure the other guy gets paid for a hundred percent because he’s responsible. So it lets you make them kind of decisions, right?
Tony Zanders (00:30:08):
Yeah, and I think the key thing in this conversation about being able to effectively use TeE Times is knowing how to go through those simple processes and knowing the steps we need to take because I’m in that zone where I’m trying to figure out those inconsistencies, but I don’t really know where to look. And Frank, you probably went through some of that as you were learning how to do this. I don’t know where to look, let me figure it out. And you proved out it looks like a lot of the processes and make sure that you know how to find that. And then your solution was a ledger, a piece of paper, which is a reasonable solution. But that’s kind of what I’m looking for for myself and for everybody else that’s watching or needs to learn how to use this, how do we figure out that step-by-step process to make sure that we’ve managed those inconsistencies?
Frank Scandura (00:30:56):
Go ahead, bill.
Bill Connor (00:30:57):
So I was going to say in that document that we have this TeE Times document, it goes through that all the way from make sure they clock in the morning, clock out for lunch, put their tablet on, make sure the service writer or somebody before they set the alarm and lock the door, they press the done for today button so that way technicians aren’t clocked out automatically at midnight. That’s part of the process. And when you go ahead and do the reports, when you do your setup, you can go ahead and go in there and decide some events that you have TeE Times events. You might want to go ahead and have paid hours and not paid hours so you decide what’s paid or not paid. And then on your payroll reports, there’s one in there that says I believe payroll plus TeE Times. So there is certain things that you might want to go in and say, Hey, you’re master tech, you’re going to pay him x number of dollars per flag hour in a different rate when he’s actually assisting other technicians. And so to be able to pull that report out like that and have it broken out into chunks makes it a lot more usable for your payroll department.
Frank Scandura (00:31:55):
So that’s a feature request that Bill Connor just asked for because there is no payroll plus TeE Times there is ARO plus TeE Times TeE Times only ARO summary and jobs and other activities. But that would be good to have it because of the TeE Times that we do use to track that we are paying for other things on. So let’s get that done, Tom, I’m counting on you to make it happen. There you go.
Bill Connor (00:32:18):
And basically you like to have it in one report, not two different ones.
Frank Scandura (00:32:22):
And that’s always been an issue and learning where the reports are, Tony. So I feel your pain because it’s tough and sometimes just remembering where to find the reports can be tough. I think what we’ve done for accounting here is we’ve created a tab near Google Chrome so when they open it up, that reporting tab is always open. They don’t have to remember what to look for. They go right there. So that would be helpful. It is a small efficiency for people. I’m one of those guys. I think I have 11 or 12 tabs that open up as soon as I open up Google Chrome because I don’t want to have to go look for the things I want to do every day. And those
Bill Connor (00:33:02):
Are things. So these are part of the things that we really want to go and have discussed in our actual forum though, because if there’s a specific thing that you need to do a repetitive task over and over again that has a high value to you and also would be things other shops need to have also, then we really need to go ahead and get that discussed on a turbo or not on a turbo form on the main form and say this is what I need. If I’m printing out my payroll report, I really need to go ahead and have my build hours and so on, but I also need to go ahead and have my time hours that I’ve agreed that we need to pay the technician on. So them are all great topics for the forum for sure. And that’s how we develop. We take needs of the industry and we are going to ask a lot of questions about why you need it and how you’re going to use it. And then we use that to go in and put the best product that we possibly can.
Tom Dorsey (00:33:55):
Yeah, that’s fantastic. And that’s when we invite everybody in the audience to do the same. Go on that Facebook form. If you’ve got tips like Frank’s tip about leaving the browser tab open so that you don’t have to hunt for it seems kind of really simple, but hey, it boosts that efficiency. Or if you have questions or needs that aren’t being addressed currently or suggestions like Tony’s, put those in there because that’s going to help us compile. Once we have that information put together, well then we have direction to build some training videos, build better documentation for you, post that up, send it out and all that good stuff. And it comes together and this is how we build everything out. I mean it’s shop owners building it for other shop owners. We come up with an idea and then you make it work so it doesn’t work sometimes. Yeah, well and we let you fight about that stuff, but that’s what that Facebook forms for. So don’t be shy. Give us that input so that we can make those improvements.
Bill Connor (00:34:56):
So when you’re setting it up, you want to go ahead and make sure to go ahead and in your list that you’re going to set up is determine the things you want to measure that aren’t productive captured on a repair order. You want to put that list in a logical order. You want to decide on that list, which are the ones that you want to include in clock time or paid time versus the ones you just want them to be able to choose. You want to go ahead and make sure that the technician knows how to use the tablet properly as far as have the tablet open when you’re working on a repair order. If you switch to another repair order, press save, open up that next repair order, mark the jobs done or partially done throughout the day so the service writer can keep you rocking and rolling all day long.
(00:35:37):
Don’t stall. And if you go ahead and choose a tee time, make sure it’s appropriate. So we don’t want a technician, for example, if they’re going to test drive a vehicle, I don’t want them to choose a TeE Times that says test drive. If they’re driving their own vehicle, that’s their own repair order. That’s part of the efficiency for that particular repair order. If they’re test driving a vehicle for another technician that they’re not a labor line on that repair order, then they would choose a TeE Times to test drive. So you know how much time is spent that way. So you got to go ahead and use a little common sense and a little logic in it. Also,
Frank Scandura (00:36:08):
Part of the process is who owns which part, right? So service advisors own and are responsible for their technicians and their efficiencies. If I have a technician that’s got 24 hours sold today and he only flags six hours, there’s something horribly wrong with the process for whatever reason. And to be able to manage that at a glance to me is priceless. That and the communication, nonverbal communication options, that was the two big things for me to decide to go to AutoVitals. The digital inspection. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s nice. We’ve been sending pictures to customers for years, but to be able to actually have in front of me my shop loading and to know who’s got work, who doesn’t have work, who needs it? You know what, it’s maybe not such a big deal when there’s two guys in the back and one rider. They all know what’s going on.
(00:37:07):
But as you get bigger and you get more efficient and you really want to tighten this up and you really want to improve quality, you have to eliminate interruptions because as soon as the service advisor goes to the back and goes, Hey, how are you doing on this job? You’re wasting time. And then you got to put a mask on too. Exactly. And then as soon as you have a technician walking up front with oil dripping down his wrist because he’s holding up a drain plug that stripped out and says, Hey, that pile of junk Honda needs an oil pan because the drain plugs stripped out and the customer goes my car. So these are the things that are terrible time wasters that need to be completely eliminated. TeE Times is an important part of that because you can track it all and communicate back and forth.
Bill Connor (00:37:52):
What’s even more important about that is that, and even more important if you’re in California or a few other select states is that for years technicians have felt that have been beat up over flag hours. They get abused on ’em or feel they’re abused on it constantly. And so if we can go ahead and use this as a way to go in and actually make sure that we’re charging the customer the right time for testing and also other things, let the technician participate in the process. And a lot of shops still today, they say, well, I don’t really care because it’s flag hour. It’s not costing me anything. And that’s a pretty naive attitude. But you’ll have shops in California that are having to pay different pay structure and they’re to pay hourly. You’ll learn really, really quick how to go ahead and keep that pipeline full and keep them guys rolling all day long.
(00:38:42):
And eventually it might come to that in the rest of the country. Other industries are like that. They don’t pay their technicians by the job, they pay them by the clock and they’ve got other bonuses. And to be able to measure every minute and understand and keep them guys going is going to probably be even more important going on into the future. Eventually we’re going to come to the head over this flag hour stuff and we’re going to probably have to define a more different or a more appropriate way to reimburse the technicians and make sure the customers pay appropriately for what is their vehicle and their responsibility.
Frank Scandura (00:39:19):
It’s truth, I didn’t buy it, I didn’t break it. I didn’t marry the girl that drives it. I shouldn’t be responsible for fixing it.
Tony Zanders (00:39:27):
Exactly. It’s not my car.
Tom Dorsey (00:39:32):
But that’s a great point and it all boils down to being able to track it again. And that is adopting those best practices, utilizing the tool that you have to be able to compile that information, that data. And then to Tony’s point and to what we’ve been discussing here today is it does need to be able to be extrapolated and extracted efficiently and preferably you’ve got some notifications set up at least through your business control panel that will also alert you without you having to go in there and manage that on a daily basis. And so that’s really important that you tie those two things together is to be able to notify yourself that there is potentially an issue quickly be able to identify what that issue is and then easily determine what the appropriate corrective action is and then take that action. And if you can set that process up and you develop the muscle memory with your staff, it becomes automatic.
(00:40:33):
It becomes almost autopilot. But to Frank’s point, you have to prove it. You have to. It’s just not one of those things. It’s trust but verify, right? You’ve got to go in, you got to put the work in to refine it, to get it so that it’s accurate and you can trust it and then don’t break it because it is unfortunately, there’s a lot of human interaction involved and we all know that if we’re not cognizant or responsible. That’s the other thing is that you have to be responsible. If I know that I’ve got an error, I have to take the time to make that right, I have to correct that. I have to alert somebody, I have to follow through on that. And the more that we can go through that process, as painful as it might be, the quicker we get to develop that muscle memory to where it’s now automatic and it’s habitual and we can trust it. We still have to spot check it and we still have to test it, but it’s going to be available for you as a very powerful tool that allows you to take that quick action, identify, be alerted, identify, and take action to correct those issues. And really it’s about getting the highest level of productivity and efficiency out of your team winning the Super Bowl.
Bill Connor (00:41:49):
So Tony, on the cards that you’re using, were they actually clocking individual labor operations on a repair order or were they just start time on a repair order and then just only other times for a break or cleaning the shop or things like that?
Tony Zanders (00:42:07):
So this is every time they clocked in and out of the job and then they correlate those times to the specific operation they were doing. And so they were clocking in and out of various activities. If they clock in once and did the entire job and clock out, that’s only going to be one flag. But every time they go back to that vehicle, they clock into it and then they note on the flag which labor operation that flag is assigned to
Frank Scandura (00:42:39):
And to clarify what bill’s saying. But you’re not asking them clock on the oil change, clock off, the oil change, clock on the brakes, clock off the, so they’re just getting pulled off that job repeatedly, which in of itself is an inefficiency and nothing irritates me more than a service advisor running back to the shop saying, ah, I forgot that I told Johnny his card be done at 10. I need you to pull this out and pull that in. And that’s a complete not of waste of time and resources. And it’s not managing customers’ expectations. And let me finish Bill real quick and I’m sorry, but that’s what the advantage of opening the repair order and doing the jobs is and then just marking
Tony Zanders (00:43:24):
The
Frank Scandura (00:43:24):
Status, the oil change is done, a hundred percent brakes are done a hundred percent and stay on it. And that doesn’t solve the payroll questions. That does solve the what am I doing, question, what am I working on? How much more do I have on this car? And I can look at a glance and say, well, he is got four out of five jobs on, he is working on the last thing, so I know where he is at and how much longer he’s going to be and my building available hours becomes accurate.
Tom Dorsey (00:43:47):
Exactly. And that’s the key, right, is then it tightens it up so that when you’re comparing it against payroll or some separate standalone type of clocking, it becomes we’re in the ballpark at least. Right.
Bill Connor (00:44:01):
And what I wanted to make sure is that he was actually tracking the way he’s doing it, repair order efficiency, not individual labor lines, which is the exact same thing we do just by using the tablet properly. And the good thing is we’re also going to get out of it productivity, efficiency proficiency and lots of other data just by them using the tablet. And then like I said, it’s just a matter of probably in your case, just a matter of going ahead and making sure inconsistencies are resolved, making sure that you market watch it over a period of time, then maybe that will go ahead and actually help you get a long ways from where you’re at. Right.
Tom Dorsey (00:44:45):
That’s good. And then also Bill, would you recommend from a team meeting perspective or once a week or even once a month, how would you introduce that information? How do you track that more broadly, especially in relation to team goals and things like that that we’re trying to accomplish business goals?
Bill Connor (00:45:04):
So that’s a great question. And so as soon as you go ahead and make sure that all the data is correctly on your business control panel, I like to use the multi shop business control panel. And I’m going to dial up average hours per repair order technician efficiency percentage of jobs marked complete on a tablet and a list of other KPIs specifically related to that. And I’m going to use that for the whole shop. So my whole shop, I’m trying to get the technicians to be 87% productive. Are they kept busy 87% of the time, which is really hard to do a lot of other things going on. And then your efficiency, we want to go ahead and have them be 125% or higher, which that’s tooling equipment, proper dispatching, things like that. So all the numbers are there for diagnostic tools and I would use that on a shop basis.
(00:45:54):
And then I also go into business control panel and I’ll go ahead and set up a preset for each employee because each employee’s going to be in a different place in a journey as they go through. They might be only 80% efficient, but they might be busy 87% of the time. So you can use these to go in and set specific goals and a deadline for each employee and then offer to help them say, this is what you’re struggling in, this is what good looks like, what can I do to help you get there? And so then you’re actually setting up a one-on-one employee performance review that you can do on a weekly basis based off of data, how to gut gut
Frank Scandura (00:46:35):
Bill’s. Going to have to do a video on that and send it out because I’m not familiar with watching the technician efficiency in the business control panel. Yeah,
Bill Connor (00:46:43):
Cool. And these are all,
Tom Dorsey (00:46:46):
That’s why we’re having this show, buddy. Yep. That’s exactly why we’re having this show. And ones like it, right? Because this is the deep dive, this is where it looks one way on the face, but really when you get underneath and you see really the power that’s available and it opens up a lot of possibilities for implementation, and that’s what we want to drag out. And so for folks in the audience as well, if you’ve got any questions, chat them in. I know you do. Don’t be shy because we’ve all been there, we’re all in the same boat, we’re all rowing the same direction, we’re all pulling for the same goal, and there is no dumb question. And so if you’ve got anything that you’d like, you got, I mean, this is a great panel of people that have a lot of experience and can help you. If you don’t want me to mention your name to say that, I won’t tell you who you are, or if you prefer to just reach out to ’em in the Facebook form, you can do that as well. But let’s not let it get away from us. Let’s make sure we get it all kind of all out on the table so we can one and done. We can produce some helpful videos and some documentation for you. We just need a little insight on what you’re looking for and what your needs are.
Bill Connor (00:48:00):
So when you’re working on a business control panel with your technicians, also I’d like to start thinking about what’s in it for them first and then going ahead. And that’s the output I want. So if a technician, normally they want more hours per repair order, so that’s less trips to the parking lot, less inspections, less racking and racking cars. So that’s a KPI want in there, something I want to increase. And then I’m going to increase it by going ahead and getting them to do inspections, make sure they got the right number of recommendations on ’em. They’re doing a thorough inspection.
(00:48:32):
I’m just going to go ahead and stack KPIs on there that are actually related to it. So this is the output that I want for the technician and this is the input they need to put in to make that number change. And I just stack it up and I’ll go ahead and save a preset form and then I’ll use that with a review form and only give them one or two things to work on at a time. Anything more than that’s brain overload. This is the KPI, you’re going to work on this next week, number of recommended actions, do a better inspection. And then it might be a few weeks later, you might be looking at the number of edited pictures and you can look at that for the technician also. Are they giving the service writer an arrow in a note? Are they helping stack the deck in their favor?
(00:49:11):
So there’s always plenty of ways to do it. And I would really love for somebody in the forum to go and say, okay, for my technician, we want to increase this. What are the things that we should monitor to go and help change this number? And what are the ways that we can actually approach our technician or service writer, service writer, they might want to go ahead and have a higher dollar amount per repair order and they’re struggling having to write 15 repair orders a day. So to go ahead and say, this is what the service writer wants to do, these are the KPIs we’re going to measure. We’re going to go ahead and perform this experiment over the next few weeks to see what happens. And if that doesn’t work, we’re not going to give up on it. We’re going to attack it from a different angle and remeasure. So to me, performance improvements to the shop is just improving the performance in your vehicle, decide what experiment you’re going to run, what data you want to move. And if it doesn’t move you don’t throw the car away or send it down the road, you experiment. That’s what we do in the industry all day long. We perform experiments, we verify the results, and if it don’t work, we don’t go ahead and send it down the road. We go at it a different way.
Tom Dorsey (00:50:21):
There’s a lot of underlying benefits in that as well, right? Because what it sends from a morale perspective to your team is that you know what you care and you’re looking to improve and you’re not just going to blame it on the techs. You know what I mean? And through that exercise, what happens is I get to give my input, I get to be in part of that experiment. I get to see, hey, we’re really looking to achieve something here. This is a great place to work. And I really get the respect coming down from my boss or the owner, whoever it might be, my manager. And I mean, that’s the best of both worlds, right? Because now you’ve got somebody who’s given you 110% and is getting 110% out. And that’s just the pinnacle to success. And to Bill’s point, stack those. As you’re going through and analyzing those KPIs and you have a ramp up plan, stack ’em like a ladder right now that I’ve got this basic action or behavior nailed on that goal.
(00:51:17):
Well now how do I improve that? Well, that influences another KPI and then that one’s on top. And then that one leads you to the next one and leads you to the next one. And before you know it, you’re at the pinnacle, right? You’re at the top of that ladder. And that’s really how you want to stack that, especially when you’re new and during ramp up from an individual perspective, is you constantly are raising that bar to get ’em to the top of that ladder. And there’s no better way, like I said, to be able to do that than be able to track and monitor through that using TeE Times and the BCP together, not only to get the insights that you need on what you should be focused on, but to be able to communicate that, especially in an individual, in a team basis so that people know where they sting and there’s transparency in there.
(00:51:58):
And if I know what’s expected out of me, get out of my way and let me go get it. And you’d be surprised at how quickly you can really coalesce around this principle and achieve things that you might thought were impossible. And you’ve seen those guests on this show. I mean we’ve got guys, they’re stunned themselves, right? The ARO increases or the productivity increases or just, I never thought I’d be opening up my third business Levon Arnold on the other day, five years ahead of schedule. We’ll take a break. Yeah, he won’t. But that’s the type of really, those are the kind of ancillary benefits to putting in that work and doing it this way that really has that effect on your team.
Bill Connor (00:52:42):
So in the past, if we wanted to go ahead and gather this kind of data, and I know because I’ve done this, can you imagine standing behind somebody all day long with a stopwatch clocking everything they do? No. To go ahead and learn and understand, but that’s how it used to be done. Now all we got to really do is get that technician to go ahead and do a simple process. If they’re working on a repair order, it should be open on their tablet. Even if they switch out of that tablet and go to Identifix or something else, it’s still going to be clocking time. Even if they go ahead and leave the wifi, if it’s on a repair order and it is open on the tablet, it’s clocking time when they go on a test drive and when they come back, that time is going to be there. So that’s a real simple process if you’re working on repair order to have it open and when that technician challenges you and says, I’m working on three cars at the same time, I can’t do that. It can’t happen. There’s only arms
Frank Scandura (00:53:31):
Are not long enough
Bill Connor (00:53:33):
Space and time continuum unless you’re in a Star Trek zone, it can’t happen. So again, what they’re doing is they’re going ahead and showing that they’re going to be highly efficient on one repair order and they’re going to suck on the other one. So again, don’t game the system. Go ahead and make sure we can change it. If they’re doing anything on that vehicle, they should have the tablet open on that vehicle. So let’s go ahead and say that it’s taking them 45 minutes to drive to go and get the monitors run after they do an emissions repair. Well, if you can go and see that, that’s highly inefficient and every time that type of repair comes up the shop, better figure out a way to go and charge for it or go and figure out a way to get a lower dollar employee to go out there and do them drive cycles. So it just use the tool the way it’s designed, gather the data, make adjustments, and just keep moving forward.
Tom Dorsey (00:54:25):
Yeah, no, that’s a great point and I want to bring in Ken Anderson’s question. He’s saying So to understand clearly the tech needs to have the repair order open on the tablet for automatic clocking per ARO and utilize the percentage done for the service advisor. The clock start is for a per job study. If the tablet gets closed, so does the time clock question mark.
Bill Connor (00:54:48):
The time clock will be running in the background. So if they switch back ate until they go ahead and force close the AutoVitals app, if it’s open on a repair order, it’s going to be clocking time on whatever repair order is open. We’re not going to stop you from using the tablet for other things.
Tom Dorsey (00:55:06):
Exactly.
Bill Connor (00:55:07):
Unless they’re watching YouTube videos.
Frank Scandura (00:55:10):
Does it track that bill? And if the tablet gets closed, you mean goes to sleep or something like that? Yeah, it keeps running.
Bill Connor (00:55:16):
If it goes, it keeps running.
Tom Dorsey (00:55:18):
If you close the app, you log out of it, you shut the tablet down, yes, it’s going to stop and it
Frank Scandura (00:55:24):
Stops. Yeah, yeah. You are correct Ken.
Tony Zanders (00:55:27):
If I understand correctly, it’s a cloud-based system. It’s not happening at the tablet level. The tablet is simply the control mechanism. Everything is happening in the cloud. And so whether the tablet goes to sleep or you clock over to another tab, your cloud is still tracking that time and until you manually close it, it doesn’t trigger the shutdown.
Tom Dorsey (00:55:49):
Yep, exactly. As long as you stay
Bill Connor (00:55:51):
Connect cloud. You also find that when they’re clocking individual labor lines for a time material job, labor time study or time and material, you’ll go ahead and see that If they clock on it and they’re working on something else, it might be rodent damage or whatever and they’re five or six hours in it and they’ve been in and out of all data or Mitchell or whatever, it’s going to be clocking that individual labor line in the background also. So again, use the timers when appropriate, but I don’t, A lot of the big truck shops where they’re charging everything based on time material, they clock on and off each individual labor line, but they normally when they write the repair order, it’s going to be along the lines of repair front brakes, repair rear brakes, and it’s not going to have a lot of individual labor operations in it like pack the wheel bearings and it’s not going to be broken up individually. It’s going to be one big chunk.
(00:56:49):
That’s fantastic. Actually, that also brings in, we got a lot of shops that they go ahead and do restoration work and stuff like that. So again, in their case, they’re going to have a time block authorized for a certain amount of money and they’re not to go over it, but they got to go ahead and clock that time and justify it and then document what they did during that chunk of time. So it could be used many different ways. But the main thing is in most applications, tablets should be open when they’re working on something, press save and go to the next vehicle, choose a TeE Times if you’re not working and update those job percentages done relatively frequently so the service rider can see that they’re staying on target because it’s all about goals and accountability. If the technician’s goal for today is 10 hours and they’re two thirds of the way through the day and they’ve only got two hours mark complete, then obviously somebody ain’t going to make their doggone goal and a service writer, they might be turning away work thinking they can’t get anything else in because it’s not up to date.
(00:57:46):
And then you get to the end of the day and the technician updates everything at once. Now he’s standing there for an hour with nothing to do because the service writer had no idea.
Frank Scandura (00:57:55):
Right? Exactly. Yeah, exactly right. And that’s the workflow management part that so critical, keeping the shop full of cars,
Bill Connor (00:58:03):
The labor inventory management is probably one of the most important things besides the inspection because if you manage your labor inventory properly, it’s your highest gross profit thing you got to sell. It’s the only thing you have that expires if it’s not used, period. And it can solve so many problems for attracting and retaining the right type of technicians.
Tom Dorsey (00:58:27):
Yes sir. That is the trifecta. So guess what, gentlemen, we are at the top of the hour. That was a great discussion. Who would’ve thought we would’ve stretched TeE Times into a full hour? And we are not even done because you need to get over to the Facebook form because I’m not going to let you go. I’m going to send you out. So in the email I send out Post Show, we’re going to put the links so you got the link to the documentation. If you didn’t copy it out of the chat, I put it in there and some other resources for you. But we want your feedback. We want to know what your needs are, how we can produce some more effective resources for you, and also your feedback on how the format or the process on how it’s utilized could be more effective for you as well.
(00:59:16):
And that’ll give us work to do. Hey Ken? Yeah, you’re welcome buddy. No problem. Appreciate you coming in and thank you. And also, I’m just going to give a shameless plug from Sean saying AutoVitals has become so important to us that we’re now taking it mobile in their service trucks. And that’s another huge benefit of that. You can do that. You just get the data plan on your tablets and off you go. And that’s a whole nother show. And we’ve done a couple fleets and I’ve got one coming up. I’m not going to let the cat out of the bag, but we’re going to be doing a fleet based mobile service based show coming up probably the beginning of the year. I’ve got some really great shows coming up. Matter of fact, next week tune in, we’re going to be having our trailblazer episode.
(00:59:59):
And this is a really great story about somebody who really took the bull by the horns. Not only had to wrangle corporate, had to wrangle a third party point of sale system, had to wrangle AutoVitals and has been in it for a year trying to get this solution into his operation in that entire time, operated with some really strong numbers on a standalone digital inspection through AutoVitals. And so looking forward to next week’s show. That’ll be 10:00 AM Pacific, 1:00 PM Eastern. Make sure you get subscribed because then you get the follow-up stuff and the documentation and the links and all that good stuff. Share it with your peers and your friends and folks that can help benefit and not just looking at my handsome face that’s coming in and listening to Tony, listening to guys like Frank and Bill years and years and years of experience and wisdom giving it away for free.
(01:00:56):
I’m just going to have to start charging. I don’t know. That’s just the bottom line, Jennifer, you’re very welcome. Happy Thanksgiving to you too. Everybody have a great Turkey day. If you’re going to have more than whatever your local limit is, what I hear is you can probably declare or maybe a strip club or something that is legal, maybe it’s a liquor store for the day and then you can have a huge crowding. And the funny thing is is that you can’t have Thanksgiving, but nobody said anything about Black Friday. So I guess they want you to get out and bomb the Walmart and the Best Buy. There’s no covid when you’re shopping, so that’s the cure. Just stay shopping from a multinational corporation and you’ll be covid free. Yeah,
Frank Scandura (01:01:37):
We’re going to be having a funeral for a Turkey at our house, so funerals
Tom Dorsey (01:01:40):
Are okay. There you have it. Funerals are acceptable. So murder that Turkey.
Bill Connor (01:01:46):
I kind of like to go in and encourage people to go in and have something to be thankful for. So let’s cure the technician’s shortage by working on labor inventory for your own shops and you’re not going to cure it for the whole industry. Secure it for your own shop by going in and using TeE Times labor, inventory management and the other tools we have to go in and make sure that you attract the best and brightest and keeping ’em on your staff. So be thankful that you can go and be selfish. That’s a point.
Tom Dorsey (01:02:11):
There you go. That is a brilliant point to be able to wrap it up as always,
Frank Scandura (01:02:15):
Good job. Thank
Tom Dorsey (01:02:16):
You Tony. Again, thank you enough for coming on, dude, to posing the question, getting the conversation kicked off. I hope you got something out of it. I know that we did from you and for anybody else out there, don’t be shy. Get in that Facebook form. Like Tony’s saying here, make sure everyone uses the Facebook form. It’s the fastest way to get real answers to current issues and she is correct. There’s thousands of people out there just waiting to help you take advantage of it. Did Frankie? So many questions. Tony, I can’t thank you else. Absolutely, bill. Thank you. Awesome. Tell Deborah well if she’s still sitting there, I said hi. Happy. Thanks everybody. I hear in the background. Yes, yes, yes. I wish we could have saw you, but next time she won’t go in front of the camera. Yeah. Happy Thanksgiving to everybody and we’ll talk to you next week. Thanks guys. Happy Thanksgiving. Be well. Be safe. Thank you.