Are Video Inspections KILLING Your Service Sales? | SDR #285

A conversational podcast episode (Service Drive Revolution) hosted by Chris Collins with Christian discussing video inspections, tablets, and their real-world effects on automotive service sales. The hosts share personal anecdotes (jet skis, relationships, vehicles), industry news (Jeep pricing, Toyota diesel test cheating), and a detailed critique of digital inspection programs (MPI and tablets), arguing these tools are not magic pills and can reduce sales if implemented without proper processes.
Chapters
Welcome, everybody, to the big show. Today we're going to talk about a subject that is often misunderstood and we are misquoted, and that is, let's talk about video inspections and tablets. I know a lot of people think that we have a certain opinion on this, but we're gonna. We're gonna break it down. It's a pretty fun conversation that we have. I go on a little bit of a rant also. Like, I don't even know how to. How to prompt this. Christian's got some big news.
We got some big news. You know what else is big news?
Big news.
I had this friend once. He was an elf. And you know what? He couldn't pay his rent. You know why?
Why?
He was a little short.
That and much, much more. Coming up on this edition of Service Drive Revolution.
Are you looking at my jaw again?
No.
So it's that time of year.
What time of year is it?
It's my girl's birthday.
Jet skis.
Oh. Almost Jet ski time. I'm really excited about that.
Jet skis are going in for service.
They just going to do a winterizing or un de. Winterizing? Do they de. Winterize them clean out the.
Oh, I don't know. They just get an oil change.
Okay.
I don't think anything else happens. I'm so upset that they came out with a new one that has 25 more horsepower.
Yeah, you've said that to me a few times.
I don't. I don't think that it's a crazy idea to have four jet skis out there with having, like, when you come up, like, we can't all ride together. I'm certainly not going to ride on the back of the jet ski with you.
No. But what a great photo. What a great Polaroid moment. That would be just you and me on a jet ski together. That's a lot of man on one jet ski.
Yeah. You can technically put three people on there. Right.
I don't think three of us would make it. I think two of us. That. That jet ski.
No, but I think we had. Last year, we had three people on one girls.
But okay, so that would work.
But don't you think we need more jet skis, more horsepower?
Need is a strong word. Those.
You want people to feel left out. Like, if you. If people come up there and then they have to wait for hours to ride a jet ski, like I also do.
What would you do?
Would you get, like, a terrible host?
Would you get the two and two left? So you'd have four jet Skis but like two right behind each other.
You mean the jet ski dock?
Yeah, the jet ski dock. Because you want to go.
Just add them on there. You can just add them on there. Yeah, yeah, we'd go for a wide. Why not? Why not?
I feel like that would take up that whole little area.
Nobody's using that area.
You and I walked in there and it was frighteningly cold. I remember that to this day. Yeah, it was like the first cold plunge.
So this is. This is how it's going down. The. The jet skis are going to go in for service. Then when they get picked up, the boat's gonna go in. So he's gonna drop off the boat and pick up the jet skis. How do you think that experience will go?
I would assume it's gonna be a mess. But I'm.
But we've. We've made the appointment. We've arranged it. Let's see.
I'm gonna be cautiously optimistic for you that maybe they've got it together, because you're not the only one to have jet skis and a boat. So that should be something they've had to do before, but we'll see what happens. And oil changes in that sometimes on boats, it's really messy. Have you seen oil changes done in boats before?
Like the way that the oil drains out of the engine and the drain plug down to the bottom and all that. It's a watery, oily mess.
Yeah, Well, I think when. When I was a kid, and we would change the oil in the boat, we just let it run on the dirt. Yeah, we didn't care. We. We actually thought it was good for the dirt because it kept the dust down.
Well, you're not wrong.
Did you ever do that?
No, it was always a bucket.
But we used to.
We.
When we would change the oil in a car, we would purposely spread the oil out on the driveway.
To kill the weeds?
No, to keep dust down.
Yeah, that too. But you'd also keep. You know, when you have that driveway and that gravel driveway, like that green, the weeds that go in the middle where the tires are.
Yeah.
The oil would kill that, too, probably.
Can you imagine? Now you'd get arrested.
Oh, you'd be public enemy number one straight away. That's good, though. But. Yeah, so.
So you do agree that we need the bigger jet skis?
Like, what if. What if the neighbors a couple houses down go and get the. The ones with the 325 horsepower?
Yeah, they're just going to pull away from you one quarter of a mile At a time, it's not gonna be that big a difference.
See, the problem is, I think you're of the opinion that they're too fast already.
Yeah, they're. They're really fast.
See, that's. You're not the one I should be talking.
No, you need somebody else that's a complete speed freak. Yeah, I'm only a moderate speed freak. Like, I enjoy going 60 miles an hour on that thing, but I don't have to go much faster.
Gosh. Although, to be honest with you, 6:30 in the morning on that lake, I bet 75 would be pretty fun.
It cuts out at 70.
Yeah, but the new ones. Maybe they cut out at 70.
They cut out at 70, you just get there faster. They have a governor.
It's even lots of a reason to buy new ones.
What are you talking about?
Oh, my gosh.
Okay, you can undo the governor somehow, but I don't know. That voids the warranty.
Yeah, we'll see. But, yeah. So that's what I need.
I need a friend that knows how to. Knows how to soup those things.
You mean to tell me there's no one at that lake that could figure that out? I guarantee you there's someone there.
I need to make more friends.
Yeah. I'm not really good at making friends. That's a thing. But. But my girl's birthday is coming up, so I bought her a present.
Ms. Claudia?
Yep.
Let me guess.
Go ahead and guess.
Pair of shoes.
No.
Really? Yeah.
Is it romantic?
Yes, it is. Yeah.
Is it a trip?
No.
Okay, give up. My next guess is it would be, like, lingerie or something inappropriate.
No. Oh, an engagement ring.
What?
Yeah. This is why I was looking for.
Wait. You said you were never gonna get married.
Yeah, I changed my mind.
She's great.
So you decided to announce this on the show that she listens to?
Yeah, But I think that this is gonna air right after her birthday.
I think if I.
Did you get the ring?
Yeah.
Can I see it?
It's at home. You want me to bring in? You didn't take a picture somewhere in my phone? Probably, yeah.
Well, let's see it. Get your phone.
Do you not have a picture of it? Because she goes through your phone.
No, she doesn't. She could, but she doesn't.
How. How long did it take you to pick out the ring?
A little while. A little while? I did a lot of online shopping before I went to a store, but. Yeah. So I don't know.
When did you. When did you make this decision?
A few months ago.
Can you, can you walk us through the process? We're all kind of dying to understand how the guy who was never getting married again.
Yeah, that's super fair.
So I think that, you know, I don't, I do want to say that I told you about this where it was like I realized one day that like I was so.
So against marriage that I started to recognize that, that that was the most close minded I could be. And, and just because I, I've had some failures with it doesn't mean necessarily that, that it's going to be. Good Lord. I don't, I can't. I don't know where the hell this thing's at.
You didn't take a picture of it?
No.
Did you just walk in and point at one and buy it?
No, it's a little more than that.
You walked in and pointed it to and said how much? And then.
Yeah, maybe do research. Maybe two or three. Yes.
Did you buy it in the jewelry district?
No.
But, but, yeah.
So okay, well, congratulations.
Thank you very much. But, but I decided that it's okay for me to be open and just because I've had two that didn't go well doesn't mean it's always going to be like that. That I would like to say that I'm a different, more evolved person than I was back then.
Didn't go well is a good way to.
Yeah.
To play down.
The heartache and torment that you've endured.
It was a rough go, but she's very different and I'm very different than I used to be. So I think that it's, it's a good time.
This is your first marriage to a Latina?
Yes.
So that'll be fun. I'm sure a wedding would be bigger than I think that I'm comfortable with £300. No, that's not gonna happen.
Women, Latin women don't understand what carbs are. They think that when you say.
You'Re eating low carb, that that means tortillas and tamales.
Yeah. So there's a, so there's a thing with her that if you rep carb with organic, anything organic means that it doesn't have carbs in it like fruit.
Right, Right.
It's organic. There's no carbs in that.
Right. Yeah.
I just went running yesterday and, and I'm getting to the end of a 6.2 mile run and she's on the beach. Right. So she does walking while I run and then I catch up to her. She hands me that stupid cup of fruit that you buy from those vendors.
It's amazing to me.
No carbs.
No carbs.
Because it's organic.
You know what else doesn't have carbs?
I would guess that food is an organic. Just an in. Just a guess.
I don't know where it comes from. Street food, but yeah. So other organic non carb things. Rice.
Bagels.
You're gonna weigh 300 pounds.
She had.
We're gonna have to get the bigger jet ski just so you can putt around for me.
Not even for three people. It's just to go on there.
But he's a big boy. That's how they'll describe you.
But I'm. But I'm really excited. I think this is a. This, this will be cool.
Yeah, she's great.
I haven't.
You guys a good couple.
I haven't thought about a date. So I don't feel it. Right.
Are you going to have a wedding?
I think so. So she's never been married. She's had a relationship before and they were going to get married and they ended up not like a church. Yeah, that would be her. That would be her preference. But you have to save the date because you got to be my best man.
Just let me know.
I will.
Just don't do it in Europe or something.
There will be no European.
I keep getting invited to weddings in other places and it's like. Yeah, I don't know.
Yeah, you don't have to worry about that with me. It'll be local. It'll be local.
That'll be fun.
I think that. Yeah.
Dress up.
What's that?
Dress up.
I would like to wear a tuxedo. I think I've never worn a tux for a wedding before.
So I think that sign make it for you.
Oh, I'm on that. Yeah, that would be great.
Do like a nice pink or like baby blue.
No, baby blue is funny. I like that idea. But I also like the idea of like no matter what. So that would be a rule with us. Right. So as long as I can fit into my tuxedo, she can feed me whatever she wants.
So I'll do it like that.
Oh, that's so funny.
But that's gonna be fun. You want to talk about news?
Yeah. Well, that was news.
Yeah. So I was just for.
I'm in shock.
Yes. For everybody at home. I saved this just for everybody so that you could see Chris's general genuine.
Reaction, you know, when Captain Mr. X.
Yes.
He said he spoke very similar to you. Never again. Not whatever. You know. And I I would always say, like, oh, we'll never say never.
He meant it like, I don't know. He's going on 10 plus years. He's not even, he hasn't even.
Nothing even close to serious. And I literally feel like he is such a great man. Like, I think he's robbing himself.
But I felt the same way about you in the sense of, well, you know, never say never. No. All right. You know, and I said that for a long time and I was kind of like. Well, James meant it like. Yeah, he didn't. I kept thinking he would change.
Because he, he, he is very interested in.
Females in that way. Like he's, you know.
Yeah, I think he would make a great husband. I just think he's a such a sweet.
The last, the last ex wife heard him hurt him too much.
So I hope there comes a time where he makes it through that. And I would say this is.
You made it through pretty quick.
I don't know. We've been together for three years.
So it took a long. It took a long time for me to get to the possibility of the marriage. But I didn't rush that part.
It's great.
So I'm excited. You want to talk about news.
So this is kind of interesting. It feels like it's following in Tesla's footsteps, but Jeep slashing a lot of prices. And I thought that. I wanted to ask because you had the Gladiator and.
They'Ve now made it to that thing. That gladiator you can get for under 40 grand.
Really?
Which I'm going to guess is less than you. They had it when it was new.
So I think we paid.
We paid 60, I think, for that one. But it was, it was right below the Rubicon. Yeah.
So they, so they lowered the price and also put in like $3,000 worth of a package. You know, like where they'll put in there with the, with a uconnect or something fancy on the inside. So really it's like they make that.
In a diesel now.
Well, I remember that. That your mom and Tim were thinking about getting one.
Yeah. They just couldn't. They had a recall and they couldn't say when they were going to sell it, so they bought a truck. Yeah, A Dodge Diesel, which. That truck is really nice. But I think that. Yeah, those, those Gladiator, I, I loved that thing. That was great.
The thing that was my favorite about that. You might not know this. You were almost always smiling when you were driving that thing.
You know why? Because I look like a redneck here in la, I play country music like you were.
You had a joke that nobody else.
Got because this isn't truck country. People don't drive trucks here. No, it's very rare that you see, like, people might drive trucks to work, but they don't. They're not pulling up to the valet at the, you know, at the restaurant or the mall. And I was, Yeah, I was cranking country music and I would have put a gun rack in it if.
If you kept it.
I kept it longer.
Yeah, yeah.
The.
But you're always smiling. The only thing that I, I like that you've got the, your. The vehicle you have now only because you fit in it way better. Like, do you remember how, like, the steering wheel on the Jeep was small for you, but this. The way that you fit into the driver's area on the, on the Range Rover. It's yours. It's your size.
Yeah, that Range Rover is nice.
Yeah, but. But you had fun driving the Jeep.
I do miss having a convertible, though. I've been thinking lately, like, I'd like a car.
I haven't pulled the top off for a little while.
I don't have anywhere to park it, though. I have to clean up my garage. Yeah, I could, but. Yeah, I got all my art stuff in there.
I think that people are not going to appreciate this conversation because they don't get it, but I love having my parking garage with my two spots. I think that that is the. One of the.
Such a city thing to say.
Yeah, very city thing to say. But like, having covered gated parking is a big premium in Los Angeles. So I love that part. But, yeah, it's about time to put the top off on that thing. All right, so. So yeah, so they're lowering the prices on the Wrangler, the Gladiator, the Compass, and the Grand Cherokee actually is gonna drop by $4,000. So I think that's really interesting that Jeep's doing that pricing strategy kind of.
It's smart to get sales going. Yeah.
Kind of following that Tesla thing.
It dealers.
Yeah. So. So my hope is they sell a bunch of them.
I, I'm. I surprised how much those haven't changed.
Yeah. So like a, A Cherokee or a Wrangler from 10 years ago looks almost exactly to what it is now.
Yeah.
One thing I do like is I, I don't remember if you and I have driven in one or not, but the, the Grand Wagoneers, that's kind of like their Tahoe size.
Yeah. But everybody that we.
Know that services those says they're not great.
Yes. I've only had it as a rental and I loved it.
You can get the Macintosh stereo thing in there, which. It doesn't sound that great, but it's cool.
Yeah.
But yeah, they break a lot.
Okay.
And you don't, you don't see.
You don't see the market penetration on those?
No, I think that. I think that GM's done such a man that.
That suburban Z71 that. That I rented a few weeks ago. Man. Thing was nice.
I love those.
Does this look like an Uber driver, though?
Yeah, I really, really like Escalades. Yeah, that's kind of been a dream vehicle of mine, but I wouldn't have one.
I can see an Escalade.
All right, cool. And then Toyota is. Got kind of caught and slapped on the hand. It really hasn't been as big a news as I think it could have been. But they got. They got caught cheating on diesel engine performance tests. Which sounds a lot like who.
Mercedes, BMW and Volkswagen.
Yeah. So Toyota got it. And this just. This poor guy just looks so busted, doesn't he? He's just. He. He is shamed.
It's weird because Toyota usually isn't.
Isn't on the wrong side of those sort of things.
Yeah. Plus the diesel thing obviously is not United States because they don't have a lot of diesels running around the North America.
But in other countries they were fudging the numbers. Yeah.
So they got caught fudging the numbers, but it hasn't. I don't think it's affected them here at all. But it's interesting that.
It's interesting that there isn't a secondary check for those. Like you leave it up to the manufacturers like an honor system.
And now they've proven several times where the honor system's a failure.
Yeah.
Yeah. This isn't.
It should be a new check and balance in place.
Yeah.
But.
Yeah, so that's the. That's the news for today.
Okay.
Let'S talk about video inspections and tablets. So there is a perception out there.
That we don't like video inspections and tablets. And I think we've clarified this a few times, but there still is this perception.
Yeah. We should do.
Because we're not culty and we're not all into it that weren't. We're not preaching it every day that the assumption is that we don't like them. And that has never really been what we've said.
So I think that it's really important to understand the context. And, you know, there's a thing like what is it that, especially here at the office, like when something is said, what is the thing that is said about me in the. How do I explain this in the area of fortune telling that you're always right?
Yeah.
So there's this thing here and like if somebody disagrees with me, there's always this thing like they're like, well, I'm going to do it your way because you're always right. Like they usually. I, I have proven myself enough that I have credibility that I'm usually right. And it's not that I'm right because I am psychic.
Definitely not.
It's that I pay attention to one thing that most people don't pay attention to. And let me give you an example. Do you remember I, I don't know if you were with Infiniti at the time, but there was a time when BMW was endorsing mpi, the company mpi, which was the first version of digital inspections.
Yeah. Which was a 75 page inspection. I remember that about.
So what would happen with MPI and God Bless Less who, you know, started it and you know, he's a great business guy.
But you had a server in your dealership and then you had this crazy color printer that you'd have to buy that would print the inspections. None of the software really.
Worked in the sense of integrating with anything else in the way that you would want it to. But the, the whole idea was that we're going to do digital inspections that will force us to do them consistently and we're going to bypass the service advisors and just email the inspection to the customers and then the customers will buy more work because we're consistently doing the inspections and we, we are getting it to them right away. That was the idea. Right. And so Les did a good job of getting a lot of manufacturers to buy into this.
So was it a requirement for BMW or no?
Well, have you ever dealt with the Germans?
Once or twice.
Is there a difference between a requirement and a requirement?
Not much.
Point taken.
It's a funny, it's, it's really a funny story.
In the sense that no, they wanted a hundred percent compliance whether it was working or not.
Yep.
And so, you know, at the, at the time I had.
Well, I rem. I remember being at the auto show here. So BMW used to do this like lunch at the auto show press day and they would unveil something. They don't even go to the auto show here anymore, but it used to be a big event.
And I remember BMW had this this agenda that all of their dealers were going to do this.
God, the guy, Gary was the guy, I won't say his last name, but it was some sort of like version of Six Sigma where you, where you wrote out all of your systems and then you had a master book. So you would close your dealership for days at a time. They would come in with these facilitators, you would write out all your processes and then you would document them. And then the idea was it was a starting point for improvement, but also if somebody new started, they could go to the book. And this is how you write up a customer. This is how you file the books and the keys with a new car in a pdi. This, you know, there's all these things and so you're organizing your processes and then you'd have an SOP for everything, basically.
And I remember sitting, you know, we were, we were number one at the time in sales. So whenever something happened, we'd sit with the president of BMW. So sitting there with the president and the guy, that Gary guy was at our table and he was trying to get us because, you know, we weren't one of the better dealers trying to get us to do this process. And there was a guy, his name was Dennis Assail. He was a car dealer. And he was funny, he was a car dealer, but he also was a, was a part time sheriff or whatever.
Oh, wow, I love it.
Funny guy. But he, so he had a dealership in the, in the Inland Empire. He doesn't anymore. He sold to Sonic, I think. But he, he, he's like, oh, it's great. And he's kind of jumping in with this Gary guy in front of the, the president of BMW about how great this process is. And I forget what the. But it had a stupid name like the GCQ or qms, maybe it was called qms, something like that. And he's like, oh, it's the greatest. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And.
To me, in these situations, the question I'm going to ask is logical. But as soon as I asked the question, I realized that it's like I'm, I've done something that in this country, how dare you unfamiliar with is off limits. But it seems like the logical thing to ask, right? So he says, we love qms, we're doing it, we're all in or whatever, kissing the guy's ass. And then I said, and here's the thing that wasn't the appropriate question to ask.
But you're shutting down your dealership. You're investing. You had to have a, you had to hire a special person to manage this. So you were adding another head to your head count. And, you know, a lot of energy and focus is going into this QMS process. I asked Dennis, I said, oh, I go, how much has it improved your profitability? Like, is your profit up and is your CSI up, your customer satisfaction?
Yeah, it was about this quiet, like, no. And then he, he looks at me and he goes, actually, our profits down. And I go, what about your csi? And he goes, I don't know. And he's like, kind of like trying to think, like. And I'm like, okay, what, what are we talking about? Like, what are we talking about?
Like, so funny. Like, it never occurs to anyone to think about measuring results.
Does anybody have any insight to the fact that the factory guys most of the time are just doing the thing? They're told they don't understand how to run a business? Like, they're doing the thing for the factory. Like, they don't. This, this doesn't make any sense. Right. So jump ahead. Years later, I've got, I think it was 12 BMW stores in my, in my kind of coaching thing, right? And the new agenda, these same people are sitting around the same table saying the same thing. But now it's not qms, now it's MPI and digital inspections. And they, they do this thing where they're like, well, if you increase your hours prior by half an hour, it'll mean this much money to you. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So you got to buy the server for a couple thousand dollars, basically. I think all in. It was like 7,500 to $10,000 for the server printers. And then it was $5,000 a month. But half of that was co opt by the manufacturer. So you were paying like 2500amonth or something to that.
Had to be paying two grand in ink also.
Oh yeah, those things were garbage.
Yes.
Okay. So now the, those dealers that are the, the, you know, early adopters or whatever go all in on this thing. And then I had a couple clients that wanted to do it.
And so.
I was like, well, let's wait and see. Meanwhile, I get like, I don't know, within that year, right? We're talking about a year long period. Within that year I got a couple new clients that were the early adopters. So I'm looking at their financials and I'm like, oh, you're, you know, you're losing money, your numbers are terrible, blah, blah, blah. And then when I got in those stores to try to fix them. They're like, oh, we're on mpi. And I'm like, well, how does this process work? You know, whatever. Well, it doesn't work because it gets stuck in parts. Like the. And the techs don't want to do it because it takes too long. There's one computer in the shop. Like they're sharing a laptop. Like it doesn't it. None of it. What is being sold and what is actually happening are two completely different things. Now.
I would get rid of npi, which sometimes you couldn't do. You just had to keep paying because you were under a contract or whatever. But I would get rid of it in the process and our hours per o would jump up. Meanwhile, a couple clients that wanted to do it tried it. So I had new clients coming in that were losing tons of money. Nobody was doing an inspection. It wasn't working.
When they were, they were emailing the customers these inspection sheets that were super colorful. But when a technician marked marginal. Right. So let's just say they're looking at the belts and the belts aren't bad, they don't need replaced, but they're not new. So they're marginal. They're in the middle.
Right.
It would quote that.
Yeah. Even if they're yellow.
So the customers would get these three, four five thousand dollar estimates and really they needed like five hundred worth of it. But it was just quoting them everything, scaring them to death. The other thing it did is they would email this, the customer would have a shopping list. They would call somewhere else and they would say, oh, we can do it for less or oh, you probably don't need that. Bring it in. They would take it into another shop and then the shop would be like, why are you telling them they need belts? Their belts are fine. And it's like, well no, we're marking a marginal. You could never recover from the fact that you would over extended like because they're right, there's no human touch. They see it and it says they need belts. And they're like, oh, I need belts. And it's not like, well did you see that? It's yellow. It's more like it was all tour guide and there's these cool slick videos that explain what a water pump is and all this. None of which did any good. But anyways, the sales would go down whenever that would go in. And that's, that's not a thing you're supposed to say if you're in the German cult of BMW and their agenda is that, you know, that's what they want, whether it's working or not. You better tow. It's a lot like Covid and the mask in California.
Yeah.
Like, you better just tell, don't, don't question any of what we're doing. It's, it's that or you're, you know, you're a despicable. Whatever. Like, that's very much how, how it was with them. And it's. So we kind of came to the conclusion that we were doing way better without the digital MPI thing. And so all my clients went off of it. We didn't have it. And so I got this group of, of BMW dealers that are performing at a very high level. They're all very profitable, they're making money, they're doing good, their CSI is good, but they're not on the, they're not in the Colts.
Right.
And so I get called into headquarters and I've told this story before, and they light me up, you're the problem, blah, blah, blah. And I just said to the guy across the table, he said, what is the average net to gross for a BMW service department in this country? And he didn't know. And he, he said 1%, but he didn't know. I get it. I wasn't even gone there 10 minutes and I got a text saying that wasn't the number, you know, whatever, but the number wasn't great. And my app, you know, my average service department was doing, you know, 300 times that or whatever, whatever the math is on that. And so what they decided to do, which was just as anti climatic is they were going to pick.
Three of my stores randomly and do an audit and compare it to MPI stores. They lied about how they did that because they ended up comparing them to the top eight MPI stores. But the top eight MPI stores in the country were still only doing like 60 inspections. We were 98 or something.
Yeah. Using paper. Right.
Their average upsell, if I remember right, was like 250 or 300 and ours was like 700. We were, we were killing them in every metric. And so the, the thing or the, the reason why the perception is that I'm always right is I'm asking the thing, I'm asking the question that gets me closer to the truth quicker. I'm not as affected by people's culty. Well, you can't say that or you can't do that or whatever. I feel obligated to, to be.
An ambassador for our clients in the sense to tell them, you know, what is working and what isn't without any sort of biases or color in that sense. Right, sure. And if something's working, I'm, I'm going to tell you that it's working as much as if it isn't working. But to ask, did your profit go up? Is like, you know.
It'S not the thing to say, clearly.
Yeah. And so I don't think that it's that I'm always right, it's just that I'm asking the right questions and I'm looking at the, the end result. So we think when we do tablets and we do video inspections, the assumption is, in the way this is sold in our industry, is it's a magic pill.
Right.
But if you do video inspections, all of your problems are going to be solved. And when I say, or we say that if you can't do it with paper, you can't do it digitally, what we mean is it's not a magic pill. Because if you don't have the process in place to do it with paper, you're complicating it. Because the other thing is when you think it's a magic pill, you don't understand that, for example, doing video inspections is a different model. It's a different system, a different process than doing paper. Right. In the sense that now your advisors aren't the one presenting the work, your tech is. So now the advisor plays a different role in that you're completely bypassing a part of the system. But most people, they're not changing their systems because it's, oh, well, if we just do it, it'll work and it isn't. That isn't. That isn't true. Like, if you're just doing the digital inspection, you actually run the risk of your sales going down, like with mpi, because you're scaring people away. You don't, you know, you're assuming that technicians, like, look at me when I took my Rover in. What happened with the, with the video inspection? They sent me somebody else's vehicle, which wasn't. That one was out of warranty and older. It needed a bunch of work. But think about that. If, if you're not in the industry and you get an older vehicle that needs all of that work, what do you think about your vehicle? Like, there's a lot of things that can go wrong. And if you don't run tight systems in the beginning, plugging something like that in and assuming it's a magic pill creates more problems than it solves. And we have this thing in our industry where we think, oh, if we just had tablets and we got cut.










