Socialism In The Service Drive | SDR #375
In this live episode of Service Drive Revolution (SDR #375), host Chris Collins, joined by co‑hosts Hoagie and Adam, covers a wide range of topics relevant to automotive fixed‑ops. The show opens with announcements about the upcoming Top Dog 2026 conference, guest speakers Jefferson Fisher and Andrew Bustamante, and the Service Drive Revolution Academy. The hosts then field live questions, providing detailed advice on pricing strategies—explaining the limited value of posted labor rates, the importance of separating labor categories (competitive, maintenance, repair, diagnosis, diesel) and targeting an Effective Labor Rate (ELR) that exceeds the door rate. They discuss industry benchmarks for gross profit percentages and labor rates. The conversation shifts to a broader socio‑economic critique, linking rising student debt, unaffordable college tuition, and a perceived shift toward socialism among young people to a shortage of qualified automotive technicians. They argue that current higher‑education pathways misalign with market needs, creating a workforce gap that fuels labor shortages. The hosts review a federal apprenticeship initiative (NADA’s Apprenticeship‑in‑a‑Box) and critique technician compensation models, contrasting hourly pay in truck dealerships with flat‑rate pay in car shops, and highlighting inefficiencies in shop operations. Throughout, they intersperse humor, personal anecdotes, and references to external videos (e.g., Maxwell King) to illustrate industry frustrations. The episode ends with a call to modernize shop systems, improve technician pay structures, and address the underlying economic forces driving discontent in the service drive.
Chapters
Welcome everybody to Service Drive Revolution. I hope you are having a great week so far. We have an exciting show for you today. We are going to talk about how socialism is coming to your service drive. We also are going to take your questions. So we have this, this new setup here where we can take questions from all the platforms that we are streaming live on. It worked out pretty good. Last week, so if you have a question or something you want to talk about, we would love for you to put it in the comments or in the chat, and we will we will talk about it. Then I just want to remind everybody that we've been doing Service Drive Revolution live on Wednesdays, and we're doing it at 10 a.m. Pacific time, which I think would mean one o'clock Eastern time every Wednesday. And then following that, we've been doing the Service Drive Revolution Academy, where we were kind of going through, kind of teaching what we know about how you can run an incredible fixed ops service drive. And today we are building on Service Drive Judo, our process that we use in the service drive. And we're gonna talk about the customer connection and petting the dog, which is going to be really, really fun. So please say hello to, uh, the Oklahoma Smoke Show. Hoagie is here. Say hello, Hoagie.
Hello.
Good morning, afternoon, everybody, whichever applies.
And Adam. Hello, Adam.
Hello, everyone.
Finally, Adam's back at home. Uh, he feels way more comfortable with the dead animals on the wall than, uh, you know, Airbnb.
I'm getting that itch though, Chris. We had, uh, 4 deer in the backyard the other day where the girls are all getting excited after around dinner. I keep telling them it's hunting season. I don't know if the two have connected that one, but we'll see.
Yeah. I mean, we're going to talk about socialism later. I think it's hilarious. You moved from Chicago, well, the suburbs of Chicago, down south to Southern Illinois where you could have all the acreage you wanted. And, uh, you aren't allowed to hunt on your own property, which is incredible.
Well, I, I, I believe that Ted Nugent is right. We should be given that God-given right to hunt, just like you said in a previous show, to hunt on our own land.
Gosh, how crazy is Ted Nugent? Yeah, whenever I'm, uh, bored, I just like to watch interviews of him. He's He's hilarious.
He can still rip it on guitar though, man.
So we have in the comments already, we have Mick Roller Pig dying to know what that means. Mick Roller Pig says, enrolled in Service Revolution. I enrolled in the Service Revolution site, but I want to go straight to the academy. Is there an additional charge to sign up for that? How do I gain access? There is an additional charge if you go to chriscollinsinc.com And sign up for on-demand, or the Academy's on the— I think it's called the Academy on the website.
Yeah.
And if you hurry, we'll make sure that you get in there by this afternoon, which is, uh, not that far away. But thank you, McRollerPig. Some of these names are funny. That's hilarious. That's good. Okay, so we got Top Dog coming up in October, which is pretty exciting. Every year we do Top Dog, it is said that it's the best Top Dog ever. I think we always kind of top what, what we do. This year, the theme is, you know, transcending the service drive. And it's, it's interesting. I had a conversation yesterday with a general manager from a Ford dealer in Texas that is one of us that transcended the service drive. He started off in service, was a manager, and then became the general manager running an incredible business. Super smart. And I, I was just telling him on the call, I'm like, you're the hero. You are, you are what we aspire to. We want the managers in our coaching group to think, uh, about becoming the ones that are leading the industry, to be the ones that have the influence and a seat at the table. And so, we've seen quite a few managers from our elite group become general managers, but it's something that we're very passionate about. And we actually even bonus our coaches if they have somebody they're coaching that becomes a general manager. It's a big deal. For us to try and do that.
Quite an achievement for sure.
Mm-hmm.
And an angel gets their wings every time that happens, I think. Then, so speaking about Top Dog, we were going through the agenda and we're kind of planning it out, but so far we have Jefferson Fisher is coming to talk. If you're not familiar with Jefferson Fisher, he wrote the book The Next Convo, but he has this YouTube channel where he basically can help you get out of any sort of argument or how to reframe things to people, any sort of tension, he has a way to, to get out of it. He's an attorney from Texas and just understands the English language and how when you put words together in a certain way, they have a different effect. Love, love his channel. We've been a fan of his for a while. And so he's, he's going to be speaking. We will have his book for everybody. Also, he's not speaking because he had a another event, but I did try to get him, Andrew Bustamante, but he is signing his new book, Outsmart Everyone, for us. So everybody who comes to Top Dog will get a signed copy of Andrew's new book. I would encourage everybody to preorder it. It comes out next week. We also are going to have an episode of Books That Changed My Life with Bustamante next week. That's gonna go out. We had an incredible conversation. This is the book that I always wish that he would write, which is about the things that I have learned from him in human behavior. So it's called Spy Skills to Gain an Unfair Advantage in Work and Life. And it's all, it's all in there. He didn't, he didn't hold anything back. And the conversation that we have was really, really fun. So that'll be in your gift bag. Actually, the gift bags for Top Dog this year are by far and away—
They're amazing, dude. They're awesome.
The best gift bags we've ever had. And almost, I would go on the record, and say that they're collectible, that some of the things in there—
Yeah, for sure.
Collectible.
They're all— all the swag is— that whole thing is, uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was really cool.
You're gonna want to put it on a shelf. You probably won't use it. Even, even the tote bag is so good. Michael did such a good job with that stuff. Yeah, I mean, we just have an incredible team here of creatives, I guess you would call them, but for sure pretty great stuff. And, uh, I remember when he first showed me the idea for the design of the, of the tote bag, he couldn't get anybody to print it because it goes all the way to the edges. And he— I'm like, Michael, there's no way we, you know, you can't un— I saw it. Like, it has to be the way that you presented it. He's like, he kept coming back and he's like, well, they can do this. And I'm like, no, you gotta do the thing. That you designed. And so he finally found somebody to do it, and they're a little more expensive for sure, but worth it. And will, will be something that you will treasure and will remind you of the great time you're gonna have if you attend Top Dog. It's gonna be quite an event. We have In-N-Out Burger again coming out.
Tacos.
Of course, that's our thing. Margaritas. But it's gonna be really, really fun. A chance for you to be around other Industry leaders, learn from from the best, hang out and get inspired. You know, there's something therapeutic about leaving the office and going somewhere else and kind of working on yourself and the business remotely. You're not getting interrupted. You're surrounded by really positive people that are thinking in a different way. So it's going to be great. Top Dog 2026 in October. Really, really fun. Oh, one other thing I forgot. Christian Hand is going to open it on Thursday night again.
Oh, sweet. Yeah.
And man, that's gonna be awesome.
It's funny because nobody understands, uh, how we do stuff, but you, you wouldn't think that Christian Hand would be somebody who's speaking at a, in a car thing, but he ends up being like one of the favorite things that happens because of the— what he does essentially is he breaks songs down that are songs that you've heard your whole life, and you will hear them in a completely different way. He will shift your perspective through story and through breaking down individual tracks. And so, uh, famously we had him do Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen twice.
Mm-hmm.
Because it was so good, we had him come back and do it again. And even like, I would, I would watch him do Bohemian Rhapsody right now, like 10 times wouldn't be enough.
I don't think that would ever get old.
No.
And now every time I hear the song, it's completely different to me. And then another song that he does that would blow your mind, you wouldn't expect it, is Hollywood Nights by Bob Seger.
Yeah, that'd be cool.
Yeah, you, you will never hear that song again the same way. I'm not sure what we're going to do this year. We're kind of talking about that. I want it to be on the theme of what we're doing. It is also funny Mike, who is our ops director here, was telling me that I had him reach out to somebody that I wanted to come do a workshop at Top Dog. And the guy looked us up and he, he was like, are you sure you want me? Like, I'm not in the car industry. Or, you know, and it's like, the theme is transcending the service drive. It's not, it's not a, it's not just linear. We gotta have outside influences and learn other industries and other things. But it's funny how People are like, are you sure it's me?
Like, yeah, don't put us in a box.
So good. But it's going to be a great time. I, the, I think one of the things I'm excited about more than anything besides Christian Hand and seeing everybody is In-N-Out Burger. It's always such a treat to actually hire In-N-Out Burger to come here because you can literally have as many as you want and there's not the line that you have to wait when Dangerous combination. Any In-N-Out Burger by me, by where I live, it's always, you know, it's lined up out into the street. So it's, it's more fun that way. It's good. So, uh, gentlemen, I lost my feed here. So I saw that people were, were putting questions and then my feed completely went away. Maybe I should hit refresh. Can you guys, uh, see the feed?
Yeah. Yeah. So McRollerPig has some questions. Do you want me to go ahead and throw them out?
Yeah.
So one, McRollerPig, your first question, you enrolled in the Service Drive Revolution site. If you've already bought SDR On Demand, the academy is included in that. If you have not, then you would need to go chriscollinsinc.com and sign up for Service Drive Revolution on demand.
Email info@chriscollinsinc.com and Alex will get right back to you.
We'll get y'all fixed up. McRollerPig says, so I'm a fixed ops director in South Carolina. My current labor GP percentage is 80 to 82%. What is considered the industry average at this time? I'm at Audi and Acura stores. Similar question for labor rate. I advertise a door rate of $225. My ELR is 285%-ish. What's considered acceptable by the Bulldog? I've heard you say above door rate is where ELR should be.
Okay, so let's take those one at a time. So the gross profit percentage, I believe the industry average is somewhere in the low 70s and 80 is really good. 81, 82 is, is doing a good job. Would you agree with that, Hoagie?
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
And then the posted labor rate. So this is, this is a really good question. Really, the thing about posted labor rate is that it doesn't matter. Like there's, there's, it just doesn't matter. First of all, you, you don't really want customers thinking about the labor rate. You want 'em thinking about the outcome and the, the job. And I know there's states where you have to post the labor rate, and that is, is what it is. But your 1 hour of labor in, in our system won't matter because we might charge a different amount for diagnosis. We might have a matrix. We certainly aren't charging that for maintenance. And the highest ELR that you might have might be on maintenance, not repair. You know, repair's gonna get shopped. Maintenance is more of an impulse. So what you really wanna do is get into our academy and go through the pricing strategies of, of how to separate your labor into different categories. So you have, you know, competitive labor, which is what drives traffic. You have maintenance labor, you have repair, and then you might have diagnosis as a 4th labor type, just depending. Then you might have diesel. If you have trucks, you might have a diesel or a heavy duty labor rate. So we, we wanna break all of those down into different buckets and then how you price those, how you approach them, and then how you sell more of them are, are all different. So, you know, repair labor for the most part is sold by people coming in needing a repair or by us inspecting the vehicle and recommending a repair. Maintenance is sold more as an impulse, like we're checking history and then recommending, or customers are coming in and doing their, their maintenance. And so each one has a different approach and how you achieve an ELR from them is completely different. So you, you gotta kind of separate them. And then the end outcome of doing a pricing strategy correctly Will be that your ELR is higher than your posted 1-hour labor rate for sure.
Yeah, that'd be a target for sure.
The least, the least exciting thing is your 1-hour price of labor at the end of the day.
Mm-hmm.
And I would say if there was a percent, like if I was, what does he, what does he say he's at for ELR?
80, 85-ish of his, uh, of his door rate.
So I would say, uh, I would say you want to be over by a, by a clip. I don't know, probably over by at least 10%, but maybe 20% is probably more normal for us.
Maybe it, it, like you said, it's not a, it's, it's, uh, that's an outcome of what we do, but we're not really tracking that as closely as we are getting to a desired net profit. So we're, we're tracking net to gross percentage more than we are some of these other metrics, and a percentage of your door rate is just something to kind of look at. What it really represents, Carfax just came out and said 40% of the vehicles on the road have maintenance way past due. And I forget what the timeline was, but it's a crazy amount of vehicles that just aren't getting offered the maintenance. And so, The way we're achieving that is pricing strategy. And then we have a very sound system and a pretty bulletproof way of monitoring, making sure, and giving the advisor, setting them up for success to be able to spend a little time with the customer and go over that every customer, every time, prepare for the visit, check history like you mentioned, Chris.
And then the psychology of the customer and the sales, right?
Yeah, which we'll get, we'll get, uh, we'll get to spend some time on that in Academy today for, for sure. So if you jump on there with us, uh, McRollerPig, we'll be diving into that, uh, a little bit later. And you can also—
How dare you call him RollerPig?
McRollerPig. You can explain that for us also.
Mr. McRollerPig.
And we'll answer each other's questions.
So funny. That's great. Thanks for the question though. Good one. But I— it's pretty easy to achieve an ELR higher than your door rate. And I don't— nobody in our group, nobody really talks about door rate anymore because it's just a— it's such a small part of what you're really doing.
Yeah.
In fact, you could lower that. And you know, if it's a market where people are looking at that, I would try to have the lowest 1-hour labor rate, probably. It's perception.
Yeah, I mean, it's perception. Yeah, 100%. That's what I was gonna say. It's just a— it's just a number.
Yeah, good stuff. Okay, there, uh, any other questions? Maybe we'll have time at the end if anybody has a question that's coming in.
That's all I got on the moment. I just have YouTube pulled up, so if there's questions coming in from other places, I'm not seeing them on my side, so Yeah, I think some of the other platforms are a little glitchy.
Like, we try to go live on LinkedIn, but sometimes it kicks us out. I don't know why. Yeah, but LinkedIn, I don't know, they're not really about being live, are they?
I think they're trying to play in that space.
I don't spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, so I'm not super familiar with it. But I love YouTube though. I spend a lot of time on YouTube. It's good. Okay, let's, let's talk about the next subject. Socialism is coming to your service drive. Did you guys see that they voted I think in the House yesterday, something about socialism. I could never get what it was. Even a bunch of Democrats voted for a bill against socialism, but—
Oh, well. I don't know.
I didn't see that.
I know there's a lot of chatter on it right now and people in primaries, winning primaries and stuff like that with an openly socialist agenda.
Yeah, it said it passed, but I couldn't figure out what it was that passed.
Well, uh, did you guys catch that there's a— some school up in, in around Detroit area that is actually paying kids to go to school? Like, if they make their attendance, they get like gift cards. So that's, that's just amazing how that's gonna play out.
What do you mean?
So they're having it to where you're going to get paid to go to school if you hit those certain times in certain grade levels in Michigan. So it's just keep feeding the beast of the socialism of like getting them to come in instead of properly— I don't know, that's the gift of education, um, proper parenting, all that other stuff that we talk about. It all feeds in.
Yeah.
So have you guys seen who is driving this kind of movement towards socialism? Have you seen who it is? The demographic?
No.
So it's, it's mostly, uh, kind of upper middle class college students, middle class college students.
Is it because they're lost?
No, because, I mean, listen, like, I think in these situations you can be against something, but if you don't try to understand the other side, it's not going away.
Yeah, that's true.
And so the secret is in really genuinely putting your biases aside and try to understand what's going on. Now, you know, we have this thing in America called the American dream. And something happened when it comes, you know, to college is that at some point the banks got the government to agree to making the student loans not qualify for bankruptcy. So you can't claim bankruptcy on a student loan. Okay. And I don't, I don't know what the thinking was at that time or how that makes any rational sense, cuz it doesn't make rational sense. But basically the situation that, that created was these kids go to college and they're, they're told, hey, you gotta go to college in order to be successful in this country. You gotta have an education. And so they can get a student loan. These colleges charge huge amounts of money. We have this whole working class of students that aren't hireable because they have degrees and stuff that doesn't apply to the workforce. Right? I mean, just think about if you did, maybe you can Google this really quick, Hoagie.
Yeah.
How many kids graduate with a degree in political sciences versus how many techs? Graduating year.
80/20 or something crazy like that.
Yeah. So you have this situation where these kids have hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans that they can never claim bankruptcy for. And the problem with capitalism is we become our own worst enemy as capitalists, is we start building in these things that undo capitalism. So it's To not be able to claim bankruptcy on something that didn't work creates this scenario where people are enslaved to student loans. And listen, we also can say like, well, they don't have to go to college. They don't have to take the loan. You're, you're right. I agree with that. But, but a lot of these kids don't have good advice. I didn't have good advice when I was 18. I had a coach convince me not to go to college on a scholarship for soccer because it was a dead end and I would get drafted into Europe and I would hate it like he did and the whole thing. And so when you're 18, you're not making the best decisions and you don't always have the best advice around you or whatever. So the idea that capitalism is no longer capitalism because it isn't allowing the markets to take care of themselves, In capitalism, there's a lot of losers. Like, 80% of businesses go under in the first, you know, couple years. Like, that is how it works. Like, you, you have to have a solution that is worth a certain amount of money to the marketplace in order for that to be capitalism, because then you're, you're constantly creating, you're innovating, you're making whatever it is that you're selling Better for the consumer. You have competition. These banks said, no, we don't want to ever have any consequences for giving loans to people that shouldn't get loans. So now we have all of these kids who are graduating college. There aren't jobs for what they've gone to college for, and they have hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans that they have to pay back no matter what. And, you know, it It's not capitalism. That's not capitalism.
Well, and the institutions are just making bank. They just keep raising the hourly rate for themselves, and it's a vicious cycle.
It should not surprise anybody that then we have a rise of socialism of college students that are saying, hey, this bag of goods that you guys sold me, I followed the system. I went to college, I got a degree, and now I'm coming out and I'm being replaced by AI. There's no job for me. The jobs that are out there don't pay me enough to pay off my student loans, let alone afford an apartment or whatever it is.
Yeah.
You got to make $100,000-something to even be competitive. And I mean, we have a couple people here that have College, they have student loans that they're paying back for something that should have been way less. So the other thing that's happened in that is the colleges just charge more and more and more and more, and there's no connection to what that degree is actually worth in the marketplace. So you got the banks that have a monopoly on it. There's never any consequences. And then you have the colleges that charge 'em whatever. These colleges have so much money, it's insane.
Can I add a little bit much to that, Chris? A lot of them is they file for grants through the state so that they become a research institution. So then they even double down and you get a professor that wants to leverage the school as a research facility. So think about it like this.
Adam, we got to be careful here because I'm going to have a hard attack. Like, okay, because yeah, that's, that's a whole nother thing that makes the veins on my forehead pop about how corrupt that thing is. And then they go out and make money off of— yeah.
Well, and it's— yeah, and you're— and the student is paying for that.
Yeah.
And they're calling it, it's experience.
So I have a, I have a sister-in-law in college right now, and Yeah, it's just nuts. It's nuts what they charge. It's nuts what they put these kids through, the whole thing. So this rise in socialism is, in a, in a sense, could be predicted. And I don't disagree with how these kids feel. I, I, I think that if we're going to be capitalist, there has to be real capitalism, that the markets decide what fair, fair value is. And you can't give these big banks a get out of jail free card that enslaves these kids into loans that don't serve them. Do you guys agree with that? Is there a counterpoint to that?
100%. 100%.
No, I think the stat you were wanting to pull earlier is eye-opening though. So for bachelor's degree, there's 2.2 million graduates a year for automotive technology degrees. there are roughly 39,000. And then for political science 4-year degrees, there's also about 40,000. So just for that one type of degree, political science, there's only that many technicians graduating with a 2-year automotive technology degree. And 2.2 million when you include all of the different 4-year bachelor's degrees.
So when you mess with capitalism in this way, there's another consequence too, besides these kids being slaves to loans, being disenchanted, and wanting to disrupt the system or overthrow the current system, is you also have, when you are an employer, you don't have an available workforce because they're all trained in the wrong stuff. The fun thing about capitalism is People gravitate to where the food is. They gravitate to where the revenue is, right? So we don't have people coming into our industry wanting to be techs, even though techs can make a really good living and do really, really well. We don't have anybody going into the services like HVAC or plumbing, all of that sort of stuff. We don't have welders to build ships. Like, the problems that this creates for us On the flip side, as businesses, is insane because yeah, these kids want political science, they want to go to college, they want to have a great time, they feel good that they're getting a degree, but then they come out and they don't make any money and they're stuck with, with the, the wrong skill set in a sense. And also, like, what does it take for us to train a technician? We could, you know, you don't need a 4 or a 6-year degree.
12 to 18 months. 18 months, I think.
I know that we certainly would, but we have tons of clients that would sponsor the right kids in college and pay for their education. We have clients that do that now. And so the problem is you are putting a glitch in the matrix in that now the workforce that we have isn't matching what the needs are of the economy that we're in. Right.
Yeah.
That's the other, that's the other side of this. And, you know, I've heard Peter Thiel, I've heard a bunch of really smart people talk about this and they all agree, like, you, we're, we're selling these kids a, a bag of goods that they're disenchanted and they feel ripped off. They feel lied to. And, um, you know, and I, I also am of the opinion that people make their own choices and that's great, but Unfortunately, when you just talk about society as a whole, you still should have the game set up with the right rules that benefit the, the players, not just the businesses and not just the banks. And the, the, the thing that we have in this country is we're, we're putting people into debt and they're, they're indentured servants. That's really what it is. Like, I've, I've been somebody who, you know, besides, uh, 2 buildings that I have. I have no— I don't live beyond my means and I don't have debt. And I've been that way for a long time. I don't, uh, I couldn't rent a car because I only had a debit card and I didn't have a credit card. I finally got a credit card just so I could rent a car sometimes because they don't take debit cards. But I don't have any credit— like 20-plus years I haven't had credit cards or any of that. I just don't believe in that. But That isn't how the world works. The amount of debt that people have, it's, it's crazy. And so, yeah. Now we have this movement, which I don't know if we would call it a, a kind of copycat movement, but there is these personalities online that are coming up that are technicians in our industry that are talking about doing away with flat rate and just how unfair they feel the system is to technicians. Now, we have a vantage point that is different than everybody else's, that we are in truck dealerships that— so heavy truck dealerships, for the most part, as an industry, the technicians are not flat rate. The technicians are hourly.
Yeah.
By far and away, the average truck dealership is running Below 60% inefficiency. And what, what did I mean by efficiency? Because in truck, proficiency is efficiency, and in car it's the opposite. So you have to be careful to understand.
Mm-hmm.
But just, there's an 8-hour workday. How many hours does the technician flag versus that 8 hours? So it isn't clocked on time, it's just available time versus what do they flag? Truck dealerships for the most part run below 60%, sometimes below 50%. And I mean, I've been in shops for truck dealers where you don't hear a truck being worked on. There's just no activity going on whatsoever. There is a pretty deep sense of entitlement. And there also is that there are a lot of technicians in that environment that wish they could be flat rate. Which is the opposite of what everybody thinks. But if they can make more, they wanna make more. If you, if you're a technician and you're talented, you would much rather be on flat rate than on hourly because you really can't, you know, take your own destiny into your hands and make more money in a sense.
Right.
So the, now on the car side, I don't know of, of too many car dealerships. Maybe it's less than 1%. I, I know that I can think of one off the top of my head that, that the technicians are hour— they're hourly and not flat rate. They're not commissioned on what they produce. Would you guys agree with that?
Agreed.
Mm-hmm.
There is a few, but they're anomalies.
Yeah.
So we kind of see the, the good and the bad in, in both of 'em. But once again, let's try to understand where this movement, the socialism movement, is coming from. And so we're going to play a couple videos. We'll play one and then we'll talk about it, and then we'll play another one. Did you tell them, Hoagie, which one you wanted to play first?
Yeah. Uh-huh.
It seems like somebody up there in big government has finally realized that the technician shortage in our automotive industry is a very serious problem. 6,000 new automotive technicians in just 4 years. That is the goal that the United States Department of Labor has just put forward. This is a nationwide push. The ASE Education Foundation has just put out resources that have to do with how these apprenticeships work, how you can qualify, all the details. Any shop, any franchise, any dealership can receive up to $3,500 for every apprentice they hire and get to a certain level. Now the trick to this is the employer has to have an approved apprenticeship program. But how do we know what that is? Well, NADA has an Apprenticeship in a Box program that's used as the baseline for what an apprenticeship should look like. But what is this Apprenticeship in a Box program from NADA? Does it actually create good technicians? Well, we finally have some criteria on that. Now, the headline for this program is Automotive Specialist with a Concentration in Electric Vehicles. So it sounds like we're going to cover all the bases here, but we actually have a bulleted list that shows you all the things that you're going to learn if you become an apprentice in this program. First up, this results in Department of Labor certification, which I think is pretty cool. The program is based on 197 competencies. 60% are for internal combustion engines and 40% on EV. Now, the program is supposed to last from 18 to 24 months, and it includes 2,000 hours of hands-on experience. I think that's a good number for hands-on experience for an apprentice. It requires 405 hours of related technical instruction. It could be completed in person and online, and this is aligned with the curriculum at ASE-accredited schools. This program also features strong mentor-apprentice relationship. It doesn't really go into detail of what that means. I don't know if that means the shop is required to provide a mentor to the apprentice. I don't know who oversees that, who regulates that. That's a nice bullet point. I just don't know how that's executed, but it's nice to see it's there. Includes 2 wage increases for apprentices, one mid-program and one at completion. This is really good for the morale of the or the apprentice going through this program to know that you have pay raises coming along the way in an industry that's often underpaid, or at least that's what technicians say. We have data that supports that. I think this is a really awesome thing they put in there to keep morale up as we go through the program. And then finally, this program supports content for ASE certification tests, the suspension and steering, brakes, auto maintenance and light repair, and electric vehicle awareness and safety. I actually like that because since you're getting 2,000 hours of hands-on experience, And you're learning about content that has to do with these tests. You have no reason not to get those ASE certifications as an apprentice because you already know the content and you qualify with your hands-on experience, which means when you come out of this program, you'll have a bunch of ASE certifications, you'll have the Department of Labor certification, you will be ready to rock in this industry. Do you think that we're actually going to add 6,000 new technicians to our industry in 4 years, or do you think we're going to run into hurdles? If you see hurdles, let us know what they are so that the people up top can hear them.
Why does no one want to work on our vehicles anymore? We have a shortage of technicians. Why does no one want to work on cars anymore? I'll lay it flat out here for you why people don't want to work as a technician anymore. And I'm going to list off all of these reasons right here now. Number 1, the over-engineering of vehicles. And we know why you do this. You do this so that you can charge the customer more billing hours for a repair and make more money. A job that used to take 2 hours now takes 4 hours, and that puts a lot of strain on your technicians because now all these technicians have to figure out your over-engineering and how to repair it and also buy all these specialty tools that's costing them money out of their pocket. And that brings me to number 2, pay rate. You pay your technicians the absolute worst wages ever. You pay your new technicians like fresh out of trade school as much as a McDonald's employee. And also flat rate. I don't know who came up with flat rate. But they need to be smacked. And I hope both sides of their pillow are hot every single night. Because if you have not much work coming into the shop for that week, you're just going to not make as much money when that paycheck hits. And also, back to over-engineering of vehicles, when you get a brand new vehicle that you never touched before, never seen before, and you have to make a repair on it, and the job quote's like 4 hours, and you're having to figure out, and it takes you 5 hours, You're not getting paid for that extra hour. And it's just overall just a dogshit pay system. And that brings me to number 3, warranty work. Warranty work is the most tedious and the most repetitive thing ever. And it's just a way to get burnt out real quickly. And honestly, why didn't the engineers like really Notice that this is going to cause problems later down the line and then just like, oh, the technicians will deal with it. It's no big deal. The company will do it. No big deal. Like, why didn't you just do your job and make sure that that fault in the vehicle wasn't going to happen before it hit the dealerships to be purchased? And overall, just the automotive trade is just a dying trade and nobody wants to do it anymore. Because these companies just want to keep reinventing the wheel constantly. We got engineers that just overcomplicate things, and it's all just for the sake so that they can make a profit. And Ford, Dodge, and whatever big company, big dealership, whatever, all their names, there's so many of them. They're just all doing it for the sake so that they can make more on their bottom dollar. They're making them more cheaply, they're making them more complicated, and they're just overall just making it just a headache. And they're not going to stop because it makes them more money. And it's unfortunate. And I honestly found another trade that I'm actually enjoying and that I love and I actually make good money doing. And overall, I'm not done working on cars as a hobby, but I am done with it as a career. And I'm pretty sure a lot of technicians are. So there's the reason why a bunch of technicians are leaving. And a bunch of them aren't becoming technicians themselves. A bunch of new people aren't becoming technicians. So there you go. That is why.
That's the funniest part. I wish the automotive trade was a dying trade on my commute in this morning that took me an hour that I could have easily done in 20 minutes if all those other cars weren't in my way. It is not a dying trade. I mean, I think clearly that's a very young kid, right? That is facing the realities of life. His channel is called Maxwell King. And I don't know of technicians making less than people at McDonald's. That isn't the world we live in. Technicians make Really, really good living, especially the good ones. Um, and yeah, I, I just don't agree with his point of view on the industry. The, you know, the other part of that is he's saying like, why can't they make a car that doesn't break? Um, I mean, that's just—
You wouldn't have service.
That's an impossibility. Yeah. I mean, you, well, I mean, You know, maybe that's better for the consumer if there's a car that doesn't break, but anything with moving parts and electronics is going to break.
It all has a lifespan. It all has a lifespan.
I'll tell Hoagie, tell this poor kid about, uh, 2002 working on BMWs.
E65s.
We used to have Maxwell King. We used to have technicians literally walk out and never come back and just leave their tools trying to work on those BMWs.
And they were in such a daze, they didn't know they left.
Yeah. The reliability of vehicles and how they are made and engineered is so much better now than it has ever been in the history of auto manufacturing. So you got to go back in time a little bit and appreciate how far we have come and how good the manufacturers are at making stuff. And engineering them. And then the, the warranty time thing, like I've, I've always had a hard time with the idea that the warranty time is half of what the retail time is. I, I agree with him on, on that one. I've always thought that's unfair to the technicians.
And well, the, the first guy we played, the Manny Mechanic guy, one thing I appreciate, appreciate about some of his posts is, uh, he's stating all those facts. So you're kind of taking a similar take that he does in that he agrees that that stuff's not right. And then he's like, but you can make really good money as a mechanic. You want to take the jobs that are hard, that people don't want to take, that don't pay the right amount of time, because that makes you that much more invaluable in the marketplace. And so he states a lot of the kind of obvious things that are true, But his whole channel, you can tell, is based on wanting younger techs to follow him, to have a better outlook on this thing, because at least that gives them a pathway forward. And right now, the consensus is just falling victim to it.
Right.
And it's hard to watch. Some of these videos are really hard to watch, and he's at least trying to be a mentor to that crowd.
But yeah, but we've, we've, uh, commented and talked, talked amongst ourselves many times about how dealerships really don't prioritize technicians. You can tell by the way they're treated, the lunchroom, just everything about the work environment. And so I think just like with the college thing is we, we get what we deserve. In a sense, like, we're allowing it to be an afterthought. And if the shop and service is an afterthought, that's what we're going to get. There's an interesting question in here from Greg Dillon on X. If student debt is pushing people towards socialism, why do we see similar social leanings among young people in European countries where university is already free? That's a great question, Greg. And I will tell you, like, The first thing is we should not compare ourselves to Europe. We are so far. If you look up just inventions, ingenuity, business, like we are number one in the world for a reason. We've solved more problems for society. We have the the talent from all over the world wants to come here in our version of capitalism. Capitalism has worked really, really well. We we just are getting to the point where the you know some of the people at the top are rigging the system against the the population, and that that can't happen. But capitalism works really well and has worked really well for us. Now, when we're talking about Europe, we got to talk about the individual countries. But I'll we'll just take England, for example, Brexit and what has happened there. The government there in England has completely gutted that country of manufacturing. They are completely dependent on their energy from the outside. They don't make anything anymore. It's something like over 50% of the population in the UK is on some form of welfare. Just think about that for a second. In a country with smart people that can work hard and do great things, 50% of them are on some sort of welfare where Their rent is subsidized or they're getting money from the government to survive. And so the wage, I would contend that you can't really point at a country in Europe that has our version of capitalism. And the thing that happens, California is a great example of this. The more that the left gains power, the more rules and taxes and things they put into place. It makes it impossible for businesses to survive. The amount of businesses that have left the state of California— and I, I probably think about it twice a day— why am I still in California running a business when the, the, you know, the business owner in California is the enemy the way that they, they treat it? And you're, you're looking at the same thing in New York, and that's very similar to, to what you have in Europe. So I don't think that it's apples to apples to compare us to even Canada. I mean, it's just completely different. We've done a lot of business in Canada and the way things work there and the heavy hand that the government has is completely different than what we have here. I just think that our rise in socialism is a wake-up call for us to really think about Do we want companies to profit at the expense of humans? And I think that we've let that get away from us. We're seeing that with Facebook and that lawsuit. We're seeing it with processed foods and the amount of cancer we have and all that. And we need to rein that in. We want capitalism in the markets to balance themselves out, and that creates ups and downs. Companies go out of business, new companies come in, there's competition. But we need competition and we need to prioritize the human beings in that where we shouldn't sell things to people that make them sick, that aren't healthy. We should have a fair game. We shouldn't put people into student loans that come out the other end and can't pay them back or can't live a decent life for that education. We should let the markets control the system. And if If tomorrow you could claim bankruptcy on student loans, they wouldn't be giving loans to everybody. The colleges would be charging way less, and they would rethink what they're offering so it matches the workforce. It's that simple. It would happen in minutes.
Like, and the quality would be better.
Yeah, the quality.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's just one example, right? He's bringing that up as an example, and that's not an example in Europe. But, uh, yeah, what you were talking about, the, the—
if you talk about Germany, it's a completely completely different thing than what's going on with Brexit in the UK. They all have, but they're failing. Like, the systems aren't working.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 60%, uh, combined, 60% of families actually in the UK receive, uh, some sort of, uh, some sort of, some sort of—
It's half. I think it's half of their GDP.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's crazy.
So you, you can, uh, yeah, you can pull different, uh, different examples. But there's— and just looking throughout history, that's, that's one thing that gets lost in this conversation. Looking throughout history, there's never been, uh, a great social experiment, uh, surrounding this, right?
Well, where does everybody that's talented want to come? Yeah, they want to come here for sure. And so we have something special here. We should, we should try to keep it fair. We You know, be honest about the outcome. And if we have a section of society that is revolting against it, we should listen. And personally, I don't, I don't agree with socialism, but I understand why they feel the way they do. And I think that it's unfair. I think that we should change it. I don't think that colleges should be able to do that.
So we just have a couple minutes here left, but this whole conversation is super applicable And kind of why we brought up this subject is there's a real grassroots movement right now that people aren't talking about. And I can give live examples from in-store, or you can just get on social media, but there is a grassroots movement for whole shops going to their owner base and saying, we want to be hourly or all of us are out.
Crazy.
And the thing is, is in truck, you talked about them being hourly. It's funny because a lot of the truck world wants to take their base from hourly to salary because the efficiencies are so low, the production is so low, the load build volume.
You mean they want to go to flat rate?
Yeah, they want to go to flat rate. They're hourly and want to go to flat rate. And then you have this thing on the car side where it's the opposite. And it's interesting because you wish the 2 worlds intersected more and they They just don't. But there's a real thing to, as crazy as some of these things sound, like you said, I think the key is to understanding it. And if you understand it, some of those problems we can start to solve. I think by the end of next year, all states will have adopted the new warranty rule where warranty has to pay 1.5 times the book time to bring it up level with customer pay. But we need to be emphasizing some of those points and right-sizing some of these things that just don't make sense where we probably have just told the technicians to go back and sorry, it is what it is.
Well, just think about how many shops we still run into, Hoagie, that have a dispatcher. They'll have 20-something techs and there's one person controlling their destiny.
Yeah.
It's the systems have to be updated. The, yeah, we can't keep running things like we did in 1920. The technicians expect efficiencies. They expect things to be fair. They expect to have a work environment that encourages flat rate, not makes them feel victim to it. And I think that lands on our lap.
Yeah.
Yep.
Yeah.
I like that.
Do you show 'em the pathway, Boogie?
Yeah, for sure. For sure. Mark my words, a year from now, this is going to be an even bigger discussion. It's coming. And so I think most people are going to ignore it and regret it, but you have an opportunity here and there's few dealerships out there that are doing that are making these strides and making it make sense. And there's a pathway to it, but you have to try to understand it and then care that each of those individuals has a growth path, reaches certain professional destinations, things like that. I mean, they're the driver of the service business, right? That's what we sell. We don't have anything to sell unless they're producing an hour of labor.
And, um, well, we could, we could talk about this, you know, for, for a while. Maybe we'll talk about it again next week. If you didn't have the ability to join us live, do go ahead and comment. Be, you know, be respectful, but comment what your thoughts are on this. If you're a technician, we would love to hear your feedback. We did talk about having somebody come on that's a technician and kind of talk about their point of view also, which would be great, but, um, We got to wrap up for today because we got to run over to the academy and we only have a couple minutes, but we appreciate everybody joining us. Thanks everybody who participated in, in the chat and we hope you have a great week and we'll see you next time on Service Drive Revolution. I know from experience that a lot of our dealers, owners won't invest in training for fixed ops, but 8 service managers in our coaching group have been promoted to general manager, something that doesn't happen enough in our industry. Proof that when you're given the right tools and the right mentorship, you can do amazing things. And I'd like to personally invite you to something that should exist already, but unfortunately it doesn't. And that's a live fixed ops academy, a mentorship, a community. But what it really is, is a service drive revolution. Anybody can afford it. Anybody that wants to invest in themselves. We're going to teach what we know about running a healthy fixed-op service business. Our average coaching client performs well above the industry average, and a handful of them are in a league completely their own. In fact, if I told you their numbers, you wouldn't even believe it, they're so good.
