The Two Types of Technicians

The question that I would ask everybody listening to this, that I think about a lot is that you have two. Two types of technicians out there. I mean, we could throw technicians into two buckets. This clearly is. Is a generalization. So, sure, probably many more people fall in the middle. Sure, there's extremes, but as a generalization, you'd have two buckets.

You.

You'd have the technicians that want to be tied to production and they want to be able to make more money if they produce more. They like being vested in the outcome.

Right.

And then you have a group of technicians that don't want to be vested in the income and really could really care less about the production. Or maybe they understand fundamentally that there has to be a degree of production, but they don't want to be tied to it. They're not emotionally connected to it. They certainly don't want their pay tied to it. In a world where technicians are in such high demand.

Which group is going to win? Because one of the two groups is going to kind of set the tone in a sense. Right?

Yeah.

And what are we, what are we as an industry going to allow? Like, how far into the entitlement and complacency are we going to go before we're not profitable anymore and we're just allowing complacency?

Yeah. I think the big thing would be in, you know, the, the leverage part of that whole thing is how good are you at recruiting and growing and the better you are at both of those things, the more accurate your pay will be.

I think that at the end of the day, it's. It's managing from a point of strength.

The other question is, you know, a lot of these technicians go and work for the electric companies like Tesla or whatever, and in those situations, they're hourly and they're not flagging. But would you not agree that sooner or later that's going to flip?

Yeah. The model has to work. Like, at the end of the day, when the business sees that it's not successful, they have to make changes regardless of what was promised to get them in the door.

Eventually, that's a line on the P and L they're going to start looking at.

That's exactly right. Right, I agree.

And so.

In every scenario, I believe that the tech's being vested and having an element of flat rate is the way to go. But it's very rare in trucking.

Yeah. So can you think of a situation where the hourly works in the trucking side?

I think there are situations where there are managers and leaders that are really on it. And they have an element of accountability.

That they.

They'Re running close to 90%. You, you, I, I don't think we've ever seen one at 100.

Efficient, not real efficiency. Like I've seen reports that have had.

Stores over to clarify that in truck, efficiency is different than in car. Yeah, it's the opposite of productivity productivity or proficiency efficiency. But for the sake of this conversation, what we're talking about is if you work an eight hour day, do you bill eight hours in labor, not how long you're clocked on in ro because that's secondary and less relevant to money in the till. And so, yeah, we don't, we don't usually see that very high, but there are some, some managers, some service managers and foremans out there that run a pretty tight ship. They still aren't achieving 100%, but they don't have the 50% where their labor cost them twice as much as they think. Yeah, but it is priceless when you show some of the, some managers or, you know, anybody in our industry, when you do the math on their shop and you show them that their cost of labor is twice what they think. So in their head they're like, well, my average tech's making 30 an hour. And you're like, well, it's costing you 60.

Yeah. When you do the math, they're almost always shocked.

Shocked.

And you have to do it again. They're pissed.

They go through the stages of mourning where there's like shock, then they're mad, you know.

And it's fun to just sit there and watch them.

Yeah. And it's, you can almost set a clock to it, like how it all works. So I've never asked you this before. I'm just kind of curious what your thought is. But truck is one of the ones that kind of reminds me or makes me think about this. What do you think for, you know, in certain parts of truck and maybe even car too? I'm thinking of like Jag, Land Rover specifically. What are your thoughts on literal, like straight time billing? Like, so truck comes in and we start with a budget of $1,200. And then this is how much labor that gets them. And then the tech clocks on and off and then when they're done with the job, that's what the customer pays.

Well, you would, you would have varying degrees of ethics and so you'd have varying degrees of customer experience. And in an industry where we don't always have the greatest reputation.

I wouldn't, you know, if A guy takes twice as long to do something, and then a customer sees a bill for something that should be 200. Now all of a sudden it's 400 or 600.

It's not the best thing for the consumer. It's not fair to the consumer.

Yeah, I was trying to think if there's an accountability member with technology that we could try to bridge that gap a little. Because a lot of it used to be on blind faith. But we're getting to a point now where you could even send a customer a message saying, hey, your truck or your vehicle is being worked on right now. And they're literal about the clocking on and off of it. But there's a lot of trust and accountability to it.

My opinion, and I would love in comments for you guys to put yours, but my opinion is I would rather pay technicians more per hour. So let's say we got techs making 50 or 60. We heard one the other day where techs are making $80 an hour. I would rather have techs making 60 or $80 an hour in relation to what we're billing than pay them $80 an hour to be inefficient. Because techs that are inefficient that aren't tied to the production and more comebacks, they. They care less about the outcome and the quality, and they. They don't, at the end of the day, have any ve company succeeding or not. So if technicians are worth more, let's pay them more, but let's reward the behavior that makes us all win in the end. Yeah, because the technicians are going to do better if the company's healthy. We're going to be able to hire more people. We're going to be able to spend more money on resources that benefit the customers. So I think we should pay tax more per hour, but reward production and, you know, the quality in a sense. Yeah.

I think the quality and the speed are my two.

I've never. I've never found a correlation between hourly and quality. I found way more of a correlation between technicians that are driven to produce and quality because they, you know, don't want to do things twice.

Yeah, the comeback's painful.

Yeah.

Because they. They look at it as opportunity cost.

Thanks so much for watching this clip of Service Driving Revolution. We're uploading new stuff every day. Make sure you subscribe and click the bell icon so you don't miss out. If you have a question you'd like us to answer on the show, call 8-333-ASK SDR and we'll answer your question on the show. That's 8333-ASK SDR. For special deals on our books and training, head over to offers.chriscollinsinc.com that's offers.chriscollinsInc.com I'm Chris Collins, and I'll see you in the next.

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