Hoagie and Speaker A explain how neglected breakrooms—broken counters, filthy refrigerators, barely functional sinks—tell technicians they don't matter. These spaces destroy morale and self-esteem. A clean, cared-for room signals the opposite.
the environment. And one thing that's very clear to us is we can walk into any shop, lunchroom, just the area where the techs work, the special tools, any, any, um, anywhere where the technicians are living and functioning frequently and tell how much you care about technicians. And Hoagie's got a great story about this one in the lunchroom. But most of the time when you go into a lunchroom, it hasn't been updated for 30 years. If you open the refrigerator, it makes you want to throw up because there's stuff in there that's so old. The counters are falling apart. The sink barely works. It's not a place that's appetizing, let alone somewhere where you would go to recuperate or just even eat lunch.
It's just not that.
And oftentimes the technicians feel like they're the afterthought because that's the environment we're putting them in. We're putting them in an environment that isn't intentional. It's not curated. Nobody's even paying attention to it. It's like we have a lunchroom as a necessary evil versus we have a lunchroom and we have special tools and all these things. To make the environment better, to change the mood. And environment has a big effect on how people feel about the company and about themselves in that way. Tell everybody the refrigerator story, Hoagie.
Oh yeah. So it's a mutual friend of Adam's and mine and used to be somebody Adam used to work with, but Eric is his name and he was a dealer performance coach and went around to different truck dealerships and things like that. And kind of to your point, Chris, when you do that and you have that perspective, you start to connect dots and you can kind of tell their intentionality of how they feel about their techs by looking at the break room. And he went to one that was just awful. And literally, literally he didn't want to, um, you know, put his hand inside the refrigerator that he opened. Like, it literally looked like a, you know, like the health department would shut down the shop, um, for them being in there. And so he just took it himself without permission, just took it and, uh, chunked it, you know, just took it and threw it in the dumpster and, and, uh, you know, got another one. And, um, but it is It is amazing what a fresh coat of paint does and a new microwave that's a couple hundred bucks at the store, a new refrigerator, how far those things go. And it's not a—
