Show Summary:

Recorded at the Institute Summit 2025, this episode features brothers Jason and Patrick Brennan in a powerful conversation on leadership, innovation, and growth in the automotive industry. Jason emphasizes redefining training through real-world rehearsal practice for service advisors and technicians, and using “education” language to promote a culture of ongoing development. Patrick brings his marketing expertise to the table, stressing the importance of reputation management and direct response strategies for businesses. Together, they explore how strong leadership, peer networking, and a healthy company culture attract talent and fuel long-term success.

Host(s):

Carm Capriotto, Remarkable Results Radio

Guest(s):

Patrick and Jason Brennan, Fine Tune Auto Service

Show Highlights:

Introduction (00:00:00)

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Episode Transcript:

Carm Capriotto: This is the Aftermarket Radio Network. Hey everybody, it's Carm Caprio Remarkable Results Radio. It's another Town Hall Academy. We are at the Institute Summit in Amelia Island, Florida. Okay, so I left Buffalo with four feet of snow and I came down here and of course it snowed last night. No it didn't.

Carm Capriotto: I'm only kidding what beautiful weather going on here. And we're so happy to be here at the Institute Summit. We're here February 6th through ninth recording this, so whenever you hear it, you'll know that it was a while back. Lots of stuff going on here. The theme is being stand out. And a lot of innovation being discussed, so we're really happy to be here.

Carm Capriotto: But before we get going, couple of great words from our sponsors. Hey, take your Autocare center to the next level, the gold level with the Napa Autocare Gold certified program. This program is for the best of the best who can provide a consistent consumer experience and earn the trust of returning and new customers.

Carm Capriotto: Talk to your NAPA sales representative about how you can become a gold certified shop. Hey, let's face it. Your shop management system is the most critical tool in your shop, and Napa Tracks will move your shop into the SMS Fastlane with onsite training, six days a week. Support and local representation.

Carm Capriotto: Find NAPA tracks on the web at N-A-R-A-C s.com. I have a great team here today. I got Jason Brennan from Fine Tune Auto. Hi Jason. How you doing? I am great sir. How's business?

Jason Brennan: Going well, thank you. 

Carm Capriotto: And you're here to what? Uh, hang out, learn, talk to your peers.

Jason Brennan: All the above. 

Carm Capriotto: Are you in a special group? 

Jason Brennan: I'm in the institute.

Jason Brennan: G. P. G Group. Three. 

Carm Capriotto: Cool. Group three. Best one. And that's the thing I love about the institute's groups. There's a little bit of a rivalry there, isn't there? You know Your brother's here with you? Patrick Brennan. Hi Patrick. How you doing? Good. You are not in the business, are you? I'm not. And we convinced him to come on because I think he may have some very interesting things to say.

Carm Capriotto: I think he will. 'cause I know he helps you a lot in the business. One of the things that I found fascinating about you guys, or especially the story you told me about the family plumbing business. So you were a family plumbing business, and what I wanna know is how did it become automotive? 

Jason Brennan: That's a good question.

Jason Brennan: I don't know if it was just that I, you know, I did so much plumbing growing up. I was already tired of it by the time I started my career or what it was. I don't know. But automotive, I, you know, that's a good question. We've talked before I started out. Working on lawnmowers and yeah, whatever. I was always just taking things apart and that kind of just naturally progressed into working on cars.

Jason Brennan: I was a technician, so got into the automotive business, but I don't think I would've had the fortitude or the courage to do it if I hadn't grown up. You know? It certainly had helped to grow up in a household. Where, you know, family, business and a, a service business was the environment that I grew up around and in 

Carm Capriotto: to me today.

Carm Capriotto: I mean, there's a lot of discussion out there about excellent customer service. If you forget about the customer, you must well forget about your business. 

Jason Brennan: Absolutely. 

Carm Capriotto: I don't know if we're getting enough customer service training, and I don't mean. Here's how you do it, but the service advisors at our counter today, I think it's the most considered educational series that I have seen anywhere.

Carm Capriotto: Every coaching company is including the institute. They've got a great focus on that front counter and that customer experience. 

Jason Brennan: I agree. They need to, they're service professionals. This isn't a job. And probably never should have been a job where, well, since I know how to fix cars, I'll just go up and you know, maybe I'll write service and I'll advise customers.

Jason Brennan: Can you explain to them the workings, the details of how the car works, why you should or shouldn't do the repair? Maybe. But it is a separate profession. You have to understand as a service advisor, those people have to understand sales. They have to understand customer service and they have to understand enough about the product that they're selling or recommending, and they have to understand all those things.

Jason Brennan: And then if they're gonna be a store manager, they need to understand business too. So it's a lot of stuff. 

Carm Capriotto: I'm curious, Jason, do they need to know more about themselves also? Because if you don't understand who you are and how you communicate, I think it's awfully tough to have a, I mean, well, it's my way or the highway kind of thing.

Carm Capriotto: There's gotta be flexibility built into building relationships. 

Jason Brennan: I would say yes they do, because you know, a lot of people just have a naturally good communication style and ability. But let's face it, some of us don't. And so my natural style might not be the right style. To be communicating to a customer with how'd you survive all these years?

Jason Brennan: So I know it's, I don't know, 

Carm Capriotto: it just happened. They loved you for some reason and they kept coming back. 

Jason Brennan: No, I actually, I did, I took service advisor training when I wrote service, of course. And that helped. So that's great. By the way, I needed it. It is great. And if I hadn't done it, I wouldn't be here. 

Carm Capriotto: You know, for you to, to realize this is a weakness, I may have to do something to fix that, or can I get better?

Carm Capriotto: And I'm on this soapbox of late, you know, this whole language shift thing that's going on in my world that I'm doing keynotes on. One of the most important things is the word removing the word training Jason, and making it the word education. Hmm. Because we train dogs, but we educate people and we go to places to learn.

Carm Capriotto: And there's an educator in, in the room. What are your thoughts on that? 

Jason Brennan: I think that's right. Never thought of it that way, but that's true. 

Carm Capriotto: So if you sit down with your people, you've got this continuing education program for them, I'm gonna send you off on a great training program so when you come back, you'll be able to fetch the ball really well.

Carm Capriotto: I'm really being facetious and I'm really kind of kidding here. Right. But it just hit me so hard. As you know, the Super Bowl is being played in a couple of days from recording this. And I think about athletes, you know, going to training, doing training. And why are we calling what we're doing training.

Carm Capriotto: It's one of those lazy words that has crept into our industry, and I think in order to lift even telling our customers, listen, our guys have gone through a continuous education program. In fact, they get 40 to 50 hours a year. I think it's important for the client. To know what we invest. Well, why do you charge so much?

Carm Capriotto: We don't need to give them the litany of it, but I don't know if you know, but we send all our people to, you know, we're, we're constantly educating them about what, do you have any idea what that computer is on four wheels and. How it works. That's why you're here. Mm-hmm. All that stuff. And I think it could be incorporated into marketing.

Carm Capriotto: And Patrick, I know that's what you're helping your brother do. Talk to me about that. 

Patrick Brennan: Yeah. Well, I have a background in home services and I kind of grew up in the home service business. Wait a minute, does this anything to 

Carm Capriotto: do 

Patrick Brennan: with plumbing? Yes. Air conditioning and plumbing. Okay. That's kind of my background.

Patrick Brennan: But in my career there, I, uh, helped form our marketing budgets across a big business. So. I learned a lot there and that's kind of, Jay bounces ideas off of me and I bounce ideas off of him and, but I like what you said about training and education. To me, training sounds. Like it's not permanent, and education to me is an ongoing, continuous thing.

Carm Capriotto: I love that. 

Patrick Brennan: I don't know. That's what I think about when I think of those two words. Well, 

Carm Capriotto: thank you for helping with that because the more I talk to people, we've been gone for almost 10 days on a road trip. In talking to so many people and I, I've occasionally been known to come here. I have an idea, I wanna run by you, but thank you for that.

Carm Capriotto: Some things that you're helping Jason with, you know, you say he to his ideas back and forth. What's a recent one that you were able to. Use of your brothers an idea. 

Jason Brennan: The most recent thing we've been working on is reputation management. Ooh. So, I mean, we've been talking about it for years, but Patrick actually already had a software platform.

Jason Brennan: He does all kinds of stuff. We don't have time to even talk about all the stuff that he's involved in. But one of the things is that he is doing reputation management for me. And built a software and him and I worked together on a word tracks or a script, whatever you wanna call it, things to say to customers that let them know we would appreciate them giving us a review.

Jason Brennan: Whatever it is, just be honest, give us a review. And the software sends them a reminder and then they give us reviews. We're able to get more reviews, and that's, you know, part of our reputation. 

Carm Capriotto: I think this is huge. Yeah. A reputation management piece of software and using the words, is it written word, typed words, electronic words, or is it the words that we are helping our service advisors say?

Patrick Brennan: I can speak to that a little bit. It's mainly like the surface advisors, the people who interact with the customers. They know our system is gonna send out a request for feedback to customers and to every customer. Now that they know that that's gonna happen, they kind of prime the customers before they know they're gonna get a request for the feedback on the service.

Carm Capriotto: Do you educate them on that? I mean, how you coach them, you rehearse that 

Jason Brennan: you actually Yes, and that it, rehearse is a good word. I think of rehearsal as a format. I think of that as training, so I would think. Education is, okay, I'm gonna go learn about a topic. Mm-hmm. I'm gonna understand it now and I know the theory.

Jason Brennan: And then training is repeating that, you know, repeating those words you wanna memorize or that process that you wanna follow or whatever it is. That's, so we do training. Our service staff do training every morning from seven 30 to 7 45. So if you had that up, that's a lot of hours a year. And they do training with each other.

Jason Brennan: And then on Fridays. We'll do a Google meet. I'm usually there and all of them. So there's currently six counter people and myself, and then we'll take turns hosting that meeting. So whatever we've been training on, just like a sports team that re runs, plays over over. That's how you get good at it. Yeah.

Jason Brennan: So we're getting good at it, we're practicing it, and so it becomes second nature and we could just do it on the spot and we could focus on the customer. Not having to think about what process am I supposed to do right now? What am I supposed to say? Oh yeah, it was that. And then, you know, because when you get busy, you know, sometimes it's like juggling chainsaws.

Jason Brennan: I stole that phrase from one of my store manager managers. I thought it was funny, but it's kind of true. So those things need to be second nature. 

Carm Capriotto: I fallen in love with what you just said. First of all, thanks Carm education is the right thing to do, but when we have to make sure we solidify. The process, the system, the greetings, the everything in the business.

Carm Capriotto: We're gonna go train. I love it. Seven 30 to 7 45. We train on service advising. Give me an idea of what they cover, what they do. 

Jason Brennan: It could be anything that we need to be good at, that we do a lot. So it could be. Listening. One example would be listening to plane, back phone calls. How did we handle this phone call?

Jason Brennan: Let's listen to it. Let's talk about it. 

Carm Capriotto: Is it public? Everyone gets a chance to listen to each other's calls. 

Jason Brennan: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, in each store it'll be, you know, the two counter people, they'll listen to each other's calls together. Okay. And then critique it. You know, the once a week meeting that we're doing, it'll be.

Jason Brennan: One shop's turn to host and they'll play a call over the meeting and then everybody gets to critique it. So it could be phone calls, it could be, let's talk about this process for reviews. You know, this reputation management. How are we doing it? Let's talk about our inspection process. How do we do that?

Jason Brennan: What kind of challenges did we have last week? What good things did we have last week? KPIs, you know, 

Carm Capriotto: I'm fascinated by your ROI and chime in anytime, Patrick. You're doing all of this, you're listening to each other's calls, you are motivating someone to maybe possibly get better. I could have done that.

Carm Capriotto: Have you seen a direct reflection in your sales growth because of this? 

Jason Brennan: Absolutely. Yeah. We've added a third store in the last year, so it's hard to say, you know what the true growth would've been if we had three established stores. What I have for sure, what I can say I have noticed is I've noticed improvements.

Jason Brennan: Improvements where you mentioned the people's natural speaking style or something. I've noticed improvements in the way that we communicate with customers because I can listen to calls and I can be there in the shops and observe what's going on. And noticed an I improving in people's 

Carm Capriotto: confidence. 

Jason Brennan: Yeah.

Jason Brennan: Yeah. Confidence and willingness to learn. At first, it's a little awkward. Jason comes in and goes, Hey, guess what? We're gonna play these calls that you screwed up on. So try to find your worst ones and then put 'em. That's what I want you to do. Find your worst ones. 'cause it's great to congratulate each other for the good ones, but we want to solve problems for you and figure out where we can improve.

Jason Brennan: We're always trying to be the best, so do that. There were a bunch of good calls on those Zoom meet or those Google meets, but, and one guy who I'm thinking of who has had, I think, the biggest improvement from where he started. Played some pretty bad calls and then he said, you know, I know I screwed these up.

Jason Brennan: That's what we're supposed to do here, is to get better. We're supposed to be vulnerable and figure out, say, Hey, this is one I'm having a struggle with. So I've seen huge improvements by doing that. 

Carm Capriotto: Is your software, does any AI on your. Calls 

Jason Brennan: We do. I haven't tried it yet. I have inbounds. 

Carm Capriotto: Yeah, I've seen the dashboard for inbound.

Carm Capriotto: Mm-hmm. And David Boyd's a great guy and he is, he's a sponsor on our network. When I saw the percentage of talking about tires, hey, you guys are talking about tires. We never sell tires. It's amazing how that can happen. The thing that I love about our discussion. Is that every morning we're working with the team for personal improvement.

Jason Brennan: Exactly. That kind of ties in. What I really liked about this summit so far was Dan's comment about teams and, 'cause we're working on with our managers, especially, we're starting with managers and we're gonna, you know, roll it out to everybody. We're working on figuring out what it takes to put together a good team and have a cohesive team, and something Dan said.

Jason Brennan: Yesterday was that it's individuals on the team are what's gonna ultimately make the difference between success and failure. People make the team succeed, the team's, the team, and everybody fails or succeeds together, but it's individuals who make that happen. So we do need to work on individual personal improvement to make the team what it needs to be.

Carm Capriotto: It's amazing. When you think about teams, and I love your analogy about each individual is an individual. You're getting ready to do a timing job and you know that the tools you need to lay out, they all do a different thing. They all have their, their strength in the job. And when we put teams together, sometimes there's a broken tool.

Jason Brennan: Yeah, there could be. And you know, if I was on a team, I am on a team, I'm kinda like the coach of three teams, sort of, if you will, with the three separate shops to count out and then, or maybe the owner and the managers or the coaches. I don't know what the real deal is with that, but if there's somebody that's either not the right fit for the team or not performing, I know I wouldn't wanna be that person, 

Carm Capriotto: but that's you.

Carm Capriotto: That's you, Jason. There are some people that are just willing to just go down the highway, get on the bus and go for the ride. 

Patrick Brennan: I think his process, uh, every morning training and rehearsing is really valuable because you cannot quickly identify individuals who are just not gonna cut it on your team. If you're doing this very regularly and hopefully you're doing everything you can, that's what that provides as well too.

Patrick Brennan: And the education to me is more the why. You know, you understand the fundamental, the training, like Jason said, is like the rehearsing and just. Building the confidence 

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Carm Capriotto: Yes, a learning management system tailored to each role in your company. Simply Put Tracks was designed and built for shop owners just like you. Visit us on the web at Napa Tracks. That's N-A-P-A-T-R-A-C s.com. I've been doing this for 10 years. You're the first one who brought up this rehearsing thing.

Carm Capriotto: It is such a strong thing. I gotta do more on this. The training is really rehearsing. Let's get the word training away. Let's talk about education. Again, if a technology specialist in the bays goes to a scope and he comes back and he doesn't use what he learned, and so maybe we then say, go and train on what you learned or start rehearsing what your latest educational class was, 

Jason Brennan: right.

Jason Brennan: Go rehearse it. It's a good example with technicians. I think they tend to naturally know that they need to do that. When I was a tech, I remember going to a John Thornton misfire class. This is probably like in the, in the early two thousands, 90% of it was over my head and I was thinking I had just opened my shop and I came from several different places, but I never really got into diagnostics that heavily.

Jason Brennan: And then I learned all these new things that I didn't know, found out about these things I didn't know. Took a bunch of notes and I thought, man, am I ever gonna be able to do this? I don't know. There's nobody else that works here. It's just me. How am I gonna learn this? And when I put it into practice was really when I learned it.

Jason Brennan: It might have taken me longer, I might not have have been able to charge people for all the time I spent on it. But that was the cost of training to me, is the extra time I had to stay after work and learn or whatever I had to do. And we have technicians that do the same thing. The ones who are really committed to learning higher level technology, diagnosis, and you know, programming or whatever it is they're doing.

Jason Brennan: Even mechanical stuff. They'll often, I'll find out that they got together with some other techs, you know, other techs in the industry on a Saturday and took a bunch of waveforms or something and put 'em, then shared 'em all and came back to their shops with a mental tool set and some, you know, computer tools.

Jason Brennan: To be able to do their job effectively and efficiently. They devoted to the training that allowed them to show up to work with a valuable skillset that they can exchange for a really good paycheck and doing a good work. 

Carm Capriotto: That's a great story. That's pure geek. 

Jason Brennan: Oh, 

Carm Capriotto: sure. Yeah. When these guys get together, I love that.

Carm Capriotto: Wow. You talk about John Thornton, one of our best industry trainers to come back from one of his classes and be so humble. It's the old story. I don't know what I don't know. Right. Yeah. I just don't know. Yeah. 

Patrick Brennan: A lot of times that's what training and education is, is figuring out how little you know. I know.

Carm Capriotto: And then take that. And say, I gotta do more, or I gotta dig in or I've gotta find another class. 'cause a lot of times you go to the same class, different trainer, or even the same trainer a year ago, and you test, let me see, hmm. One to 10. I actually knew 4% or 40% of what I didn't the last time. And I still have more to go.

Carm Capriotto: And I think you take the education you get, you go back, you use it, you rehearse with it, you put it to real good usage. And I've always said that when you go to a seminar, I've said this for years and I've known it myself, when you go and learn something. If you can come back and bring that to your people and you teach, even if you go to one of your people, you sent them to vision to do a couple of technology classes and they came back, then let them teach for one hour what they learned, the teaching experience solidifies a lot of what they learned because they were, were able to respeak it.

Patrick Brennan: Absolutely. 

Jason Brennan: I agree. I think that's one of the best ways to master. A topic or a skill is, you know, whatever a profession is to teach it. You'll get asked questions that you never thought of making things you never thought of before, right? Then you have to figure it out, so you're really learning as you're teaching.

Carm Capriotto: What makes you really successful? 

Jason Brennan: I don't know. When I get there, I'll let you know what it was. Pick 

Carm Capriotto: one. 

Jason Brennan: I no. That success. Pick one of the greatest 

Carm Capriotto: traits that you have that you say, I just can't believe this is working so well for me. 

Jason Brennan: What makes us successful as a company and gives me person the most amount of personal satisfaction has changed over the years.

Jason Brennan: It used to be a hard diagnostic challenge or something on a car. Now, I think what makes us successful is the effort that the people who work for us put in toward fulfilling our mission. When someone, you know in what gives me, you know, satisfaction about what I do now, making a good profit is always important so we can have the right resources to continue doing what we're doing and everybody else does too.

Jason Brennan: And, but seeing people succeed and make improvements and achieve the highest level that they can in their career, achieving their goals, being a part of that is what? Makes me feel like I'm being successful. 

Carm Capriotto: 10 years ago, you would've never felt that thought that 

Jason Brennan: I don't think I would've 

Carm Capriotto: because you never got out of the bays.

Carm Capriotto: Right. 

Patrick Brennan: I'll tell you what I think, one thing I think made Jay so successful is perseverance. If I had to say one thing, I mean, yeah, there were probably a a hundred times I'm on the phone with him and he's like, what the hell do I do? I, and if you don't mind me telling this story, one time he called me and he's like, I had to sell my snowmobiles.

Patrick Brennan: I had to sell something, this and that to make payroll this year. And he's like, I got. Some cash in the drawer at home and that's all I got left and he's like, I'm this close to going out of business, but he's far from that now, and because he stuck with it, I think that's what's made him successful. 

Jason Brennan: I love that story.

Jason Brennan: Yeah. I've been there, you know, a couple of times. So that was actually around the time that I joined the, what was RLO training's, bottom Line Impact Groups. Sure. Now the institute, so, um, 

Carm Capriotto: BLIG. Mm-hmm. That was a great group. Yeah. Did you come over to the institute after Cecil bought the RLO? 

Jason Brennan: Yeah, they kept all the groups intact.

Jason Brennan: Yeah. So they're really still the same. Some of the same core people are still with those groups. Yeah. So the group three is still the same, some of the same people. Yeah. Some new guys. Some new people. So 

Carm Capriotto: I heard you just had a peer review. GPG. 

Jason Brennan: We hosted a meeting. Yeah. Okay. We hosted a group meeting. You hosted a group meeting.

Jason Brennan: Right. So our group meetings, most of 'em are hosted at a shop or by a shop. So 

Carm Capriotto: you hosted? 

Jason Brennan: We hosted, but they didn't review your place did. Oh, they did? Yeah. Ah, that's what, I guess what I'm need it is a peer review. Okay. I just didn't think of it that. How'd it go? It went pretty well. Did you work 

Carm Capriotto: hard in prep for it or they just said, come on in, I'm perfect.

Jason Brennan: No, we did a lot of upfront, you know, the low hanging fruit, you know, I've been in the group long enough that I know to have like fire extinguisher signs and don't have the first aid kit in the bathroom and to make sure you have coat hooks and those kind of things, you know, just don't I. 'cause I didn't want, yeah, 

Patrick Brennan: pro tips.

Jason Brennan: Pro tips. I didn't want it to be a waste of people's time and just go there and find all this stuff that I already know I should have had done. So tried to, and that's how I'm gonna get the most value out of it, is to have them find, I wanted them to dig deep and find problems. Find room for improvement.

Jason Brennan: Problems are opportunities. Yeah. So, and they did so working. So you took care 

Carm Capriotto: of the fluff that you didn't want them to find the easy Yeah, the, I walked by it every day. I'm not sure why for the last four years, but I've never fixed that. Right now I've done it. 'cause I don't want them to pick on me. Go deep.

Jason Brennan: Right. That was our approach and we did, the manager was involved in that meeting and they came to the shop. Other business owners, 

Carm Capriotto: I've watched it happen. I've actually watched a GPG group do a peer review on a shop. And it was exciting to be there. I thought there was a lot of fun going on. They found a lot of stuff, but the owner had a chance to say confession to himself for almost six months before and clean and paint the ceiling and get new lights and all this stuff.

Carm Capriotto: And he says, I always wanted to do this. There's nothing like the people that you work closely with and that's why I'm such a believer in networking groups or peer groups like they have here at the institute. To rock your socks, to make some profound changes to let your conscious boil up and say, yeah, coulda, woulda, shoulda, gotta right.

Patrick Brennan: So it is kinda like when you're, you know, you're having guests over the house, you don't clean the house so well until the guests come over and it's similar. It's like your business, you know, you're gonna prepare for that. So I do see a lot of value in that deep cleaning. Exactly. 

Jason Brennan: Yeah. And they did a good job with that, you know, with all that stuff.

Jason Brennan: So I was proud of them. Yeah. I like the peer group process because it's more of a peer group, it's less of somebody standing there telling you things. We'll get information from the Institute, but I think we get just as much information from each other than we do from Aaron Woods, and he's a great facilitator.

Jason Brennan: And I've looked into, over the years, I've looked into probably all the different coaching or consulting groups that there are. This one was the most customizable meaning. It was up to me. I'd be held accountable by my peers for the results that I say that I want to get. Of course, they're gonna help me to figure out what that should look like, but if I say, well, I'm targeting a 20% net profit and these other KPIs, and also I want good employee retention, of course, and this many customers, this many cars per month, et cetera, it's me making those commitments.

Jason Brennan: To my peers and to the facilitator and how I do it. It's just up to me. Nobody's gonna tell me, well, you have to do this process this way. That might not work for me. I probably shouldn't deviate from it if I don't know anything else to do. But I wanted the flexibility to be able to customize my auto repair business to serve the customers the best possible way that it can.

Jason Brennan: You know, and we're not robots. I don't treat my employees like robots. We do have certain things we have to do. And I have certain things I always have to do, but other than that, it's, you know, us as people figuring out, using our brains and being smart about things and figuring out how we want to do it.

Jason Brennan: And that's what I think you need to have that in order for a business to be truly unique in the marketplace and have competitive advantages. 'cause there has to be innovation. If you just follow a rigorous set process all the time and it has to be that way and everybody's doing it that way, then we're just.

Jason Brennan: Too similar to, I think like a box store model or something, rather than When 

Carm Capriotto: you say innovation, Jason, do you mean innovation in leadership? Innovation in being able to retain and hire innovation in policies, or you're talking about innovation in the shop with technology? 

Jason Brennan: I would say all of it. Yeah. You know, just anything.

Jason Brennan: But when people are allowed to think for themselves, they might have a set of rules to follow, but when you hire smart people and they're allowed to think for themselves. And the leadership listens to those people, big improvements can happen. 

Carm Capriotto: How do you hire smart people? Help me. 

Jason Brennan: That's a good question.

Jason Brennan: First of all, I think you have to have a business that attracts those kind of people. The smart people are looking to work for good businesses because they're smart enough to figure out this place seems like they provide a good product to customers. And I'm smart enough to figure out that that's what businesses do mainly.

Jason Brennan: And they're probably also gonna be able to provide a good workplace for me. And have the revenue stream to pay me well for my knowledge. So I'm gonna work there. So I think, and, and the culture's good. It seems like when I walk in there, or I drove, I, I've had technicians tell me, they drove by my shop and looked at our guru reviews and all that stuff to see and they went in, or you know, kinda walked around just to see if everybody was smiling and telling jokes or if it was completely silent.

Jason Brennan: And all they heard was tools. That was part of their decision making process on where to work. 

Carm Capriotto: Well, and it goes back to this whole reputation management thing, Patrick. I think not only is the reputation management important to the client. It really has so much to do with being able to attract great people.

Patrick Brennan: It's a recruiting tool. Absolutely. You know, you're, everybody knows intuitively your reputation matters, right? You are your reputation. You wanna be proud of that at the end of the day, like, you know, it's a public thing when it's reputation management. So yeah, definitely recruiting tool. 

Carm Capriotto: Home services, that's what you do.

Carm Capriotto: What is it exactly? 

Patrick Brennan: Well, I came up in that industry. I'm not in the industry anymore. I focus on helping local service companies with marketing, but I kind of grew up in the air conditioning and plumbing. Industry and I had a lot of experience with the marketing and the operations side of the business.

Carm Capriotto: What kind of marketing do shops have to do? All of it. I, I knew the answer to that. It 

Patrick Brennan: needs, yeah, you need a well-rounded approach. 

Carm Capriotto: So what you talking about internet, you're talking about social media, we're talking about video. Help me. 

Patrick Brennan: Well, as much as you can afford to do, but my advice is to usually small businesses is start with reputation management.

Patrick Brennan: That should be your baseline. If you're gonna spend $1 on marketing. Spend it on reputation and you're talking 

Carm Capriotto: about getting reviews. 

Patrick Brennan: Getting reviews, okay. Improve your public review profile. After that, I recommend direct response marketing, whatever's the highest ROI for you. I wouldn't focus on social media or branding until you have a big budget.

Carm Capriotto: Really? What are you expecting? Somebody that has a big budget would spend on social media. 

Patrick Brennan: That's a good question for automotive shops, a three store chain 

Carm Capriotto: like Jason. Well, 

Jason Brennan: that's, that's a good question. Yeah. We're not doing a very good job with our social media, 

Carm Capriotto: but if you're growing, do you need it? 

Jason Brennan: I think it can be done if the owner or someone, a spouse or somebody in the company.

Jason Brennan: Wants to run it themselves, they can be pretty effective without any cost. 

Jason Brennan: Mm-hmm. 

Jason Brennan: One of our shops, the manager's spouse is doing it for us just 'cause she likes to do it and he said, Hey, can I have Jen do our Facebook page? She's really good at that. I said, sure. We're not doing much with it anyway. Go have at it.

Jason Brennan: Just put good stuff on there and. It's gotten a lot of followers. I don't know how to track it with a, a metric kind of A-A-K-P-I and numbers kind of guy, so I don't know how to track it. So if I was paying somebody to do it, I wouldn't know, you know, what I was looking for anyway. Not my strong point. I don't know what I should, you know, if I was gonna hire a company to do it and I don't want it to be cookie cutter, 'cause I've tried to do that before where it's just all the same standard stuff on there all the time.

Jason Brennan: Right. That I don't think people are really interested in. 

Carm Capriotto: Hire. Just hire Patrick. 

Patrick Brennan: No, actually I will actually say the best social media that I've seen is the most genuine. Yeah. And that comes from within the company because no company you hire can have the same voice or promote your business like you do.

Patrick Brennan: And I think what he's doing is great. The best social media is like posting pictures of the team. 

Carm Capriotto: Organic. 

Patrick Brennan: Yeah, organic. That's a good way to put it. You know, somebody's birthday, it's so and so's birthday today or so and so volunteers at this church over here and they did this event. That's a community building and actually it's also a recruiting tool.

Patrick Brennan: You know, your social media outlets are recruiting tools, and I think that's the best way to do social media. As a smaller, medium sized business, 

Carm Capriotto: we can go a million different places. Are you happy with what you're getting outta life right now, Jason? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. There were times you were worried, obviously we've heard the story.

Jason Brennan: Yeah, there were times I was worried. There were times I was working way too many hours. 80 a hundred hour weeks were normal for years. 

Carm Capriotto: Call that being stuck in a hobby. I'm sorry, I'm just gonna say that you were in total struggle mode. Oh yeah. I'm such a big fan of coaches and networking groups because I really do think if you fix your attitude that I need help, I'm not Mr.

Carm Capriotto: Know-it-all that, oh, I wanted to prove to the world that I can do it. But you don't really notice that you're not. Yeah, you are, but you don't wanna admit it. A lot of people, you know, their egos are get in the way. Take us to the day that you said, listen, I gotta turn my life around. Right. And my business, 

Jason Brennan: there's kind of two different times for two different types of turning it around.

Jason Brennan: The financial, I knew I couldn't operate at a loss or a break even, or whatever wasn't gonna work. I wasn't gonna be allowed to continue operating if I didn't make a profit. 

Carm Capriotto: You were done. So 

Jason Brennan: yeah, I was almost done a couple times and just, I just somehow, by the grace of God or or willpower and whatever, all those things, and talking to people.

Jason Brennan: Talking it through with, you know, that's one of the things I do with my brother Pat, is just talk with him. The whole sounding board thing. He's just a smart guy. So yeah. Anyway, talk about that. Talk with a bunch of smart people. Get their ideas, but hey, how do you think I can get out of this? I started that with RLO.

Jason Brennan: Yeah. Which is now the institute in 2011. In 2011, and John Effler was working there was the facilitator, 

Carm Capriotto: great group, great facilitator. And did you come out of those first couple of meetings saying, whoa, this is gonna be good, or, I have a lot of work to do? 

Jason Brennan: Both. I came out relieved because I thought, okay, I think I found some of the answers.

Jason Brennan: I was looking for some of the solutions. To my problems. I know what I need to do now what? That's what I needed. I just needed to know. Jason, 

Carm Capriotto: what did it take for you to do the work this, you know, what kind of flu did you have to do in your world? 

Jason Brennan: I had to slowly start working on the business and not so much on cars, so I was still working in the business, but on different things.

Jason Brennan: I needed to increase my car count. At the time it was really low. I wasn't in a that shop. Still there doing very well now. In Lansing, but we didn't have enough cars to work on. It wasn't 'cause we weren't doing good work. We were do fixing cars right all the time with a great warranty to not enough vehicles to work on.

Jason Brennan: Part of that had to do with not answering the phone correctly. You know, incorrect verbiage, not conveying the value that we provide to customers was part of the problem. And also part of it was marketing. And we weren't doing enough to attract new customers. We weren't doing any customer retention. I didn't even know what our customer retention numbers were or very many numbers.

Jason Brennan: I knew how to read a p and l, but I didn't know about all the automotive specific KPIs that I should look at and where I, what a good benchmark would be for those. 

Carm Capriotto: What's next on your list of improving your skillset? 

Jason Brennan: Well, I'll tell you, you know what I'm working on right now? My skillset right now that I want to improve is teaching leadership, you know, becoming a better leader and also how to teach other people how to lead would be an ultimate goal I'd like to achieve in that area.

Carm Capriotto: That's great because you've got a growing business 

Jason Brennan: and I can't be at all the shops all the time. I can be in them. When I need to be or when I'm able to be. But somebody's gotta steer the ship, you know? And, 

Carm Capriotto: but you don't want many Jasons, you want individuals, right. Leader, individual leaders 

Jason Brennan: that Right.

Jason Brennan: Who believe in our core values and Right. Can carry out the mission and the culture of the people Do that. Taking care of our customers and the employees who they oversee. 

Carm Capriotto: I love this. I think we covered a lot of great territory here. Good to have you on again. And Patrick, for you to just come in like that.

Carm Capriotto: I mean, you brought him to the Institute's conference here just because you wanted him to. Hear all this. 

Jason Brennan: I'm hoping he is having a good time and learning some things. I 

Carm Capriotto: bet you will and can from 

Patrick Brennan: it. I learned something. These types of things I love because I take a little bit of something from every one of 'em.

Carm Capriotto: Yeah. Think about all the marketing companies that are here that you can just go up and, 

Patrick Brennan: yeah. Or just guys like Jay or you. I could talk to you guys and learn something, you know. 

Carm Capriotto: Well, 

Patrick Brennan: it's all gonna benefit all 

Carm Capriotto: of us. Yeah. Itself. Nothing like having family here to Yeah, it was, it was to run stuff by, 

Patrick Brennan: yeah, it was kind of random.

Patrick Brennan: He just said, Hey, you wanna go to this thing with me? And I'm like, okay. 

Jason Brennan: I guess. Sure. Well, I kind of told him he was going. Yeah. And then I, well, I asked him, and then after he said, yeah, I said, well, I already told him you're going. So 

Carm Capriotto: they called that voluntold, right? Yes. I love it. Oh, this is great. Jason Brennan, fine Tune Auto and his brother Patrick.

Carm Capriotto: This is a blast. Thanks for your wisdom and your insights. Appreciate it. Thanks. Thank 

Jason Brennan: you. Appreciate it. Thank you. You're welcome. 

Carm Capriotto: Thanks for being on board to listen and learn from the Premier Automotive aftermarket podcast. Until next time.