169 - "Ask Me Anything" with Cecil & Lucas: Culture, Accountability and Real Leadership
November 12, 2025 - 01:12:13
What starts as a casual catch-up between Lucas Underwood and Cecil Bullard quickly turns into a no-filters AMA on the realities of running a modern repair shop. Together they examine why stepping back onto the counter resets an owner’s perspective, and how broken estimating routines quietly rob advisors of hours they can never get back. The conversation cuts into emotional discounting, “hero” pricing, and the financial chaos that follows when shops try to save everyone but themselves. Cecil and Lucas break down the power of documentation, signed warranty terms, and photo-backed repair validation when customers push back or chargebacks hit. Culture becomes the centerpiece as they discuss boundaries, accountability, and removing toxic influences before they shape the entire shop. The AMA winds down with straight talk about coaching, long-term planning, and why shops that prepare now will be the ones standing strong as the industry shifts.
Lucas Underwood, Shop Owner of L&N Performance Auto Repair and Changing the Industry Podcast
Cecil Bullard, Founder of The Institute
[00:00:00] - Lucas and Cecil open the AMA and talk about why owners should revisit the front counter.
[00:02:00] - Cecil explains how broken estimating processes drain advisor time.
[00:03:58] - Lucas describes how weak training turns procedures into the “telephone game.”
[00:07:15] - They discuss why repair shortcuts almost always lead to comebacks.
[00:08:45] - Cecil and Lucas highlight the dangers of emotional discounting.
[00:13:10] - Lucas shares his “cash on the counter” exercise for pricing confidence.
[00:26:01] - They address a stopped $9,000 check and stress the need for signed warranty terms.
[00:33:20] - Cecil explains how photos and torque marks protect shops in disputes.
[00:33:58] - A culture question leads to insights on accountability and standards.
[00:57:43] - They wrap with advice on hiring a coach and preparing for industry shifts.
In every business journey, there are defining moments or challenges that build resilience and milestones that fuel growth. We’d love to hear about yours! What lessons, breakthroughs, or pivotal experiences have shaped your path in the automotive industry?
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Episode Transcript Disclaimer
This transcript was generated using artificial intelligence and may contain errors. If you notice any inaccuracies, please contact us at [email protected]. Lucas Underwood: Hello folks. My name is Lucas Underwood with the Changing The Industry podcast, and I am a shop owner, l and n Performance out here in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. I am so excited today to be joined by the one, the only Mr. Cecil Bullard. Cecil buddy. How you doing today?
Cecil Bullard: Howdy Brother? I'm great as usual.
Lucas Underwood: Yes, sir. Yes, sir. I'm back in the shop working today. That's, and as you know, it's been a little bit I remember why I hired people now.
Lucas Underwood: Like it's a reminder.
Cecil Bullard: It's a good idea every once in a while to get back on the front counter, just to stay grounded a little bit. I think. For
Lucas Underwood: I, you know, I see that a lot. I see a lot of a lot of owners who will go to a training class. They will go and be involved in something and they'll come back and they'll say, I want you to do this, and I want you to do this, and I want you to do this, and I want you to do this. And I'll ask 'em. I'll say, Hey, could you imagine doing that?
Lucas Underwood: Like, seriously, could you imagine being on the front counter? And doing all of the steps that you just shared. And they'll say, well, I'm, I pay people for that. Okay, I understand, but I'm just saying like, let's say that tomorrow if you were, yeah. If you were on the front counter, tell me how that would work out for you.
Lucas Underwood: And he's like, oh, that would be miserable. Like maybe you should think about this process before you implement it. Right.
Cecil Bullard: Funny thing too, you know, if you look at service advisors, they, in my opinion, that's probably the toughest job in the shop being the service advisor. Absolutely. So much going on that you're trying to organize, et cetera.
Cecil Bullard: And they believe that they're really busy and they are really busy.
Cecil Bullard: And so now you have an owner that comes in, comes to a class of mine or whatever, and goes in and goes, okay, hey, I want you to do these three things. And you're like, if you're the service advisor you're saying to yourself.
Cecil Bullard: Well, when and how would you like me to do those? Because right now I'm tied up.
Cecil Bullard: And instead what we need to be doing is we need to be going, okay, how do we make you less tied up?
Cecil Bullard: sure. So for instance, if you don't have a really good estimating process in your shop
Cecil Bullard: your service advisor is going out to the shop and talking to the techs, and every time they walk out to the shop and talk to the techs, that's 15 minutes, right?
Cecil Bullard: Yes. Yep. And so if you do that, say eight or 10 times, you've just killed two, two and a half hours of the day, right?
Lucas Underwood: Yep, a hundred
Cecil Bullard: percent. And so instead of looking at your processes and going, oh, this one is not very efficient, this doesn't work Well, if we created a more efficient estimating process where the service advisor never had to really go out in the shop and look at the car or talk to the tech.
Cecil Bullard: That would save two hours of time. Now you could be doing some of the other stuff that you might need to be doing or want to be doing. I th you know, I think it's unfair to walk in and go, okay, here's five more things. Now we're yeah. Instead, you know, and we do this on A-A-C-E-O level. You know, what can I give away?
Cecil Bullard: Right? What do I do that I shouldn't do? Or what do I do that someone else? Probably could do or should do. And you know, I'm, I want to delegate that out so that I have the time to do things that are on a different level. Right?
Lucas Underwood: Yep. Well, and you're so right and one of the things that I've noticed is that process builds garbage, right?
Lucas Underwood: Like through the daily basis of doing what we do, especially you have an advisor and I'm gonna tell you something this is not automotive specific. This is any business. No. Yeah. And I made a video about this, I don't even know if I've released it yet, but I was talking about the family business and, you know, what's happened with that?
Lucas Underwood: And it's this big mess, right? And so I was talking about it the other day to them and I said, Hey, like I see all these processes and I see all these policies, and I see all these procedures. Why is everything such a mess? Why is it like, why do we not do those things anymore? Because somebody put a lot of work into making this happen.
Lucas Underwood: They said, well, what happened was is it was trained once and then it was given to the employees to train the next employees. Who then train the next employees, who then train the next employees and it became the telephone game.
Cecil Bullard: But you have to, if you have policies and procedure, when you have policies and procedures,
Cecil Bullard: you need to have regular procedure review.
Cecil Bullard: Meaning, yes, are we doing it? Are we still doing it? Are we doing it correctly? Is it efficient? A random change, something change. Yeah. Yeah. And so what, every employee, everybody's going, well, wait a minute, if we did it this way instead of that way, it would be simpler, it would be easier, it'd be easier for me, or whatever.
Cecil Bullard: Instead of having a, like a formalized. How do we get this done? Yeah. Where we're sure that it really made a difference where we're sure that it was better and where we're Sure now that everyone's being taught the same way. Right.
Lucas Underwood: Exactly. And so what happened was is you ended up with this little bit of garbage.
Lucas Underwood: Right. Imagine a desk and there's all these crumpled up papers all over it. And so, you know, it's like you go and you talk to 'em and they say, well we've always done it this way. Yeah. And you work through the process and you can find where it happened at.
Cecil Bullard: Well you're
Lucas Underwood: managing that
Cecil Bullard: process. Yeah. We're creatures of habit.
Cecil Bullard: And so whenever I bring something new into the shop or into the business, I need to create a habit, right? Yes. And then I can bring in one of the problems with bringing in like really strong employees. You know, you bring someone that's really got good willpower for a service advisor manager. That's what I want.
Cecil Bullard: I want a really strong person.
Cecil Bullard: But when I bring a strong person in, one of the problems with that is. Let's change this. Let's do it my way instead of the way that a shop has done it does it. And sometimes that's good and sometimes that's not good. You have to be there or someone does have to be there.
Cecil Bullard: And paying attention to when it's not good. And also recording the new process, if that's the new process.
Cecil Bullard: And then you had a, you did something. I was gonna make a joke when you were saying, I don't know if I've released it yet. I don't know how you could tell you probably release like 27 things a day.
Cecil Bullard: So I don't know how you do anything else but then you have owners or managers, you know, high powered people that go, well, I'll I won't follow that process, right? Yes. Okay. This time, because I can make that decision, right. I, it's
Cecil Bullard: I'm the guy. I
Lucas Underwood: can do this if I want.
Cecil Bullard: Yeah. I can do it however the heck I want.
Cecil Bullard: And unfortunately I think you and I were kind of talking before this, but you know, so when we did breaks in my shop
Cecil Bullard: You know, we cleaned we cleaned the calipers up the slides, made sure they worked properly, clean the practice. We put new hardware, new pads and new rotors, period.
Cecil Bullard: Yeah. Okay. Unless it was like some giant. Dodge Diesel truck that had, you know, super, super inboard mount that you
Cecil Bullard: Yeah. That you could, or that it was built that way, right? Yeah.
Cecil Bullard: Other than that, new pads and rotors. Well, you know, the one time that the owner wants to save somebody some money and they go, okay, I'm not gonna put new rotors on this.
Cecil Bullard: The rotors are. They're okay. They're close enough, blah, blah, blah. I'm gonna save my pal some money, my buddy.
Cecil Bullard: That's the time that it bites you in the ass.
Cecil Bullard: You know, and
Lucas Underwood: Never fail,
Cecil Bullard: man. And you get yourself in trouble. Right.
Lucas Underwood: Well, and it happened just this morning. That's where the conversation came from is I've got a friend, Scott reached out to me and he said, Hey, Lucas I, man, I wanna go back and read a comment that you made about something.
Lucas Underwood: And I said, okay, what's up? He said, you were talking to this lady and she was talking about how somebody had purchased a car. They bought this car, they brought it in, it overheated before they left. It, it was just like a mile down the road from the dealership. They take it back, they put a thermostat in it.
Lucas Underwood: She makes it a mile down the road, it overheats again. She starts to question what they're telling her. So they bring it to the her shop. She begins to look at this car and finds out, Hey, it's got coolant in a cylinder. Thermostats aren't gonna fix this, and it's a really expensive repair, like $25,000 and I want to help her.
Lucas Underwood: And it's like, listen, the best way you can help her is properly repair the automobile. Yes. And charge what you need to charge so you can stand behind it if something goes wrong, being the hero is not helping. And see, that was something that messed me up for years because I always wanted to be the hero, always wanted to lower the price.
Lucas Underwood: I'm gonna be the hero with awesome customer service and with a properly repaired vehicle that I can stand behind. And the minute that I deviate, I break that.
Cecil Bullard: I think we all want to be the hero and we all want to help people out. I think that's one of the things that's kind of indicative of our industry.
Cecil Bullard: Yeah. Hey, I wanna, I'm a nice, I'm a nice guy. I really want to help people out. And so, but you know, you can't help others if you can't help yourself.
Cecil Bullard: right. So, I got a shop I don't, it's three or four months ago, a relatively new shop to the institute. I think they made like three grand and they discounted almost $12,000 in that month.
Cecil Bullard: And, but they made three grand. And three grand was probably two, two and a half percent net. Yeah. And so that's not a company where I could help somebody out. I can't I'm giving away so much on the front end
Cecil Bullard: That I can't make a conscious decision to say, Hey, I want to do X, Y, Z at the shop.
Cecil Bullard: The last shop I ran we had, I think the budget was 30 grand and we went down to the, one of the local churches and we said, Hey, to the pastor, we said, Hey, we have $30,000. It's our annual budget for helping. Community, you know, we know you have people in your community that need help. We want you to send them to us.
Cecil Bullard: You can decide I'll use the whole dollars. I won't pay for labor or parts. Or you can say, Hey I'll pay for the parts, you'll pay for the labor whatever you want to do. But it's 30,000 and Yeah. But you can't do something like that if you don't have 30,000 to give away. Exactly. Right. Exactly.
Cecil Bullard: And I think, you know, in, in small business, again, I don't think it's automotive specific, I think it's small business specific.
Cecil Bullard: We, we, we don't understand what our real finances, what we really should be making. What is a fair profit? You and I were kind of talking about that before.
Cecil Bullard: And therefore we do this in a. Like, I'm gonna help this one or that one because they got a great story or because I know that one.
Cecil Bullard: And by the way,
Lucas Underwood: it's not enough. And by the way, everybody has a story. Okay?
Lucas Underwood: Every, everybody has hard times. Everybody has things that, that is not fair. And I'm gonna tell you something, if you wake up in the morning and expect life to be fair,
Cecil Bullard: oh yeah. Well, if
Lucas Underwood: You are asking for trouble,
Cecil Bullard: you're gonna have a tough life.
Cecil Bullard: Yeah. No, my, my dad, you know, my dad was one of those guys that life's a bitch and then you die. Right. You know, that was one of his sayings. Right. And
Cecil Bullard: And I think he certainly understood that life wasn't gonna be fair. I don't ever wake up any morning and think, oh, it's gonna be fair today.
Cecil Bullard: Right. Right. It's gonna be what I make it. Right. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm gonna, the other thing too, I think we all have to realize in our lives and in our businesses, they're gonna be good days and bad days. Right.
Cecil Bullard: Be I believe because of the government shutdown that a lot of shops have had a kind of a weak month last month more so than normal.
Cecil Bullard: We look at the numbers and yeah, we got more shops down. Now all of a sudden, it's picking up now that the wonderful people we have in Congress have decided to do their job. I think you sound
Lucas Underwood: sarcastic.
Cecil Bullard: Yeah. Oh yeah. Trust me. I was gonna say something else, but you know, I don't, I, my daddy, my mommy said don't swear.
Cecil Bullard: It makes you look dumb. So I only do it a little bit 'cause I'm only a little dumb.
Lucas Underwood: Oh my goodness.
Cecil Bullard: But now it's coming back. But I think you have to like look at that and you have to say, that's normal. I mean, yeah, there are gonna be times when our government can't get their crap in a pile and it's going to affect us.
Cecil Bullard: There're gonna be times when things don't work perfectly. They're gonna be community situations, they're gonna be personal situations that are either gonna affect us personally or they're gonna affect our businesses. And if we're not profitable to a certain degree, I can't ride through that for sure.
Cecil Bullard: So I've got a couple of different business I got a young couple that's kind of building their business. I think we're, when they started, we were doing like 57,000. We're probably up about one 10 now consistently monthly. And I keep saying to them, put money aside. Put money in the bank, have a savings account, and they do.
Cecil Bullard: So now they put 15,000 in this account where they never had money before and something came up and it's a $4,000 cost. And you look at it and you go, oh, okay. Not too bad. I can do that. Right. And then you pull it out of the pile, you put it in, and then you build the pile back up. Right? Yes. Yep.
Cecil Bullard: And, but I, you can't do that if you're not being profitable.
Lucas Underwood: Profitable, yeah. Okay. And you know, I've got a friend, his name's John. And John is a new shop owner, right? Never ran a shop, never was a business owner, anything like that was a tech. And we were having discussions a while back and I said, you know, he would call me and he would say, Hey Lucas I've got a 30% margin on this part.
Lucas Underwood: It's really expensive. I don't know if I feel okay charging this. And I said, okay, well let me give you a piece of advice. This was given to me years ago. What I want you to do is what you think is a fair price. I want you to go get that much cash outta your personal bank account or outta the business bank account.
Lucas Underwood: And then I want you to walk back into the shop and when he comes in, I want you to walk around the front of the counter and I want you to count out a hundred dollars bills, how much you think it would take off that, and I want you to lay that down on the counter and I want you to pay it. And he said, but Lucas, I don't have that much money in my bank account.
Lucas Underwood: I said, that's my point. Exactly. Right. Like, you, those don't have the money to do this.
Cecil Bullard: And yet we, again, this is another kind of piece you and I had have kind of talked about is
Cecil Bullard: so many owners are. Doing this on the fly, right? Yeah. They don't really even understand how financially prosperous the business needs to be in order to be a comfortable, safe business where you can help when you need to help or when you feel like I just absolutely have to help.
Cecil Bullard: For sure. And I always say I hate emotional discounting. Yeah. And that's emotional discounting, right?
Cecil Bullard: If you you know, I would tell you that you need to make 20% net profit, and if you don't have a business designed, a machine designed to make 20% net profit, then you do not have a business that is safe work, come comfortable, and you do not have a business that can help people when you need to help people.
Lucas Underwood: Listen, I'm gonna tell you something. You know, I'm a huge Warren Buffett fan. Yeah. And you know, I became one of his fans years ago. I posted this in my LinkedIn, but I became a fan of here's years ago, and I was watching a YouTube or a Yahoo Money or Yahoo Finance video, and they asked, they said, Hey, Warren, what is the best advice you've ever given?
Lucas Underwood: He said I wasn't given this advice. I was taught this advice from my dad, and he said, my dad just showed me what unconditional love was. And he said, if you can do that with a child, you're 90% of the way home. And then she said, what's the worst advice you've ever been given? He said, you know, he said, I've always kind of known what good advice was.
Lucas Underwood: He said, I'm sure I gave plenty of terrible advice. But he said, I'm gonna tell you that Tom Murphy told me 40 years ago that Warren, you don't have to tell that guy to go to hell today. You can wait and tell him tomorrow. You ought to sleep on it and think, make sure you feel the same way. And he said, I've learned that instead of making decisions and emotion, I need to make decisions.
Lucas Underwood: In fact, yeah. Now I'm gonna tell you his retirement letter, if you've not read his retirement letters, one of the most powerful things you'll ever read. Right? Because he talks about an obituary and he said, you better be writing your obituary right now because you don't want somebody else writing it based on what you didn't do.
Lucas Underwood: Right? Yeah. And so that's something that I often think about and emotion plays into this. I had a probably two hour conversation with a shop owner day before yesterday, coming back from sema, you know, over the weekend, that kind of thing. And I happened to see it and I didn't respond to him until yesterday.
Lucas Underwood: And he said, I've got this guy, he's been working for me since October, paying him 30 bucks an hour, flat rate, 30 hour guarantee. I'm doing all these things, trying to keep this guy happy, and all he does is complain and fuss and I don't get paid for this, and that's not my job. And this isn't that. I'm like, bro, right now's the time to send him down the road.
Lucas Underwood: And he said, yeah, but this is a nice guy and I, you just don't understand, and I'm trying to help him. I'm like, there is no place for emotion in business. Right?
Lucas Underwood: It's not okay to keep this person because they're toxic. They're gonna make the environment toxic. It's gonna destroy your business. But see, as business owners, we often bring emotion into the situation.
Lucas Underwood: There is no place for emotion in business. It's by the fact. And if you look at,
Lucas Underwood: Go ahead.
Cecil Bullard: Would you talk to my CEO about that a little bit?
Lucas Underwood: Your CEO is a pretty tough guy. I don't,
Cecil Bullard: yes, he is. We all are emotional beings and we all. Keep people too long and we, yeah. Allow people to do certain things and, you know, so I had a, I got tagged by one of, one of my guys, and I'm not currently coaching with him, but you know, I love the guys I've worked with over the years.
Cecil Bullard: And he said
Cecil Bullard: I got an employee. This is the second time that he's lied to me. What do I do?
Cecil Bullard: okay. And my answer is you can't have people working for you that you can't trust. Exactly. You get one. You know, you get one. Okay, you made a mistake. I'm going to overlook this. You can earn my trust back by doing this, and this over time.
Cecil Bullard: But if you come back a second time, you lie to me a second time and it's very obvious that you lied to me and there's no out, then you can't work for me. And it doesn't matter if, you know, I love this excuse. Right? Well, yeah, but Cecil, good techs are hard to find.
Lucas Underwood: Yeah. And back ones are fairly easy to find.
Lucas Underwood: Yeah. So you might as well just pick another one, right?
Cecil Bullard: Yeah. Pick another bad one and see if you can't change their habits. But
Cecil Bullard: But it's the excuses that we use to. To the, you know, to justify whatever where choice we're making. And it's often an emotional choice and not a logical, or a good business decision.
Cecil Bullard: Okay. And I'm not saying fire everybody, and I'm not saying you, you shouldn't have grace and those kind of things, but you know, if you've got a guy that's worked for you for say 60 days and all he does is bitch and complain,
Lucas Underwood: it's only gonna get worse.
Cecil Bullard: Yeah. You're, that's
Lucas Underwood: only gonna get worse.
Cecil Bullard: Get used to that because that's gonna be your life as long as that guy's with you
Lucas Underwood: and you can set the standard. Yeah. And this is one of the things I see everybody do, is they don't set the standard fast enough. So the very first day you can ask my team, right? Like, you step outta line down here.
Lucas Underwood: I'm not waiting to talk about it. I'm talking about it right now. And they, I used to think, oh, this is very aggressive to do that and I care about my people, so I don't want to know. Like you, you set the standard from the word go. And if you let that slide once, we're gonna see a decline. If you don't let it slide at all, we'll either hold that line or we can begin to improve and go in a better direction.
Cecil Bullard: So, you know, one of the, one of the guys that spoke at our summit said something about you may have a standard here, but you allow this behavior.
Cecil Bullard: He said, congratulations, this is your standard. That's your new standard. This is not your standard.
Lucas Underwood: you promote what you permit.
Cecil Bullard: Yeah. And we do that almost constantly.
Cecil Bullard: Well, that guy's a nice guy, so you know, okay, he's having a bad day, blah, blah, blah.
Cecil Bullard: I'm gonna let this slide and then pretty soon, that's the habit. And then now that they've created the habit, everyone else is looking at that and going, well, wait a minute. I thought we had this standard here.
Cecil Bullard: Obviously we don't. So if that person can act that way, then I can act that way.
Cecil Bullard: And the other thing is, I'm not gonna spend my life and I, and believe me, I have made mistakes up the Ying yang. Just many mistakes. Business mistakes, personal mistakes, life mistakes et cetera. You know? But I'm not gonna live my life thinking, oh my God, I gotta go work with that guy and it's gonna be oh and oh.
Cecil Bullard: And I know he is just gonna, you know, all he's gonna do is bitch. Today we have we have our core values, right? Our five core values and one of those, it has to be fun. And so when it's not fun, we take a look around and we go, why isn't it fun? And if that's a person, then how do we help that person modify the behavior or how do we replace that person?
Cecil Bullard: That's all there is. There's no more.
Lucas Underwood: Absolutely.
Cecil Bullard: Right? Absolutely. And we want
Lucas Underwood: time. 'cause your business will become who you allow in it.
Cecil Bullard: Yeah. And I want timeframes around that. You know, are we gonna give this guy two weeks? Are we gonna give him two months? What's the and by the way, I'm gonna let that person know you've got two weeks, you know, pull it out.
Lucas Underwood: percent because
Cecil Bullard: It has to be fun. I'm gonna, you know, I tell the story. I'm not supposed to be in the automotive industry. I never thought I would be in the automotive industry. My father didn't want me in the industry. And yet I've spent 45 years here. And you know, you wake up one morning and you look in the mirror and you go, wow, that guy's old.
Cecil Bullard: Who is that dude? And it's 45 years have gone by and I'm not gonna spin, I don't know, the next 15, the next 25, whatever I have left. I'm not gonna spin that being miserable. I'm isn't worth it.
Lucas Underwood: Right. I've told this story before and I'm gonna, Gary, I promise I'm gonna answer this question. I know the car's pulling into your driveway right now, so we're gonna go to it next, I promise.
Lucas Underwood: But I am gonna tell this story. You know, here's the thing. Years ago I walked into this shop. I had a guy who was here and he tinted windows. He had a Volkswagen and there was a Volkswagen specialist in town. And I knew the Volkswagen specialist really well. He was elite. I mean, like you, you wouldn't find a technician this good on Volkswagens anywhere in the country.
Lucas Underwood: I mean, this dude was just that good. And so he was known to be a little ornery. And so I, my friend took his Volkswagen over there. He didn't know, he worked over here, didn't know anything about that. And he went to pick up the car. After weeks, he hadn't heard anything. The guy called him and said, your car's ready.
Lucas Underwood: And he's what? Like, you didn't call me with an estimate. You didn't anything you, this, that and the other. And he was really rude and really short and really abrasive. And so I said, well, I'll tell you what. I'll go over there with you and we'll pick up the car. And so we go in and he walked in first and I came in behind him and this guy's just giving him up the road and he walks in.
Lucas Underwood: I said, Hey, what are you doing? And he said, oh, not much. What are you doing here? I said, oh, he is a, he works for me. And he said, oh, well let come on back here. Let me show you what was wrong with the car. Let me show you how you can avoid this next time. And by the way, you don't owe us nothing. Don't worry about it.
Lucas Underwood: Come on back. And I was standing there and the lady at the front counter was there. And I said, what makes him like that? And she said, sweetheart, he spent his entire life of making every person who walks through that door problem, his problem. And he's bitter his ill. Yeah,
Cecil Bullard: Can't do that.
Lucas Underwood: Yeah, exactly.
Lucas Underwood: And so that's what we do when we involve ourselves in these levels. We can't fix other human beings. And so if we run our business by the numbers and by the facts, it eliminates this emotional attachment that's unhealthy. Right.
Cecil Bullard: So, so that I'm a bit of a counselor often between partners or between Yeah,
Cecil Bullard: My husbands and wives even who work in the business together and I have this situation, had this situation where the husband was almost abusive, verbally, at least to the wife in the shop. And then the wife would, they had this pattern that she would just, you know, start screaming and crying and blah, blah, blah.
Cecil Bullard: And you know, I talked to her and I said who can you control? What can you control? What you know? Yeah. And she said, well, only me, that's what it came to. And I said, okay. So if he was abusive to you or verbally abusive to you in the shop, in front of people, instead of screaming and crying, what behavior could you do that might change the situation?
Cecil Bullard: And so what we came to was that she should say, that's not appropriate. That's not what you should be doing. You shouldn't treat me this way in front of all these employees. And then I'm gonna go take a break and then you and I can talk about it later tonight, tomorrow, whatever. But no screaming and crying.
Cecil Bullard: And you know what happened? It shifted the whole tide. You cannot control other people. You can only control yourself. That's all there is.
Lucas Underwood: Yes. Absolutely. So, absolutely. And E plus R equals O. See, a lot of people live life and they say E equals O No, the event doesn't equal the outcome. Your reaction is what creates the outcome.
Lucas Underwood: Yeah. And so if you can learn to slow down and think about it before you react, don't let the emotion drive you into a reaction. Focus on the event and say, what are my options? What is my solution? What could I do? How could I make this better? But make good decisions after the fact because you can't control what happened
Cecil Bullard: and also under
Lucas Underwood: respond to it.
Cecil Bullard: And also understand that not every choice will be a good choice, even though you make it right. Yeah. So it's not about whether or not I have some failures, of course, I'm gonna have some failures.
Cecil Bullard: It's about am I moving forward in a, intelligent, logical,
Cecil Bullard: Way that's gonna improve my life and improve the lives of others around me, right?
Lucas Underwood: A hundred percent. So, hey, listen, we're gonna jump in. We're going to answer this for Gary, okay? Yes,
Lucas Underwood: Because here's what's happening.
Lucas Underwood: Live right this very minute. This car go, Gary, that he's asking about, just pulled back into the driveway.
Lucas Underwood: do it. He says, client from a big project came and picked up, paid with a check, no issues with the previous check from this client and send a message saying they're stopping payment on the check due to mechanical issues with the vehicle.
Lucas Underwood: Unable to contact the client at this time to retrieve the vehicle for diagnosis on the issue. What's your opinion on best approach? Mind you, this is $9,000.
Cecil Bullard: I gotta get the car back in the shop somehow, because number one if they're saying that I have mechanical issues, then they can decline the check.
Cecil Bullard: That's I almost have no recourse. And if it's something I did. I have a warranty and so what I've done in the past is made sure I got in touch with a client and that might take more than just, oops, I sent them a text or I sent them an email. It might be multiple phone calls. It might be chasing 'em down where they work.
Cecil Bullard: Yes, where you can be in front of them and I've gotta get the car back in my shop. Number one,
Lucas Underwood: absolutely
Cecil Bullard: to verify that whether or not what I did was done correctly. That's the first thing I'm gonna do. Yeah. Whenever we worked on a car and things didn't go the way they were supposed to, the first thing we do is we check the work we did to make sure that the work we did was legitimate and then it was done well, and then it, this is not our instance.
Cecil Bullard: I document that very clearly and I don't release the car until they bring me cash. Cash this time. Yes.
Lucas Underwood: No, no credit card, no check,
Cecil Bullard: no checks, no nothing. Cash on the barrel head.
Lucas Underwood: I have a very similar process, step number one, right? Because you're right, they can stop payment on a check. It does not have to be legitimate for them to stop payment on check.
Lucas Underwood: They can do that if they want. Same with a chargeback that it doesn't have to be legitimate. Nope. Now, an amount that high. Because I have warranty terms and service and I tell people this all the time. Your warranty terms and service, dang well better be on your invoice. Yes. And they better have signed something.
Lucas Underwood: cause it says what my warranty is. And
Cecil Bullard: by the way, it doesn't
Cecil Bullard: if they don't sign, you don't have a contract, you have nowhere
Lucas Underwood: to go. Exactly. Absolutely. And so own that warranty terms of service. When they sign their invoice it, it literally says, we don't do refunds. There is no refund policy. We correct the problem if it's related to something that we did, and here's how you obtain that warranty.
Lucas Underwood: If that is not on there, you are up
Lucas Underwood: creek in many cases.
Cecil Bullard: It's a vacation warranty. You have to bring it back to us. We have to have the car. It's not take it somewhere else and then send me a bill. It's not
Lucas Underwood: Absolutely.
Cecil Bullard: We don't pay for hotels or travel rental
Lucas Underwood: cars or Now if you wanna do that.
Lucas Underwood: if you wanna do that's on you.
Lucas Underwood: Right. You can do that after the fact, but it needs to be on paper that you don't do that.
Cecil Bullard: The whole back page of our work order
Cecil Bullard: Was printed with our warranty policy stuff.
Cecil Bullard: I mean the whole page. And they had to make it
Lucas Underwood: small to fit it
Cecil Bullard: off 0.9 or 0.8 to get it there. Yeah. So. So, and it's like, you know, we did a transmission and we got a call from somebody and they were 500 miles away from the shop and the transmission's leaking and they're at a dealership.
Cecil Bullard: And the dealership's like, well, we have to put a new transmission 'cause these guys are idiots, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we're gonna send you see, so we're just gonna send you the bill from the dealership. Oh no you're not. Right. Yep.
Cecil Bullard: You will take it to a shop of my choice.
Cecil Bullard: I found a shop nearby there.
Cecil Bullard: There was a seal leak it, I think it cost me like, I don't know, $24 to have it fixed.
Cecil Bullard: The shop was being nice to me, but they didn't need a whole new transmission. Absolutely. And that, that the only way that happened was based on the warranty policy and the signature
Lucas Underwood: Yes. Absolutely. And I'm gonna tell you something.
Lucas Underwood: Listen when I go into these instances, I get a telephone call, Hey, there's an issue with something you did. Hey, I'm unhappy with my experience. You know what I'm doing? I am attacking it like you would not believe. I'm on the telephone, I'm calling them, I'm texting 'em, Hey, I wanna make this right. I wanna take care of this.
Lucas Underwood: Tell me what's going on. How can I help? What do I need to do? And by the staff is by,
Cecil Bullard: I'm also documenting all of that because I may have to go to court. Yes. And if it's nine grand, I'm gonna go to court.
Cecil Bullard: And I might even talk to the district attorney because that's a felony for them to mislead and steal nine grand from me.
Lucas Underwood: Well, in North Carolina, theft of services.
Lucas Underwood: Right. In North Carolina it's theft of services. And that's why the terms of service is very important, right? Because I have to have a terms of service that says what?
Cecil Bullard: Yeah. But this also goes back to the conversation that you and I also had, and that is we have so many guys that are flying by the seat of their pants.
Cecil Bullard: And you, they don't even understand the liability they have. Forget about the $9,000 job that the check got bounced on. Right?
Cecil Bullard: Think about somebody you doing work on somebody. They take their car outta your shop the next day they kill somebody.
Cecil Bullard: You know? And who do you think is gonna be named in the lawsuit?
Lucas Underwood: Absolutely
Cecil Bullard: right? Yeah. Absolutely. No matter what, even if it's not your fault, even if it's not even remotely your fault, even if it has absolutely nothing to do with you because you touched the car, you're going to be named in the lawsuit. Yeah. And if you cannot prove what you did, how you did it, and why you did it.
Cecil Bullard: And you don't have signatures. You are screwed. And
Lucas Underwood: We have completion photos. Yeah, on our repair orders. And so the part was replaced. Here's a picture of the part. Oh, by the way, you see that red mark right there? That means that we torque the bolt, right? Yeah. That's torque mark.
Lucas Underwood: And so we know that never gets put on until we torque that bolt. And so you can see the repair that was done. You can see the completed completion, you can see the photos of the parts that were changed. All of that is documented and available for you, for your review at any point in time. And people say, Lucas, that repair order is like 25 pages long.
Lucas Underwood: And I'm like, right, because shop wear makes it super easy. It's not like it's a lot of work for us to do that. I don't care how long it is, as long as it's documented
Cecil Bullard: and you better raise your labor rate by 50 cents an hour or so So you can pay for the paper.
Lucas Underwood: Absolutely.
Cecil Bullard: Absolutely. So it is what it is.
Cecil Bullard: Yeah. And we used to, like, we always had an after fix report.
Cecil Bullard: So if the car came in with this symptom. And this is what we diagnosed. This is why we decided to replace that component. We replaced that component. We retested the vehicle, we verified that component is working properly at this time and that, and so that's always documented.
Cecil Bullard: In whatever repair you're doing or whatever service you're doing that, that was done legitimately. Especially if you're torquing. I love the idea of, you know, here's a red dot on that bolt. It means it was torque. Right.
Lucas Underwood: Exactly. Yes sir.
Cecil Bullard: Imagine, you know, going to court and then you can stand in front of a judge or whatever and go.
Cecil Bullard: Here's our process, here's how it's done, here's how I know it was done properly. Yes. You know? And by the way, it's
Lucas Underwood: documented. It's on paper.
Lucas Underwood: Here's how this works.
Cecil Bullard: And we do that how often? Every single time.
Lucas Underwood: Yep. About
Cecil Bullard: just the way we do business, right? Yep. And nobody gets the choice not to do it.
Lucas Underwood: Now look I'm going to, we're gonna step on the accelerator here. I got yelled at by somebody last time. They said go. You didn't answer my question.
Lucas Underwood: And I said, well, Michael Smith's a talker, man. You can't let him just talk on and on. I mean, he's smart. Cecil
Cecil Bullard: two, you don't hear
Lucas Underwood: what he says.
Cecil Bullard: Yeah. Cecil two. So let's, this is, I don't know about the smart part, but the talking part, we definitely,
Lucas Underwood: I tell you that Michael Smith is a very smart man, right?
Lucas Underwood: is. Like, he's pretty awe inspiring when you get to talking with Michael and the way he asks questions. That's how you know he is really smart, is because the way he asked the question, you're like, you're trying to get in my head, aren't you?
Lucas Underwood: All right, Matt McCann. Now, I love this question. He says, we have a solid team of technicians and front staff. Oh, they moved it over so I can see it over here. We have a front staff who work well together, but it often feels like most of them work for the company rather than with the company. I truly believe a great culture and buy-in leads to a positive outcome in production.
Lucas Underwood: What are some effective methods or approaches to help strengthen our shop's culture and shift that mindset toward a sense of shared ownership and teamwork? Now, I'm gonna tell you this, okay, Cecil, I've gotta jump in and answer this first because it's something that's near and dear to my heart.
Cecil Bullard: Go for it.
Lucas Underwood: The first thing is there's this great video and it's by a man named Tim Kite. It's on YouTube and it's about leadership. And if you go search this, it's got some like yellow and purple dots or something on the title screen. You'll see it. And it is one of the most beautiful speeches on culture I've ever heard.
Lucas Underwood: And he names a couple things. And one of the things that's always stood out to me is that you have to be going on a journey. You have to be going somewhere, right? Because people today want to be on a journey. They want to be accomplishing something. It's bigger than just showing up and getting a paycheck for them.
Lucas Underwood: And so we have to show them what that journey is and why it should matter to them and why it matters to us. And you know, the other thing he talks about, you have to do it for the right reasons. It can't be a personal agenda. It can't just be about me getting a paycheck. It has to be about this business serves you too, right?
Cecil Bullard: You have to, you also have to talk about it. You have to document it, and you have to live it. So, you know, when we start talking about your mission statement, your vision statement, and your core principles, you need those documented. And I always tell people, look, if you're gonna write a mission statement, put it on the wall and then not live it, don't write it.
Cecil Bullard: But that, that in, in the, at the institute we worked together. Now I had a meeting the other night with a few of the top people here, and I was like, I need everyone to understand it's not a democracy. Right? Yeah. It is not everybody's not you're not gonna get what you want because there's three of you that want x.
Cecil Bullard: It's what does Dutch
Lucas Underwood: say as a benevolent dictatorship?
Cecil Bullard: Yeah. It's, it is, it's a benevolent dictatorship. It, it is. Right. But, so there's that. On the other hand, people need to feel like their voice matters, right? Yeah. And that their
Cecil Bullard: And that their vision or their their, what they want lines up with what the company wants.
Cecil Bullard: So why do we have a mission statement? Well, 'cause Cecil's nuts and Cecil feels very passionate about what we need to do, but it's not Cecil's mission statement. It's a mission statement that was brought by all of the employees of the institute at a point in time. And it's been, it really hasn't been modified 'cause it's very simple.
Cecil Bullard: Better business, better life, better industry. But we, when we advertise for people, when we say, Hey, I want a new employee, it's there when you interview, it's there. When you have meetings with your people, it's there. It's constantly there. It's not just on the wall, but we also discuss it. We talk about it, we talk about how it applies when we have decisions to make at the institute that are tough.
Cecil Bullard: Decisions. We say, how does that fall in line with our core values? Yes. Right.
Cecil Bullard: We had one of those last week.
Cecil Bullard: And we decided that the decision that we were making didn't fall in line with our core values, so we were going to make another decision. A different decision. Right. Yeah. And I think that other piece that you and I talked about, when the owner or the manager doesn't follow the process or doesn't, then it's all out the window.
Lucas Underwood: You're taken outta that trust account,
Cecil Bullard: right. You're
Lucas Underwood: taken outta the trust account, you know,
Cecil Bullard: and now you. Go ahead.
Lucas Underwood: You go ahead.
Cecil Bullard: No you go ahead.
Lucas Underwood: You'd already forgot what you were gonna say.
Cecil Bullard: Go ahead. No, I haven't. I'm good.
Lucas Underwood: So, Tim Kit said the real challenge of like, because core values the way that we see it, right?
Lucas Underwood: Because core actually is a Latin word for heart. Yeah. And he talked about the fact that, you know, because you go to the coronary department of the hospital and he said the challenge is getting it off of the wall because those are poster values into the heart of your people. And so it means that we have to hire people who believe what we believe.
Lucas Underwood: Right. Now, I'm gonna tell you something. One of the, one of the coolest practices or I don't know what you'd call it that we've done in our shop, Jeremy Hoem is the business coach for the family business up the street, right? And he suggested something and I found it brilliant. He said, I want you guys to sit down and I want you to name three people.
Lucas Underwood: Each person in the room named three people that made a big impact in your life. Named.
Cecil Bullard: That's, you guys do that on the podcast?
Lucas Underwood: Yeah. We name all those three people. And then he says, okay, now what I want you to do is I want you to name three things about those three people that was impactful for you. The reason that stuck with you and why you, why it emulate matter.
Lucas Underwood: Yeah. And so we go down and we make this list. And you know, when we got done, we found out that the things that mattered to every single person in the room mattered consistently across the board. Honesty, integrity, doing what's right, regardless of who's looking right. It wasn't about money.
Cecil Bullard: We can't, yeah, you can't run a business and make.
Cecil Bullard: You know, poor decisions because that's gonna put more money in your company. Now again, you and I have conversations all the time and 'cause I love talking to you, and I don't know if you care about, I don't know if you love talking to me or not, but I do. I do, of
Cecil Bullard: So of course. So, you know, we have the shop owner who's not making a living who feels bad if they make a profit, et cetera, et cetera.
Cecil Bullard: That's not what I'm talking about. I'm not saying that, you know, the business has to be profitable and it has to be profitable to a certain extent because that then allows me to take care of my employees and their families and my customers and my community and all the other things. But when you have a financial decision to make and you decide to go against your core values because it's a financial decision, 'cause it's gonna impact you, right?
Cecil Bullard: You are making a mistake. Okay. You need to build that bank account that allows you to make the right choice even when it hurts, right? Yes. And in order to do that, you have to charge properly on the front and be profitable on the front so that you have that opportunity. I would tell you, you know, that there was that post about, there's these dishonest guys and there's always dishonest people.
Cecil Bullard: Yeah. No matter what industry you're in, right? Yeah. There's gonna be a certain percentage of those no matter what you do. But I think that most of the stuff that looks dishonest, it might actually be dishonest in our industry, but it's really because I put myself in a position where I could not make the right decision because I didn't have the money or the finances to make the right decision.
Cecil Bullard: So instead of, you know, pulling that motor out and putting a new motor in at my cost because we screwed it up, I'm gonna put it. Cheap patch on this thing and hope it gets past the warranty period. Right,
Cecil Bullard: Yeah. 'cause I don't have the money to do anything else, and it's not the decision that I really, if it was my car, it's not the decision I would make.
Cecil Bullard: And so I always look at it like that. I'm gonna be the one driving that vehicle. Yeah. And so if I'm gonna be the one driving that vehicle, how am I gonna fix that thing? Yeah. And if you charge enough, and I can't say that we always do either. You know, there's sometimes you come up against a financial decision and maybe there isn't all that money sitting in the bank, but if you make the wrong choice and you've got the writing on the wall and the mission statement and the vision and the values, and you
Lucas Underwood: value against that, but
Cecil Bullard: What message? You just wiped it all
Cecil Bullard: Yeah. And I think as business owners, as people who want to be leaders, who try to be leaders, that we need to be very conscious in the decisions we're making. We need to be very solid in the in, in our core values so that we keep making the right decisions. 'cause when we make the wrong ones, we can get a little grace from our people.
Cecil Bullard: But if that becomes a pattern
Cecil Bullard: Then there's no grace.
Lucas Underwood: They will not trust. Do you know how many technicians I talk to, how many service advisors I talk to and they say I don't trust them. I've seen what do to other people. I'm not gonna.
Cecil Bullard: But I, and I also think that we're not building the emotional bond with our employees that we need to build.
Cecil Bullard: And the emotional bond is not, you can walk on me and you can do whatever the hell you want. I'm gonna pay you whatever you want and all that. There, there are rules and B, my can't boundaries. Yeah. You gotta have boundaries. Boundaries. Okay. There, there are rules and boundaries but we need to have an emotional connection with our people.
Cecil Bullard: A around the core values of the business and that journey that you're talking about. You know, what's the journey that we're on together so that when we fumble, right, when we fall down, we have a lot of people there to pick us up and help us move forward.
Cecil Bullard: And not point fingers and laugh at us while we're on the ground.
Cecil Bullard: And if we don't build that core, if we don't build that emotional bond. Yeah. Then we don't get Absolutely. We don't get what we need. Absolutely. What we should have.
Lucas Underwood: And you know, one of the things I'll say about this to Matt is that, that, for one, you need to be really careful here because usually if the culture, right, like, so I have a big personality and the people in the shop know my heart.
Lucas Underwood: They know what I believe, and I try my very best to live that. There's days that I don't hit that mark. Yeah. And they pick me up and they get me there and there's days that they don't hit the mark and I pick them up and get them there. There's days I don't feel like it, and they're like, Hey dude, it's okay, right?
Lucas Underwood: Like, we got this, we're fine. We're gonna get through this. Right.
Lucas Underwood: well, so here's the thing. It's like you need to be careful because if you don't have a culture that's developing underneath you, there might be a seed somewhere in that culture that something's wrong. There might be someone in the culture Yeah.
Lucas Underwood: Who is trying to distract and pull back from it. Now, you said something about boundaries. I wanna just tell you how smart my wife is. Okay. The other day she can't be
Cecil Bullard: very smart. She's still hanging out
Lucas Underwood: with you. So,
Cecil Bullard: I don't know, brother. Go ahead. Sorry.
Lucas Underwood: She tolerates. Okay.
Cecil Bullard: Yeah. There we go.
Lucas Underwood: I'm always gone.
Lucas Underwood: You notice that like, yeah. I'm always on the road. That's how she tolerates me.
Lucas Underwood: She said, listen, I'm gonna tell you something about yourself that may not feel very nice. She said, you're a giver. And I said, okay. She said, givers have to set boundaries because takers never will. And I thought, oh.
Lucas Underwood: Huh. Right. Because I'm bad. You've seen me do that. Yeah. You've yelled at me for doing that.
Lucas Underwood: And it's like, listen you have to set boundaries with these people. And one of the things I see shop owners doing, I just had a conversation with that guy who's having all these issues with this tech in the shop, only been there for a short period of time, super toxic killing the organization.
Lucas Underwood: Yeah. If you don't set a boundary that says you will not behave this way, we do not tolerate this here. Right. Because see what I've learned, Cecil, is that I have to have a line. And that line is once you cross that, no, I no more Mr. Nice Lucas. Okay. I have a job to do. I'm not letting you damage the rest of the team.
Lucas Underwood: It's not that I don't care about you, it's not that I wanna harm you. It's that you're going to cause harm to the people that I care about.
Cecil Bullard: And that's the kind of the point I kind of wanted to make is that while I'm trying to be the nice guy, and I'm trying to be a giver and I'm trying to make sure everybody's taken care of.
Cecil Bullard: I can't have someone that, that routinely is not part of the team, is not part of the mission. It's not part of the vision. I can't do it. Exactly. You know, I was, I thinking, you know. What's your favorite whiskey or bourbon?
Cecil Bullard: do you like best?
Lucas Underwood: I'm gonna say horse soldiers probably my favorite right now.
Cecil Bullard: Okay. So I've got a really nice young, maybe I've got a really nice glass bottle. I'm gonna pour you you know, two fingers of horse s soldiers and but I'm only gonna put a little poison in it.
Lucas Underwood: Yeah, just a little.
Cecil Bullard: Okay. I'm just gonna put a little poison. Probably won't kill you.
Cecil Bullard: Might make you sick a little bit, but it probably won't kill you. Are you gonna drink that or not?
Lucas Underwood: Even a little bit.
Cecil Bullard: No, I thank
Lucas Underwood: you. I like David. I'm not trying to have the stomach plug in the middle of a podcast,
Cecil Bullard: but kind of how do we do that in our lives? We keep poisonous people around, we keep poisonous ideas, we keep poisonous behaviors around us.
Lucas Underwood: gonna fix on Cecil.
Cecil Bullard: Yeah. Win because you know, I was invincible until I was, I dunno, 57.
Cecil Bullard: And you know, prior to 50, about 57, sometime in my 57th year, I looked out there and I thought, oh my God, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I mean, there's a, there's an end to this life, right?
Cecil Bullard: Yeah. And it's closer now. Than it was, you know, now I can see that I got 25, 30 years left maybe. Right? Maybe. Right. And then quality of life and all of that. And when you're invisible, it's like, okay, so I'll drink that. It's got some poison in it, so what? Right. You know? Yeah. I'll take care of that tomorrow.
Cecil Bullard: I'll i'll do that next week. I'll, oh, you know, having to deal with that guy, you know, and then it's gonna be tough on the business because now I don't have that guy. Yeah. Well, I got news for you. Running shops and running, you know, the institute, when you get rid of toxic people, it's amazing how much the other people step up.
Lucas Underwood: Exactly.
Cecil Bullard: EE. Every single time I've gotten rid of someone toxic, the company has made leaps and bounds move moving forward. Percent. Right?
Lucas Underwood: A hundred percent. And look, here's the thing is there's a video of Jordan Peterson. It's actually the video that got him canceled. And you'd watch it and you'd say, how in the world did that, did they cancel
Lucas Underwood: Right over this, right? It's in, it's insane. But he talks about fixing things and he said we teach all these kids in school that they're gonna be able to go out and do something. 'cause he taught psychologists, right? Yeah. He's like, you know, we teach 'em, they're gonna be able to fix something.
Lucas Underwood: And he said, no, the world's a really complex place and it's really hard to fix things. And you're the equivalent of a chimp with a wrench, right? Yeah. You're whack. Did it make it better? No. You, to fix a human being is a lot of work. And it takes years. And it's not something that as a business owner, you're really supposed to be doing in the first place.
Lucas Underwood: You're getting off into some gray area here. And so we have a toxic person in the shop because what, what happens? How many season, how many times have you seen it? They've got this toxic person in the shop. Yeah, but he's banging out hours. The minute he's gone, you're gonna find out that he was covering up all of his mistakes.
Lucas Underwood: And when that car came back the next time with loose bolts, he tightened them up and said, what do you think to do?
Cecil Bullard: Yeah, I didn't, it wasn't my fault. I didn't do that
Lucas Underwood: exactly.
Cecil Bullard: I'd rather have the guy go, oops, I made it. Yeah, I did it. Right. You know,
Lucas Underwood: a hundred
Cecil Bullard: percent. When I'm interviewing potential people, I'm asking open-ended questions that will direct me to whether or not they will take accountability or not.
Cecil Bullard: Take accountability for sure. One of the questions I might ask someone is, tell me about the worst mistake that happened. We all have a, like if I said that, I know you have a picture, you'd go, oh man, we did this. Blah, blah. And tell me what it was about and tell me what we did to take care of that.
Cecil Bullard: You know? Yeah. And a lot of people will instantly go, well, so and so did this, and so, and it was, it's never them. They never have a part of it.
Cecil Bullard: Another piece of that is we're all broken, right? We're not, none of us are perfect human beings. We don't, I mean, we're, I guess we're perfect human beings.
Cecil Bullard: We're just not perfect. Right? Yeah. Human beings are flawed. Yes. And it's not my job to fix you. It's my job to set goals, set boundaries. To run my business the way that I need my business to run so that my clients can be taken care of and my employees can be taken care of. 'cause you know, that's my
Cecil Bullard: That's my job,
Lucas Underwood: what I do, right?
Cecil Bullard: That's what I
Cecil Bullard: And when somebody comes in that's going to interrupt that or make that, you know, more difficult, the more I tolerate that, the harder it becomes because other people are also paying attention, watching, et cetera.
Lucas Underwood: And I'm hurting other people, right?
Lucas Underwood: Like, that's the thing we don't really want to talk about. I'm actually hurting other people. I'm impacting the lives of other people. I'm help I, we talk about negative attitude, right? And I tell people all the time, like, I wanna be careful about who my kids hang out with.
Lucas Underwood: absolutely. 'cause the negative attitude is contagious.
Lucas Underwood: You know,
Cecil Bullard: if I had only one thing I could do for my children when they were growing up Yeah. My grandkids now, it would be choose their friends.
Cecil Bullard: Okay. Absolutely. Who they hung out with. Absolutely. Because you become like the people around you.
Cecil Bullard: And you know, when they talk about, you know, you don't wanna be the smartest guy in the room, you wanna be in a room where there's a lot more smarter people than you.
Cecil Bullard: That, that is kind of the example of, if I'm in a room with a lot of smart people, I might not be really smart, but I'm gonna get smarter. Right?
Cecil Bullard: If I'm in a room with a lot of yahoos and idiots, guess what? I'm gonna be a Yahoo and an idiot. It's inevitable. Yeah, so I, one more thing about the culture piece.
Cecil Bullard: Not only do you need to communicate routinely, but some of the things that are important to them when they fall in line with what's important to the company, you need to make a part of what your company is about in doing, and you need to make a big deal about that. So it's not just, well, the company's here to make 20% and take and have a great reputation, blah, blah, blah.
Cecil Bullard: It's also like, what do you want and how does that fit into that company goal and values?
Cecil Bullard: And how can we help you achieve that
Lucas Underwood: a hundred
Cecil Bullard: percent by working here and doing your job here. Right?
Lucas Underwood: A hundred percent.
Cecil Bullard: And if you're not having routine communication, and that's not, it is like, okay, I'm outta your toolbox, you know?
Cecil Bullard: Good morning, how's your family doing? How's your son, Bob? I know you had some problems with him. Is that okay? What can I do? You also have to be talking to the employee on a, this is your job. These are the boundaries. These are the things that you're doing fantastically. These are the things that we need you to improve.
Cecil Bullard: Here's how, if you need help, here's how I'm gonna help you as leaders in our companies. We should constantly be helping others in our companies become better and better. And we do that and they see us as that. They don't see the company as outside of themselves a different goal, different direction.
Cecil Bullard: Then I have people that work. With the company. Become a part of the company. Yeah. As opposed to, oh, I'm just here for a paycheck. I don't want people that are just here for a paycheck.
Lucas Underwood: A hundred percent. I, one of the, one of my very close friends worked for a big national organization and he was so depressed and just really upset about the position.
Lucas Underwood: I'm like, dude, you're like their top sales person and all this crazy stuff's happening and you're doing all these amazing things and look at all the progress you've made. He's like, something just doesn't feel right. And he switched positions and he said, I figured it out. It was feedback. It wasn't good or bad feedback, it was just feedback.
Lucas Underwood: No feedback.
Lucas Underwood: cause I was getting nothing.
Lucas Underwood: Right. And so if we're not talking to our people and they don't know the content of our heart, but
Lucas Underwood: missing an opportunity. So
Cecil Bullard: how many small businesses shop owners have a goal for the company that they know that everyone knows what that goal is? A sales goal.
Cecil Bullard: A customer satisfaction goal, a comeback goal, you know, et cetera, et cetera, that everybody knows and understands that you're routinely talking about. How many of those shop owners now have a position that's well-defined? Here's what you're responsible for. Here's who you answer to. Here's who answers to you.
Cecil Bullard: Here's how we have our decision making paradigm. You know, it's how we make decisions in this company. And how many of those owners now have goals with the position and good position. Yeah. You know, agreement, contract description, whatever. And then how many of those people are having routine interviews?
Cecil Bullard: I mean, like, at least twice a year. On your position and on your personal checks, personal goals, et cetera. And I mean, I see employees. I've been working in this company for seven years. I've never once had a Here's how you're doing an interview.
Cecil Bullard: I mean, I've had the owner come out, yell at me because I, I did something that they didn't like, but I never had a sit down and say, this is my job and I'm doing a great job here, but I need improvement here.
Lucas Underwood: Well, I'm gonna get us through these last two questions. Go for it. I think you're absolutely right. And I'm just a little disappointed. Nobody's asked why you're in a 1970s bathtub for this recording. I don't even
Lucas Underwood: in the background.
Cecil Bullard: Don't even, I don't know why the green is there. I don't know what happened.
Cecil Bullard: So we're gonna,
Lucas Underwood: later we're
Cecil Bullard: gonna get some other acc later.
Lucas Underwood: There you go. Right. Go
Cecil Bullard: something.
Lucas Underwood: Okay, so, so one I'm gonna answer really quick. I'm just gonna go through, I think we're fairly close on this. Kyle says, Hey this is a weak point for me. Should we be telling the tech and advisors actual revenue numbers and goals?
Lucas Underwood: I'm gonna tell you
Cecil Bullard: something. Yes. Yes.
Lucas Underwood: I share every single dime of numbers. Yes. The only thing I don't do is share like individual payroll data. No, we don't do that. I share everything. I share the payroll.
Cecil Bullard: I'm not telling you what everybody else gets paid, by the way. Probably everybody knows anyway 'cause the employees are gonna talk et cetera.
Cecil Bullard: But why do I share the numbers? Because we have a goal and we have a target and we're not hitting that. I want you aware of that.
Cecil Bullard: If we are hitting that, I want you aware of that. And if you don't think I'm here to, you know, make a profit and drive a nice truck, then we didn't interview you properly.
Cecil Bullard: Right. Here's the thing
Lucas Underwood: I'm training my staff every single day about how to look at those numbers. What those numbers mean. Yes. What number affects what, how it changes things, how it affects the bottom line. Because you know something, one day I won't be here anymore and if I can raise them up because what do we have happening?
Lucas Underwood: I told you this in the meeting we had a while back, we see all these people that are leaving shops and starting their own and nobody's ever taught 'em how to run a business. And so if we can advise them, if we can educate them and people say, well, what if they go start their own thing? So what? Yay. At least your competition knows what they're doing.
Cecil Bullard: At least they're charging a reasonable rate instead of 75 bucks an hour because they think I can be cheaper and blah blah, blah. The other thing, if you're not telling them what's happening, they are guessing what's happening. Exactly. And you don't want 'em guessing. You made a
Lucas Underwood: lot of money
Cecil Bullard: And when you come in, when you hang on, 'cause you gotta cover this.
Cecil Bullard: When you come into a shop and you have like the technicians going, well, the reason we're not busy is 'cause we're too pricey. You're not having the right conversations with those people. They don't understand why we have to be $156 an hour, a hundred, $200 an hour. And all of your employees need to know what your rate should be and why you need to hold that rate.
Cecil Bullard: Steady because if you don't, then you make 3% and you have a business that's unsafe and you can't make good decisions financially for sure. And so I'm the guy that says, you need to know where we're at. You need to know what the profits are, and you need to understand that the company is set up to make 20% net profit because I don't get to keep it all.
Cecil Bullard: If I'm lucky, I might end up with seven or 8%.
Lucas Underwood: Amen. I've got one question we're gonna answer. There's actually another one in there that I think's important. One is how to know when to hire a coach. And I'm just gonna say, like, for me it was very simply that I knew that my knowledge had gotten me as far as it was gonna get me.
Lucas Underwood: I was up against the wall. Every time I turned around, I was dealing with another problem I didn't know the answer to, and I felt super stressed out. I felt like no matter what, I just could not make progress. And that's when it's time to get that outside perspective. I'm gonna tell you that I think if you're starting a business, you should hire a coach when you start the business.
Lucas Underwood: And I understand the revenue concerns with that, Cecil, but I think having somebody help you set the business up properly, ensure success down the road. If nothing else, just somebody to help you set up a proper chart of accounts. Oh my God, I hate to even bring that up.
Cecil Bullard: So I'm a coach and yeah, and I've been a coach. You're retired. Let me, no, I'm not. No, I'm not brother. I'm not. I will kick you in the head next time I see you. And you don't want that. 'cause I have this giant boot on my foot right now.
Cecil Bullard: we have clients that, that. Come to us and say, I'm buying a business.
Cecil Bullard: And we usually save them a hundred, $150,000 on the purchase price because they don't really understand the numbers and blah, blah, blah. We help 'em negotiate, we help 'em set up the systems and process. We help 'em get the goals in place. We help them understand the business as a financial machine, a model, you know, et cetera.
Cecil Bullard: And so our average client I think last month we were over 19% net for our average client. And that includes brand new people who are only at three or 4%. So our clients have been with us for a while, are making really good money, and they're not working 60 hours a week or 80 hours a week. These are guys that are now working 20 hours a week, 25 hours a week in their automotive shop, right?
Lucas Underwood: absolutely.
Cecil Bullard: And so, you know, it. Can I do it by myself? Yeah, probably. It might take me 20 years to figure it all out, or I may never figure it all out.
Lucas Underwood: trying to get
Cecil Bullard: it here. And so guys like yourself, you know, if I asked you, I said, Lucas, you know, when did you first hire a coach?
Cecil Bullard: And you say, okay, I did it when, I don't know, I was in business 12 years, right? And
Cecil Bullard: I finally thought, okay, I'm in trouble enough that I better hire somebody otherwise I'm not gonna be here. Right?
Cecil Bullard: And that's a huge portion of guys that hire coaching. I've got to a point where I'm almost desperate.
Cecil Bullard: And my coach, the coach is the last straw. I gotta either, you know, I'm gonna go broke or I'm, they're gonna help me, right?
Cecil Bullard: But I will ask you, so I don't know if it was 12 years, 15 years, seven years when you got the coach and you started, you know, helping yourself and you don't run a perfect business.
Cecil Bullard: Neither do any of my clients. Okay?
Cecil Bullard: Sure. But do you say to yourself, man, I wish I'd had done this. Sooner.
Lucas Underwood: Absolutely.
Cecil Bullard: So I have people,
Lucas Underwood: Do you know I, I mean like I know where, do
Cecil Bullard: you know how much farther along I would be if I had hired
Lucas Underwood: a coach myself? I would've money, I would have like college accounts for my kids and I would have a HSA and I'd have a lot of money put back in it.
Lucas Underwood: I'd be 10 years ahead towards retirement right now.
Cecil Bullard: My business instead I'm playing would be worth, my business would be worth twice what it's worth or three times what it's worth right now. Even though I did hire a coach and I'm working towards all those things, I could have done it better sooner, faster.
Lucas Underwood: kinda like compounding. The earlier you get in and get it started, the easier it is to get there.
Cecil Bullard: And so I get into a lot of meetings. In fact, I have one with a potential new client today. I'm, when we have someone who's kind of outside of what the institute normally does, like they don't just have a normal, like I work on Yeah.
Cecil Bullard: Repair shops or whatever. I get involved and I have these conversations and what I really detest is this you go through and you say, okay, we do this for you. And they believe it. They see it. They go, okay, and you talk about, you know, your parts margin is off by 18 points and that's costing you $70,000 a year and you know, we may not get the 18 points, but we'll probably get at least 12 and that will certainly pay for us and put more money in your pocket, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Cecil Bullard: And. And then you get done and you're like, okay. And they're like, oh yeah I really, I think this would be great. And you say, okay, sign on the bottom line.
Cecil Bullard: And we don't have long-term contracts. We're not even, we're not like signing for a $60,000 contract. We're just saying, yeah, you're gonna pay us month to month, and if you don't like what we do, bye-bye. You know? And if you do like what we do, you're gonna keep paying us. And our clients keep paying us because they like what we do.
Cecil Bullard: Yeah. But then they go, well, you know, I'm I'm gonna hire a service advisor. So once I do that, I'll then I'll come back. There's always a reason. Do coaching or I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, yeah. And you know what I tell 'em, I said, no, you're not. You will never come back. And I'm sorry, but if you think you can do this on your own, can you Yeah.
Cecil Bullard: And you know what? You'll probably make half or less of what you should earn. Yeah. And your life will be, but the cost of doing it
Lucas Underwood: that way, do
Cecil Bullard: you know how much it's pain that
Lucas Underwood: causes, do you know what it
Cecil Bullard: does? It's painful not to for you, your family. Yeah. You know, and that's what they don't Yeah.
Cecil Bullard: That's what they don't understand. Right. It's like, you know, my, my dad all he worried about was the clients and he did care about his kids. Don't get me wrong. He loved us and he provided food and all that kinda stuff, but when it came decisions about where he spent his time and all of that, it was always with the business.
Cecil Bullard: It was never with the family and on, there was always
Lucas Underwood: another fire to put out
Cecil Bullard: on his death bed. After two months in, in the hospital on a breathing tube, knowing he was gonna die, all he could say to me was, I'm sorry.
Cecil Bullard: Okay. And it wasn't, I'm sorry that I, you know, didn't leave you $10 million or, you know, any of that.
Cecil Bullard: It was, I'm sorry that I didn't give you the time. That you should, that we should have. I'm sorry that we didn't have the relationship we should have. So they don't understand that. And if you talk to, I don't know, I could give you a hundred clients to talk to, and they would say, oh my God, my life is so completely different.
Cecil Bullard: I, I now have time for my family. I have a life outside of my business. I have money in the bank. I'm not concerned about, I, I can do investing in other areas. You know, Michael, Mr. Smith you know, brainchild there you know, he talks about like having that extra bid and peace.
Cecil Bullard: Yeah. Well, Maslow basically says if you're worried about money and whether or not you can pay payroll next week, you can't think about family. God you know, life.
Lucas Underwood: You can't have a good life. You can't enjoy life. And you know, here's on the other side of that, right? There's a lot of shops out here who are listening and they're saying, but man, you know, I've got things pretty good right now.
Lucas Underwood: I've got things pretty dialed in. I've got things lined up. And you know, the reason that I coach with the institute is this, because when I sat down and started talking with Michael Smith and because I'm not gonna lie to you, Michael and I butted heads when we first met. And I went to Michael and I said, I really like Cecil.
Lucas Underwood: I feel like he's a close friend of mine, and I'm worried that what you're doing with the institute and your engagement could be bad for them. And he said, why do you say that? And I said, because you're trying to tell all these people to go sell their shops. And he said, whoa, stop down.
Cecil Bullard: That's not what we're doing.
Lucas Underwood: That's not what that's
Lucas Underwood: Down we, we were at a conference and he pulled out a chair and he said, I want you to sit down and you need to listen to me. And I said,
Cecil Bullard: It's about creating a legacy and having the legacy and controlling some of that.
Lucas Underwood: Go ahead. But beyond that,
Lucas Underwood: but beyond that, what he did is he put his hands up on my shoulder and he said, I need you to listen to me because I have seen all of these businesses and other verticals go through what's getting ready to happen to you.
Lucas Underwood: He said, if you don't believe me when I say this, go look at the collision space and see what's happened to them. Because you work in the collision space too. I said, what are you talking about? He said, I'm talking about consolidation,
Cecil Bullard: mom and pop hardware stores, mom and pops, pharmacies, et cetera.
Lucas Underwood: Funeral homes, right?
Lucas Underwood: Yeah. He said, what I'm trying to tell you is that the environment of which you operate now is not gonna be the environment of which you operate 10 years from now. And if you wanna sell your shop, great. If you wanna build a bunch of shops and sell them as a package and take the money and run, great. But what I'm trying to tell you is that you're not gonna survive and thrive in this market, in this environment unless you change what you're doing, because you're gonna be in a different market 10 years from now.
Lucas Underwood: You have to Yeah. The
Lucas Underwood: prepare for it now.
Cecil Bullard: So I don't know you're not a young guy. You're young compared to me but you've been in here for, I don't know, 20 years, right? Yep. In the industry. And you've seen the changes that we have, not just technologically, but even Yeah.
Cecil Bullard: Kind of business. And we have fought that tooth and nail, like Yeah. Raising our labor rates and, you know, charging what we're really worth and actually even paying technicians and creating a path. And we fought a lot of this stuff. Right. If they're good, they'll figure it out. Right? Okay. Yeah. That's what we should do is roll the dice and hope that we have good people.
Cecil Bullard: Why not help them become the best that they can be?
Cecil Bullard: And. The changes we had in the last 20 years will pair pale in comparison Yes. To the changes we will have in the next 10.
Lucas Underwood: A hundred percent.
Lucas Underwood: A hundred percent.
Cecil Bullard: I mean, we've got AI to think about how is that going to influence what, who is that gonna replace?
Cecil Bullard: How is that gonna be used in our business or buy the do it yourselfer out there. Right?
Cecil Bullard: And by the dealerships and the manufacturers and, you know, there's so much going on here and what I hate we probably have, I don't know, at any given time we have I dunno, 50% of our clients are probably.
Cecil Bullard: 50 or older. And we have a good percentage of guys that are 70 and still working in their shops because they need to, because they have to, because they don't know how to do anything else. And they have no life outside of that. And they've come to the point where they're physically or mentally not capable of moving forward and they have no path.
Cecil Bullard: They haven't spent the last five years with one of their key employees helping their key employee understand the business so that key employee can pay them and get them out. Or they're you know, they go to sell their business and they need, I don't know, 800,000, but it's only worth two.
Cecil Bullard: And they don't even understand. I, we have an employee, a, an older gentleman, fantastic guy. He's been with us for a very long time and he's gonna sell this business for like, I dunno, 500,000. And we look at the business with him, we go, this business worth a 900, $950,000. And he cried. I mean, he cried because at 500,000, it wasn't quite gonna be enough to make him feel secure.
Cecil Bullard: Yeah. But at 950,000, it's enough to make him feel secure.
Lucas Underwood: He's gonna make it through it. Yeah.
Cecil Bullard: Yeah. And it's it breaks my heart
Cecil Bullard: To see these guys at the end of their career. With no plan, no move forward plan for themselves. And I don't know how many shops closed this year. I can tell you we're not 240,000 shops anymore.
Cecil Bullard: And the only reason that we're maintaining numbers is 'cause you have all these technicians, all of a sudden we think, oh, I'm just gonna go do it. And now they're working out of their garage and they're calling themselves a shop and charging, you know, $75 an hour not marking parts up and letting their customer bring their own parts in.
Cecil Bullard: And we're gonna see that disappear. Yeah. We're gonna see it disappear because of regulations, because of technology. It's gonna be less and less
Lucas Underwood: different world. Yep.
Cecil Bullard: A hundred percent.
Cecil Bullard: I'm telling you, in the next 10 years, there are gonna be so many guys that are going to have to be out of the industry.
Cecil Bullard: And it's a shame because they could control their destiny. So when do you hire a coach? I don't know if you're looking at going, yeah, why not? Right. Yeah. What's the first thing I'm gonna do? You're gonna hire me and the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna look at your parts margin. I'm gonna look at your labor rate.
Cecil Bullard: I'm gonna say you're, we're costing you x. You have to make that from your customer.
Lucas Underwood: accountability
Cecil Bullard: partner. 10 bucks an hour, right? I'm your new And I have a big foot. That's but, and by the way, if it doesn't fit, don't stick. Yeah. Don't sign long-term contracts. Yeah. Percent. If it doesn't fit, don't stick.
Cecil Bullard: And if it doesn't fit, like we, we have, I don't how many coaches we have now. Nine or I don't 11 or whatever it is. Yeah. And I'm also the guy that gets the call, Hey, I'm working with this client, I'm kind of struggling. Not, and it doesn't it's not working well. So ciso, will you get involved? Yeah, absolutely.
Cecil Bullard: I'll meet with a client and I've taken on some of those clients, or I've moved them to other coaches where it fit better. Right? Sure. Where it felt better, where it worked better for them. So. You also want to probably hire a coach that, or a coaching company that has the philosophy that you fit with if you
Cecil Bullard: Are the discount, the
Lucas Underwood: belief and moral, ethical guidelines.
Cecil Bullard: Yeah. If you're the discount, get 'em in, get 'em out. Get as much as you can, and that's what you wanna be. It isn't gonna fit here at the institute. We're not, you will not be happy with us and we will not be happy with you.
Cecil Bullard: If you want great relationships in a shop that runs really well and people to build a great team with really good culture.
Cecil Bullard: That's what we do here
Lucas Underwood: to make the world a better place, baby.
Cecil Bullard: Yeah. That's what we do here.
Lucas Underwood: Well, hey listen, I just got a text message from the producer. He says he too late, calls us too late, double overtime for every minute, past an hour. So I, we
Cecil Bullard: better go,
Lucas Underwood: right? You're gonna be yelling at me for my p and l here in a few hours.
Lucas Underwood: There we go.
Cecil Bullard: No worries, baby.
Lucas Underwood: It's a big bill, man. It's a big bill. So,
Cecil Bullard: and we can do this again. So
Lucas Underwood: that's it. No worries. That's it. Cecil, thank you so much. I think this was an awesome conversation. I appreciate all the wisdom and knowledge you shared and I can't wait to do you
Cecil Bullard: too, brother.
Lucas Underwood: See you buddy.
Cecil Bullard: You too brother. Bye-bye.
