Fixing Fixed Ops: Training, Retention & Profitability with Kyle Newsom

In this episode of Word on the Street, we sit down with Kyle Newsom, Co-Founder of Vesperio, to dig into the real challenges and opportunities facing dealership fixed operations. From communication breakdowns to training gaps, Kyle shares why most service departments struggle with efficiency and what dealers can do to increase profitability while retaining both customers and staff.

We cover:

• Why most service issues boil down to communication
• How dealerships can turn basic training into long-term retention
• The critical handoff from sales to service and its impact on customer lifetime value
• Recruiting, onboarding, and keeping top talent in today’s tight labor market
• Why investing in people is not an expense—but a growth strategy

If your dealership is looking to boost fixed ops performance, grow service revenue, and actually keep the talent you hire, this episode is packed with actionable insights.

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Transcript

If you're a dealership curious to grow profitability in the fixed ops department, or you're looking to really drive operationally, set up your fixed ops department and put some fire behind the team. This is a conversation I would listen to, and this is somebody I'd consider hiring. This is Kyle Newsom, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Andrew Street. This is Word on the Street. Enjoy this fixed ops conversation with Kyle Newsom.

Kyle Newsom. Well, could you tell us who you are, what you do and who you work with? Yeah, so my name is Kyle Newsom. I'm one of the co-founders of Vesperio and we are a fixed operations training and consulting company that specializes in online digital fixed operations training for your service advisors, your service managers, your FODs, your BDC, your parts managers, your shop foreman, everything on that back end of the house. That is our expertise. All the sexy stuff. So what, like with all the dealers that you're working with and hearing from right now and talking to and like, you know, just helping them increase profitability in the backside. What are like the headwinds and a lot of the challenges that you're seeing right now? A lot of the things that we run into on a daily occurrence is really, it's the simple things. Obviously, we know some of the service departments, maybe they have a net profitability issue. Maybe there's an effective labor rate or overall production issue when it comes to that efficiency or proficiency in the shop. But when we kind of peel that back just a little bit, it really comes down to a lot of the basic training and communication and just setting the standard in that store that we find is missing. And it always usually boils down to about anything in life, right? It boils down to communication and usually lack thereof. And once we start kind of peeling that back and we start having those conversations and getting team involvement, then we usually discover some pretty amazing things. And all those little things can be tuned and trained and ultimately affect the dealership's bottom line. Right. And are you seeing stuff with like, obviously like increased capabilities for the staff, but also with just satisfaction and retention? Yeah, when we think about, you know, let's think about customer retention, right? Is everybody's always after customer retention because we should be, you know, sales sells the first car, service sells the rest. There's a reason that saying has existed for the last thirty plus years and the reality reality is is so often I think we've kind of got a little too far down the line where you know some of our stores they kind of view that customer as a number right we're just another number coming in we know we have to get so many ro's per day and maybe there's a top-down initiative of I just need more repair orders more repair orders because it looks like an easy solution And then we find that, well, we're really not optimizing the customers that are coming in and we're not creating those great experiences with the customers because we're worried about the next customer. And that ties into everything from your appointment system, how you're scheduling your daily preparation as a service advisor. If you have a preparation process, what are we telling our customers and setting expectations before they even get to the service drive? because all the time we love to surprise customers on the service drive I've never once seen anybody give somebody a birthday cake on the service drive but we're surprising them every single day hey guess what you need to spend a thousand dollars and they wonder why they say no yeah it's like when I one thing when I first serviced my new car two years ago or something I went into the audi dealership and like oh you just got it congratulations Nobody ever said congratulations when I bought a car. Yeah. Yeah, it's just those little things, right? Creating a relationship with that customer. And the reality is, is it really takes, what, another hundred and twenty seconds probably to really make that difference. But so often there's another customer behind this customer and maybe our heads down and we're kind of ignoring that customer because for some reason we think if we say, hey, Mrs. Jones, I'll be with you in just a second, it's going to cause an issue. Right. And so I think to your point is it's the little things. that make the biggest difference you know there's one one story I tell often the service advisors and managers is one of the dealerships that we worked with had a simple process at the end to where they would put a bottle of water in the car and then they would have a note on the bottle of water that would say the difference between good to great is a little extra and then they would give them a pack of extra gum what a silly thing to do but you think about that that made a big difference to a lot of customers and I promise they remembered it makes me want to ask you a question kyle I know that both of us uh come from the dealership space can you tell us a little bit about what inspired you to start this academy like what did you what need did you see yeah so we spent you know I've got two amazing partners in the company tom finnan and uh vick keller that has a you know remarkable background in history uh in the automotive space and you know from spending so much time on that retail side we noticed and we see what we kind of put our people through and what I mean by that is the traditional style of training the oem of course we have to do the oem style training and I'm not saying you know a bunch of advisors just see how fast they can click next and maybe buy the guy lunch that can pass the test I know that never happens in our stores right but the reality is is hey what are we really doing with it because so often training is constantly viewed as just something I have to get done it's a check the box feeling and the accountability metric is typically hey did you watch your video today or did you get your training done and we say yes and then we just go on about our day nothing really changes we didn't implement anything we didn't execute on anything And so, you know, that was frustrating to us and we wanted to build something that really honed in on the fact that we want to provide great knowledge in a little different manner. We do it a little bit differently than a normal online training academy delivers the message. Right. But we wanted to deliver that knowledge. And we wanted to tie in the execution and accountability all within one system because we really need all three legs of those barstools to really have a good understanding of what we're going to do moving forward. And it's got to be tailored per the individual. It can't be this cookie cutter feel where everybody's learning the exact same thing today because a six month advisor needs something different than a six year advisor. A one month manager that used to be a peer needs something different than a ten year manager that maybe needs some deep dive analysis on a few things. So we have to do it different and it has to be tailored to that individual. In your experience, what's been a recurring smallest tweak that a dealership can do or a personnel in the service department can do with the biggest upside? You know, it sounds silly. It's talking to their people, communication, collaboration. Just get your team involved. You know, we were just at a dealer group, large dealer group, and we were doing leadership training with their team. And we got to sit through some of their meetings with everybody in the store right on that leadership level. and there's a constant theme that always comes up and it goes back to that communication hey we're having an issue in used cars you know days to front line right that's always a big topic when we're thinking about used cars is hey you know maybe your days to front line is a little high and does everybody truly understand what that car costs you every single day it's sitting there because it has a cost sitting on that lot every day from the moment we trade for or purchase that car at an auction And what does it really mean? And a lot of times we find that, hey, there's constantly a rub. You know, maybe there's a rub between parts and the service advisors, not saying that that ever happens and they all get along great at every single thing in the nation, right? But the reality is have everybody came together and just had a genuine conversation and then collaborated to come up with, okay, what's our best process moving forward and how are we going to do this together? But they have to understand what the end goal is, right? We can't come in there and just start barking orders, changing processes without getting the team involved because they need that buy-in. And what is that end goal often? Do you guys kind of zero it in with different goals with different dealerships? Or is it, hey, let's find some metrics that we really want to grow to? Yeah, so what a great question, because the reality is, is we all have the KPIs. We can look at, you know, NCN data and, you know, NADA data. Everything's out there, right? We have benchmarks. Maybe you're in a twenty group and there's benchmarking data within your twenty group. Well, the reality is what is important to your store? That's what we want to know. So before we get involved with real deep training or anything within that store is we have to know what does success look like to that individual? Because maybe one store is really focused on one area. and then we come in and we find that okay well there's actually three other things that are really driving this to show what it is and I think really backing down and understanding the root cause analysis is one thing that a lot of dealers if you're really looking to understand okay yes my end goal is probably net at the end of the day, right? Cause I can kind of deposit net. I can't really deposit a percentage in my bank account, but we'd like to look at percentages, right? They give us a lot of good information, but the reality is what are we trying to get to at the end? And what are those things that affect that? And how do we drive performance? Andrew, we're actually having this conversation yesterday talking about how important it is when you are meeting a new client to do the discovery piece of that. Really drill down into their pain points, understand what makes their store unique. and how to best serve them if someone has a huge push and they're focusing on used for example and um you're not talking to them about helping them with acquisition or how to you know focus on their inventory it's a huge piece of their pie that's very important that's completely being missed every store is going to have different goals And that's huge. I know that you're a big resource in that and kind of helping drill down into your dealers and your clientele. What are you seeing with dealerships that you're talking to right now? Are they leaning more into fixed stops than they have in the past? Or what's the feel in the industry? yeah I think the you know obviously the front end's tightening you know that we all know that we hear it right the front end you know it's we're getting back to what we'll call traditional car business on the front end of the house and so that focus is shifting back on fixed operations right now hey You know, we've been there forever, right? Maybe we ignore them sometimes. But at the end of the day, you know, we've always been in the back fixing cars just so everybody knows. Right. And the reality is we put that focus back on fixed operations, our parts and our service teams to understand, hey, how are we going to pick up this grows because at the end of the day we don't want to go backwards as a dealer right so we want to at least grow year over year as a goal and so understanding okay what does that really look like what is the most important thing that we need to be focusing on and from the service department side It's real simple. You sell one thing, we sell time. So at the end of the day, the most important KPI is hours in production in that shop. And then we kind of back into it to understand, okay, how do we effectively move that needle? Do you guys get your like fingerprints on transitioning a customer from a car sale into the service department and how a dealer can like best usher that, that handoff? Yeah, I think there has been a lot of really amazing things over the years to where, you know, we used to see a lot of service clinics and we really don't see dealerships doing service clinics anymore. Right. And that's where, hey, I bought a new car. For those of us that don't understand what a service clinic is. Right. It's somebody that bought a new or used vehicle and we invite them into the service drive. And usually we have some sort of spread of food. And then we have our master technician or a couple of technicians talk about specific things on the vehicle and the importance of maintenance. And we really educate that customer. And those are very successful for a long time. Customers really enjoyed that. You talk about creating a customer for life. They get to meet the shop for him and meet the master technician. They meet the service manager. We fed him some food. We gave him some great information, probably some swag, right? And then all of a sudden, do you think they're going somewhere else? If something happens to that car, I promise you they're coming back to you. But we kind of got a little bit away from that. And I think the simplest thing is getting back to our sales to service handoff process. And what does that look like that we notify not only the sales to service handoff process, but what are you doing to notify the service department that you just sold a used car yesterday? right or a new car yesterday and mrs jones just bought this car and here's kind of a little bit about her story are we calling that customer and thanking them for purchasing a vehicle welcoming them to the family and congratulating them to your point right we congratulate them on their amazing purchase and oh by the way hopefully we set that first service appointment sometime during that process and did we maybe take them to parts during our sales or service walk A lot of times parts gets missed. You know, we have some really cool parts departments out there that sell accessories. What a great conversation to have happen. I was just going to jump off of that talking about when I used to do parts and accessories turns at the dealership. salesmen were threatened by that. A lot of times people would try to get their accessories, finance, the labor, like the additional part of the sale, and they were worried it was going to hurt their chances of closing. But then you would have sales guys that would go above and beyond and understood the value of that relationship. And they would bring them to me directly and enter, hey, this is our parts manager. She's going to talk to you about these other options that you could kind of upfit. And then I sell twenty thousand dollars of accessories or what have you on onto that on top of it. You know, the whole store wins. The customer is thrilled. They know every point of the department. They probably met the service manager when they were back there as well. Finance guys getting them taken care of. It's critical for their relationship in that life cycle. We always talk about. No one's going to buy one car from your dealership and be done with it unless they had a horrible, horrible experience. But ideally, we're looking at four and five times over that life cycle and referrals and they're going to tell their friends and things like that. It is so important to keep driving that flywheel of energy to keep them in the store, keep you top of mind. That's huge. Yeah. Yeah. And understanding, you know, I don't think we communicate enough that, you know, that customer lifetime value, because that is a pretty decent number. And I don't think we do a great job of communicating that to really our frontline workers. Yeah. And having that be a metric that is pretty apparent for the dealer to be able to follow of what's the lifetime value of our average customer. And let's set that benchmark right now, whether it's thirty thousand or one hundred fifty thousand. And let's look back at that in a year. And what are we do? What can we do with our vendors? What can we do with our trainers? What can we do with our staff to increase that lifetime value? Right. It's like the little tiny things we're doing from our end from the marketing side is as soon as somebody buys, ideally we stop advertising to that customer with incentives and inventory and we start introducing them quickly and reminding them about the service contract that came with the purchase of their vehicle. And here's the service manager and here's Jose who's been here for twenty seven years and why he specializes in this manufacturer and what that's meant to his career and his life and his family. But to do what we all can from our desk to help grow the customer lifetime value ultimately, but manage that handoff to the service department. And it sounds like with what you guys are doing, it's training, it's virtual, right? You guys aren't necessarily in the stores. Yeah, so primarily what we do is, I would say, a hundred percent virtual minus the fact that we do actually come to the store and do leadership training events. Now think of kind of like a mini twenty group style meeting. But when we come in, we're not on the service drive training your service advisors. We come in and we help with the management side. We help with the leadership side. And we typically do that after the partnership has happened. You know, we don't want to come in month one. We really want to come in maybe month six or month four because we want to have a good understanding of, OK, how does the department work? What are we really working on? What is the most important thing? And the other side of that is I don't necessarily want to be viewed as the hero in anybody's situation. I want the manager that's there every single day to be the hero. so our whole goal is to develop and strengthen that relationship between the manager and their team because guess who's there every day the manager right they're the ones that should be helping train and guide their employees but a lot of times either a they don't have experience with it because maybe they got Promoted into this position without a whole lot of training, or maybe they've been in this position a long time. They're doing a decent job. Right. And they just really haven't had that coaching and guidance on what it takes to really train and develop those employees. And they really don't have a tool to utilize it. Because there's a lot going on. Our service managers are asked to do a whole lot throughout the day. And sometimes it gets viewed as I don't have time to do another thing, right? This is going to take too much time. I don't have time to do this. And I think that's a lot of the kind of rub that we sometimes see until we really teach them how to overcome some of those limited beliefs. Yeah, like in my experience, a lot of the dealers that I talk with, they're stretched to capacity. Like there's a lot that marketing and outreach can do to increase the volume of targeting people who are driving those brands that didn't buy from them yet. Right. To come into the service department and to advertise to all the defected client, the customers, the dealership to come in and start doing services with us, even though they, for some reason, aren't. And a lot of dealers are just at capacity and it comes down to the like staffing. Have there been things that you've found from your end that you guys can do to help with recruiting and employee retention? Yeah, I think there's two parts to that question as a reality, because when I hear things and we hear this too, we hear general managers typically as a person that's telling you, hey, my service department's at capacity. There's no way we can help another customer out. Okay, well, that's kind of a red flag because odds are they're not at capacity, right? If we kind of break down capacity versus utilization in their service department, I highly doubt they're at a hundred percent. So the reality comes down to, okay, is what are we doing with the cars that are currently coming in and what really are those spots of inefficiencies, right? We do a process with the technicians called an unproductive time study. And it's really simple, right? The answers in the name is, hey, what are we doing? That's our unproductive time. And you'll find that there's a lot of time spent that's extremely unproductive because maybe our process isn't quite right on a couple of different things, right? Maybe it's something as simple as we don't have a great back counter process in parts, not picking on parts, but a lot of times they spend some time in parts. Maybe it's where we park the cars and hang the keys. What is the process when it comes to dispatching? Do they spend thirty minutes a day searching for cars and pulling cars in and out that entire process? Or maybe we're having technicians wash cars, right? after they're done with the car you have your technicians washing cars well I promise you that is costing you a lot more than you think it's costing you right and so when we're thinking about the capacity I would kind of push back just a little bit on that until we have some true data understand hey what are we really doing and what are we really capable of because those are two very different numbers right And from the recruiting side, the retention side of that employee, well, we're thinking about recruiting that employee is do we have a structured development plan in place for that position? If I'm hiring a lot porter, am I thinking about the next position for that lot porter? If I'm hiring somebody, I'm usually thinking about, OK, what could they be in six months? Maybe they're going to be a service advisor. Maybe they're going to go into Express. And then once they hit Express, do I have a clear path to master technician, to service manager, whatever they might be? So often we see and we hear we you know, we know we have a turnover issue in this industry in general. Right. And typically the reasons that we hear turnover is usually lack of training and they don't feel like they're invested in as an employee. And sometimes that goes with communication. Right. But I think all three of those really go together. To where if I'm an employee and I work for a dealership and they're investing in me personally through training and development, I have a clear roadmap and process to get to the next level that I'm interested in getting to. What are the odds that I'm leaving that dealership? Probably not very high, right? But if I don't have any communication, maybe we've identified somebody as a potential next leader. Well, that's great, right? They're a potential next leader. Maybe we give them a little more responsibility. We kind of pat them on the back. And then for the next four weeks, six weeks, we never mentioned it again and we don't do anything. And we wonder why they get upset and potentially leave. And we kind of miss out on building that pipeline for future leaders because we don't have that process in place. Totally. And so I'm about to go present at NCM event next month. And so I was having AI do some deep research on what are the biggest topical concerns that dealers are having right now? What are their headwinds? What's the forecast for the next six months of what's really on their desk? And the number one thing was staffing and the retention is like, have like a fifty percent turnover at a dealership forty six percent turnover which is just brain damage to to try to continually be hiring and a lot of dealers it's like hey we can run ads saying hey let's target recent college grads for a sales role and ask them if they know anybody looking to level up their career and see if people will start sharing it for us and get more applications But like what we don't at all touch is like the operational side of what can the dealer be able to do to make it be a growth oriented, you know, energized place for people to want to stay. Right. Yeah. You have to fill a bucket with a bunch of holes in it. Like doesn't make any sense. Like, What is the biggest eye-opener you see when you're doing this diagnostic or kind of discovery phase with clients where you have the solutions, you've been working on it, you know procedurally what works and what doesn't, and they think they know the problems that they have? What is the one that commonly comes up where everyone's like, wow, duh, there's a problem right there kind of thing? Yeah. Yeah. A lot of times. And hey, a lot of times they have the answer is a reality. They know the answer. They probably already have the answer. It's just a matter of, OK, what is that first step? Because, you know, it gets overwhelming. You know, they might know what they need to do, but maybe they don't have the tools, the resources. Maybe they feel like they don't have the time. And so I don't know that there's one specific thing, because obviously it's a little bit different at every dealership. But I think the reality there is understanding that more likely they have kind of an idea. You know, I promise you somebody in that dealership has an idea of what the solution might be. But we constantly talk about the problem, right? And we never get together and we talk about the solution and how are we going to implement. You don't need to have A to Z completely mapped out. I just need A to B. Right. What is the next step? And I think getting them to understand, OK, what's the first step that we can take? You know, a lot of times we see shops that maybe are in a little bit of a disarray. Maybe the organization's not there. And that's a good thing to really get and feel overwhelmed with. Right. Especially if maybe you took over somebody else's kind of bad habits and messy environment. Well, when you stand back and look at it, it's overwhelming. Well, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, right? So what can we do right now? And then we start walking them down the path of what would it mean if we focused on this one area? What would that impact? Oh, well, that would impact this and this and this. OK, well, what does that mean? How do we quantify that to a dollar and cents? Because at the end of the day, that's why we're here. And so I think it's walking them down that path and understanding. You know, a good example would be is, you know, fluid maintenance. Hopefully your store is doing some sort of fluid maintenance, right? We usually have some sort of product that we're utilizing in the store, if not the OEM product, but we're doing some sort of fluid maintenance and there's equipment for fluid maintenance. Well, where does the equipment go? Right. What is the process and expectation for when a technician goes and gets that equipment? Is it in the appropriate spot? Do we have tape on the floor, paint on the floor that says, OK, this is where this goes? And oh, by the way, after you do a service, make sure you drain it. So the next mechanic and technician doesn't have to drain it and waste another time. What do you do when the barrel is full? Right. Yep. A hundred percent. And so it's the little things like that, that just have a chain reaction that all of a sudden they realize that, you know, Johnny over here actually waste about forty five minutes a day jumping around, getting equipment, you know, servicing things. It's it's a mess. Right. And so just take first step. What's the first step? OK, what's that first step going to affect? All right. What's the next step? Little steps. So like, I guess when, like, uh, I love the idea of like starting at the end of like, just net of like this work backwards and let's get our accessories and parts manager to start going through, uh, this curriculum and start working with, with your team and, uh, or, and with your, your training, like what's, what's like a process that you'd walk them through? to to get them to better profitability yeah I think you know when it comes to the net dollars right net doesn't lie at the end of the day is you know we can deposit net in the bank account but there's a lot that goes into net and the first step is do we understand as the managers how that is calculated do we understand our financial statement has somebody taken the time to sit down with us and go through really those key things do we have a trending report do we have the data that we need to best manage our department and some of the times we find that you know you might be running a service department or a parts department maybe you don't get the financial statement right believe it or not some dealers don't share that with managers not sure why right but some of them don't and so I think raising your hand and asking that question and understanding that's okay to raise your hand and ask that question because at the end of the day if you're the manager well guess who they're looking to if something's not quite right or they're not happy with performance So you better raise your hand and ask the question and kind of be that squeaky wheel of, hey, if I'm going to be held to this standard in my store, I need the data. I need the tools. I need the resources. I need the help to really ensure that I fully understand how this is calculated and what I can do to impact it. New experiences, they're like. It sounds, is there like a good utilize or a good indicator that a dealer is a good fit to get started with you guys? Like, is there a, this is a no brainer, whether they've got a new service manager that just got promoted from service advisor or something that's like, Hey, or they just want more profit. But is there something that's like, Hey, if a dealer is seeing these couple things, this is a great fit for us to get started. Well, selfishly, I can say that we're great for every single dealer, right? But at the end of the day is some dealers we don't align with. And what I mean by that is we're selling diet and exercise, not candy. It's work. It is work. And so some of those dealers, some of those managers, right, maybe they just they're not willing to do that work. Now, our system is going to do about ninety percent for you, but we still need ten percent from you. And it's a ten percent that you're going to see this multiplying factor and to where you're starting to communicate with those employees. Because one of the biggest unique factors of our academy and the thing that we get feedback on almost daily for managers is the open employee feedback loop that we have built into the training. Because there's always disconnect between what the learner's learning and maybe what the manager thinks they're doing. I maybe think that Sally over here is learning about objection handling. And I know that, OK, that involves a few things. But if I don't have some sort of feedback loop or conversation with her after training, during training, throughout that process, I really don't know how to best support her and her specific needs. Because I promise you, you have ten advisors and they all go through the exact same training. You have ten different people that took ten different things out of that that want to implement ten different things and probably need support on five different things. Right. And so that is one of the things that was really important for us to build inside the academy and is really one of our unique features that nobody else has is we involve the manager. We take that disconnect away. The learners can't go forward until the manager does their part. And that goes for video role plays. We have a lot of video role plays within the system as well to where you'll see them on their phone, doing training, shooting a video. The manager gets instantly notified. They go through rate and review. But the whole point of that is not only to create that really environment for true development and growth, I'm really trying to force the initiative that you go having a conversation with that employee right because maybe they did an amazing job on a video well not only are you going to provide that feedback in the system but what else are you probably going to do as a great manager go find that person and give them some genuine recognition I promise you if you do that and you start calling out specific things that they did They're all over. They're ready to do the next one, right? Because I did something and something happened versus you ever take like those ESI surveys for companies and then like give really good feedback and then nothing happens. How pumped are you to do another one of those? I like to think stuff happens. Well, Sheila, you've been, you've worked in fixed operations for years, right? What was your experience like with training? Kind of non-existent. They, you know, me and Kyle kind of talked about this at length about how in dealerships traditionally it's throw the keys to the guy that's been there the longest. A lot of times because turnover is so high and because the sense of urgency is so real every day in the dealership, And because traditionally no one has prioritized retention or succession planning, you don't know what you don't know. And when you have a manager on the floor and your service writer just broke up with his girlfriend and walked off and clocked out and you're never going to see him again, you've got to put a body there. You have to, or you're going to fill the gap. There's a couple of options there. And the training is not... They might have a module or two for you about how to use the CRM, but there's so many variables and moving pieces in a dealership that it's impossible to have a comprehensive. You would have to have like a trainer that goes to every single dealership. I mean, basically the service that Kyle provides to be able to do that comprehensively. There are so many variables. facets about how to increase your revenue one of the things that we were talking about uh earlier was service writers we're talking about you know net is obviously important trying to increase your numbers but like how do you how do you find out if one of your service writers is cutting technicians hours how do you find out if someone is pulling parts off of a work order and you're eating that on your inventory instead of it getting billed to the customer because they wanted to give them a homey discount and you know have a better csi score or whatever There's so many little nuanced pieces to it that it does take years to learn comprehensively unless you have a super regimented and structured way of training. And I have never worked in a single dealership that had that laid out from the company level. They just don't, because none of us did that. We all got thrown to the wolves and we all, you figure it out or you don't, you're either a dealership guy or you're not. And traditionally, that's kind of how it's gone. And that's one of the reasons why I was so interested in what Kyle does, because it's so obvious to me how everyone needs this. It's a really important value to be able to train your people. I wanted to ask you, Kyle, one of the things that comes up daily for us is retention of staff. We're talking about turnover. Technicians are notorious for, I love my text, please don't get this wrong, but they're flighty. They might move from shop to shop. Traditionally, they get jobs by word of mouth. They're very high sought after. They are premium price usually. How do you educate around retention and kind of like the employer branding part of keeping people there? We talked about succession planning earlier and I'm interested in your thoughts on that. Yeah, I think it, you know, at the very beginning of this, I think it ties into even the onboarding piece, right? And thinking about, hey, you know, we're going after this tech, let's say it's technicians, right? Let's continue the technician path. Well, we did a lot. to attract that talent. Hopefully we have a good brand presence. Hopefully we're embedded into the community. They see our dealership name. They see that we're involved in different things. They see that we invest in our people. And we have a solid onboarding process. I think that's one of the things when you were just talking a second ago about, hey, understanding What happens? Why did they leave? Why did they fail? Right. Well, they didn't fail. We failed them at the end of the day. We failed them in some point of that employee cycle. I promise we failed that employee. Right. And it all starts with that onboarding process. What is the onboarding process to where we can simply take somebody through that process? path versus, you know this, right? You throw him a clipboard and a pen or a tablet and you say, go shadow Jimmy over there for a day or a week. He's a great guy. Well, first off, Jimmy doesn't want to do that. Jimmy's a terrible trainer and Jimmy's going to teach him a bunch of bad habits probably, right? Not saying that that ever happens. But understanding, okay, what is the standard in our store? First off, what is that onboarding process? And then what do we do to really retain and develop those people? And to go back to your brand question is it's vitally important that people understand in the community that we are involved, right? As a dealership group, you might not think it's important that we're doing the food drive. or we're down at the local pet shelter on a Saturday or whatever it might be. But I promise you that makes a difference. Somebody is going to see that. The word of mouth gets around, right? We're involved and we're investing in our community and our people. But it goes both ways. The moment you attract that person, let's say we do an amazing job. We're involved in a bunch of community things. And then they walk in the front door. And we don't necessarily do the same thing once they get past the front door, right? We look like we do from the outside, but then they get inside and we kind of pull back the curtain a little bit and maybe, you know, there's a dumpster fire going on and we're running around, you know, putting out fires all day, but never looking for the arsonist, right? And so it goes both ways. And sometimes that's a gut punch because we spend a lot of money, spend a lot of energy on the front side of that, attracting that person. And then we forget about what happens when they step in the front door. Things that we talk about every day is how important it is to advertise the sign on the front of your building, as opposed to the badge on the front of that car. Like all of the OEMs have their own budget. Their brand is good. They've been doing it for a long time. They've got their marketing. Their brand is that. But why would you go to Billy Joe Bob Auto's instead of this other guy down the street? That is the part that is your business. That's what everyone's goal is, is kind of driving that message of why you need to come here instead of there. And it's the same for employer branding, why our bays are cleaner, why our computer system is better, why we offer training and additional support for our staff. Why there's succession planning, why I can talk to you about your path to management if you're interested in leadership, like in growing with our company, things like that. Those are the pieces that make companies stand out. That's how you're going to win business and beat your competitors. Yeah, and to your point earlier, there really isn't a great solution, right? If I do identify somebody, maybe I'm a manager, I'm a general manager and I identify somebody that I want to invest in for that future leadership. Well, currently your options are kind of limited and you're probably going to spend roughly about ten thousand dollars on that employee just to go through step one of any sort of normal, traditional process. And of course, they're going to leave your store. And that's one of the reasons we get asked all the time from stores is, hey, I need a service manager. Do you know of anybody? Do you know of a good service manager? Hey, I think we need to make a change. Who can we put in this position? And they're always looking outside. Well, what are we doing inside? What does that pipeline look like? How are we building our bench strength within our dealership? And the options used to be very limited. I mean, this is why we haven't really announced this yet, but we created with dealer groups because we were getting this question all the time. We created our FLA Academy, which is our Future Leadership Academy. So now you have an option to where you can develop somebody that you've identified. It's a twelve month program. At the end of the twelve months, you have a rock star service manager that's ready to go that you can place into a dealership and they're fully supported, right? So they have somebody that's fully supporting them through that transition process as well. So not only can we identify and train those up and coming individuals in a limited cohort, we limit it to twelve people per cohort. So it's extremely engaging, right? And what we do is we set them up for success in the future. But that's future planning. It's a twelve month program to get there. Right. Sometimes you need a manager tomorrow. You need somebody next month. Well, that's a little different process. But if you're thinking ahead, you have to run those in parallel. You have to have something now and we have to have something for the future. Otherwise, we're going to constantly be going through. It's kind of like the definition of insanity. Right. yeah it's like in my experience too companies that are like invested in their employees to continually grow and to uh level up their skill set and have a path towards a next step versus clocking in and clocking out each day and they hopefully can do that for as long as possible but to say like we're invested in people who are hungry You seem hungry. I'd like to see if you're interested in this trajectory and this path, that's an employee. That's going to stay. I got, we've all been employees of places and there's been a few places that I've worked where they've invested in like public speaking courses for people. And it's yeah. It's a self selected. It's a what I was saying. I want to brag on you a little bit, Andrew, as your employee. I have continuously been able to upskill doing my little certifications and things like that with the education investment that this company makes in me as an employee. I've always felt supported in kind of pursuing different, you know, skill sets. They push me to present things like that. And that is huge. Like that speaks more than. Even salary and benefits can at times. That is a huge, huge part of your quality of life when it comes to your career and like who you choose to work with. One of the great points there, not only like what a great compliment for you, Andrew, and your team, obviously great communication and internal, you're really actually doing what you're saying, which is huge. And when you give that little bit of leverage, you give them a little bit of that rope and maybe they've identified that they're kind of interested in this. A great example we see is you might have somebody in your BDC that wants to be a service advisor. Well, that's fantastic. Well, what do we typically do? We throw them out on the drive and we make them a service advisor. And then they realize six months later, four months later, three months later, hey, I didn't realize that this involved all this. I don't want to do this. Versus, hey, if we identify somebody, maybe there's a cross-training moment where we start giving them a little more responsibility. We pull back the curtain just a little bit on what that job truly entails. You'd be amazed at how many people raise their hand thirty days later and say, hey, I didn't realize that that was this involved. I'm not quite interested. I'm super good being the best BDC manager, best BDC rep that you've ever seen. And I'll do this for the next fifteen years. Totally. And do you feel like there's like a big misconception that owners or general managers have about uh, investing and their fixed ops department. Well, I think that's the right word to use is investing. And I think a lot of times they don't use that word, right? They use a cost or expense. They have this expense on their mind. And, you know, at the end of the day, training is one of those things. I don't, if you have a trainer come in, if you partner with the spirit, I don't care what you do, just do something right. But invest in your people because it truly is an investment that pays off every immediately. You're going to get an immediate payoff when you start investing in those people. Obviously, we want to make sure we vet that trainer, that person that we're going to partner with. But understanding that if we do invest in those individuals, we are going to see that reward. Of course, we deal with general managers, CFOs, whatever it might be that we're talking to on the program. that maybe have a little bit of hesitation because they've tried something in the past. Odds are your dealership has tried something. You've done something. And maybe they have a little bit of heartburn and they're just put everybody in that category. You know, online training, especially because There's some online training out there that is really that check the box training. It wasn't designed to really deliver that full, immersive, grow together, continuous development experience with the accountability and execution built in. So what did we get? We got a bunch of probably videos with some green screen or talking head look and maybe a PDF. And that was about it. And we just made everybody watch a bunch of videos, but nothing ever happened. Nothing ever changed. We didn't implement anything. And so to their eyes from the top down, they just saw it as a waste of expense, right? Because yeah, we did that. We had them for six months, a year, nothing really ever happened, right? Net dollars never changed, okay? Maybe effective labor rate fluctuated just a little bit, but for some reason it didn't fall to the bottom line. Well, Kyle, I, I, I'm a believer in this stuff. Like, I feel like there's an aptitude, like a lot of energy that people have that like, I already went to school, so I'm done learning and I got training and shadowing. Um, so I, I love the pursuit that you guys have. And what would you say, like, what, what, what's a good way for dealers to connect with you or follow you? Yeah, so the best way to get a hold of us is we're on social media, primarily LinkedIn. If you search for Vesperio Performance on LinkedIn or search Kyle Newsom, you're going to find us. Obviously, if you want to go to the website, you can book a one-on-one demo. We'll take you through the entire academy. And that's www.vesperio.com and then book your demo. Thank you so much. And Sheila, thank you. You both know so much more about fixed operations than I do. And I hope it didn't come across as really obvious while we were talking. Cool guys. I appreciate it. Hey, thank you so much. Thank you.