Get In Person
With all the tricks and tools modern PDR offers, we as techs still forget one of the main components to running a successful business: In person sales. Join Keith for this show as we map out a strategy to get that appointment
Fix dents in double panel edges now!
Transcript:
Hi. I’m Keith Cosentino. He’s Shane Jacks, and this is the PDR College Podcast. The place where we take ordinary dent repair technicians and turn them into extraordinary producers. We are bringing the skills, the knowledge, the techniques, everything we glean from technicians worldwide, and we’re condensing it down here into an hour a week with just the bare vital components that are the most powerful that are going to make the most difference for you as long as you take some action.
So sit back and strap yourself in. We are gonna hit it hard and fast this week, but you guys are gonna have some awesome takeaways. It’s gonna be some stuff that you can use to make money today, so let’s get to it. Now, you will recognize Shane Jacks is not here with us. He is going to miss this show. He is trying to look up the meaning of deep sea spider fishing. Good luck because I couldn’t find anything either.
But what we are gonna learn today is how to close and more importantly how to get to the place where you can close. So the topic of today’s show is get in person. Too many of you guys are trying to run retail businesses, and you’re working transactions via text, via email, via phone. And you’ve forgotten the goal. The goal is to get in person. You cannot fix a dent through a text. You cannot fix a dent through an email.
You need to be there, and if you’re gonna be there eventually, you might as well get there early so you can sell your prospect on why you are so great and why it’s so darn expensive compared to what they thought it was going to cost. Now, I’m gonna start off with a couple of stories from one of my technicians, and I’m sure some of you have similar stories. But some of you your story ends in the beginning of this story. And you’ll see what I mean in a second.
We do quite a bit of retail here at my company. It’s not completely retail because we are mobile, and we still have a dealer base and some body shops. But wholesale is about 30 percent of our business, and the rest is body shops and retail. So we do quite a bit of retail. We all stay real busy. And one of my technicians just this week had this. Two different times this happened to him.
Now, what you gotta know about this guy is he is by the book when he is working his phones. He uses his log religiously, so everybody he talks to their stuff gets marked down in there. He knows who he talked to. He knows what he told them. He knows where they came from and how to get a hold of them again. He knows what price they were thinking about. He knows what price he talked about. All that stuff is in our phone log. So let’s just start with the first one.
He had this guy with a Durango, and the guy was calling. And he was a little cold meaning he didn’t show a lot of promise as far as a prospect goes. But his physical area was not too far away from kind of an epicenter of where we service. So they talked about the damage. They talked about price, and the guy said, “300 is way too much for what we’re talking about.” So my technician being the by the book guy that he is agreed with the customer. He said I understand. Why don’t we come on out there and have a look at it in person and see if we can determine what it’s really gonna cost and see if we can get the repair done for you? The guy wasn’t committing to anything except the minimum of 300, which is a good place to go. You don’t want to go out in person if a guy is talking about 50 bucks or 40 bucks or something silly like that. You’ve gotta cut those guys loose. But this guy was willing to spend at least 300, so you know there’s something there, okay? But he said 300 is too much. I don’t even want to spend that.
So nothing changed about what he said he was going to fix, but when he got there, when my tech got there, he worked with the customer. And he closed him at $438.75. That’s almost 50 percent more than the number that was too much. How did he do it? Could he have done that on the phone or in an email? No way! You give out a number that’s 150 percent of what they’re talking about, right away they’re gone.
You never get a chance to get there in person and sell them on everything else besides the price. Let me turn this backwards around on you if you think I’m wrong about this, and let me emphasize the point of buying a car. When you go to buy a car, I think we all know that the cheapest way now to buy a car is to not do it at the dealership. You do it in an email or a phone call but usually an email.
You’re gonna email five dealers and get the cheapest price. Say I got your price online. I found the invoice price. How close or under it will you go? And then you shop that number around. And then you go and pick up the car. That’s the cheapest way to buy a car. Well, if the cheapest way to buy something is on email, then that’s probably not the way that we should be communicating. We should probably get in person because that’s the most lucrative way to buy something or to sell something.
It’s the worst way to buy something unless you’re the world’s best negotiator. But we gotta get in person with these guys. We gotta get there. The other one was similar. It was a nearly new or a few year old BMW 3 Series, relatively small dent on the bodyline right front door. Open metal, no bracing or anything like that, but it’s on a bodyline. So it takes a little bit of extra work especially if you’re gonna make it look right, so we told the guy around $250.00.
And the guy said I’ve had this kind of work done before. I know what’s going on with PDR. 250 is way too much. It’s way too much. There’s no way I’m spending that. Well, guess what he spent. 250. Once we got there in person, we were able to show him what we’re talking about and measure the dent, work the entire estimate process that we’ve talked about before.
Getting out your lighter or reflection source, marking up the dent if need be if it’s one that’s hard to see where it starts and stops, using a price guide to measure it and come up with a price, and justifying that to the customer. He did all those steps, made a connection with the guy, and that’s a sold job at 250, which was what the guy said on the phone no way I’m spending that. See, so many of these little battles are lost before you ever go there.
And my tech and I were having a talk, and he said gosh. I think I might have blown some other jobs because I see these. I get here, and I can do them. I might have blown some guys off the phone, and he just wants to capture everybody that comes across his desk whether it’s phone, text, email, or whatever. But I reassured him that you’ve gotta let some of them go. They’re just garbage. You gotta do some triage on the phone, find out what they expect, and find out if you can deliver.
And then if it’s a good contact, then you gotta work to get there. So that’s what I want you to remember. The goal is to be in person for every transaction that starts whether it starts on a web form on your site, starts on the phone, starts in an email, or starts in a text. And I hope the email and text are minimal for you. I hope they’re mostly phone and web form from your site. But it’s not to just give them a quick quote. It’s not to text over pictures, and I’ll tell you what it costs to repair.
You should only be using those things to qualify, and what do I mean by qualify? I mean, A.) Is this a person that I can or want to work with? It could be the best car in the world and the best damage, but the guy’s just a punk to work with. You gotta get rid of those too because they’re gonna drain you out. So is it a person you want to work with, is it damage I want to work with, and are we talking the same language about the price? Let’s talk about a range and make sure they’re comfortable with that even if I plan on going above it a little bit.
Let’s just make sure they’re in the game. I’ve gotta talk about this is gonna be somewhere between $200.00 and $450.00. If they say well, that sounds good. I’m hoping it’s closer to 200 than 450, let’s go. That’s a good deal. But if they say ugh, man. I don’t know. I’m gonna call around. I think I should have this done for 50 bucks, you can sell a little bit and see if you can bring them back around. But if you can’t, cut them loose.
They are not your customers. Get them off the phone because they’re clogging up the lines because some other customer who wants to spend the money is right behind them trying to get in, and that’s gotta be the attitude even if your phone is not currently ringing off the hook. And I know a lot of you that is not the case, and I know a lot of you who that isn’t the case know the reasons. But it’s too easy to just sit and listen to a podcast and hard to get out and fix all the stuff that’s broken in your system.
Your website is broken where the listings are broken. You have no backlinks to the site. There’s a million things that you probably know about and you’ve done nothing about. So if you’re really pumped about retail, do something about it. Prove it. Go fix some stuff. Get that phone ringing because you can’t do any of the stuff I’m teaching if your phone’s not ringing. You’ve gotta have some people coming through the door or you can’t work with them.
So let’s talk about kind of a system that you can go through on the phone to get yourself into this place where you can get in person, and I can do a whole other show on closing in person. In fact we’ve done a lot of that in the past, but you guys who know me know that I can talk about that stuff until the cows come home. It’s a passion of mine, so today we’re just gonna focus on getting there in person. We’ll do another show later on on actually selling and closing once you’re there. Let’s talk a little bit about hot glue, specific for paintless dent removal. What kind are you using? You can get a decent pull from any type of glue; I mean any.
You can go get some stuff from the craft store. You can get stuff from Walmart. In fact I used Walmart glue for a long time. Before I really got into the manufacturing side of PDR, Walmart glue was my glue. You know what I thought? All these colored glues are fancy ways to trick me out of money. How much better can they work? Well, to some degree, I was right. Some of those colors suck, and they’re there just to take your money.
However, once I opened my eyes and got some of the samples of glues that were the real deal, glues that really did work better, I thought holy smokes. Here I am again doubting the technical progress of our trade. Just because something looks different doesn’t mean it’s not better. It doesn’t mean it’s a scam. So I started using colored glues. I found two that work amazingly; green glue and the pink glue. And we stock both of them on blackplaguepdr.com.
But I wanted a glue that worked even better than that. Now, can a glue work too good? Yes. Super Glue and Liquid Nails work too good. They will take the paint off the car. That’s not what we’re after. It’s a fine line of maximum adhesion but not going over the top and ripping the paint off the car putting us further back than we started in the first place. We want to leave the paint on the car, so we need something that doesn’t have maximum adhesion for a hot metal glue.
There’s a lot of glues out there that are made for construction and manufacturing that would make this glue look like it doesn’t work, our glues that we use. But we have a specific purpose, and we need to find the maximum adhesion we can get out of those conditions. And that’s what we’ve done with our new line of glue TabWeld. TabWeld is the new standard for PDR. You don’t think it can get better because what you’re using works now.
But if you want to function at the highest level, you’ve gotta squeeze the last 2, 3, 5, 10 percent of performance out that everyone else is leaving. It’s just like racing cars. Everything has to be dialed if you want to go faster than the other guy. And if you want to do a better repair with less pulls or do a repair that someone else said couldn’t be done, you’ve gotta have the best tools. And glue is so stinking cheap for how much you use.
I did a $600.00 repair the other day. I was on it for four hours, and I used two sticks of TabWeld the whole time. And I glue pulled the whole time. It’s not a lot of money to put in, and there’s almost no other expenses in our business. Stop being short sided. Buy the glue that’s gonna make your life easier and more profitable. Don’t forget that’s what I’m all about in this business, making more money. And if you’re using the right tools, you’re gonna make more of it. I can promise you that. You got the right lights, you got the right tools, you got the right tabs and the right glues, and you know how to use it all. Magic happens. So that’s what I’m trying to tell you about. There’s a glue that works better than what you’re using now, and it’s called TabWeld. Check out the website tabweld.com. You can bop yourself onto our mailing list there so you can be notified. We’ve got some exciting stuff coming out.
With that you are going to be impressed. I promise you. And if you don’t like it, I’ll buy it back because I use it every single day. I can’t have enough of it, so buy it. Enjoy it, make more money; Tabweld.com. Okay, so when someone reaches out to me on any one of these mediums that we’re talking about, phone, email, whatever, I’m pushing to the phone. If it didn’t start on the phone, I’m trying to get the conversation to the phone because that’s where I can do the best work.
That’s where I can listen to the sound of their voice and listen to all of the little pauses and hums and all that. All that stuff is valuable communication. It’s not just the words you’re listening for. It’s the tone, the silence, the pauses. All that stuff matters. It’s gonna help you read what they’re actually trying to tell you. But to remember all the steps properly, I’ve broken it down into three categories. The three Cs; connect, clarify, and close. So let’s break those down a little bit. The first thing you want to do is connect.
What does that mean? It means listening to their tone and their speed of speaking and mimicking that tone and speed. You want to speak in a way that they speak. You want to be able to speak in their quote unquote “language” even though you’re both speaking the same language. They communicate that way because that’s how they see the world. When you’re coming back at them with something crazy either really fast or really slow, something that doesn’t match the way they speak, it’s difficult for them to understand you and to connect with you and think they like or are like you, okay?
So listen to the way they speak, and just make a small adjustment in the way you speak. Next, you want to make it a little bit personal. When they tell you the story about what happened, you just don’t want to say uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. You want to get a little personal with them. Try to make a connection. That’s what connect means. It’s not that difficult to understand. You want to connect with this person. My son took the car and smashed it into a garbage can. Oh man, that’ terrible. I’m sorry to hear that. That’s all it takes, just a little bit of personal connection.
You’re gonna hear their voice change when you get it right. They’re gonna go from yeah, I was calling for some information. And then they start telling you the story. And they’re still kind of stuck up. They’re kind of cold. And once you break that wall down, you’ll kind of hear them just relax a little bit and start telling you the story in a different manner, and you know you’ve got your connection. Now, you’re not gonna make it with everybody, and you’re not gonna spend ten minutes trying to make it. And some people once you make it they don’t want to get off the phone. But it’s no silver bullet, but it’s gonna get you farther than without. So try to make a quick connection, and the more you practice the faster you’ll get at it. And it doesn’t have to be a love connection every time you do it. You just want to have a little bit of a personal nature to that call. Then if you have something that you can connect with them on on a personal level about an experience or a place or a car, pick anything they’re talking about, and try to share a little bit of a story.
Even if it’s a short one or even if it’s a long one rather, try to shorten it up. And let them know that you’ve got something in common, and that’s neat. And this is gonna be hard for a lot of you guys because you’re not really excited about talking to strangers on the phone. But if you’re in the business of doing retail, you better get in the business of speaking to people on the phone because that’s how you’re gonna make your money. So whether or not you like it, whether or not you want to do it, this is how our business works.
So quickly try to connect with something in the story. You really love that make of car. That was the car you currently drive. It’s the one you used to drive. Your brother ran into a trash can. It was terrible. It doesn’t matter what it is even if you fudge it a little bit. You just want to relate to them somehow on a personal level. All of this is engineered because when someone knows you and likes you, they want to trust you. If they don’t like you, they don’t want to trust you.
They probably won’t trust you no matter what. They’re gonna like you first, trust you second. So let’s work on the like part. Let’s try to engineer it a little bit, and then once they think they are talking to somebody who they can enjoy their company, they’re going to be a little more receptive to your pricing and your level of service because you’re selling if you’re listening to me and doing what I think you should.
You’re selling the highest level of service with the highest price possible in your area or possible anywhere. You should be the highest priced guy in your area. That’s how I believe you should run your PDR company, but everybody’s gonna be a little different. But that’s how I feel you should be. You should be appalled if you hear about someone who is more expensive than you in town because it should be you all the time.
That’s where the money is made in this biz. So connect, share a little bit from you, listen to them, try to match something. Once you hear, it you’ll know it. You’ll know what I’m talking about, and if you don’t hear it, that’s okay too. Just keep on going. But you can’t stay too long on the connection part. You’ve got maybe 30 seconds, sometimes a minute depending on the customer, and then you gotta move on.
After that clarify. That’s the second C. So you’ve connected. Now you’ve gotta clarify. Well, what are we clarifying? We’re clarifying a bunch of stuff. First of all, what type of vehicle is it? Is it something that I want to work on? What kind of service am I going to be offering them? What can I do? What can’t I do? What are they expecting of you, and what are you expecting of them?
Basically, we’re qualifying the prospect in this stage. We’re going to tell them what we’re going to do when we get to their house, what the purpose of the appointment is. It’s to verify the estimate, and if they’re happy with the estimate, it’s to do the repair right there on the spot. That’s what you need to make sure they understand before you drive out. If you go through all the stuff I teach you to do, you’re gonna be done driving around on bong sales calls where you think you know what’s gonna happen and you don’t.
You’re gonna drive out only on qualified stuff, and you’re gonna make money every time you go somewhere. But you gotta take all the steps. If you try to shortcut it and cut the steps out, you’re gonna get burned. I didn’t create these steps because I thought it was neat. I created them because I kept trying to tweak what I’m doing so every time I went somewhere it was profitable. And at the end of the day, I had big giant stack of money. So over the years, this system has been created.
I just give it names here so it’s easy to remember; connect, clarify, close. I didn’t have names for it before. It’s just what I do, but it’s easier to remember if we make steps out of it. So don’t skip. Do everything you can, and trust me. You’ll make some money. So when you’re clarifying, you’ve gotta make sure you’re clear about what you do and clear about what you expect from them. And you’ve gotta make sure that they are clear about what’s going on with their vehicle.
Some people are really, really inept at providing details about their damage, and it’s really tough to get through to them. You don’t know if you’re gonna look at a smashed car or a door ding. And sometimes you just gotta pull the ripcord and get a photo. I don’t recommend going to the photos because it just lengthens the process and prevents you from actually getting an appointment.
It puts another step between you and the job. But man, sometimes if they are just the 1 in 1000 communicators that flunked out of communication school, you’ve gotta get something before you drive out because it’s gonna be bad. It’s too many unknowns. But that doesn’t happen that often. If you get good at asking questions, really eliminating questions like okay, so it’s on the right from fender. That’s the panel between the door and the headlight. Does that sound right? Yes.
Okay, if you’re looking at that panel, is it more between the tire and the headlight or the tire and the door? Stuff like that, I mean, kind of yes or no dummy questions can help you really get an idea of what’s going on when they have difficulty describing the damage to you. So once you’ve clarified everything to them that you’re going to come out and confirm the estimate and do the repair if they’re happy with it, then you’ve got to close for the appointment. That’s the last C.
So you’ve connected with them in some small way. You’ve clarified what they’ve got, and you’ve clarified what you offer and what you expect from them. Now, you’ve gotta close. Sometimes the close happens naturally. After you clarify everything, they say that sounds great. When can you be here? And that’s a wrap. But sometimes they say oh well, okay. I’ve gotta call XYZ, and they’re just making up crap to get off the phone. You’ve gotta try to close them. You’re in a sales business. You’ve gotta make sales. You’ve gotta get people in front of you with dents and money, and then have the money change hands.
Sometimes they fall into your lap, and when they all start falling into your lap, you get real lazy. And you stop actually trying to sell. But don’t forget you’re trying to sell somebody something to bring some money home. So you’ve got this person on the phone. You spend a few minutes with them. It’s damage you think you want to fix. You’ve got to close. You’ve gotta tell them when you’d like to come out.
Let’s go ahead and make this appointment, and if they give you some kind of resistance, you have to ferret it out and ask them questions such as this. Sounds like part of you would like to proceed, and part of you is hung up. What part of you is having difficulty making the decision to have me come out and have a look at it? It’s almost always the price. If it’s the quality, you’re not gonna get them back. If they already think you’re crappy, it’s because you didn’t do the first couple steps right.
But if you did that stuff right, they already have a good idea that you’re good at what you do. And the only time that really hasn’t had to close with you is because they’re worried about the price. But listen. If you went through the first two steps properly and you kind of told them what to expect from you as far as the price goes and you ask them what they expected for the price if they were kind of seeming a little off, you kinda know where they’re coming from.
If they’re hung up on price, you’ve gotta tell them listen. You expect this. I’ve given you a range that’s higher. I haven’t seen the car in person. Why don’t I come out there? That’s completely free. If I can see it in person, I’ll know exactly what it’ll be, and then you can make your decision based on a real fact and not the numbers that I’m generating without ever seeing the car in person. Remember the story that I started the podcast with. 300 was too much. Spent 438.75. No way I’m spending 250. Spends 250. There’s a ton of wiggle room in their budget. Just get there.
If you’ve gotten to the point where it’s good damage, the people are cool, the numbers they’re talking about are not crazy, just get there, and work on closing them. So close for that appointment. Like I said earlier, we can do a whole show on closing. But try your hardest to ferret out why they’re resisting, what their objection is, and give them some supporting facts to put that objection to sleep. And remind them that you want to be in person. That’s the best way to really see what’s going on with the car. Get in person.
Let’s assume you did everything right. You got the appointment. You went there. Guess what we do now. Everything all over again but in fast forward if it’s a good job. You’re gonna connect with them in person. This is easier because you’re at their house. You can point some things out. You can complement them on their truck or their house or whatever. Just making a personal connection that has nothing to do with dents. Zero. Smile. Hopefully you have a clean shirt. Shake hands, make eye contact, do all the things that you know somebody who you look up to would do. Connect with them, clarify that you’re there to do the repair because oftentimes they’ll kinda get stupid between the call and the appointment. You’ll come there and clarify the damage and the price, and they go oh okay. Well, when would you like to do it?
And you say well, I’m prepared to do it for you right now. Oh, really? And like we talked about that, but you don’t bring it up. You say that’s right. If you’d like to do it another time, that’s fine too – to take that pressure off of them. But you say if you’re happy, I’ve got time. I’m happy to do the repair for you right now. And right now is the time when you absolutely want to do it because the only thing that can happen between right now and the next appointment is something bad.
You’re not gonna put the appointment a week out, and when you get there, they say you know what? I think we should spend an additional 100 on this. That doesn’t happen, but sometimes when you hang up, they do decide that their water heater needs to be rebuilt or replaced rather or that maybe the dent isn’t that bad or they’re gonna sell the car. A billion things could happen between now and then, and all of them end badly for you. So the time to do the dent is now.
And I guess I can tell you when I get to the stage where everything’s good, the customer likes the price, but for some reason I cannot get them to close right on the spot whether it’s a fabricated time constraint they have or the real time constraint or something – I don’t know what it is – and I’ve used every trick I know to kinda get it out of them and they’re playing it close to the vest, I’ll offer to do the dent for a discount. And I’ll tell them here’s why. My business is completely mobile, so my costs involve driving to and from every job. I’ve already driven to your job, and I’m gonna drive from it.
If I have to come back again, it’s gonna involve even more time for me, so if we do the dent today, it will save me the second drive out and back again. So that’s gonna save me almost an hour, so I’d be willing to discount the job today because I don’t have to spend the hour next week or whenever. So instead of the 350, I could do it for 290 or whatever the number you want to give them is. So that’s a close I’ll use when I just can’t get them to commit, and I think it’s about price.
But I don’t know for sure, but they’re getting ready to send me away. That’s one I’ll use, and you can capture some of them that way. I feel like that’s a win, win if I don’t have to drive out again, and I was going to have to before. And I got the job when there’s 20 percent chance you don’t get the job once you drive away. So I’m not a big guy for giving up a lot of gross, but if you’re ready to walk out the door, you’ve got nothing to lose.
And I’ll roll those dice every time. So the three Cs happen on the phone, and then the three Cs happen again in person. Connect with them, clarify what they have, what you offer, and what your offer is, and then close them. Pretty simple stuff, but when you break stuff down into steps you get better at it. You can monitor yourself. You can make sure you’re taking the proper steps to maximize your time spent at work and make the most amount of money. I’ve been talking about a pricing guide forever in a day now, and I think I’ve been clear that I did not create this strategy.
But there’s so many things in this business that are great from all over the world, and that’s what I love about it is I can find new techniques, new tools, meet new people, and expand my horizons. And using a pricing guide was one the things that’s made probably the biggest difference in my business this year for all my techs including myself. And you would be surprised how much negotiation it takes off the table, how easy it is to deliver these really what you would think are large estimates.
They’re still cheaper than conventional, but they’re big four digit numbers weekly. And you’re getting them, and that didn’t happen before because you’d get stuck in your own mind of your crappy prices. So make yourself a pricing guide, and make the prices stupid high and see what happens. Like, they’re starting at 150, and the guy goes all the way up to 1500 bucks for one dent based on size and other conditions.
It sounds crazy, but trust me. You’ll make more money. It’s legit. So man, between these steps and getting in person with a pricing guide, the world is your oyster especially if your town has minimal competition for retail. And you know what? I have really banged this drum for a long time, but it came up again in social media. And it just boggles my freaking mind. More guys saying yeah, nobody in this area will pay XYZ.
Man, I don’t know how many times I gotta go over this, but it just drives me nuts. It drives me nuts. The cars cost the same flipping price in my town and yours. They’re the same. Somebody will pay, and if they’re paying in any city, Anytown, USA, if they’re paying in freaking Temecula, if they’re paying where you are, maybe not as many people are paying, but they’re paying.
Unless you live in like the most backwards Podunk place where the streets aren’t paved, then this business sucks for you in that area anyways. Then get out and sell peaches on the side of the road or something. But if you’re gonna sell this luxury service, move to a place where there’s at least a million people. And go make a bunch of money if you do the steps right. But stop thinking you know everything because you don’t. If you think that nobody in your town will pay, then you don’t know enough.
Wait until there’s nobody around, go in a closet, and admit it to yourself, and cry a little bit, and come out refreshed and ready to make some money because all that stupid thinking is doing is making you broke. If you like living in a doublewide, then keep on thinking that nobody in your town will pay this. And maybe you’ve had that experience that nobody in your town will pay because that’s what people keep telling you for a year straight. Well, it’s because you haven’t done these other steps that I’ve talked about. You haven’t done a good job at qualifying your customers, at weeding through the crappy ones and getting to the good ones. Maybe you’re not getting your phone to ring. So you have missed the entire first ten steps of running a retail business. You’ve gotta make sure that calls are coming from the right places, and you’ve got the right lures out there to catch the right kind of fish. I mean, if your business name is Super Cheap PDR Done in 20 Minutes, you’re not gonna get the proper customers. And all this stuff falls to pieces. You’ve gotta set it up right in the first place. So I know that’s a little bit off topic, but it just drove me crazy that I keep hearing that stuff.
They’d rather paint it than pay whatever. I think it was my buddy, Paul Cordon out of Virginia, did some fender for 1700 bucks, and some guy said oh, not in my town. They’d paint it. They’d put a fender on it and paint it. What are you talking about? That’s not even the same repair. That’s like saying hey, this guy’s nose got broken in a softball game. Doctor wants this much to do a surgery to fix it.
They’re like oh, not in my town. They’d just shove a bunch of strawberries in his nose and let it heal up that way. Well, what are you talking about? It’s not the same thing. We’re making stuff fixed like a freaking time machine back in time with the original components. You’re talking about putting something that was made in China on it and having some dude named Buck sand it down and paint it. It’s not the same at all.
It’s not even close to the same thing, not even close. So if you want to have that argument, have it in your own mind because it’s retarded. And if you can’t sell around that to your customers, if you can’t sell them that what I’m doing is the ultimate repair, what that body shop repair is is a bunch of garbage on top of your car. It’s extra crap that your car didn’t come with. It’s extra paint on top of your paint. It’s extra everything. It’s not original.
If you can’t sell that your repair is as good dollar wise if not better than that other repair, then I don’t know if there’s any hope for you to make money in this business. You’re gonna be stuck doing wholesale. Because that to me is as clear as day that our repair is so superior that there’s no way I’d have a problem standing right in front of any customer or a family member or anything and saying I would pay 150 percent of the conventional price to have it done PDR, assuming we’re talking perfect or very, very high level repairs.
And you know what? Let’s talk about that for just a second because I had a fellow I was talking to the other day, and he said, “I’m having trouble with my large repairs pricing them right because I don’t think I can make them perfect.” And I said, “Okay, you’ve been in the business for a long time. You’ve been into a lot of body shops.” And you that I’m talking to now as you’re listening to this podcast, you’ve been in a lot of body shops. I want you to think in your mind of the last repair you saw at a body shop that was perfect.
Never! Never perfect. I’ve never seen one. I’ve seen really good ones, but I’ve never seen a perfect one. So forget about not being able to produce a perfect PDR repair. It doesn’t matter because nobody can fix anything perfect; not a body shop, not a PDR guy, anything. And I’m talking literally perfect. I know and I’ve done some beautiful PDR repairs that were virtually perfect, but perfect is perfect. The word perfect means without any flaws, perfect. There’s always something. If you’re a detective and you start looking around, there’s something. There’s something on new cars though.
Brand new cars have little flat spots all over them where they DAed the dirt out from the factory. Those aren’t perfect either. There’s factory waves and wiggles around door handles, and we all know each car has its own little beauty spots. Like, I was looking at the brand new Mustangs the other day at a body shop. They had, like, five of them there, and every single one of them had the same little two low, baby low depressions on the left quarter lip.
Every car has little spots. Nothing is perfect. So a perfect PDR repair is possible, but a perfect repair straight up in the universe that’s just not gonna happen. But for the vehicle, it can be perfect. And for every intended purpose, it can be perfect. But there’s always gonna be some flaws just like the body shop repairs. At the really high body shop, they can be a phenomenal repair, but it’s not perfect. Nothing’s perfect.
Hit it with a paint gauge and look at it. That’s not perfect. It’s a different amount of paint. So he said, “Man, I just can’t charge the money because I can’t make them perfect.” Nobody makes them perfect, so charge the money. Charge the money. Even if you get 90 percent of conventional, it’s still a win for you. And it’s a win for the car, and it’s a win for the customer. So man, that’s my little rant that I’ve been through 100 times.
But it never stops chapping my hide when people talk like that. It’s bananas, and those guys are destined to work in wholesale for the rest of their lives unless they figure this stuff out. Because if you don’t believe in your heart, you’re never gonna sell it. I could tell you to connect and clarify and close until I’m blue in the face. But if you don’t think this stuff is the best thing that ever happened to an auto body repair, then you’re not gonna get the money. You’re gonna get the crap dollars.
So fix your stinking thinking if you’ve got it. That’s a zigzag alert term. Fix your stinking thinking. Go through the steps, get in person, go through the steps again, and then make it rain. That’s all for today guys. Let me know if you put this stuff into work. Send me a Facebook message, put it on the PDR college wall, send me a message onto the comment widget on our site pdrcollege.com. Connect with me. Let me know this stuff is ringing out in your minds because it makes a difference to me.
I’m here in the evening when I could be hanging around with my kids, but I’m making a podcast because I want to make the industry better. So let me know it’s working. Best of luck to Shane. Hopefully by now he’s figured out what deep sea spider fishing is, and we’ll get him back with us next week. Oh, you know what? I can’t let you go. We gotta talk about tools. We gotta talk about a tool review. You know what it’s gonna be. It’s on Shane’s new tool even though we’ve talked about it because I used it this week, and I made some more money with it. That is the coolest little tool that has come along in such a long time, the Edge Jack. He’s got two of them now. One’s longer than the other one, but we keep coming up with new places that it works. Shane’s using it on a sunroof opening when he had a dent right up on the edges. Didn’t even take the sunroof down. Just snuck that little thing in right at the edge of the sunroof opening, and was able to work an edge there.
We’ve been using them on the bottom of a new kinda European style quarter lips when they’re doubled up all the way up high, on the open quarter lips as well. You usually use a flat bar or something, but those things kinda have a tendency to kinda blow out. Like, on a C-Class, you can use it in there too. Such a neat little tool, and until you start using it, you don’t realize how many different areas you can use it on. Really, really helpful.
I had a left front fender on a TSX, had some road debris come up and smack the fender edge square into the – how can I explain it – like it came off the tire tread and came straight back into the fender. So it’s not an impact from the side. It’s an impact from the wheel opening straight back towards the back of the car towards the bumper. So it kinked in that way. Well, that’s a weird angle to get leverage on to push back out towards the tire.
Took everything out – liner out, mud flap out – and opened it all up and used the Edge Jack from the wheel area pulling straight back towards the brake and disc and hub assembly and was able to pull that edge back out the way it needed to be and then go ahead with the rest of the PDR repair normally. There’s no other tool I could have pulled it in that direction with. I could have gotten in there and whacked it with something, but you can’t really get a hammer strike inside the fender.
That was the only way that thing was coming out right unless I custom bent some tools and built some little backing plates in there to get the right leverage. Saved me a ton of time, and that’s a few hundred dollar repair right there. And 115 bucks or whatever he charges for the set of those things or whatever they are. It’s ridiculously worth it. So get yourself the Edge Jack set. That’s the long one, Edge Jack XL and the standard version. They come together as a set now.
You’re gonna be so happy. Disclaimer though: you’ve gotta have a few interchangeable tips. If you don’t have any tips, they’re useless. So just about everybody now has a handful of tips, but if you don’t, you’ve gotta get some. And I’m sure Shane is gonna come out with some tips on his site soon to use with that. But basically you want a sharp tip, a blunt tip, and, in my opinion, the Whale Tail tip. And I think PDR Finesse is the only company making that Whale Tail tip right now.
It’s an interchangeable Whale Tail tip which is an awesome tool by itself for a double bend tool working in fenders to rebuild a body line with the Whale Tail tip. And use it like you would traditionally use a Whale Tail because it’s thicker than that anyways, but you use it to build up a line. So that’s great on a fender. So I’ll have a link in the description to this show over to Shane’s side where you can pick those Edge Jacks up. They’re gonna be on my side within a couple of weeks as well, blackplaquepdr.com. Shane is also gonna have TabWeld on his site pretty soon, so you can pick up the Edge Jack with some TabWeld either on his site or when it hits mine. You can get them both there, but the TabWeld is still breaking records all over the place.
It’s breaking sales records, and it’s breaking tabs sometimes. That stuff sticks. But get yourself some TabWeld. You are gonna love that glue if you’re doing a lot of glue pulling, and glue pulling is the future. There’s so many areas that you couldn’t work on before without drilling holes or doing stuff stupid, and now glue makes us infinitely more capable. So if you are trying to function at the highest level, you need the best stuff. And TabWeld is the best glue you can get your hands on right now.
And we’ve got plenty of it, so head on over to the site and order it. We’ve even got a way where you can order glue and have it shipped to you on a regular basis, and we’ve got that going for the other glues we sell too, the pink and the green. So if you don’t want to switch but you want glue coming to you on a regular basis, blackplaquepdr.com. Pick your glue, and just say send it to me every whatever you want.
You can set it between one, two, three, four, six, and eight weeks if I remember correctly. But yeah, lots of options. Trying to make your life easier so you can push more steel and make more money. Help me help you. All right fellas. Thanks for hanging out with me. I hope you were able to use this stuff and make some money. Until next time get better.
[End of Audio]Duration: 44 minutes
