Keith’s Adventure in Hawaii as a Customer and Lessons from it
When we are shopping in various places as a customer we can learn some valuable lessons and apply them to our OWN businesses. Always keep your eyes open for marketing strategy!
Blackplague PDR sells the world’s best glue tabs
ReconPro is the solution you need for your PDR invoicing
Did you remember to review us in itunes? We NEED your awesome reviews!
Website urls mentioned on this show: (opens new tab / window)
www.blendinghammerpdr.com (Jack Hammer)
www.blackplaguepdr.com (pull tabs)
www.designwithenergy.com (get a professional PDR Website or landing page)
www.automobiletechnologies.com (ReconPro™)
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:
In the past, when we have needed to repair dents and double panels, along edges, or inseams, we’ve used rather imprecise, and dare I say, ineffective methods of tooling; screwdrivers, awls, and hammers were all we had. Now, with the development of the edge jack, from blendinghammerpdr.com, that has changed. Using the power and precision of a mini lifter, we can now effectively repair these damages with control. It takes interchangeable tips, so you can vary the tip that you need, depending on the damage and what you need to lift. Again, crazy control, crazy power. You’re gonna fix dents in double panels and seams that you struggled with before in half, quarter, one-tenth of the time. Grab these bad boys and start making some extra money, fellows. Blendinghammerpdr.com.
I’m Keith Cosentino, he’s Shane Jacks, and this is PDR College Podcast, your weekly source for the best information in the world when it comes to paintless dent removal. We are teaching you how to take your business to the next level. The place where you thought you should be, didn’t know how to get there. We are gonna help you. We’re gonna talk about business strategy. We’re gonna talk about selling, marketing, all kinds of fantastic stuff, all with the same goal, with the pursuit of piles and piles of cash. At this point, I usually refer to my co-host, Shane, and ask him for his often witty, consistently hilarious, joke about why he needs so much cash, but Shane’s off today. We gave him the week off.
He gave me a week off last week, and I’m returning the favor, so here we are on the show, minus Shane, but I want to start out a little bit differently than I have lately, but how I used to, and that is to talk about our iTunes reviews. You know we appreciate all of the downloads and the sharing that you guys do for us. All the time, you’re telling people about the show, you’re recommending it to other techs, and other guys who are in the business, or want to get in the business. We appreciate that very much. However, the world of iTunes revolves around reviews, so if you like the show and I hope you do, and you’re still listening, so you probably do, do me a favor. Pop over to iTunes and leave us a nice review.
We have a goal of getting to 100. We are currently at 39 and you guys have been fantastic helping us with our goals, when we ask for your help, and we need your help, so we’re gonna get from 39 to 100, so if you’ve been thinking about it and you haven’t done it, do it for us. It’ll be a nice little early Christmas present, or Kwanza, or whatever you celebrate, so to do that, you got to get into iTunes and they don’t make it that easy, to be honest. You got to be logged in and you got to have iTunes on your computer, and then, you can go and leave a review, but to give you an example of one that is relatively recent that I don’t think we’ve read on the show yet, it is all five stars, and it says, “Great show. By Hell Raiser. I have been a big fan of the show since day one. I love my job and really enjoy fixing dents, but I enjoy it even more since listening to the show. I’m a good tech, but not strong at sales. That’s changing, thanks to your show. Thank you, Keith and Shane. Doug.”
Doug, thank you for leaving us such an awesome review. Really cool and I know that story is not unique to you, because people tell me all the time, and there’s nothing more satisfying to me than to hear that from everybody out there that, hey, all the hours that you’re putting in behind the computer, behind the microphone, it’s making a difference in my life, to my family, to my wife, to my kids, so thank you guys for sharing those stories with me. I appreciate it very much, because you know what? This is a lot of work sometimes. I do a lot of work that isn’t PDR College, and sometimes, having PDR College on top is extra stuff, and when you’re just in one room by yourself staring at a screen talk into a microphone, you can forget that you are actually helping people. I’m helping people, so thank you guys for reminding me about that, because we love it.
ITunes reviews, check. Now, let’s talk about periscope. Shane and I have not been on it lately as much as we were in the past, but we are going to continue chipping away at periscope and sharing useful, cool, funny stuff that happens to us on a regular basis. It’s just another way for you to connect with us and keep us in your ears, and in your faces, if that’s what you want, so periscope is an app you can put on your phone, Android or IOS Apple. Almost everyone knows what it is, but if you don’t, what you do with it is Shane and I find a time or place where we would like to share with you what’s going on in our lives, so we turn that sucker on and if you’re following us in periscope, then, you’ll get an alert immediately that’ll say, hey. Keith’s live, or Shane is live right now, so you turn it on and it’s a live streaming video from wherever we are, and then, you can interact with comments, like a chat screen, on our screen and everyone else’s screen, for that matter, so you can chat with other people that are talking to us, or you can talk to us, or you can just watch. You don’t have to say anything, if you don’t want to, so it’s kind of cool. It’s fun. You know it’s real time and the videos stay up for 24 hours.
If you miss the first one, you can come and watch it later that evening and you can see all the comments, but you can’t comment once it’s not live, so if you want to get in the action, you got to get on there when it’s live, and the scorecard on periscope is hearts. Shane and I are in a race to one million. I am losing, so I have actually drugged him, so he’s not on the show today, so that I can plead for you to put me back in first position via periscope hearts, because I don’t like to lose anything, except my keys sometimes. I don’t really like it, but I keep putting them in different places and I keep losing them, so you could make the argument that I like it, but I don’t like losing anything to Shane, so next time I’m on periscope, get on there and you give the hearts by tap, tap, tapping the screen like a crack monkey, like you’re trying to get a treat to come out of it, so just go crazy. Get a blister on the screen and give me some hearts, so I can beat Shane. I like to win all the time, no matter what. Last word every time.
Today, I’m gonna talk about an experience that I had while I was on vacation with my family. We went to Hawaii to Disney’s Aulani Resort, so it’s not like a Disneyland, but it’s hotel that’s run by Disney, so it’s pretty dialed. Disney is known for their service and their systems. You know all their employees are held to really strict systems and procedures, and because of that, the experience for the guest is consistently phenomenal. It’s a fantastic resort, and believe it or not, that’s not what I’m gonna talk about. That’s the easy thing for most people to talk about, but we had an experience shopping there that I thought related pretty well to what we do on a regular basis. You know we talk all the time on the show about interacting with your people on a personal level and selling, and everything from body language, to the language you use, to setting expectations, and all that kind of stuff, but the one thing that we don’t talk too much about is promotions, because generally, we don’t need them.
Our business is so nichey, you don’t really need any kind of promotions or coupons. It’s kind of like a cheap way to advertise, but I’m gonna tell this story about what happened, and it might change your mind. It changed mine a little bit, not a lot, but a little bit, and sometimes, the difference between good and great is just a little bit. It’s just a slight shift in the way you are attacking something, so let’s dig into this story and let you know what I’m talking about. We didn’t do too much shopping in Hawaii. We just kind of hung around with the kids and took them to see some sights. We took them to Pearl Harbor. We took them to the Dole Plantation where they inundate you with pineapple things, and we took them around to see some kind of easy going stuff like that.
There’s a Polynesian cultural center we spent the day at, so just a lot of basic stuff, not a lot of store shopping, but of course, you got a wife, you got kids, they’re gonna do some shopping at some point, because there’s a tradition of going on vacation where you bring trinkets home for people who didn’t go on vacation, so you can make sure they knew you were on a trip and they weren’t, so we were doing that. At the end, we were bringing stuff home to people. Hey, you unlucky rascals. Here’s some mementos from the wonderful trip I took. What were you doing? That’s right. Nothing, so enjoy this pineapple shaped ashtray.
I hung out outside of the store with my father-in-law who’s not doing amazingly health wise, so we hung out outside. Doesn’t get around too well and everybody else went shopping in the store, so there’s this little boutique store that’s just a block, or so, from our hotel. My wife, and her mother, and a couple of the kids are in there shopping around to bring some stuff home. They’re in there forever. They’re always in there forever, but they came out and I don’t even bother asking her what she spent, because I don’t care, but she has a relatively small bag, and she said, “Hey. They gave us these little coupons and the kids will get a free gift, if we go to their sister store that’s right across the street.”
This store that they initially went into was kind of a – for lack of a better description, a mom store. There’s upscale clothing and jewelry, but not over the top evening wear, kind of casual stuff, but there’s nothing for kids, nothing for men in there. It’s just for ladies, so they have a sister store, because of that, that caters to children. Now, we were not shopping for children’s stuff at all. We were looking for specific stuff for my wife’s aunt, in particular, because she had a birthday coming up, so we were not in the market to go shopping for any kids stuff. My kids wanted a toy ukulele and some other crap. They already knew what they wanted. However, on the checkout, they gave them, my wife and my kids were in there hanging out at her heels, they gave them these coupons that said go across the street. Visit our kids store and you’ll get a free gift for the kids plus 10 percent off of anything you buy, if you bring the coupon.
Well, guess where we went after that? And they were in that store three times as long as the first one, so let’s break some numbers down. My wife – I found out later, because I said, you know what? I got to know what you did, what did that action that they took with you, how did that relate to them for revenue? I didn’t care what she spent, from my end, but I wanted to know from their end what she spent. That’s kind of such a nerd I am for business, but here’s the breakdown. She spent $120.00 at the first store. She was done, got the thing she was shopping for, finished complete-o, but they gave her the coupon and the offer for the free gift. She went across the street, spent some time there, and you know how much she spent in that second store? $180.00, so that’s $300.00 total, but what’s important to me is how much more she spent at the second store.
You know if that – if she spent $40.00 or $50.00, it was a win, because she wasn’t going at all, but she spent 150 percent more than she did the first time, on the second store. Something that she wasn’t in the market for, because they had this transaction dial. They had it perfect upsell opportunity and they knew when and how to present it. It made me think, what are we doing with our businesses to make these scenarios happen for our people? Now, I’ve spoken a lot to you already about upselling jobs. I have a really specific system that I use for that, and I’ve shared a lot of it on the podcast already, so we’re gonna cover a little bit of that again today, but so many times we just do the one job and we split. We don’t try to do anything else.
Now, let me derail your mind for a second, because you’re already thinking I’m talking about other crap like polishing headlights and fixing cracks in the windshield. All that stuff is junk. We are at the pinnacle of profit, when it comes to reconditioning trades. At this point in time, somebody might come out with something later that’s more profitable, but the chances are not, and here’s why. What we do currently with PDR, this is an art, and as much as you may not agree with me about it being artsy and all that kind of stuff, the fact of the matter is it is an art and a technique that you have to develop. It is not a process that you can teach with steps.
When you fix a windshield chip, or you polish a headlight, there’s no art involved there, or very little. It’s just a process, so I can take someone else and show them the 52 steps, and as long as they learn the steps right, they can do the repair just as well as somebody who’s been doing it forever. Not the case with what we do, so it keeps the jokers out of our business and it keeps the repair costs up. If all you had to do was stick a rod behind a dent and put pressure on it and it popped out, it’d be almost free, but it’s not. That’s not how it works. That’s why we can make so much money doing it, if we position ourselves correctly. We’ve got to position ourselves correctly, so when I’m talking about doing extra stuff and doing an upsell, we’re not adding – we’re not selling them any other types of things, so get that out of your head right away, because we’re just talking about doing PDR repairs.
You know you’ve got a lot of options, when you decide what to do with your invoicing and your data capture for your dent removal, or other reconditioning business, but the choice I’ve made for my company is Recon Pro by Auto Mobile Technologies. This stuff has proven invaluable. I had a mountain of paper invoice books stacked up in a room, in case I wanted to look something up. It was archaic, ridiculous. Now, all of my technicians are on iPhones. They scan the VIN of the car, they enter a few pieces of information, including capturing the e-mail for customers. It’s 2015, you need to be building a mailing list for your customers, so you can keep them updated, if you want to run specials, you want to reach out to them, touch them. You need an email. This prompts you to capture their email, so you can send them the receipt, which comes via email. No paper in the truck to get lost.
You guys, this is the way to do it. There’s a lot of options you can take. There’s lots of competitors, but this is the one I’ve chosen. Check them out online. Automobiletechnologies.com. The product is called Recon Pro. It’s not one guy who’s also a PDR tech building software, it’s a team of nerds dedicated to making your life better, and that’s what you want. Check them out. Tell them we sent you over there. Recon Pro.
How this relates to a retail scenario is someone’s calling you about the one dent that – or they’re calling about the one piece of damage that they’re hung up on. Sometimes, they call you with multiple things, but nine times out of ten, or more, it’s the one thing, so that’s what they’re focused on. That’s the first store. That’s the mom store. You’re gonna go and you’re gonna do your business there about talking about that repair, and not until you have finalized your transaction – now, you haven’t finished the dent, although, sometimes you have. Once you’re getting towards the end is when you’re gonna pitch for more work. That’s the kid’s store.
I’ll give you a scenario that I had on a Porsche just awhile ago, and I think a few episodes ago I talked about this. Forgive me I have, but it’s the same scenario and it makes perfect sense here to talk about in this episode, so if you heard it before, you’re gonna hear it twice. I had this – I don’t know what year this thing was. 2005, or seven, Porsche 911 hardtop, regular coupe, and it had a dent in the quarter panel. The guy was a nut for the car. I told him what the price was gonna be. It was rather expensive for what it was, but he needed this car perfect. He knew all the details. It was built in Germany, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and he was really tied into this car, and he wanted it perfect, and I could do it.
I gave him a couple of options. I’m cutting out the parts of the story that don’t make sense for today’s episode, to save you some time, but the long short of it is I – that quarter panel dent was about $275.00. I noticed, because I did my job right, before I even started, that there were some other dings around the car; a couple on the door, really small, a couple on the fender, another one on the quarter panel. All he knew about was the one, because his grandson ran a scooter into it. I knew about the other stuff, so before the repair is through – before it started, rather, you don’t want to go around and talk about all this other stuff, because it would’ve unkeen to my wife walking into this store and they say, hey. Do you see anything you like? Tell you what, we got stuff across the street, too. There’s kids stuff. They maybe have other things, too.
That would’ve overwhelmed my wife and she probably would’ve split, and I would’ve overwhelmed this customer, too, by saying – he called me for one dent and I show him, literally, eight total. I just keep my mouth shut about that and I let him complete the natural progression of his interaction with me, and just like they, at the other store, let my wife turn into a customer, first. We worked out a deal on the one dent. I worked on it. I had to bend a tool to make it happen and I got it fixed and he was happy. Loved it. Great repair. I was proud of it, too, because it was perfect.
At this point, I say, “Listen. You’ve got a couple of extra dents. I wish you didn’t, because the car is so clean, but the only thing keeping it from being perfect, now, are these couple of dents. Do you want me to show them to you, or do you want to just go back on living like you didn’t know they were there before?” He said, “No. Show them to me.” So I showed him and he goes, “Oh man. Yeah. I see those.” And he was pretty price sensitive, in the first place. He was trying to kind of use a backhanded – underhanded negotiation where you pretend you forgot the number, and then, you make another run at the guy, so I had kept a good notes and I knew what I quoted him over the phone based on his description and I stayed right there in that range. He tried to bring me below it, so I knew he didn’t want to spend what I wanted to charge.
He didn’t want to spend any more. I can promise you that, but once I showed him what I could do and what was done, I said, “Hey. If you go across the street to my other store, I’ll be able to give you a better deal and I’m even gonna give you something for free. A free gift.” What I did was I fixed another dent in his same quarter panel, just because I wanted the car to look nice. Tiny little whisper dent, but then, I showed him the two dents in the door and a palm print on the top of the fender and I said, “Listen. I can never do these dents this cheap, but I can do them for an additional” – I believe the number was $125.00. I didn’t pull the paperwork up before the show just to make sure I got the exact numbers right, but for the purpose of the story, it was about $125.00 for the other two panels. 15 minutes worth of work, or something like that, but here I am going from $275.00 to $400.00 just like that, and that’s the difference between a good and an amazing day is those little 20, 30, 40 percent bumps, and sometimes, 150 percent like my wife was able to help this chain out with.
If you’re not doing any kind of upselling, or promotion, you may be leaving some money on the table that was hanging around there and just went unplucked. They’re never going to come at you with it. Like my wife would’ve never said hey, do you have any sister stores that I can also shop at? Nobody asks that, and when you finish the repair on the vehicle that they called you for, nobody says, hey great. Is there anything else you can fix for me? They just say thanks and send you on your way. You’ve got to artfully choose the proper time to bring up that other dent, or other dents sometimes, but it’s almost never before you start. It’s never right in the beginning, and even if it’s before the tools come out, that’s fine, too, but you make the negotiation happen for the first dent, and you do everything but fix it. You shake hands on it, say it sounds great. We’ll get started. Then, you bring up the other stuff, because you got to get into some type of agreement, first, before you can be upsold. It’s not an upsell, unless they’re already buying something in the first place.
Let’s talk a little bit about hot glue specific for paintless dent removal. What kind are you using? You know 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 Wal-Mart. In fact, I used Wal-Mart glue for a long time, before I really got into the manufacturing side of PDR, Wal-Mart 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 worked amazingly. Green glue and the pink glue that we stock – 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. Superglue and liquid nails work too good. They will take the paint off the car. That’s not what we’re after. It’s 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 melt glue.
There’s a lot of glues out there that are made for construction and manufacturing that’ll make this glue look 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, Tab Weld. Tab Weld 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 got to squeeze the last 2, 3, 5, 10 percent of performance out that everyone 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 got to 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 Tab Weld 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 Tab Weld. Check out the website, tabweld.com. You can bop yourself onto our mailing list there. 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.
I want you to try that this week. Remember that for every job you walk away from, wholesale, body shop, or retail, there is more money hiding there somewhere and it’s your job to figure it out, so I’m gonna leave this episode a little short today, so that you guys can just take this piece of information and go put it to use and try to make some more money this week, and I want you to share your stories. Well, you know what the best place for you to do them right now is on the Facebook community page, so we’ve got the Facebook group called PDR College Community. That’s a closed group, so you have to request membership, if you’re not already a member to it. It’s free. It’s nothing like that, but you got to get in there, and that’s where fans of the show are talking about stuff from the show and stuff that they encounter in a daily basis.
If you’re able to use this message and get yourself a little bit extra revenue from the jobs you already have scheduled this week, share your story, because it helps inspire other guys. You know a lot of you think it’s not gonna work for me. It works for other guys. It works for Keith in California with all the Lamborghinis and the Bentley’s, but it’s not gonna work for me in chicken lips. Not gonna work in Temecula. It probably won’t work in Temecula, but it will work everywhere else. It’ll work in – it’ll even work in chicken lips, if it won’t work in Temecula. It will work for you. No matter where you are, it works, but it’s personality stuff. It’s not mechanics. You’ve got to be the right guy, and if you’re not the right guy, you got to work on putting in the time to start acting like the right guy, because it pays you better to be the right guy.
Work on yourself. Get in the right state of mind and make some more money on those same jobs today. You will thank me later. Trust me. Let me give you a little update on Black Plague, because we’ve got some new stuff coming out soon. We have a new version of the smooth series tabs coming out. I have spent a lot of money. Unfortunately, this stuff is expensive. For a stupid little piece of plastic, it is expensive to put together, but that’s my problem, not yours. The new tabs are looking amazing.
I’m working on a couple of kinks on the prototypes, right now, so I can’t release anything to you yet, but very, very soon, and like I like to do when I bring a new product, I like to reward all my fans of the show and say, hey. I will give you guys an opportunity to buy it before you can get it anywhere else and at a cool early bird price. Keep listening here and you’ll hear some more about that, but what I’ve tried to do is take the very best tabs that you can buy and make them even better. There wasn’t a huge area to improve, but I did what I do and I found things I didn’t like that could be better as a technician and I changed those.
See, that’s one of the things that I love about both, Shane and my tool companies, is that they’re run by guys who use this stuff all day, every day, so I know what sucks and I know what’s good, and I even know what sucks about my own stuff, because I’m using it. The gray tabs are hard to find in the bottom of your toolbox, or on the ground. They’re invisible. I didn’t think about that, when I made them. I just thought the color was amazing, but they hide, so there’s your first hint about what’s changing, but that’s the smallest of all the things that are changing. Keep listening here.
Watch your email, because when I’ve got some video, I’ll send that out in a link, so you guys can see what I’m talking about. Even before it goes on Facebook, I like to send it out just to the PDR College community, so if you’re not on our email list, hope over to pdrcollege.com and put your name and email in one of the places there for various reasons, but they all will end up in a similar place where I’ve got access to send you email, and I’ll show you the new stuff that’s coming out. I think you’re gonna like it, because I’m enjoying it quite a bit.
Let’s talk about glue tabs. More specifically, let’s talk about Black Plague smooth series glue tabs. These guys come in a variety of sizes and are specifically designed for maximum adhesion. They’re designed differently than other tabs and I can say with all honesty that they stick better than any other tab out there. From the itty bitty tiny ones that seem as if they wouldn’t pull anything, all the way to the large ones, these things pull like a tanker, and best of all, they pull with finite precision. They pull exactly where you want, in the exact spot you want. I’ll tell you what. Pair these guys with the tab weld glue and you’ve got an unbeatable combo. Visit blackplaguepdr.com. Pick these guys up. Pick up some tab weld glue and take your glue pulling to the next level.
Thank you for spending a little bit of time with me. I appreciate it. I appreciate your friendship via the show. You guys are my boys, and I love having you, and thanks in advance for the iTunes review. We will get to 100, sooner than later. Thank fellows. Until next time, get better.
[End of Audio]Duration: 33 minutes
