Finding and Landing $1,000+ Retail Jobs

Many of us have a mental “limit” to what we think we can charge for a PDR repair. THINK AGAIN! We show you some of the main factors to consider when you want to get your pricing to an Elite level.

We welcome Layne Minor as a guest on the show to share his story on breaking out of wholesale prison and swinging in the big league of high dollar retail.

Resources:     Recon Pro   |   Blackplague PDR Glue Tabs   |   Jackhammer Blending Hammer

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Keith Cosentino:    I’m Keith Cosentino.  He’s Shane Jacks. And this is the PDR College Podcast, your weekly source of expert level information for the Paintless Dent Removal business.  We are bringing you the things you can use to plug into your life to make it more successful.  We’re gonna be talking tools.  We’re gonna be talking techniques.  But most of the time we’re gonna be talking business, business, business.  Shane?  Why are we talking so much about the business?

Shane Jacks:    Well, that way, Keith, I can pay someone to stand in line to buy my new iPhone 6.

Keith Cosentino:    Man, I had to sleep overnight for mine.  You could pay somebody?

Shane Jacks:    You had a sleepover night?

Keith Cosentino:    I had to.

Shane Jacks:     What?  Like an iPhone 6 party?

Keith Cosentino:    Yeah, it turns out I was sleeping at the wrong place though.  All I got was arrested.

Shane Jacks:    Where were you?

Keith Cosentino:    I was out in front of Radio Shack.  I guess they don’t have iPhones.  Well, they might have it but I was accidentally in line for Panera Bread to apply for a job.  It’s right next door to Radio Shack.  The line looked the same though, the guys who needed the iPhones and the guys who needed jobs.

Shane Jacks:    You may be hip enough to work at Panera Bread but you’re way too funny and have way too much of a personality for that.

Keith Cosentino:    I may be too qualified to work at Panera Bread and that’s a good thing.  I’m happy about that.  I don’t even like to eat there that much.  The bread is too hard.

Shane Jacks:    Who said qualified?

Keith Cosentino:    You did.

Shane Jacks:    Did I say qualified or I said you’re too witty?

Keith Cosentino:    I guess you said I’m too witty.

Shane Jacks:    Yeah.  I don’t think you’re overqualified for dang near anything.

Keith Cosentino:    To me, wit is what qualified me to do everything.

Shane Jacks:    Yeah, sure.

Keith Cosentino:    All right.  Well, today is an exciting topic for me because it’s kind of where I hang my hat.  We are talking about retail and getting big money for retail.  What do you know about that Shane?

Shane Jacks:    At one time, I knew absolutely nothing about getting big money for retail repairs until I met this dude named Keith.  And, man, now I’m getting all kinds of crazy cash.

Keith Cosentino:    You were stuck in the cocoon of darkness, where we all start.

Shane Jacks:    The cocoon of darkness, yeah.

Keith Cosentino:    In wholesale.

Shane Jacks:    I always thought – and I guarantee you most of the people that are listening here either are in this mode or have been in this mode, Keith, where they think that if I can make “x” amount of dollars per hour, that is my goal.  And that’s where I was stuck for a long time.  And that amount is pretty high.  You can say if I can make $100.00 an hour, I’m good to go.  Ten hour day, that’s $1,000.00 a day, right?

Keith Cosentino:    Right.

Shane Jacks:    That’s a great goal, right?  That’s not bad for an uneducated idiot from Pickens County, South Carolina, right?

Keith Cosentino:    That’s true.

Shane Jacks:    The thing is I’m uneducated but I’m not an idiot.

Keith Cosentino:    Are you from Pickens County?

Shane Jacks:    I am from Pickens County.

Keith Cosentino:    All right.
Shane Jacks:    That may be a fact you didn’t know about me.  Anyway, Lane knows what Pickens is.  That’s the home of Clemson University.

Keith Cosentino:    Lane is our guest today on the show.  Lane Minor, welcome to the PDR College Podcast.

Lane Minor:    Thank you, Keith and Shane.  Man, man, man.  Let me say, I’m honored to be in the presence of PDR royalty today.

Keith Cosentino:    Where are they?

Shane Jacks:    I’ve got a purple robe on right now.  I don’t know about you, Keith.

Keith Cosentino:    That’s all I have on.

Lane Minor:    You guys must be at the bottom of the barrel this week, trading in those yachts for a pontoon boat and giving me a call.

Keith Cosentino:    Yeah, well, in Shane’s neck of the woods, I think a pontoon boat with one of those giant fans on the back is probably about the best boat you can have.

Shane Jacks:    I’m staring at one of those in my yard right now, Keith.

Keith Cosentino:    You’ve gotta put the seat real far forward or else your mullet gets stuck in that fan.  So the reason we brought Lane on the show here is because we’re talking about getting big, big money for retail jobs and that is a mental block that a lot of people have.  And Lane had a post on Facebook last week about a four-digit repair for a single dent on the bedside of a truck.  And a lot of people were freaking out about it.

And it kind of reminded me of my past when I would not get my repairs up that high and I would have freaked out if somebody told me that.  And I know Shane kind of was like that when we first me.  We were talking back and forth about how much to charge for this and how much to charge for that.  And he was stuck in his cocoon of darkness in the wholesale business.  So I kind of opened his eyes to that.  And now, Lane, tell us about your mindset.  How did you get to that point?  How did you go from doing mainly wholesale work to doing high-level, high-dollar retail repair?

Lane Minor:    Mainly just going into business for myself.  I started that little entrepreneurial devil or angel, whatever you want to call it, sitting on my shoulder, kind of whispered this wholesale stuff, it’s great and it’s a good way to make a great living but I want to work smarter, not harder.  So retail?  In the past, I’d always just kind of blown it off like a lot of wholesale techs probably do.  And if I did price something, I priced it like an idiot basically.  I began looking online, looking at what guys were getting for repairs.  And, man, it kind of blows your mind.  You can actually do a repair on somebody’s car for more than $100.00?  Really?  It’s mind-blowing to me.

So with that, I listened to a lot of the podcasts, I had a lot of my own thoughts, and just started putting two and two together and started asking for bigger money.  I mean, there’s things you’ve gotta do to get there.  You’ve gotta qualify the – I mean, you’re not gonna knock a homerun, naturally, every time you step up to the plate.  But it’s out there, you know?  It’s just a matter of what poker face you can put on and how much money you can get out of each repair.

Keith Cosentino:    Yeah, that’s really –

Shane Jacks:        A step – go ahead, Keith.

Keith Cosentino:    Go ahead.

Shane Jacks:    One thing I wanted to ask you about this repair.  This was your first retail $1,000.00 repair, correct?

Lane Minor:    Non-hail, yes.

Shane Jacks:    A non-hail.  Yeah, of course.

Keith Cosentino:    Yeah, that’s mainly what we’re talking about.  Hail is a different animal.

Lane Minor:      Yeah.

Shane Jacks:    Right.  How many more are you gonna have next week?

Lane Minor:    I do have a repair I’m looking at.  It’s not something – I would love to say one a week like that but my goal now is to try to book at least one of those a week or one every other week.  And that just means taking on the larger damage and finding the right customer to sell that damage to.

Shane Jacks:    Well, step us through that sales pitch right there on that one dent.  How did it start?  Did it start with them sending you a picture on the cell phone and saying, “Hey, can this be done?”  How did that start?  Step us through it.  And I’m hoping you say the right things.  Again, we do this stuff totally unrehearsed.  Correct, Keith?

Keith Cosentino:    That is correct.

Shane Jacks:    We do not coach.  We’re not coaching Lane into what to say here.

Lane Minor:    Believe me, I asked for a list of questions in my rider but I did not receive them.

Shane Jacks:    Nope.  As a matter of fact, what I told him last night was be prepared to be surprised.

Keith Cosentino:    Exactly.

Shane Jacks:    Step us through that opening all the way through to them saying, “Hey, $1,000.00 sounds great.”

Lane Minor:    Awesome.  Okay.  First of all, it started with a phone call.  This particular guy called me on someone’s behalf, on the owner of the truck’s behalf.  So automatically –

Keith Cosentino:    Oh, that’s one of our red flags, right there.

Lane Minor:    Well, to me it meant two things:  either the guy’s really conceited or he has Shane Jacks’ kind of money.  Or both.  So he called me.  He wanted the repair done then.  Naturally, I’m still an 80 percent or so wholesale tech so I was on the lot.  I tried to nail down a time with him I could come look at it and he insisted that he bring it right then and there.  So he sent another guy over for me to look at the truck.

It gets there and the damage is nowhere near as described.  Imagine that.  It was described as a smaller dent.  The damage wasn’t too, too bad but I put a time frame of about 4 to 6 hours on the damage and they could not do it right then.  The guy was just too busy.  I also gave a price.  I went into it with him what all was involved in this particular repair.  I’d have to take out the tail light.  The new trucks have got the liner on the inside of the wheel well and he had a Tonneau cover.  I don’t know, I didn’t pull the Tonneau cover to see if there was access on the new model there on the top or not.

But I basically went through what I was gonna do with the repair and gave him a price.  And he said they would call me next week and, of course, I never thought I would get that phone call back because I priced it at $1,200.00.  And that was the first time I’d actually thrown a $1,200.00 price out and meant it and not just blowing some salesman off.  So the next week, I did get a phone call.  He wanted to schedule the repair.  He brought it in.

Keith Cosentino:    Let me ask you a question quick.

Lane Minor:    Go ahead.

Keith Cosentino:    Was your intent just to – did you think you were gonna get the job?

Lane Minor:    I wanted the job.  I was loaded up with work so I knew I could go in a little higher.  I didn’t have to make a living off of this one truck.  And I did want the job.

Keith Cosentino:    That’s a really, really important point that you bring up.  When you’re busy is the time to go for a higher price that you’re not sure about.  That’s when to test the waters.  When you’re slow and you’re hungry, you stink and everybody smells it and your prices are gonna suck because you’re gonna bid every job just so you don’t lose it.  But when you look at your book and it’s full and you’ve got stuff to do for the next seven days, that’s the time for the price that you don’t think you can get.  That’s the time to give it.

That’s exactly when I do it too, Lane, and that’s exactly what you did.  Because it doesn’t matter if you get it or not.  You’ve got work to do.  Let me just price it at what I need per hour.  And if you’re six hours into this thing, $1,200.00 is not crazy.  A $200.00 door ding doesn’t take you an hour.

Lane Minor:    No, not at all.

Keith Cosentino:    Takes you a lot less.  So, anyway, the guys call you back and they want to schedule it.

Lane Minor:    They schedule it.  They bring the truck in.  Of course, he’s got some concerns being as it’s a less than 10,000 mile truck that the owner, guy, whatever you want to call him – his right-hand man, as described to me as a “boy dog.”  I can tell that he loves this thing, you know?  So I did go through and tell him, I shot him a percentage of the repair.  I knew I could make it darn near perfect.  I could make it where I would be happy with it on my truck and that was important.

But I did give myself some leeway and put it in the 95 percent range.  I told him there might be a little bit of waviness or a little bit of texture.  And he was okay with that.  Time was really what he did not want to spend.  Money was not a problem.  Time was a problem.  He did not want to have it down at a body shop for three days, four days, whatever that time frame may be.  So he brought it in.  Let’s see, four hours later and a lunch and some Facebooking, I’m done.  And $1,200.00 richer.

Shane Jacks:    You just said something that was automatically, in my mind, I thought there was a key right there that helped Lane sell this.  You said he did not want this truck to be down for any amount of time.  Did that come out before you gave the price?  The reason I’m asking that – what were the cues there, other than it was a repair that was kind of difficult and was gonna take you time, what were the cues there that told you, hey, this guy will pay for this?

Lane Minor:    Knowing who he is.  I won’t discuss who he is but he owns a very large paving company in town.  So I know he’s got the income to pay for it.  I know he wants it done.  I know the fact that they brought me the truck to look at right then and stressed that, the guy I was in contact with on the phone stressed that.  There’s no way we want to put this in a body shop and be down for a week or half a week.  This is a busy guy and he’s got to have it fixed here and now.  So with that little bit of information, I stuck that in my arsenal and used it, you know?

Keith Cosentino:    And they never tried to negotiate with you at all?

Lane Minor:    No.  Not one bit.

Keith Cosentino:    I know that’s surprising to a lot of people all over the country, the world for that matter.  But these guys are out there all over the place just waiting for you to do the repairs.  But you’ve got to do a couple of different things to make sure that you are the guy they choose when they’re looking for somebody to have a car fixed.  How did they find you, Lane?

Lane Minor:    It was a referral from a body shop.  As a matter of fact, when I did the repair, I took the vehicle in to that shop to do the repair.  I just wanted to do it inside and make a real good job and do it real clean.  So I wanted it inside with good lights.  So it was a referral from a body shop.

Keith Cosentino:    And we’ve talked about that on the show a bunch of different times, about how important it is to be aligned with the top-level shops in your area and to make sure you’re getting those referrals.  It is crazy important because the people who want big dents done, the first place they go a lot of times is the body shop.  And if you don’t have that referral, you’re never gonna see that guy.  And if it’s the wrong kind of shop, a small, slow, greedy shop, you’re not gonna get that referral.  That shop was probably a high-level, real busy shop.  It didn’t matter to them if they get that job or not.

Lane Minor:    Right.  This is the busiest body shop in town that we did a lot of hail work for a year and a half ago or something.  Got a good relationship with it.  They are the largest body shop in town with two locations.

Keith Cosentino:    Now, where in Georgia?

Lane Minor:    Yes.  West Georgia and East Alabama and the tip of LA – Lower Alabama.  So Columbus, Georgia to be specific.

Keith Cosentino:    So I would imagine there’s body shops out there that would paint that bedside for $300.00 to $400.00.

Lane Minor:    Yes.  There are mobile paint guys that will paint it for less than that.  I know a few of them.

Keith Cosentino:    Right.  So don’t think it’s different in Lane’s area.  Don’t say it’s different here than it is where you are.  Those cheap paint guys are in every town.  They’re in my town.  They’re in Lane’s town.  They’re in Shane’s town.  But it doesn’t matter.  It really doesn’t matter.  It’s totally different.  It’s a different repair.  It’s straight-up garbage if some mobile guy is gonna paint a bedside of a brand new truck.  I mean, you wouldn’t want that on your truck.  Nobody would.

Lane Minor:    No, no.

Shane Jacks:    I had a retail customer last week; I believe it was that he had taken it to a body shop.  His trailer jackknifed into the side of his truck.  That always turns out really nice.  So he had taken it to a body shop.  It had completely went through the metal on the bottom side of the bed and crinkled up the top side of the bed.  I mean, just a lot of distortion on the top part of the bed.  The body shop literally fixed the bottom part by beating it out, welding the seam back together, throwing some Bondo on it, and then fading it in – it was a Tundra – before it got up to the Tundra sticker at the top of the bed.

This is a body shop and the wrinkles at the top of the bed were still there and they were absolutely horrible.  And I tried to talk the guy out of it.  I said, “Man, I just don’t want to do that.  There’s too much pressure from all that horrible body work down there pulling on this.”  And he keeps on and on.  And this is kind of counter to what we normally talk about because I will, and I’m sure you do too, Keith and Lane, will try to talk some people out of it because I do not want to be involved in it.

And, I mean, I gave this guy – I don’t want to do this.  Why not?  I was like because I’m not gonna make it look right.  But you can make it better.  I’m like, yeah, I can.  Well, how much to make it better?  $600.00, cash.  I don’t want anything but cash in this situation.  And he says okay.  And I’m like, seriously?  Crap.  So I spent about two and a half hours on it and he comes to pick it up and he said, “Yeah, it don’t exactly look like – ” and I went, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa there, bubba.  I told you I didn’t want to work on it.  I told you at least 11 times.”  “I know, I know.  I’m gonna pay you.”  So he pulls out six $100.00 bills.  But, anyway, that was kind of a sidetrack about the story.

Keith Cosentino:    That sixth one, did you have to pull it out of his grip?  He was hanging on to it?

Shane Jacks:    No, he had it in a BB&T packet.  He had the cash in there.  So he just handed it all over.

Keith Cosentino:    Bed Bath & Beyond?

Shane Jacks:    BB&T.

Keith Cosentino:    Oh, T.

Shane Jacks:    The last time I checked Beyond was spelled with a “B.”

Lane Minor:    That’s the public schooling in California, I guess, Keith.

Keith Cosentino:    Common core spelling.

Lane Minor:    Exactly.  It’s right if you feel it’s right.

Keith Cosentino:    So those cheap paint guys never came up in this scenario which is awesome.  And 99 percent of the time on your high-priced retail jobs, the cheap paint guy is never gonna be an option.  A lot of guys who tell me they can’t get these prices because they’re selling against these body shops, these cheap body shops, they’re only selling against them in their minds.  They’re stuck because they know someone else who would paint it and do a really good job at $500.00 or whatever.

But that’s a total bastardization of that truck and everybody in the car business knows that.  I mean, you bring that brand new truck in for a trade-in with a repainted bedside, even if it looks good, they’re gonna paint meter it and they’re gonna knock $1,000.00 off the price of that truck.  Whether it’s justified or not, that’s what they’re gonna do and they’re gonna get it.

Shane Jacks:    I pretty much use that on every single sale now.

Keith Cosentino:    I have been threatening to bring a paint gauge to work every day for a couple of years and I just never pulled the trigger on one.  But I think it’s a really powerful selling tool for retail to see that visual when you show them what it’s gonna look like when you have a repainted panel.

Lane Minor:    Yeah.  Let’s be honest too.  These repainted panels, even at a high-line body shop, you can tell.

Keith Cosentino:    20 feet away.

Lane Minor:    Yeah.  You can tell.  This is a pearl white truck.  You can tell.  I don’t care who you are.

Keith Cosentino:    That same model truck, Lane, that you worked on, there’s one in one of my body shops that I worked on the other day and pearl white as well – they repainted the whole truck just because they couldn’t get the color right.

Lane Minor:    Exactly.

Keith Cosentino:    Holy cow.

Lane Minor:    This guy might have been told that being as I got the referral from a body shop.  And because, like I said, taking it to a cheap paint person never came up.  Quality and time, that was the main concern.

Keith Cosentino:    Did you tell that body shop what you charged him?

Lane Minor:    No.  I did not.

Keith Cosentino:    That’s a double-edged sword sometimes because I want to open their eyes to what the stuff costs but a lot of times they’re stuck in their world of why would they have you fix it when we can paint it for the same price or less.  And they can’t get over that because they’ve got to believe in their repair.  They think their repair is fantastic.  They have to or they can’t work there.  They can’t sell it.  But they think that a lot, their repair is great.

But once in a while you get the advisor or the estimator, whatever they call him there, who’s realistic and they don’t want to paint their own cars because they know it doesn’t turn out right every time.  I’ve talked about it on the show before but one of my eye-opening moments was when the painter at the highest level body shop I serviced paid me to take a little ding out of his truck that he could fill and paint himself for free.  When he was paying me to fix the truck, I knew I was on to something.  This is better.  Even the painter agrees this is better.

Lane Minor:    For sure.

Keith Cosentino:    So in retail, to get these big numbers, there’s a definite mindset that you need to have.  And there’s a definite checklist of things that you need to make sure is in place either in your mind or in reality to make this stuff happen.  And some of the stuff for me that I have on this list – the first one is your attitude.  You’ve got to have the proper attitude that you are capable of doing this repair, this is the better choice, and you’re positive and you’re happy about it.  And when you look at it, when they’re watching you estimate it, you need to be confident and act confident.

If you act sketchy and talk about “mmm, mmm,” all that kind of stuff, you’re gonna blow all their confidence right away.  You’ve got to have a great attitude about it and right off the bat, the second you meet them.  Kind of like complete confidence in everything that’s gonna happen from there on out.  And when you deliver that price, you’ve got to have that right attitude.  If you’re kind of sheepish and you go, oh well, it’s gonna be a lot, it’s gonna be, pff, I don’t even want to say it to you.  Sometimes you can use that as a tactic.  I’ll incorporate something that sounds like that sometimes.

On the outside looking in, you’d think that’s what it is but the tactic I’m talking about is I’ll try to send them away before I take the job.  And say, “I don’t know if you want to go this route because it’s gonna be a better repair but it’s gonna be more expensive and you might be looking for a cheaper, easier way out.”  You know, kind of send them away, take the repair away from them, and then let them dig it back out of me.  And then once they’re still interested then I know we’ve got a good chance of doing business.  And sometimes they just go right off the bat and I just let them go.  I kind of use that to test them and see how serious they are.

So attitude is one of the most important things.  Remember that.  And then you’ve got to have the actual physical abilities to back it up.  You’ve got to be able to do a nice repair because this high-dollar stuff can sometimes be small dents but more often than not it’s a challenging dent.  So you’ve got to be able to bring it.  You’ve got to have the highest level skills and that usually means having the highest level tools and by staying on the cutting edge and getting all the current tools that are coming out.

Are you trying to stay on the cutting edge of Paintless Dent Removal when it comes to your tools?  Well if so, you need to make sure you have two things in your arsenal.  One is the Shane Jacks Jackhammer Blending Hammer.  Find it at blendinghammerpdr.com.  If you want to learn blending, we’ve got an awesome tutorial to go along with the hammer right there on the site.  You’re gonna love it.  You’re gonna learn something.  And you’re gonna get better and make money.

In addition to the hammer, if you are doing any glue pulling, you need to have the Black Plague Crease Tabs.  It’s a six-piece crease pulling set.  The two largest are absolute monsters.  They’re gonna pull out collision damage like nothing else you’ve got available.  And the smaller sizes are gonna be for the normal, everyday door edges and minor, minor collision dents and a dog leg and a bottom of a door.  I’m telling you guys, it’s gonna change the way you do your repairs when you have the cutting edge tools and these are two of them.  Blackplaguepdr.com, blendinghammerpdr.com.  Check out the sites, guys.  Bring yourselves into the 21st century.

Do not forget about ReconPro, the software that we use to run our PDR companies.  This stuff is phenomenal.  You’re entering all the information on your device which is an iPhone.  You’re scanning the VIN with the camera of it.  Everything’s populated in there for you.  You buzz that little rascal off via magic off to a server somewhere.  It’s all living on a server.  You can dunk the phone in a bucket of water as soon as you’re done, you don’t lose any data.  Everything’s paperless.  The invoice is delivered electronically.  You can send duplicates at a moment’s notice.  Guys, get off paper,     quit screwing around, automobiletechnologies.com.  ReconPro.  Get your business into the 21st century.

This particular repair that we’re highlighting with you, Lane, is a bedside crease, like right above the body line?

Lane Minor:    Yep.  They’ve got a new style line on them.  And it kind of comes out, it goes negative first and then there’s the edge of the panel.  It was right in there and it was good sized.  I would say football width, little longer than a football.  I don’t know if the pictures really did it justice.  It was a tough repair.

Shane Jacks:    Tell us what kind of truck and everything, Lane, just for those that are listening that didn’t see the pictures.

Lane Minor:    This was a 2014 white Sierra and it was loaded with every possible option that it could be loaded with.

Shane Jacks:    Including pearl white paint.

Lane Minor:    Including pearl white paint.  And I’m not sure; it might even come with free drinks.  Who knows?  He paid a lot of money for this truck.  It’s the new body style which is very accessible from the taillight and if you’re using Black Plague Crease Tabs, that goes a long way as well.

Keith Cosentino:    Did you use a Black Plague Tab on her?

Lane Minor:    I did.  I did.  I started at the very corner of that with an Atlas Titan, the oval, kind of where it goes up and then got it out to the middle and used the biggest crease tab.  Kind of pulled it when the glue was still tacky a little bit just to move some metal and weaken the surface.  I wasn’t trying to pull the dent all the way up.  I was just trying to give myself a little bit –

Keith Cosentino:    Of a running start.

Lane Minor:    Yeah, a little less stiff surface to work with there.

Keith Cosentino:    So the reason I started asking you this is to find out what tools you used.  So you started with a couple of high-level glue tabs.  And I say high-level because those are a little more obscure than just a basic hail tab that everybody would have.  So you started with that and then what tools did you use to get behind it?

Lane Minor:    I did a lot of glue – I probably stayed on the glue for, gosh, an hour maybe.  And then a hammer.  Took a blending hammer and it had a rubber tip on it, softened the area up real good.  I’ll take a repair like that as far as I can with glue just simply to hide the pushes.  When I did go to pushing, I came in from the taillight and used a – gosh, I don’t know the name of it but it’s one of the 5’ long Dentcraft tools with a rubber, I think, R4 rubber-type tip on it.  And also if you pulled out that felt-type liner down on the inside of that wheel well, there is a nice large access hole in there that comes standard and it just happened to be in the right place.

Keith Cosentino:    I like it when that happens.

Lane Minor:    Yeah, no additional lightening of the truck was necessary.

Shane Jacks:    All of my repairs come standard with a free hole.

Lane Minor:    Well, mine sometimes do too.  But I would never admit to it on the internet.

Shane Jacks:    I’ve got no shame, brother.  None at all.

Keith Cosentino:    So another one of the factors that you need to consider, things you need to have to pull these repairs off is a passion for the vehicle itself.  It’s got to make you personally happy to save this car from the body shop.  And if you’re like the guys we were talking about at the paint shop who want to paint everything and you think painting a car is fantastic, it’s gonna be tough for you to sell a PDR repair.

But if you really want this car to stay factory – like imagine you’re at a body shop doing a dent and you see a customer pull in with a door ding and they’re writing them up for a paint job.  If that doesn’t make you cringe inside and want to just go over there and talk to everybody, that’s how you need to feel to make these things happen.  Because that passion that you have, that bleeds over and the customer feels that.  And they know that you’re putting them on the right track and giving them inside information.

I don’t know how to make you feel that if you don’t and you’re probably not gonna be the world’s best dent repair guy or sales guy if you don’t care what cars get painted and what don’t.  But you show me a brand new car that nobody even owns and you tell me they’re gonna repaint the two doors because of a door ding, immediately my face gets crinkled up and I think, “oh, man, you’re gonna paint that car.”

I don’t even care who owns it but it just seems like such a – it’s like you’re taking a perfect car and ruining it, you know?  When I can make that damage just go away.  Everything stays original and they’re gonna frigging paint it by some dude named Buck in a booth that was built 20 years ago.  Man.

Shane Jacks:    That happened to me last week.  One of the higher end body shops I do work for, the Dodge dealership down the road brought a car to them, a truck, a brand new Ram 3500 and the left front door had a dent in it.  And I was standing in their office and I look out and I see it’s got a sticker on it and I know it’s a brand new truck.  It came from right down the road and I’m like is that a door ding in the door?  So I look and it’s about 3” long.  It’s a pretty shallow crease.  And I said, “Why is that truck here?”  And one of the people in the office said, “I don’t know.”  That’s how we say I don’t know around here.

Lane Minor:    I understand.

Shane Jacks:    I knew Lane would understand.  Why is that truck here and they go, “I don’t know.  I guess it’s got some paint work to do on it.”  Well, I know that.  I’m not a moron.  It’s at a body shop.  Anyway, I’m like it’s got a pretty nice ding in the door and they said, “Oh yeah, I think that’s what it’s here for.”  So I walk out.  It’s got a scratch that’s not repairable.  But I’m thinking the same thing.  Even though it has to be painted, taking it a step further, Keith and Lane, even though it has to be painted, I’m thinking if they would just let me push that out so there’s no Bondo in this car that is not even sold yet.  But they wanted those hours, you know?

Keith Cosentino:    Yeah, that’s the hard part.  You don’t want to take food from these guys and they don’t want you to take your food.  But, man, you know it’s a better repair.

Shane Jacks:    They know it’s a better repair.

Keith Cosentino:    Oh yeah.  They sure do but they also know why they built that building and that’s to mud up 1,000 cars and paint them.

Shane Jacks:    And the body guys out there are looking at that – you can almost feel on a gravy job like that.  They probably got three hours to wipe that and I’m out there rubbing on the dent.  You know the body guys are looking at me like you S.O.B., I will absolutely kill you if you take that from me.

Keith Cosentino:    But it’s such small-time thinking because check this out.  I had one of my best body shops.  They do a ton of Mercedes work.  Okay?  For the dealer and they get all their referrals.  So they had an SLK, like a 1-year-old SLK, had a ding in the hood.  It’s got those two vents in the hood, those fake vent things right at the back and the sides.  And it had a ding with some paint damage right in between the two, so about 4 to 5 inches back from the windshield.  I never saw the car come in.

The reason I saw it is because they mudded it, primed it, painted it, and it had all these waves through the repair.  So the guy re-mudded it, then they primed it, get it ready for paint, and they scuff it so finely that you can see your reflection back again and the waves are all still there.  So they call me out and say, “Hey, can you get these waves out?”  And they said it was just like one wave and then once I look at it, there’s like a 10” section that’s all wavy.  And it’s every place where the bracing is glued to the skin with that crazy epoxy that they use on the aluminum hoods.
And it’s so deep in this cavity I can’t get in there with anything with enough muscle to cut that stuff.  I need that oscillating cutter to cut this stuff.  You’re not gonna cut it with a knife unless you get all tricky and heat it with a torch.  And even then it wasn’t gonna fit through there.  So I play with it for a minute just to make them happy that I tried and they ended up replacing the hood on this car.  $1,100.00 hood plus all the time to prep it and paint it because they couldn’t fix a ding right in aluminum.

Shane Jacks:    That’s a great story.

Keith Cosentino:    And the manager’s pretty cool.  He’s kind of like a buddy.  And I said, “You should have just let me fix it the first time, bud.”  Well, I haven’t put up this video yet but I’ve got a video testing the new Smooth Series Tabs and I did it on a hail-damaged SL Mercedes which was in the same shop.  And that SL came in the next week after that SLK.  And he goes, “Can you even fix all this stuff?  This aluminum?”  He’s like, “Maybe we should fix it?”  And I used some of Shane’s terminology.  I said, “Bubba, don’t get into this stuff again.  We saw what you did with aluminum last week.”  And he was like, “Oh, come on, man.”  He got all embarrassed.

I said, “You just let me fix this one from the beginning this time.  We’ll make it right.”  But these guys, they’re gonna screw up a car even at the highest level.  It’s not a good repair.  It’s a crap repair to smear it with Bondo.  Shane, at the factory, they did a ton of PDR, they did a ton of repaints, what don’t they do?

Shane Jacks:    They will not, at least at the factory I worked at, they will not put any kind of filler in any capacity whatsoever in a car.

Keith Cosentino:    There you go.

Shane Jacks:        They will not do it.

Lane Minor:    They won’t do that at the Kia plant either.  I get called down there occasionally to fix a dent.  I think they’ve got their own guys now but they told me that.  They don’t like the filler.

Keith Cosentino:    There’s a Kia plant out there?

Lane Minor:    There is.  They build the Sorrento about 45 minutes north of here.

Keith Cosentino:    And they previously did not have internal guys.
Lane Minor:    When they first built it, they would call me.  Whether they had internal guys or not, I do not know.  I never saw them.  I didn’t get a lot of calls and it’s really kind of a hassle because you have to get checked at security and leave your truck at the gate and get driven in.

Keith Cosentino:    Bringing a handful of tools in there.

Lane Minor:    Exactly.  Exactly.  But I know that they don’t put filler in stuff either or not supposed to.  They didn’t at the time.

Keith Cosentino:    Factory environment is interesting.

Shane Jacks:    There’s so many problems with fillers.  Shrinkage and, I mean, it can look great coming out of the body shop and then two months later or a year later, whatever, there are going to be problems.  It’s plastic sticking to metal.  What could go wrong?

Keith Cosentino:    Trying to stick to metal.

Shane Jacks:    That’s what I’m saying.  So what could possibly go wrong?

Keith Cosentino:    It’s junk, you guys.  And everybody knows that but you’ve really gotta believe it when you’re selling this stuff.  So your passion for the vehicle is important.  We all have it.  I’m sure a lot of you guys listening, most of you guys have it.  But if you don’t, maybe just become aware of it.  Just think about it and try to portray the attributes of somebody who does feel like that.

Something else you need which starts this whole ball rolling and probably should be at the front of this list is your reputation.  Somebody’s gotta know who you are and talk about it to somebody else.  And whether that’s in person like happened with Lane here with the referral to the body shop or whether that’s online with some kind of online review system or on your own website, you’ve got to have some type of reputation.  It helps if you have all of them but that is really important.

If you haven’t built a website, well, I just woke you up from your 12 year coma.  And everybody needs a website now so you’ve gotta build a website.  You’ve gotta get that done yesterday if you don’t have one.  It’s crazy.  If you’re after retail and you have no website, forget it.  You’re not even in business.  You’re surviving on your referrals alone.  What’s your website like, Lane?  I’ve never seen it.

Lane Minor:    It is in it’s infancy stages right now, being built as we speak.  That’s because I stayed in wholesale so long and now I’m looking to expand a lot more into retail.  Right now, honestly, I’m living off referrals right now as far as retail goes.  But that is very soon to change.

Keith Cosentino:    Good.  It goes a long way.  And I’ll tell you, I’ll be honest with you, your life will be more stressful doing retail and wholesale than it ever was doing wholesale.  Wholesale’s a pretty easy gig, man.  You just show up when you want to show up, you do the cars, you’ve got your headphones on.  You might get two or three phone calls throughout the day.  And you work until you want to be done and then you come back the next day.  Is that basically how you roll over there?

Lane Minor:    That is exactly how I roll.

Keith Cosentino:    It’s a nice, easy way of living.  And there’s nothing wrong with it.  But if you want to reach the next level, you need to incorporate the retail like you’re doing.  And when that happens, you’ve gotta juggle a lot more balls.  And it does get more stressful.  I’m not gonna lie to you about that.  You get a lot of phone calls.  You’ve gotta stop what you’re doing and put that poker face of happiness on even if you’re feeling like you don’t want to answer the phone because you’ve got five cars in front of you that need to be done.  You’ve got to be the happy guy on the other end of the phone.

And I know you’ll be able to pull that off.  And almost everybody is.  But you’ve got to be ready for that.  It’s not easy street when you’re making that transition.  The retail money is good.  It’s way better than wholesale.  But it comes with some babysitting.  You’ve gotta be happy to have these 10, 15 minute conversations before the repair and sometimes after the repair if they’re old people.  They want to hang out with you.  And when you’re used to going at a really fast pace in the wholesale world, it’s a different machine.  It’s a totally different animal.

Lane Minor:    Yeah, that conversation you talk about, having a long conversation, that’s something that I’ve incorporated over the past year or so.  It used to – I’d answer the phone, “What kind of dent is it?  How big is it?  Here’s the price.”  You know?  And now I just make it a point, I feel like a failure if the phone conversation does not last more than five minutes.  I mean, you’ve really gotta dig deep.  You’re establishing a rapport.  It’s a good way to make them feel confident and a better way to sell a higher dollar repair.

Keith Cosentino:    You’re exactly right.  It’s like you’re reading my notes because that’s my last line item on my little list here.  It’s your presentation and your relationship.  You’re building it from the minute you answer the phone.  Whatever you say, your company and your name, when you pick up the phone – and I hope you say that not just, “Hello?”

Lane Minor:    What you want?

Keith Cosentino:    I always say the name of the company and my name to get it so they know they’re calling the right place and they know who they’re talking to and we can pick up the conversation right away.  They’ll still ask sometimes, “Is this the dent removal place?”  Yeah.  It’s not accidentally another company named the same thing.

Shane Jacks:    I didn’t stutter.

Keith Cosentino:    No, we do stencils on fine china.  Of course, it’s the freaking dent removal place.  But I stay nice.  Yes, it is.  What can I do for you?  How are you?  And building that relationship with them right off the bat.

Shane Jacks:    And it’s not easy to stay nice all the time.

Keith Cosentino:    It’s not.

Lane Minor:    No.

Shane Jacks:    I’m horrible at it.  I make myself do it but it’s not natural to me.

Lane Minor:    No, particularly when they tell you it’s a 2008 Corolla.  You want to end the conversation but sometimes you never know?  I did fix one the other day that was a ’02 with hail damage.  I just knew they were gonna take the money from the insurance check after I wrote it but came back, got it all plus the deductible.

Shane Jacks:    It’s funny you say Corolla.  I’ve got a ’98, I think it’s a ’98 Corolla that came in here this last week.  ’98 with a dent – it’s softball-sized.  How much?  And I’ve got it written down here.  I think I told him like $350.00 to try to scare him away.  When I say softball-sized, it was softballs and shallow with a little bit of a crown in the back of it.  And he went, “All right.  After I get that done, I’m gonna get it buffed out real well.”  And I’m like, no, you’re gonna pay – the car’s not worth but like $1,400.00.

Lane Minor:    It’s not to us but you never know if those people aren’t giving it to a kid or something, you know.

Keith Cosentino:    That’s a big one, Lane.  You’re right about that.  Affluent family’s getting a car ready for a kid.  They just want it to look decent.

Lane Minor:    Right.  You’ve gotta dig a little deeper.  That’s why you don’t always just blow them off when it’s something like that.  Just dig just a little bit to make sure.

Keith Cosentino:    Yeah.  And you don’t always price it right away.  Just start asking some questions.  What are you doing with the car?  Wow, that car’s been around a long time.  Have you had it since new?  Just make a conversation and work your questions into it.  My lead guy, Jared, he’s fantastic at that.  And he was really upset the other day because he had one of those stone-faced customers that he just could not get to talk.  He’s giving him all the nice things; he’s asking him some cool questions, just topical and things about the car.  And the guy’s, “Yep.  Nope.  Nope.  Yep.”  And he’s like –

Shane Jacks:    He must have been from the South.

Keith Cosentino:    And he was like, man, I just could not crack this guy.  And I had to remind him that you’ve got to tailor your conversation style to the customer’s conversation style.  And when you’re encountered with a customer who gives you those quick, abrupt answers, it’s not always because they’re a jerk.  Sometimes that’s just the way they communicate.  So you’ve got to go into that mode real fast.  You’ve got to switch gears and start talking to him in the same way.  And it sounds weird because you don’t talk to people like that.

But he says, “Yep.  What’s it gonna cost?” and you have to come right back with, “We’re gonna get it done.  It’s gonna be ‘x’ amount of dollars.”  You don’t start trying to start drawing him back into your back-and-forth conversation style because you’re never gonna get there.  And believe it or not, those guys will feel more comfortable if you’re talking in a cowboy, construction mode with them, the same way they talk.  They don’t have time to waste, they want to get the point across fast, and by you asking them do they ride bikes and all this kind of stuff, you’re just pissing them off.  You’ve gotta talk just the way they talk.  And it sounds crazy but that’s how it works.

So if you encounter that situation where you can’t communicate with a customer, just listen to how they’re talking and what type of answers they’re giving you and adapt your conversation to that.  That’s the best way to build that rapport quickly.  And, oftentimes, if you do it right, those guys who started off in the transaction where you thought they were real jerks, they end up backslapping and trying to give you a drink on the way out.  They can be your best buddies.  You’ve just gotta break down that wall.

So, man, the retail big money is there.  Find a way to get yourself to that spot.  And if your mind is stuck in $150.00 to $300.00 as the maximum you can get for a PDR repair, you can’t fathom getting a $1,200.00 repair from a customer, work your way up there.  You don’t have to go straight from $150.00 to $1,200.00.  Push the limits.  And we’ve talked about this on the show a lot before but it bears repeating.  Whatever number that you have in your personal life that feels like a lot of money, I bet if you look back over your repairs all of them are gonna be below that or at that number because that’s your threshold and you just bleed that over onto your customers or your prospects.

If you think $500.00 is a lot of money to lay out on the table in cash and give to somebody, it’s gonna be really hard for you to sell that repair to someone else for $700.00 or $800.00 because you’re cringing as you say it.  So you’ve gotta break through those barriers.  I’m sure, Lane, you had that living in your wholesale world.

Lane Minor:    Oh man, I used to price – when I did not avoid retail and it was actually something that was easy to fix and I would price it like a drunken frat boy in Panama City just to get the job.  But that’s come up quite a bit.  Just a few months ago, I think $400.00 seemed to be my magical number that I was too scared to price above.  But you just, like you’re saying, you just keep inching up and then eventually you throw it out there.  That’s not the first one I’ve thrown out there but that was the first one that had come back and I’m looking forward to many more.
Keith Cosentino:    $400.00 was my figure for a long time, too, right in the mid-$400.00s.

Shane Jacks:    $400.00 – I’m not gonna lie.  $400.00 is still a figure that really resides in my mind.  I mean, there are some repairs that I still sell at around $400.00 that I could probably get more for because that number does still hurt me.  I don’t mind telling you that.  Now, there are several times when I do go above that.  The bedside I mentioned a few minutes ago that I absolutely murdered for two and a half hours.  But it is a number that hurts me personally so I still do it.  I don’t mind telling you.  Keith and I, we’re still working through this stuff too.  Right, Keith?

Keith Cosentino:    Yeah.  All the time.

Shane Jacks:    I mean, we’re still learning all the freaking time.  I think myself more than Keith.

Keith Cosentino:    I haven’t done a $2,000.00 door ding yet.  I’m baby-stepping.

Shane Jacks:    A good example:  Keith did a hail repair estimate a couple weeks ago where he learned a few things and got a few hundred more dollars than he would have before.

Keith Cosentino:    That’s a great point.

Shane Jacks:    And that was just recently.  That was just two weeks ago.

Keith Cosentino:    Yes, it was.  And I’m glad you brought that up, Shane, because I say this a million times.  Everybody knows.  We don’t get hail here where I live so I know a little bit about fixing hail because the hail that does come to the town, I get a lot of it.  And I have all the high-level tools.  I don’t have a full complement of hail tools but I’ve got just about everything you could possibly need.  And we get these hail cars in and I know how to estimate them but I’m not perfect at it.

So when I get one I usually run it by Shane and he says, you know what, you could get a few hundred more dollars out of the hood or more out of the roof or whatever the particular car is and kind of coaches me up on it.  Every time we’ve had that conversation, I’ve made between $200.00 and $600.00 more dollars on a repair just because of the information that resides in Shane’s mind that’s not in mine.  The same way I helped him get his retail collision stuff up higher, he’s been helping me with my hail.

So we’ve been doing this back-and-forth for a couple of years and that was one of the things that I talked about when Shane and I decided to launch this new networking group.  I said, “Man, there’s so many guys out there with a general knowledge but they’re really, really dialed in in one specialty that I don’t have or that you don’t have.  We need to be in the same room with these guys.”  Because there are guys out there right now that are killing it in the wholesale business.  There’s guys out there that are crushing with retail with a couple locations.  And everybody has something that we can learn from each other and we can all grow together.

So I thought we’ve got to get us all together in the same place.  We need to get a group of these guys together, working together on a regular basis, helping everybody get better.  And that’s the idea behind the Inner Circle Networking Group that we’re launching soon.  Right now, we’re just capturing emails and we’re gonna keep you guys in the loop of how it’s gonna go down.  But basically we’re gonna have a group of people who are functioning at the highest level in PDR.

It’s not for your first-year guys or your just-out-of-training guys that want to be around a bunch of guys that are better.  We love you guys.  Stay on the podcast, you’re gonna learn more.  But we want to talk to guys that are already doing it and already doing well and want to do exceptional.  Guys that have great incomes.  Guys that have employees or not, it doesn’t really matter.  But if you’re out there and you’re already doing well and you want to do better, this is the place for you.

So we’re gonna get together on forum, we’re gonna get together on webinars, we’re gonna get together in person at least once a year to have an event, learn some things from some high-level guys, and get to know each other in person and make some connections.  So we’re calling this group the Inner Circle.  If you’re interested in that, you can hope onto pdrcollege.com, there’s a tab at the top of the page that says “Join the Inner Circle” and you can enter your information.  And then when we get everything solidified, you’ll know about what’s going on with it and you’ll receive an application.

You’ve got to have the proper qualifications to be in this group and it is not going to be free.  It’s gonna be expensive which means if you think it’s expensive, that’s perfect.  You’re not the right guy for it.  We want people who have an income and want to make it even higher.  So if that sounds like something you’re into, make sure you’re on that list on pdrcollege.com.  And I’m really excited to get that thing going.  I know as much as I’m helping guys all over the world, I’m gonna learn as much more if not ten times more than I’ve already given from all you guys out there who are functioning at high levels.  So I’m really excited about that.  Lane, I want to see you on that group too.

Lane Minor:    I am going to log on.  I saw that at the top of the page and I’m going to look into that and send you my email.

Keith Cosentino:    Yeah, I’m excited.  It’s gonna be phenomenal.  There’s nothing out there like that right now.  There’s a lot of things like that in other industries.  Like, for example, one of the GMs at a store that I have done forever – some of you guys that work at car dealers may have heard of this.  But he goes to something he calls a “20 Group” and there’s 20 guys and these are all guys that are at the highest level as owners of GMs of franchise dealers.

And they go to these ritzy locations a couple times a year and they have a meeting and they do some seminars and network with each other.  And they’re all growing because of it.  They’re all sharing their tips and their skills to grow those dealerships.  And this guy wouldn’t leave that group for anything.  It’s high-level networking.  Happens in every other business and now it’s happening in PDR.  So I’m excited about that.

Shane Jacks:    Yeah.  I know Lane – I’ve done some investigating, Lane.  I know Lane likes to hunt.  Is that correct, Lane?

Lane Minor:    That is correct.

Shane Jacks:    And I know Lane likes college football.

Lane Minor:    I love Auburn.  War Eagle.

Shane Jacks:    Yeah.  War Eagle.  How many mascots do you all have?  It’s like 400 different mascots.  But anyway.  I know hunters.  I know fishermen.  I know them well.  I live in the South.  Keith, I don’t even know if you know what a gun is.  But I know hunters and I know fishermen.  And Lane will spend “x” amount of dollars on a new scope that is not going to guarantee him any more kills.  I will spend “x” amount of dollars on a mountain bike that is not going to guarantee that I don’t break my helmet and put a video on YouTube of me going over the handlebars.  We will pay for things to make us a little bit better at hobbies.

Lane Minor:    Exactly.

Shane Jacks:    All we’ve gotta do is invest a little bit of our money into our business that is going to return greatly and that’s what this Inner Circle’s about, man.

Keith Cosentino:    Yeah.  I can’t wait to see what my company looks like after a year of networking with the world’s highest guys.  We’re opening this up to guys all over the world.

Shane Jacks:    I can either join the Inner Circle or get this new Browning shotgun.

Lane Minor:    Choices.

Shane Jacks:    Lane’s gonna opt for the shotgun.

Lane Minor:    I have the shotgun already.

Keith Cosentino:    So at this point in the show we like to talk about tool review.  And I am gonna be talking about the new Black Plague Smooth Series Tabs.  Lane, you do not have these tabs yet.

Lane Minor:    I do not have those tabs and I am –

Shane Jacks:    I do.

Lane Minor:    Awesome.  I’m not a dent Olympic winner but I’m training to be.

Keith Cosentino:    Are you gonna bring it this year?

Lane Minor:    Well, I’m listening to Rocky music in a wife-beater every afternoon working on dents, training up.  Maybe, maybe not.

Shane Jacks:    The wife-beater gives you full freedom of movement so that’s a plus, man.

Lane Minor:    Exactly.
Keith Cosentino:    Am I remembering it right that you did your dent with a wife-beater and Oakley’s?  And a mullet if you could have got it?  A skullet at this point.

Shane Jacks:    Are you talking about me?

Keith Cosentino:    Yeah.

Shane Jacks:    Dude, I couldn’t grow a skullet if I – I couldn’t grow a mullet if I had to.  I skullet?  Maybe.  Maybe.

Keith Cosentino:    Hey, if you guys haven’t been to our website, by the way, we’ve redesigned it recently and we’ve got some cool little caricatures of us at the top that we think are pretty awesome.  And more importantly, much easier to navigate website.  Easier to find the shows.  Easier to play them.  Much, much better and it’s gonna continue to get even more user-friendly.  So if you haven’t checked that out, bop on over there and just check it out and tell us what you think of it.

And at the end of the show, we want to hear your comments about your retail business, your big repairs, what you do to get them.  We want to hear all about your retail business and the best comment will receive a set of the new Black Plague Smooth Series Tabs before you can buy them.  So we’re gonna announce the winner on the next show but after this one, leave your comments on this episode and enter to win.  So which tabs are you using the most out of that set, Shane?

Shane Jacks:    Why did you have to ask me that?  Okay.

Keith Cosentino:    See if you know which ones they are.

Shane Jacks:    Here is my answer: the little one and the littler one.

Keith Cosentino:    I’m glad you said it like that because in the world of tabs, that’s how we talk about them, right?  Like, Lane, what’s your favorite Keco size?

Lane Minor:        Dime and nickel.

Keith Cosentino:    Okay, but you can’t buy a dime or nickel tab.  That’s not what they’re called, right?  We’re just saying they’re about that size.  And that’s the same for me.  So on the shaft of every Black Plague Smooth Series Tab, there is a model number which is a BP and then a size in millimeters.  And that’s for the rectangle tabs and the round tabs.  So the two smallest are BP9 millimeter and a BP12 millimeter, Shane.  And it’s not that prominent.  If you’re just holding the tab in kind of low lighting, you won’t see it.  But if you look on the shaft and kind of turn it in the light, you can see there’s a little size on there.

So the 9 millimeter is really small.  The head of it is just a little bit larger than the shaft itself.  And the 12 millimeter is similar to the smallest Atlas Tab, I believe.  But much different design.  The face of them are completely flat and smooth.  Hence the name, Smooth Series.  And what they’re doing by being flat and smooth is giving a nice, smooth, clean surface to glue to.  All these little pits and crevices that say the name of the tool company or look like a golf ball or have a checkerboard, all that’s doing is inviting dirt and air between the glue and the tab, the two things that you don’t want for a nice pull.

You want them clean and you want glue in there.  And you want a very thin layer of glue for glue to do its job.  If you hold a glue stick by itself, it’s a thick piece of rubber.  It has stretch to it.  It’s not solid.  You can wobble it around.  By itself, it doesn’t have any good properties.  It’s just the fact that it’s a glue and it sticks things together.  It can do that with a very thin layer.  You don’t need a lot of glue between the tab and the dent.  So with this nice smooth face, you’re squeezing out just a thin layer of glue and that’s all you need.

Less is more when it comes to glue unless you’re trying to do something silly like just barely pull something or do some kind of high-level manipulation.  But for the purpose of getting the tab to stick to the panel well, a nice, thin layer is performing twice as good as a little blob of glue kind of stuck down underneath the tab.  And that’s what a lot of these pitted and ribbed surfaces are doing.  They’re inviting extra glue and extra contaminants between the seal.

Shane Jacks:    And extra sponginess with that.

Keith Cosentino:    Right.

Shane Jacks:    And we won’t go in-depth on that but that is counterproductive in most cases that we are gonna use it.  And, Keith, as far as these tabs, one part – I know, Lane, you had a pretty big hail storm a couple years ago, correct?  In your area?

Lane Minor:    Yes.  Yes.

Shane Jacks:    And Lane made like $8 million off of that storm.

Lane Minor:    I made good money.

Shane Jacks:    But with hail, a lot of times there’s a lot of rail work, a ton of inaccessible area that you’re gonna be using glue.  And one thing that we have a problem with when we’re doing hail, repairing hail, is getting those little pits up.  That last little pit.  Or if the hail is sharp, even getting it started when it’s deep in the center like that.  These new tabs that Keith has out, just like the original Black Plague Crease Tabs when you first sent those to me, Keith, the prototype – I know I’ve told you this a few times.

I looked at it, “What the heck is this going to do?”  And Keith was like, “Now, tell me the truth.”  And I’m like, well, I’m gonna tell you the truth.  That’s what our entire relationship at the time, and still is, was based on was telling each other the brutal, honest truth.  So I’m like, “Oh, I’m gonna tell you the truth what this piece of junk is not going to do.”  So then I use it with the slide hammer the first time and it didn’t work like I wanted it to.  It worked better than I thought.  And he goes, “No, no, no.  You’ve gotta use the mini-lifter.”

And again I’m like – he’s just making excuses for why these things suck.  I used a min-lifter and I pulled that insanely tight crease out of a Dodge Caravan, burgundy – I mean, and I don’t remember.  We work on a lot of cars.  So I don’t remember every car I work on but this was a freaking “aha” moment when this thing pulled this crease out.  And I called Keith excited.  And then the tables were a little bit turned.  Keith was like, “Man, are you just saying that?”  And I’m like, dude, I just told you they were worth nothing two days ago and now I’m telling you –

Keith Cosentino:    I was just expecting him to beat me up.

Shane Jacks:    Yeah.  But then he sent me these things and, again, these were prototypes a while back.  You all can be jealous that Keith sends me stuff.  I really don’t care.  He sends me these prototypes and I’m holding them in my hand and I’m like, “What are these things gonna do?”  But those two smaller ones, especially the two smaller ones – I use the bigger ones some but I’m a small tab kind of guy now unless it’s a crease tab.  But anyway, I start using those tiny tabs.

And I had three other guys working in the shop with me at this time.  We were doing hail damage.  And one of them, he looks over at me and he goes, “Holy crap, did you hear that snap?”  Because he was using the mini-lifter on Keith’s new, I believe it was the 12 millimeter that he was using.  And I said, “Yeah.  How did it pull?”  Because even with a snap, you’re thinking it can pull the edges and make a volcano.  Not the case.  Not at all.  Dude, these things pull magnificently.  And I don’t care if you all think Keith’s paying me or whatever because he’s my buddy.  I’ll say this.  I’m just telling you they’re awesome.  All right?  So there.  There’s five free minutes from me.

Keith Cosentino:    I’ll pay you when the show’s over.  I’ll send you a Paypal.  You already got the dang free tabs, now you want money too.  But they do, they give you that pop.  And even the Crease Tabs, they give you that nice pop that you want.  And it’s popping because it’s pulling up until the last second and then it’s just giving up.  It’s not giving you that spongy rip-off that doesn’t do anything.  You’re just, crap.  Clean it off.  What did I do wrong?  Something’s not clean, I didn’t let it sit long enough or too long.

And so far, I’ve let them sit for a while and I haven’t run into the issue where they’re sitting too long and the glue’s getting brittle and they’re coming off easy.  Normally, a small tab, you’ve got to pull it real fast.  You know?  Because there’s not a lot of glue there.  And there’s especially not a glue here on these things.  But what I’m finding is if it’s glued down right, which is a very thin layer of glue, and you put a little bit of pressure when you apply the tab, if it’s downright you can leave it for a while and yank it.

I did a video that I’m in the process of editing and I’m gonna put it up and send a link out to everybody who’s on our Black Plague mailing list.  But I was testing them on that same hail damage we were just talking about.  It was an aluminum deck lid I was working on for the video.  And I set, I don’t know, 25 or 30 tabs out which I never do.  I set four or five tabs at a time maximum.  But I set tons of tabs out, almost all the tabs I had.  And went and pulled every single one of them and the very last one pulled just as good as the very first one.
So I’m having a lot of fun with those little tabs.  The Crease Tabs are working fantastic as well.  They’re in sizes that are similar to some tabs that we have now and there’s some sizes that we don’t have in any other tabs now.  So Black Plague Smooth Series Tabs are coming out very, very soon.  In fact, I’m going to the manufacturers tomorrow just to put the final stamp of approval on everything and we’re gonna start cranking these things out.

So if you want to be the first ones to get a chance to buy them, make sure you’re on the mailing list for Black Plague or PDR College.  We’re gonna send an email out with a link when they’re available to everyone there first before they can get them at any tool company or anything like that.  I’m enjoying them.  I’m sure you think I’m biased because I created them but these are the only tabs I’m using now and these are the only tabs my guys are using.

And I want them to make money so I say, listen, use whatever you want but take these.  Try to break them is what I tell them because I want to know if they’re gonna fail.  I say try to break them.  Tell me where they’re gonna fail so I can go back and reengineer them if I need to.  And they keep coming back and saying dude, that’s all I’m using now.  That’s fantastic.  Coupled with the new glues that are out.  Pink Bubblegum which we’ve got on the Black Plague site now so my guys are using that.

And there’s a Cactus Green glue that’s not necessarily new but that stuff pulls amazing.  Both of them.  I personally am using more of the Green than the Pink right now but, man, that stuff sticks like crazy.  And I’ve been a Walmart Clear guy forever and ever and ever.  And occasionally I’d use Dent Out Red when the temperatures were up but for the hot stuff, I think Green might be my new favorite.

Shane Jacks:    I haven’t used the Green yet.  The Pink is stupid good.

Keith Cosentino:    Both of them are fantastic.  So if you guys want to try any of that, we’ve got it on the site.  And as a bonus, the guys who’ve been buying tabs, the Black Plague Tabs, for the last week or so, I’ve been throwing a free sample of Pink and Green in there.  So if you want to try a sample for free, that’s a good way to do it.  All right.  Lane, I want to thank you for coming on the show with us.  Sorry that you could not be a part of our Black Plague Smooth Series party here but soon enough you will have your own set.

Lane Minor:    That I will.  I appreciate the opportunity to come on.

Shane Jacks:    Thanks, Lane.  We do appreciate it.

Keith Cosentino:    It’s been really inspiring for Shane and I to hear all the stories from everybody around the world getting their retail money up.  And Lane’s one of them.  We’ve really enjoyed hearing his story and we want to hear yours too.  We want to hear about how you’re getting your retail money up.  What are some of the things that you do that I didn’t talk about?  Or what are some of the stories about the stuff that you did that I did talk about?  Put them in the comments and get a chance to win yourself some new tabs.  All right fellas.  Until next time.

Shane Jacks:    Get better.

[End of Audio]

Duration: 70 minutes