Also, Shane reveals the exact tool he used to WIN the Dent Olympics and where YOU can get it!
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:
Keith Cosentino: I’m Keith Cosentino, he’s Shane Jacks, and this is the PDR College podcast where we are going to share with you the tips, tricks, techniques, and jedi-skills that are going to make you more money in the paintless dent removal business. We’re gonna talk about tools, we’re gonna talk about techniques, but we are gonna spend most of our time talking about the business. Shane, tell these boys why we’re gonna talk so much about the business.
Shane Jacks: Because money is the world’s best deodorant and I’m a stinky, stinky man.
Keith Cosentino: It does. Someone was telling me the other day, “It sure doesn’t buy happiness, but it can make women love you.”
Shane Jacks: And you walk away scratching your head after that statement. What?
Keith Cosentino: It’s true though; it is true.
Shane Jacks: Yes, it is.
Keith Cosentino: Money will allow people to look past many of your faults.
Shane Jacks: Yes, it will. Yes, it will.
Keith Cosentino: Shoot, I’ve heard even people in Temecula could get married with enough money.
Shane Jacks: Really?
Keith Cosentino: Yeah.
Shane Jacks: I thought that was avocado.
Keith Cosentino: Maybe. It could be. They’re both –
Shane Jacks: It’s kind of one in the same though.
Keith Cosentino: Yeah, you can use avocados for money.
Shane Jacks: Right. It is currency. So, I guess what we should have said is currency is the world’s best deodorant.
Keith Cosentino: Is avocado a –
Shane Jacks: Oh, avocado in Temecula is the best deodorant.
Keith Cosentino: Oh my gosh. That’s ridiculous but so is Temecula. We’re gonna do that food drive pretty soon for those guys.
Shane Jacks: Are we?
Keith Cosentino: Yeah. I just feel so bad for them. We had a few weeks ago, we talked about, they’re eating all the leather out of their ANGs. I got the update on that. They’ve eaten it all out now and they’re starting to eat the foam and they’re getting sick.
Shane Jacks: No way.
Keith Cosentino: Yeah. It’s kind of tragic.
Shane Jacks: It is.
Keith Cosentino: But actually, they’re starting to really find an angle to it. They’re making insurance claims and calling it rodent damage, so they’re coming out on top.
Shane Jacks: They always do in Temecula.
Keith Cosentino: Yeah, the insurance company allows them to take a picture and then you can make a claim –
Shane Jacks: And they will straight up give you an estimate right off of that claim. They will tell you, “Yes, I could tell that interior was worth $8,000.00.”
Keith Cosentino: What are we talking about tonight? We’re talking about setting goals.
Shane Jacks: Setting goals.
Keith Cosentino: It’s a big deal. It’s a really big deal. You cannot hit a goal that you cannot see. If you haven’t actually set a goal, you’re just floating along through life, hoping that the stars align, and you get to this magical place that you want to get to. But if you’ve never actually put it down on paper and thought about, “Why do I want to have this goal? What will it look like if I achieve this goal? How will my life be different?” Then you’re just leaving it up to chance.
Shane Jacks: Yeah. You’re not – If you don’t know where you’re going – well, that’s not exactly what you’re saying.
Keith Cosentino: No, that’s exactly what I’m saying. If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re never going to get there. If you don’t know, “I wanna make X this year for” – you know what, for me it’s always about money. I recognize that for some people it’s not, and in a weird way I look up to some of my friends who it’s not all about money, it’s all about their lifestyle. I can’t really relate, but part of me thinks that’s cool because I bet they’re happier, honestly. But they wanna work just a little bit, so for them, their goal is, “How can I be as profitable as I can in just this small amount of time, so that I can golf, or fish, or ride motorcycles, or whatever.”
Most of those guys seem to be single; I don’t know why. Somehow they’re happy with that and that’s their goal, to be able to earn enough in a short enough period of time, so it’s different. For me, I wanna stack money up so high that I can’t even see Temecula from my house, and for that to happen I gotta set some goals and figure out, “How am I gonna earn this money? And when is it gonna happen? How am I going to achieve it?”
Shane Jacks: That stacks gonna have to be really high for you to not see the effects of Temecula. The smog, the smoke, the general melees, wafting into the atmosphere.
Keith Cosentino: It’s so bad, man. I haven’t slept for a couple of days, worrying about those guys.
Shane Jacks: I have. Pretty well, actually.
Keith Cosentino: With your pillowcase stuffed full of benjis.
Shane Jacks: Full of benjis. But Keith, go on, to what you just said. You couldn’t relate to the guys that it’s about making a minimal – well, not a minimal amount of money, but an amount of money that is enough to afford them their lifestyle, but they only want –
Keith Cosentino: Yeah, the lifestyle’s the goal and the money is secondary.
Shane Jacks: Right. I’m between the two a lot of times.
Keith Cosentino: A lot of us think we are. We think we’re more like that guy than we really are.
Shane Jacks: Let me rephrase that. I want to be further on that side. I work way too much to be on that side, but I do envy – you said you really can’t relate. I do. I envy the time. But that’s why I’m doing this. Maybe there will be a day when I’ll have a little bit of time. I’m probably too much of a workaholic, so I’d be doing the stuff I love, thinking about working.
Keith Cosentino: You know what, when I’m doing the stuff I like, I really don’t think about – well, shit, not true. I think about the company. That’s not true. I was gonna say, when I’m on my bike or when I’m in the gym, I’m thinking about the gym, but – For jujitsu, that’s true because if somebody’s trying to choke me out, that’s all I’m thinking about for that moment, but on the bike, I’m thinking about marketing strategies and stuff like that. It’s a sickness but I enjoy it.
Shane Jacks: Yeah. How to not strangle the next costumer that sends you a picture of his van.
Keith Cosentino: You know what, you say that, and there’s a lot of people that do really get frustrated with their customers and I almost –
Shane Jacks: I do, at times.
Keith Cosentino: I know but I almost never do. The only time I really get frustrated with my customers is when there’s a communication barrier. Language, usually. English is not their first language. And I just can’t convey the things I wanna convey. They can’t understand me; I can’t understand them.
That’s when I get frustrated. When my tools are taken from me. My communication tools. I have nothing else to do, I’m going in circles, and I get frustrated. Anybody else, I don’t really get frustrated. Even by customers that are kind of jerky to me. I kind of look at it as a little – like a challenge. Can I turn this guy around? Or can I get to the bottom of why he’s acting like a jerk. Is he just a jerk or is he trying to set me up?
Some of my best lessons about dealing with people have come when guys have just, on the phone or in a negotiation, have just handled me. I walk away going, “Dang. That dude is good. He knew exactly what to say and how to say it and I just went right down the path he set out for me.”
And I learned a lot from guys like that. I don’t remember if we talked about this before but I think I did – talking about discounts? How to get a discount for something? Did we talk about that?
Shane Jacks: Yes, I believe we did.
Keith Cosentino: Yeah. Asking for a specific discount. I think we talked about it. That was one of my best lessons, man, and it’s so powerful when someone does it to you. You just crumble. There’s nothing you can do. It’s like a jedi-mind trick. Some guy did this to me the other day and he – I have a rule when someone counters me. For example I bid a car at $450.00 for the repair and somebody says, “We do it for $400.00.” Well, you know that there’s no difference. That $50 makes really no difference. They just want to get a little bit of a deal.
So, you always counter and you meet them in the middle because otherwise you’re just leaving the $25.00 on the table. All they want to know is they got a little deal so you can keep $25.00 that you were gonna give away by saying, “I tell you what. I’ll meet you in the middle,” and they go, “Okay, sounds good.” All they wanted was a little ground. But this guy was like a ten time over repeat customer for me, and I was just off my game for a little bit, and he said, “Would you do it for $400?” And I said, “Yeah, you got it. I’ll do it.”
Then I thought, “Man. He’s so nice.” He was giving me ten compliments before, really setting me up. How it’s good to see me, he’s missed me. We got to negotiating – side note, he’s a high level corporate sales guy. That’s what he does for a living so he’s no stranger to negotiations. It reminded me that I was off my game a little bit and leaving money on the table. I’m off on a tangent. Goal setting.
Big deal for me. Super, big deal for me. That’s how I really started to creep my numbers up from what I would consider average to what I would consider above average. You remember when you started setting goals for yourself? Relative to PDR?
Shane Jacks: Relative to PDR? Three weeks ago. No, I honestly don’t remember. I think they were more of necessity. Honestly, I think the first time I really started setting goals, truly setting goals, was during hail. Being at the plant and working part time, there wasn’t a set goal, day wise or week wise; because it depended on what time I was leaving the plant. Overtime. There, it wasn’t something where I could actually truly set a goal for a week. I guess I could, but it wasn’t –
Keith Cosentino: It would have just been an internal goal, not performance related.
Shane Jacks: Right, but there were some hailstorms that happened during that time that I did the work at my house or at the body shops after work, or on Saturday, Sundays, whatever. That’s when I started. This is the amount that I want to make today or this week, or whatever, on this hail, while I was still working at the plant. So, I guess that would be technically the first time I was really setting goals as far as amounts made and PDR. Set goals before that, goals as far as training, not monetary goals. Goals, being able to repair certain types of damage.
Keith Cosentino: So, when I first started setting goals was early in my career, when I was like 90 percent wholesale. When I had just gotten trained in the business and I was learning it. I didn’t really know much about the entire market as a whole, but I knew what I was trained, and we did tons of dealer work.
I had kind of walked into a pretty established dealer route that the company that trained me had, so I was able to make good contacts within these accounts and I was their guy. So, there wasn’t a lot of negotiating for each fridge day. It was working. They just wanted me to show up, fix the cars that needed fixing. So it was almost like a blank check. It was, “how much work can you get done is what you’re going to make today.”
This was kind of a unique situation, I guess. But I remember thinking, “Okay. This is kind of like a fun game. I get X amount per car, I wanna make X by the end of the day. I have six and a half hours to do so; I need to do a car every 19 minutes.” Or whatever it was. And my phones weren’t real busy at that time. Like I said, it was mostly wholesale.
So, to me, it was fun. It was a game where I get money at the end. It was like poker, to some guys, which I don’t gamble, but I was like, “If I win this game, I make extra money at the end of the day. This is fun.” So, I’d set my timer or my stopwatch – this is before iPhones, I had a phone with a hinge on it – and set an actual stopwatch for myself and see if I can get through these cars in 19 minutes.
Most of the time I was successful, and once you get to that point, you think, “Okay, I did 18 cars today. Can I do 20? Can I do 21? Can I do 25? Can I do 30 cars?” And that’s when I really started discovering how far I could push myself, once I realized that I could accomplish these basic goals.
So, that kind of mindset never left me. And I don’t do as much wholesale work, I do almost – well, not none, but maybe 20 percent of my work now is wholesale. Just from accounts that I don’t wanna let go because I like the guys. They’re like my buddies, the managers.
So, now, that same mindset carries over to retail and you’ve gotta set your goals a little differently because it’s not an open check, like the wholesale accounts are, but you still can determine what you need to make per day, if you have X amount of jobs lined up, what they look like basically.
And you need to know, “Okay, I need to somehow scare up another $100.00 on each of these four jobs and I need to find a way to do it.” But if you didn’t set that goal, you’d just be going through, doing the work that’s in front of you, and not making any effort to upsell, any effort to squeeze another job in the middle or at the end of the day. Anything like that.
Shane Jacks: Any effort to adjust your dealings to reach that goal.
Keith Cosentino: Right.
Shane Jacks: No adjustments can be made if you don’t know what you’re adjusting to.
Keith Cosentino: One of my techs has just dove-in, head first, to drinking my Kool-Aid, and he sets himself a goal. He’ll say, “Well, I have one job left and I need $350 to reach my goal today.” Nowhere does he bring up what this job is. It doesn’t matter to him. He knows this is what he needs. $350.00. And I swear, seven or eight times out of ten, he hits that goal. It doesn’t matter to him what car it is, he’s gonna find a way to make that goal happen. He’s so freaking cool. I love him.
Shane Jacks: That’s awesome. That is awesome. It’s something that Keith and I actually talked about, this one, before we went on air. We’ve got two – half the time when we come on these things we are cold. We have no idea what the other guy’s gonna say. Which is pretty cold.
Keith Cosentino: Wait. Cold, like you’re in Temecula and you can’t pay your heat bill?
Shane Jacks: Not that cold, dude. That’s like zombie-dead cold.
Keith Cosentino: Ice cold.
Shane Jacks: Yeah. So, we come into it cold, but this time I’m not letting you get too far off on the tangents tonight. This time – well, that may be a lie. We’ll see later at the end of the show. We can let you guys judge. We can let you judge if Keith and I stayed on target. But anyway, we normally come to these things cold.
This time, Keith and I, we discussed this briefly at the beginning, what we were gonna talk about, and his goal setting is a little different than mine. Mine is more of a philosophical type thing. So, I’m gonna hit a couple of those first, Keith, if you don’t mind.
Keith Cosentino: No, hit them.
Shane Jacks: First off, I believe you need – when you’re setting goals, yeah, you can set daily goals, that’s great, but before you do that, you need to set life goals. Where do you want to be in 20 years?
Keith Cosentino: You’re absolutely right. I kind of came at it from the wrong end but you’re absolutely right because these little goals are what – you determine what these little goals are by what your big goals are. You don’t know your daily goal until you know your weekly goal. You don’t know your weekly goal until you know your monthly goal. Monthly, yearly, yearly and five years, and ten years. Exactly right. Elaborate for me.
Shane Jacks: Right. So, where do you wanna be when you retire? Okay, I guess that would be the – you don’t wanna say when you die because you wanna, in my opinion, I wanna be dead broke the day I die, but just getting to that point so my descendants can’t ruin it. All my money for me. That was a joke. I wanna leave something to my kids.
But where do you wanna be when you retire? And that’s gonna back you up to where you wanna be in ten years, or where you wanna be in 20 years, or 5 years? And just keep stepping it down like Keith eluded to, just a few moments ago, because without knowing that big goal and stepping it back, how do you know where you’re gonna go?
So, you gotta set those goals. Long-term goals, so you can back them down to shorter-term, shorter-term, shorter-term, until you come down to the daily goals, hourly goals, minutely goals which is getting too minute, but –
Keith Cosentino: Well, no. A minute, yes, but an hour is a legit goal.
Shane Jacks: An hour is fine. That’s a legitimate goal. Yes, it is. We also have goals for right now.
Keith Cosentino: How do you think I stopped eating lunch, homie?
Shane Jacks: You’re right. That’s one hour. And getting up one hour earlier instead of 9:00 a.m., making it 8:00 a.m. But what are your goals now? If your goals now – if your goals in twenty years –
Keith Cosentino: By the way, I just feel like I have to be honest here, if you saw me, there is no way you would think I skipped lunch. I do not look like a guy who skips lunches. I look more like a hail tech than anything else.
Shane Jacks: At this point, I’m using the southern wisdom, “If you don’t have something nice to say about somebody, don’t say anything at all.”
Keith Cosentino: It’s not true though. I don’t look – I’m not that fat.
Shane Jacks: No. You’re not fat at all. P-H-A-T, phat. Not F-A-T.
Keith Cosentino: Word.
Shane Jacks: Word. So, anyway. You’re 20-year goals. If you’re 20-year goals are to have $8 million in the bank, and you’re goals right now are to go fishing six hours a day, something has to give. One of those two have to give, and you’re gonna have to figure out what you want out of life. Long-term, short-term. Temper those goals, figure out where you wanna be, and go for it after that. All right? So, you’ve got to have those long-term goals before you can set the short-term.
Keith Cosentino: Let me tell you this though, I’ve been doing dent removal, basically my whole adult-life, so my life status has changed, all throughout my career. So it’s okay to shift your goals as your life changes. My goals when I started were much different than my goals now. I didn’t have a wife or kids.
Now, I have a wife and almost four kids, so my goals are way different now than they were and it’s okay to shift, change it up, and get back after it. It’s totally cool. But you have to have something, realize it’s off a little bit, reassess, and set new goals, and get after those. And you’re still on the right track. It may not be the same end place but you’re still going somewhere.
Shane Jacks: You’re right, Keith. You took my third point away from me but that’s okay. I’ll get you back later. Why goals? Why do you say goals? We kind of already went over this. You never start a journey when there’s no end in sight.
If you’re gonna start a journey, if you’re gonna go out of the door in the morning, get in your truck, load your tools up, and head down your driveway, if you don’t know what your goal is for the day, I guarantee you, you’re not gonna hit it. You can’t hit what you can’t see.
Keith Cosentino: You can’t. No, you can’t.
Shane Jacks: Goals clearly define a path. If your goal is $1,000.00 in a day, it’ll clearly define a path. Well, what I’ve got to do with these six jobs that I have today to get to that $1,000.00. If it doesn’t clearly define a path, if you have zero jobs there that day, zero jobs set up that day, well, you’re gonna have to figure out a path to get there. So, it either clearly defines the path or it makes you define the path yourself.
Keith Cosentino: Let me just break your concentration for a second. I want you guys listening to think about what you do, day in and day out, and how you make yourself aware of your numbers. Chances are, you run your day like most other guys. You do all the work you need to do, and at the end of the day, or a week, or a month, you do some calculations and find out what you did, after the fact.
This is the absolute wrong way to be most productive. You’re just running at the mercy of the tides as the business comes in or doesn’t come in. You’re doing it all. You can convince yourself into thinking that you’re doing all you can do because you’ve done everything that’s come your way. And you worked hard and you did a good job and everybody was happy, and this is your score at the end.
To me, that’s what the numbers are – they’re scores. So, you look at the scores and you think, “Oh.” And sometimes – I know, I’m in your heads right now. I’m in your heads because I do the same thing you guys do everyday. You look at that score and you go, “Oh.” That’s either, “Not as good as I thought it was,” or, “Whoa! That’s better than I thought it was.” If you ever had that realization, you’re doing it wrong.
You’re doing it wrong because you’re just letting the universe give you whatever’s hanging out there, instead of going out, and grabbing what’s yours, and bringing it home. Kill something and drag it home.
So, when you know what you want or need to make – let’s just call it what you wanna make – you know what you wanna make, and you break that down to a daily number, now you’ve got something you’re shooting for and you hit it. And everyday you do or don’t hit it, you know where you are in relation to that end of the month.
For example, if my goal is $1,100.00 in a day, day one I do $1,105.00, day two I do $1,000.00. I’m now a $100.00 under where I’m supposed to be. I will recalculate the remainder of my month and my new goal is $1,110.00, or whatever the difference to get me back where I need to be. And if I go over, I do not do the calculation to bring my number back down. I just recalculate it if I’m under, to make up that deficiency that I left.
I’m always grinding at that number and that’s why I hit them because I know what they are. And if you guys do this, if you take some pen and paper and figure out what you think you wanna make and write these goals down, you’re gonna be amazed at the power that you have to make these things a reality. It’s like magic. It sounds kind of, “woo, woo,” kind of touchy feely, but it’s the truth. If you know what you’re after, you’re gonna get it. We can break down some numbers [inaudible] [00:23:21] day because that’s kind of fun to me. If you want to.
Shane Jacks: Going with that Keith, you hit on something that I wanted to relay. Make clear goals. Don’t make vague goals. And I think everybody can pick up on that by what we’ve said so far. The goals have to be clear. They can’t be – if your goal is to make more money, well, yeah.
You may do that but you’re gonna go out with the same mindset you did yesterday. I’m gonna go do as many cars as I possibly can, as much of this as I possibly can, and you’re not – without that clearly defined goal, with vague goals in mind, again, you’re not gonna hit them because you can’t see them. They’re not there.
Keith Cosentino: Right. They don’t exist.
Shane Jacks: So you’re not gonna hit them. So, make them – and here is where Keith and I, when we spoke before – make achievable goals. Goals that you can hit. Make – how am I trying to explain this here?
Keith Cosentino: I know exactly what you’re trying to say. Here’s what you’re trying to say. You’re not gonna go from $100.00 a day to $5,000.00 a day. That’s unrealistic. No matter how hard you try to hit that goal, it’s not gonna happen. That’s not realistic. So you gotta go from 1 to 4, or whatever you think is just barely achievable. That number that you say is, “Whew, I’ve done it once or twice, but that’s a really tough number to get.”
If you’re having a hard time believing it in your heart then set it for a number that you think you can win. If it’s $500.00 a day, if you think, “Yeah, that’s a number I could do. I don’t always do it but I know I do it often and I know I can do it.” Set it for that and start tracking your numbers. And then once you realize that you can start knocking that down much, much easier than you thought, once you set it, now is the time when you really gotta start pushing yourself.
And I kind of look at this like working out in a gym, Shane. If you’ve spent any time in your life working out in the gym, once you get in shape, you can really push yourself hard. But then if you fall away and you stop working out for a while, and you decide to make a comeback – you’re now a big soggy mess – and you come back to the gym but your mind still has the mindset you had when you used to push it really hard.
If you engage that mindset in the first week, you’re gonna blow something up in your body. You’re gonna be busted because you don’t have that baseline fitness to handle that intensity level of training. Right?
Shane Jacks: Oh, yeah. I can relate to this real good.
Keith Cosentino: Yeah, I think a lot of us can. So, when you set those goals, you’ve gotta set these baseline goals to kind of establish, “Okay. This is where I can be; I know I can get here. This is pretty easy or just a little hard.” Now it’s time to hit it hard and say, “Okay. I’m gonna set a freaking outrageous goal next month. It’s a big working month.”
As a side note, how many of you guys know how many working days are in a month? Each month is different. I hope you knew that. I hope you know that there’s four point three weeks in a month and not four. It’s a numbers game. You gotta know these numbers. And I hope I’m saying stuff that you guys are all saying, “Yeah, duh,” but I know some of you are going, “Four point three?”
You gotta know how many days are in a month. And once you start hitting these basic goals, now you can just start pouring the coals to it and say, “Okay, I’m gonna set this crazy goal and I’m gonna do some math before the month starts and know this is the number I need to hit everyday. And I’m gonna go out there and go after that number.” And do that calculation all day.
Every time you make another sale, go to your book, and put that in there, and decipher how much either you’re on or off your goal. If you break it all the way down to the hour, it’s powerful. You’re gonna be able to tweak that goal in the middle of the day and know, “Shoot, I’m $50.00 behind or I’m $100.00 behind. When I’m done with these cars, if I couldn’t scare up any extra money, I’m gonna run by the dealer and try to knock out a car or two on my way home.” That’s the power that these goals give you. Sorry I keep going off on tangents and taking you off points.
Shane Jacks: No, that is fine, that’s what this thing’s for Keith. So, make achievable goals, but I wanna temper that a little bit also with this. Make goals also that are, although they are achievable, they might seem to you be a stretch. So, you wanna make them big enough, as Keith said a few minutes ago.
Make them big enough to where you think, “Hmm. That’s doable but, man, I’m not sure I’ve got it in me.” Make it big enough to where it’s – unless you’re one of those people that needs to be able to achieve a goal every single day and hit that. Different people are wired differently and I’m gonna tell you –
Keith Cosentino: Yeah, that’s true.
Shane Jacks: We really are. Some people have to hit their goals or they get discouraged. To those people I say, “Tighten your bootstraps. Suck it up, kid.” Different people are. Maybe you’re one of those people but do it smartly. Do it to where you’re going to get the most out of it.
Me, personally, I rarely hit goals because I change them so often. If, let’s say – and hail is easy to do because oftentimes when you get to a storm you have no idea what your goal is. Zero. Because the work is so different. It could be going from Jackson, Mississippi, last year, up to Minnesota, or to another storm that’s gravy work.
You can make a lot more in a day on the easy lower dollar cars than you can the high dollar cars. Just because they’re beat. It’s hard to make money on beat crap. So, you can go into a storm and have zero idea of what you’re goal is. You can have a baseline and say, “Look, I’m not working for under – I’m not gonna put myself through this if I can’t make this much a day.”
But you can go in thinking, “All right, my baseline is $2,000.00 a day,” and then you get in there and you go, “Ooh – you know what? I could turn $3,000.00 a day, if I work X amount of hours.” You may go into it $2,000.00 a day, maximum of 12 hours or 16 hours, whatever you pick, and then you get there and you go, “You know what, if I work 14 hours – I’m out of town, nobody’s around me, I don’t have any family here, I might as well work. If I can work 14 hours, man –”
Keith Cosentino: I thought you had cousins in Chicken-Lips.
Shane Jacks: I do. They talk like me too. It’s worse than this, actually. They import avocado from Temecula and chicken-lips by sea. They’ve got these big barges and shipping containers. What was I talking about? You’re killing me.
Keith Cosentino: You’re talking about setting goals at a hailstorm site.
Shane Jacks: Hail. There we go. We’re back on target here. You say, “Hey, in 14 hours, you know what? I can do $3,200.00 in 14 hours, I bet.” And this may be after – Maybe $3,000.00. I may not say $3,200.00. So then you work on a few cars, you’ve been there for a week, you’ve hit $3,000.00 everyday. You’ve hit $3,200.00 some days; you’ve hit $3,300.00 one day.
I’m gonna change that goal and I’m gonna make it $3,400.00. And if hit $3,400.00 one time, the next week, I’m gonna change it to $3,500.00. So, I’ll take the goals and set them to where I’m really hitting them. Especially on a hail site, or whatever. And I do the same with my daily stuff but they’re not so unattainable that I’m not gonna strive for them. Like we said earlier.
Keith Cosentino: Right. If you’ve got the mindset that you get depressed if you don’t hit your goals, I want you to just consider this for a second: If you set the goal higher than you think you could make it and you didn’t get quite make it, chances are, I can almost promise you, you made more than you normally do.
So just take a step back and say, “Okay, I didn’t hit my goal. I’m still winning. I made more money than I would have otherwise.” So, now, just do another calculation and put it back in the book and have a new goal.
I look at it like a game. And I know money is deadly serious to people and it’s deadly serious to me, but it is a game when I’m at work because I get to make up the rules, and I get to write down the scores, and I get to win or lose. And I hate losing. Every once in a while we bid a job wrong or something’s not turning out the way we want it to.
Everybody loses sometimes but if you can wrap your mind around the idea that it’s a game, and it’s not life or death, these things are much easier to manipulate. My guys had kind of an issue with the fact that I’m telling them it’s a game, and they’re like, “No, dude. This is deadly serious. This is how I feed my children.”
I said, “I understand that but just look at this numbers part as a game. Try to hit the big numbers. It’s fun to do.” Like I said, my guys are my guys because they drink my Kool-Aid and do what I tell them to do, and everybody’s happier because of it. And now they’re looking at it like a game, and everybody’s having fun and making more money.
Shane Jacks: Very nice. You may have to adapt your goals. We kind of touched on that but just don’t – if you gotta adapt them a little bit, if something happens, if something comes up, don’t kill yourself. Don’t be hurt too bad. You may have to adapt goals because of extenuating circumstances. Adapt your goals, be okay with it, hit it harder the next time. And basically –
Keith Cosentino: Here’s the litmus test. If the day just ended and you don’t know what you made for the day, then you’re not working hard enough on your goal. You should know before the last job how much money you needed, and you should know how much the last job was before you even finished the repair. You should know where that day ended up.
That’s the tracking that I’m talking about. Every job has its place in your goal. They’re all little baby steps for it. And if you’re waiting until the end of the day, two days, three days, a week to figure out, then they’re not goals. They’re just ideas.
Where did I hear this quote? I think it was from some YouTube video or something that somebody sent me. Oh, no, I know where it was. There was a TV show about football players, and how much money they made, and how broke they were after they were playing. And I’m not a huge football guy, so I don’t know all the guys by name, but there was a really charismatic coach, a black guy, and you know sometimes those guys are so good at making a point. It’s fantastic. I wish I had that power of speaking, but he said, “A goal without a plan? Well, that’s a wish.”
And it’s awesome, but he’s totally right. If you have a goal, but you don’t have plan to get there, well, you just have a wish, dude. That’s just a wish. That’s not a goal. You need some steps. So, that’s the litmus test. If you don’t know, as you’re doing them, you’re not paying close enough attention. Do it for a month. I promise, you’ll blow you’re own mind. I promise you. If you know that number and you’re trying to hit it, amazing things happen.
Shane Jacks: Yes, sir. Now, what do you have for us, Keith? What is the wisdom? I am done with the notes that I have now. I’m just going to interject on the wisdom of Keith that about to float forth, from Nor Cal.
Keith Cosentino: I will bring it forth.
Shane Jacks: Bring it, brother.
Keith Cosentino: What wisdom are we talking about?
Shane Jacks: Goals.
Keith Cosentino: So, I was sharing with you – I listen to a lot of books on goals, and selling, and stuff like that, like we’ve alluded to earlier, and I always like to quote Zig Ziglar because he’s my man. I was sharing this story with you, Shane, earlier, when we were talking about what our topic was gonna be and – I’m gonna paraphrase this because I don’t remember everything word for word, but Zig is telling this story and he said, “Imagine this fella, here that we’re talking about, is the world’s best archer.
And he can Robin Hood three arrows on top of each other from a 150 yards, or whatever the distance is, and you don’t have any archery experience whatsoever. What if I told you that with ten minutes of instruction by me, I can have you, firing arrows at an even more accurate pace or level, than this champion? Provided I put a blindfold on the champion.”
So, he used that story, which I thought was fun to remember, that you cannot hit a goal that you cannot see. So, until you put that number in your reality, until you say, “This is what I want. This is how I’m going to get it and these are the steps I need to take to get it,” you’re never gonna get there.
And you’re gonna stay stuck on the hamster wheel, wondering why ten years later, you’re still making the same amount of money you made ten years ago. I don’t wonder that because I don’t. Every year it goes up, and up, and up because I’m pushing it. If I hit my personal fitness goals as hard as I hit my work goals, I would not wear a shirt ever. But I don’t.
Shane Jacks: Please, please, please.
Keith Cosentino: I do not hit my fitness goals the way I hit my business goals. I put a lot into my business and frankly, I probably should leave a little more in the tank for my personal well being. When you talk to somebody who’s really fit, they’re following everything they do.
They know how many hours they wanna spend in the gym, they know how many calories or how many grams of protein, carbs, and fats, and sugars they wanna consume. Zero sugars. But they know those numbers. They know the numbers. They’re watching them. Here’s another cool saying, “What gets measured, gets done.” Totally believe in that saying. It is true. So measure your stuff.
In fact, I know there’s a couple of you guys listening that are gonna really take this to heart and make it happen. Please, please come on the website www.PDRCollege.com and leave your story because it’s gonna make me feel awesome that I’m helping you make more money, but more importantly, it’s gonna inspire other guys who heard this.
Maybe they thought it’s a good idea, but they’re gonna read your story, and you’re gonna help some guys improve their position. And I can tell you from experience; it’s the best the feeling. It’s not money, it’s nothing like that, but to know that your words of encouragement helped somebody else better their position; it is the coolest thing ever. And I want to thank all you guys for sharing all those stories with us. It makes us feel so good.
Shane Jacks: Those comments that we get, they come to our email of course, through the email alerts, but, man, reading those comments underneath the link there, that is honestly – when one comes through and I see it and I read it, it is a highlight of my day. It’s so freaking awesome.
Just helping people. Helping all of you all out there. Helping guys make more money, helping guys do things better, helping guys make better decisions. That is so cool. And it’s not the whole, they’re looking up to Keith or I, it’s honestly, I swear, the enlightenment – you can almost hear it in their voice, although they’re typing it. You can almost hear it through the typing what they’re trying to tell us and the excitement in their words is just absolutely awesome sauce.
Keith Cosentino: Yeah, it really is. I wanna bring something up, though, that’s absolutely true. Shane and I are very, very good at what we do, but don’t think for a minute that we’re under some delusions that we are the best in the world. You get good by realizing you don’t know S, and you’re gonna listen to everything somebody has to say to you – doesn’t matter who they are.
And you’re gonna take those nuggets and put them in your sack, and you’re gonna get better, and better, and better. So, we got to this position by being open minded and listening to some dude on a tape, listening to a customer that has a successful business, and always adding that stuff to our arsenal.
So, are we done all of sudden because we have a podcast? No way. I know I’ve got much more area to grow and get even better, but the fact of the matter is where I am now, I have a lot of information to share with a lot of people who haven’t yet gone through the things that I’ve gone through to get to this point.
So, are we really good at what we do? Heck yes. Are we the best in the world? No, probably not, but we’re working to get there, and that’s the difference. I just wanted to let you know my mindset on this whole deal.
Shane Jacks: I’m the same way, Keith. I honestly think that I have touched barely the tip of the iceberg, when it comes to marketing, sales, everything. I honestly – are we doing good? Yeah, but there’s so much more out there.
Keith Cosentino: And that’s how you get good. It’s like when the guys say, “Man, Bill Gates has $30 billion,” or whoever has $5 billion, why are you even working anymore? Because with the mindset that gets you to $5 billion –
Shane Jacks: It’s gonna get you as high as you possibly can –
Keith Cosentino: You don’t just turn it off. So, the idea that, “Oh, yeah, we got really good at this stuff and now we’re done.” You never would have gotten this good if we didn’t have the idea that we’re always trying to get better. I’m always setting these goals to be a little bit better than I was before, and that’s what got us to this point, and that’s what’s gonna continue to carry us forward.
So, we love sharing what we know but don’t think we think we know it all. We’re trying to learn it all and share it with you guys, but there’s always more to learn. Listen to everybody who has something to tell you. You might just crumple it up and throw it in the garbage afterwards, but you might find that little hidden piece of rock cocaine in a piece of garbage and then you get it. Gold. You find a piece of gold, not rock cocaine. They hide it in garbage sometimes. That’s what I heard.
Shane Jacks: Crack cocaine?
Keith Cosentino: Yeah.
Shane Jacks: Yeah. We call it – they call it crack cocaine. Not rock cocaine.
Keith Cosentino: Well, I’m from the 90s. Did you ever see that episode of – oh, what’s the name of that stupid cartoon with Bobby Hill? “Damn it, Bobby.” King of the Hill. Where Hank was buying fishing bait in the alley, black market fishing bait, and the fish were jumping in his boat after it, and he went back to get more and more. Turns out he was buying crack. He’s fishing with crack. It’s awesome.
Shane Jacks: Good stuff.
Keith Cosentino: Well, as usual, it would not be a podcast without a cool tool review, and as a little refresher course for some of you guys, who may or may not know how much of a big deal Mr. Jacks is, he is a Dent Olympic champion.
Beating, I think it was, 70 some odd competitors from all over the globe on a contest of skill, and he did so with a unique style that most guys don’t use. He uses a really sharp tool, and he uses the hammer for the knockdown, and today we’re gonna talk about the tool that enabled Shane to win that contest.
Shane Jacks: It was my superior intellect. That was the tool. No, just kidding.
Keith Cosentino: Which coincidently, when these contests are over, I really think they could do a better job of telling everybody, “This is the lye he used, this is the tool he used, this is everything that went down for the first top three places.” Everybody wants to know that. This guy did an awesome repair, he’s obviously very skilled, but what tools did he use? He didn’t use his fingers. What tools did the best guy use? The winner?
But they just give him the trophy and they let him walk out of the room. And if you go run him down, like I did the first couple of years – I think Simon, from up in Canada, was the winner and I chased him down in the parking lot, and I’m like, “Simon! Simon! What tool– what tools did you use?” And I didn’t even get to see it. I don’t even know – he didn’t tell me what model it was, he was just talking about the tips, but anyways. Tell us Shane, what you used to bring home the gold.
Shane Jacks: What I used was the Ultra Dent tools – www.ultradenttools.com. Is that the correct website, Keith? www.ultradenttools.com?
Keith Cosentino: www.ultradenttools.com. Yes, it is.
Shane Jacks: Okay, www.ultradenttools.com, just making sure. And it is the Item No. 7607 and, Keith, you can translate for the non-southern English-speaking people. 7-6-0-7. Okay. It’s a 28 inch sharp, double bend tool with like a 65 degree bend. It’s two bends.
This tool is – when you see it on the site, it’s a purple handle tool. Sharp tip. Really – Well, not really sharp, but it is a pretty sharp tip on the end. It’s not like a needle or anything but that is the tool that I used to perform the repair on those cars – on that car, that Dent Olympic’s dent. This tool is something that I use constantly.
Keith had another tool that we spoke about earlier that he uses on doors for a good portion of the time. This is the one that I use a lot on doors, going through windows, going through the boot. It has enough bend on it, enough throw, that you can pry against your window guard and push the dent out.
And it also – it’s short enough going through the window at 28 inches. It’s a little long but it’s not terribly long going through the window. It’s short enough to where it’s not in your way and you’re not reaching too far up – monkey arming it is what I call it. I don’t know what you call it, Keith.
Let’s say if you’re not monkey arming it, it’s not that long, but it’s also long enough for good leverage. I absolutely love this tool. Use it ten times a day, maybe. I’m constantly using, constantly going for, and grabbing this thing and using it. Again, I really love these sharp, sharp tip tools, especially on side damage for pinpointing, getting a little bit of stretch out of metal. Good tool. Love this tool and that is the tool that I won the Dent Olympics with.
Keith Cosentino: And it is $90.00.
Shane Jacks: I forgot that part. Thank you, Keith.
Keith Cosentino: Yeah, I’m Ultra’s site. In my opinion that’s pretty cheap. Is it stainless? It doesn’t say it is but it kinda looks like it.
Shane Jacks: Ultra’s tools have a coating on them. Yeah, it’s whatever their coating is and I’ve never had that coating come off, amazingly. I’ve got a few of their tools. Well, six, eight, ten of their tools. Something like that. It’s probably eight to ten of their tools. And they have a coating that not only protects it from corrosion but also makes it pretty slick so it’ll slide in. On this tool it’s not that big of a deal, but on some of the brace tools that slick coating helps you out. Really good tool. 7607.
Keith Cosentino: You know what else is amazing about Ultra Dent tools?
Shane Jacks: What’s that?
Keith Cosentino: You can order some Black Plague tabs there while you’re buying that tool.
Shane Jacks: There you go. I know the guy that makes those.
Keith Cosentino: Black Plague tabs are the best crease tabs you can buy for glue pulling.
Shane Jacks: Period.
Keith Cosentino: Shameless plug but it’s the truth.
Shane Jacks: It’s the truth so it does not matter. The truth is the truth. False humility is lying, Keith.
Keith Cosentino: False humility is lying. That’s too deep for me to even understand. It’s true. All right, Episode 7 is in the books. When have we even been putting these out? On Mondays. Mondays. So, come on back next Monday and we’ll have a new episode up for you guys. I’m not gonna tell you what it is yet but it is exciting.
All right, so you’ve ordered yourself a 7607 from Ultra. You’ve got some Black Plague tabs coming with it, just for good measure, and now you’ve got some goals set for next week, next month, next year. So your current goal, on top of those things, is to listen to the PDR College podcast next week, and every week thereafter to continue to elevate your game and to get better.
One thing I wanna tell you guys to make sure you do – I know a lot of people are listening to the podcast straight from the website, which is totally cool, but if you’re on an Android or an iPhone, it’s a lot easier to get a podcast app and subscribe to the Podcast. That way these fantastic nuggets of priceless information are magically popped into your phone as they are released.
So, you make the settings, as soon you have a Wi-Fi signal they go looking for the new podcast and they download straight to your phone. And then you don’t need a connection. You can just listen to it just like it’s music on your phone. So you don’t have to worry about streaming it, you don’t have to worry about eating up your data. You can just play it from your phone and you can play them over and over again, and there’s no lagging.
So, it’s a much better experience to listen to podcast because I know; I listen to a lot of them and that’s the way I do it. So, if you’re on Apple, get the podcast app and go and search for PDR College and then subscribe to the podcast. Obviously, it’s free. And that’s a fantastic way to listen.
If you’re on Android, you’ve gotta go get a Stitcher Radio or some other – there’s 100 other podcast managing applications. Just do a search for one that’s popular and load that thing on there and search for PDR College. Much, much, much better to listen to like that. If you can still – knock yourself out if you wanna stream it from the site, if you’re on a computer or if you just wanna do it from your phone, but much easier if you go that route.
Shane Jacks: All right, thanks for listening.
Keith Cosentino: Until next time, get better.
[End of Audio]Duration: 52 minutes
