We had a store we bought the end of 2018. It was a first seller finance deal we structured, but manager was like terrible. Texts are like one of them is drinking on the job. We completely clean house. The next year we did 1.8 million. We doubled. We almost doubled the sales. So we put 50 grand in this thing. We made 400 grand the next year.
What's up everyone? This is car dealership guy. You're listening to the car dealership guy podcast, which is my effort to give you access to the most unbiased and transparent insights into the car market. Let's get into today's episode. Brian Beers is the president of Prandtln Automotive Group, a 32 store auto repair group that's focused on buying Midas auto repair franchises. Brian took me through the nuts and bolts of what it's like to run 32 auto shops. This was a fascinating conversation. We discussed going from software development to auto repair, pros and cons of franchising, how much money each auto repair shop makes, how Brian sources new shops to buy, his best and worst deals, how consumers can maximize their dollars spent when getting a car repaired and Brian's predictions for the auto repair industry. Here's my conversation with Brian Beers.
All views of car dealership guy and guests on this podcast are solely their opinions. None of the views expressed should be treated as financial advice. This podcast is for informational purposes only. We got Brian Beers on the pod. Brian, how are you? Hey, thanks for having me. Brian, so I'm super excited about this. I think there's just a ton of great content here to share and to discuss auto repair in general right now is having a moment with car prices, eclipsing all time highs, interest rates. People are definitely keeping their cars longer. They're fixing them. They're paying more to fix them. I think there's just going to be a lot to cover and I'm really pumped about it. Can you tell us how did you get into this business? What is your background?
Yeah, so we're a legacy business. My dad started in the 70s where you've run Midas, you know, automotive repair franchises. He started it because his uncle was in Boston or whatever was into it. So it was just kind of like, he was 22 years old looking for something to do, got into it with my granddad, started one location. Him and my uncle over the course of 30 years, grew it to about six to eight locations. It kind of bought and sold them all in the Philadelphia Metro. And then I joined in 2010 after college, the 0809 had been kind of rough on them. They were tired. They were going to sell it, just kind of walk away. I weren't making any money. And I come and, you know, breed this whole new life into the business. I travel to the country. I learned best practices from other franchisees and, you know, took six years and then started to acquire other, you know, existing franchisees that wanted to get out. We kind of snowballed our cash from, you know, the locations we're acquiring into the next one and the next one. And, you know, the short version is as of today, we have, which is my brother and I, 32 locations between Philadelphia and Allen Towner, which is like an hour north of Philly and north of New Jersey. It's kind of our territory. Incredible.
Now, did you, did you see yourself joining the auto repair business? I feel like it's so unsexy and you're, like you said, you're in college. Like, what was that like? Thank you for that. Yeah. So at the time, I mean, I was like, I was kind of like a tech, techy guy. I was into like software development. I had a job on South. I went to school, my name was by the way, that's even crazier to me that you're into software development. And now you run. Like software development. Yeah. I was like, I can make like basic, like database driven out, like web apps and stuff. Like I was, I was in terrible, but I'm the like, so what kind of valley guy. But anyway, I had this job, you know, on South Beach working in some software stuff.
And then, you know, I saw a lot of, you know, talking to them, like a lot of old school, just like, you know, my dad, of course, like, there wasn't a ton of software or data behind it. And so I kind of figured, Hey, I could come in and, you know, we could add a lot of this software stuff to make like streamline the business, you know, have better reporting, have better insights, and like, you know, kind of bring us into the modern, modern world. And maybe that would create some synergies.
And so, you know, as of today, like, we have a ton of tech in terms of like, at least in the franchise, where we use Slack, like all the stores communicate on Slack. So we've got 32 locations, but nobody's on an island. They're competing throughout the day on jobs and celebrating success. Who actually uses Slack? Who uses the story in the assistant managers, and then all of our back, back office team. Yeah, we did something, we did something funny one time. It's totally my, it was totally my decision. It did not work. But we, we gave Slack initially to every single employee. Oh, yeah. We've done that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
That's an interesting experiment. You know, take conditions and Slack. It's just funny. Different uses for everyone, and how that works out. So I digress. So anyways, stuff like that. We try to leverage technology and to make, you know, just improve the business. So yeah. So going back to that initial entry into the business now, when you first came in, right, like today, you run shot, you're the president of the company, you're running the business. What did you initially do? How did you actually get acclimated? Again, I'm putting myself in your shoes. And I think that the shop is, it's definitely a different, you know, it's, it's a dirtier part of the business. It's, there's more, more of that tribal knowledge comes in handy. So how did you just get acclimated so quickly to the business? Yeah. I mean, I worked 60 hours a week in the stores. I mean, I was like, you know, my first day, I'm like, yes, I'm, I was kind of like an assistant manager of a sense, you know, where I would just float between the stores and, and, you know, learn the point of sale. I talked to the technicians, I'd like quiz them on, you know, what they found, why they need to fix it, you know, what's, how they'd prioritize, like all this work that they're recommending. And, you know, I build the tickets, you know, eventually I'd sell the jobs. I mean, I was a store manager for a while. And then eventually I kind of, you know, as I got acclimated to it and, you know, saw like we needed to make certain changes and, you know, culture-fit guys that they weren't right. Yeah, I became kind of like the district manager of a sense where all the, the six stores at the time kind of reported up to me. And then I started, you know, making our changes and, you know, continued to kind of elevate myself. But honestly, it was just, it was just working in the stores like five, six days a week and, and traveling around the country and learning from others.
Before we get into the nitty gritty of how you source jobs, you know, economics and all that, I'm curious to know why franchise, right? Like, why, why have the franchise shackles? And I say that obviously it sounds like a negative connotation, which you're smiling when I'm going to assume it's a good thing. But tell me why franchise? Like, you know how to run this business? Why don't you escape the franchise world? Like, what benefit does that bring you?
Yeah, multiple ones. So first, in arc, in our business, the biggest challenge is real estate, right? Retail automotive, we need 4,000 square foot on a major road. That's like, you know, zoned automotive. And so, you know, you look around these days, especially in the Northeast, you know, where we're at, like, it is becoming harder and harder to find those spots. And a lot of those prime spots are major brands, right? They're their franchises or they're corporate. And so the number one thing that we get as a franchise is access to like, you know, have those shops, right? Occupy those shops. Like, I can go and I can take over a store that has a great spot. We're looking now for more real estate. And we can't find it. Like, and we don't have, like, the unit economics don't necessarily work, that we can go and buy some lot and like, build this, you know, 6,000 square foot shop or whatever it would be. And so that's, that's a big part of his access to real estate.
The, the, so you're saying pre-existing shops, right? Existing for shops.
所以,你是说现有的商店,对吗?对于商店而存在。
Like most of ours have been acquisitions. Like we've, we've, we've opened two stores, new, the rest, the other 30 have been acquisitions.
就像我们大部分的是收购一样。
例如我们已经开了两家新店,剩下的其他30家都是收购来的。
Wow. And so like, so that's the other big reason. If I was like, beer is Tyran Auto or whatever, you know, maybe we have one location, but then I'm like, all those mituses are never going to convert to an independent because the franchise or has real estate control. And so even if the owner wanted to, the franchise or wouldn't allow it. And so then my, my path isn't independent. We explained that to be explained at the, how does that work?
Yep. So real estate control is, you know, there's a couple different variables, right? Depends on who owns it. Now in, in Midas's case, they own some of the properties and rent to franchisees, right? Like the McDonald's model or whatever. Some are owned by a REIT, like Midas owned a bunch back in the day and then they needed money. So they sold, they packaged it up and sold them. And they're all triple net leases too. So it's like a very attractive investment for the landlords. And so, you know, they're tied up in these big REITs with billions of dollars. They never sell. And then you've got third party landlords who sometimes will lease directly to Midas, who then lease sub leases to franchisees. And then sometimes you've got third party landlords that lease directly to franchisees or, you know, the franchisee, like we, we own like seven of our properties.
But in all those cases, especially ones where third parties are involved, like the REIT or, you know, the third party landlords are even franchisees, they want franchisees to sign various levels of real estate control documents, like one's an optional lease assignment, one's a conditional lease assignment. Basically it says that, you know, hey, if so I'm a third party landlord, my lease is up with the Midas franchisee and I want to lease this thing to Mavis now or Pepp Boys or whoever, you know, they have this control document that says, you know, we have the option to rent it and then, you know, we would assign it to another franchisee and to kind of be the middleman. And so a lot of franchise, especially real estate based ones, have these these real estate control documents in place in order to not lose like entire markets, which has happened in the Midas system years ago. Somebody owned an entire market, didn't agree to any of the real estate stuff and a competitor came and they sold, you know, they sold their shop, so they shut them down and they sold all the real estate, at least the real estate. And so, in a minute, they lose an entire city.
And so why did I see, like, why did I see a couple years ago, all these like Mavis discount tires pop up throughout the Northeast? Like what's the deal with that?
所以,为什么我看到几年前在整个东北地区突然冒出了这么多Mavis折扣轮胎的店面呢?这是怎么回事?
Mavis is backed by private equity company and it's purely an acquisitions place. So they bought out all of the NTBs and they just bought out the rest of the like, Tire Kingdoms, which is like a sister, corporate sister brand of Midas. You know, they're on this MNA spree and they have, I don't know, 2000 locations now, maybe it's 3000. It's, it's, but they have a completely different model than we do, like there, it's, it's, it's, it's completely different.
We have what's the core difference? Other than the fact that they have like, you money backing them.
除了他们有你的资金支持这一事实外,我们有什么核心区别?
Yes, that's a big part of it. So they buy, they buy a, they buy a property for what's called 800 grand. That's, you know, dilapidated. They fix it up. They sign themselves at least paying like 120k a year, 150k a year, and then they sell it as, you know, out of 5 cap or 6 cap and flip it for like 1.5, $2 million or whatever. So they've got a flip the property. Yeah. So that's a huge sale on these back. So they get a whole bunch of cash for selling these properties that they're the tenant.
And then the goal of like them on an operational basis is just to pay this lease. And then they have all this backend money on rebates for selling boatloads and boatloads of tires. How do you source your shops?
So yeah, franchises, right? So this is, this is a big reason why franchises. And so, you know, when you're part of a franchise, it's kind of like this community where everybody knows each other. And so, you know, franchisees want to sell to other franchisees. And so when these older guys and ladies are looking to retire, they're looking for another franchisee to sell it to, you know, the bigger, the better, you know, it's more secure. A lot of times, you know, our deals are still our finance, which we can talk about.
And so they either come to me directly and say, Hey, Brian, I would would you buy my store? Or, you know, I'm reaching out to them saying, Hey, we're looking to expand in, you know, in the next six months or an ex city, would you be interested in selling? And, you know, I give them all the reasons of why they should sell to me. And that's, that's where I get most of them. Sometimes the franchise or brings me deals, like they'll sit down with somebody to do a business review. And, you know, they say they want to exit the franchise or, you know, regional manager comes to me says, Hey, so and so wants to sell. He wants 150 grand. He wants 200 grand, whatever it is. And I call him up, but we get a deal. And so that's my primary source.
The others through brokers, you know, there's a pet boys that was closing down. And, you know, we'd heard about it and we swooped in there and, you know, got a got a lease with them bought the equipment from Peppoy's corporate. You know, we flipped the banners and up and run in in like a month. And then other, you know, we're looking at independence to buy to that are just off market or on market.
And you said you typically go for seller financing when you buy these.
你说过当购买这些物品时你通常会选择卖方融资。
Yeah. So we've done. Yeah. So most of our sales. So we have, I don't know. I forget the number. Maybe six million more in acquisitions, almost all seller financed. And so kind of how that works is the seller becomes the bank. And so instead of me going out and getting alone and paying a down payment in principal and interest, I the seller, I pay a down payment to the seller. We have a note. I pay them principal. I pay them interest. You know, they have all the same securities at bankwood. They have a personal guarantee. They have a lean on the assets. You know, if I default in theory, they get to keep all the money and potentially take, you know, take the business back or have, you know, lean on the assets. So they have a lot of protections. And for me, you know, creates these win-win scenarios.
Some cases these, these, some of these ones were buying like aren't profitable. Like they, they're potentially losing money. And so you couldn't get traditional financing on them either way. And then the cash price someone would be willing to pay like they might not willing to accept, but you know, a seller financed deal where it's like low money down and payments. Usually we can create some win-win deals that get them cash flow, which is what they want. And we're looking for a good cash on cash returns. We have like low risk and low money into the deal. And then we have the ability to work these in things into our world and get them rolling.
That's great. So when you, what do you look for in a shop, right? Like how do you add value is, are there, do you, do you have care? Like do you just, you know, if you can find a real estate, you'll buy it or do you look for some specifics?
Well, depends. So if it's an existing shop in our footprint, right, which we kind of have these three distinct markets, we'll buy it. Like it there's, there's, as long as it's a, you know, three, three-ish times earnings is what we want to pay. If it's, you know, if it's losing money or not. Over what time period. So if I, if the shop like a year, the last year, so if it's making a hundred grand a year, we'll pay 300 grand for it.
Got it. Generally, we try to get an owner financed and, you know, with maybe like 50 grand down and, you know, three grand a month for the next, whatever, X amount a month, sir, or years. And the owners like that, right? Because they have some, you know, they're maybe repiring, but they have a consistent flow of income coming in.
Yeah, they like the cash flow. They like the fact that, you know, when you sell on an installment loan, which is what these are, you get to, you get to, you get to pay your capital gains in installments. So like, instead of them getting hit all at once, and then giving this money to like, into the stocks or whatever, you know, they kind of get to defer out their tax gains and then pay monthly. And so it, there's a huge benefit from that. And a lot of them just like they're used to making, you know, getting that deposit every month and like, it's just natural for, for these like small business owners to continue that, that flow.
So, so back to my question, is there something specifically that you would look for to add value or are you just buying everything that you can buy because the real estate's so hard to find? Yeah, so we'll buy any, any existing store that's in our market. Now our problem now is we bought almost all the ones that we can buy, except for the other major players. So there's like three or four left. And I guess what we look to do maybe is kind of the better question of how do we add value, I think is, is where you're getting that. There's a lot of it is, is culture, right? Every franchise, every automotive, like, we're in the people business, right? We just happen to fix cars. And so a lot of it is our ability to get people, you know, reenergize, we get them focused, we get them excited about the future.
A lot of times when these older owners want to sell, like, they haven't been putting any money back into the business. They're probably behind on their times. Most times their computers like don't work. The phone systems are crap. Like, and so we go in there and they don't never see them. So we go in there and we have like, you know, this whole leadership team, we get the guys on a better con plan that can like, you know, they've upward potential. It's pay for performance. We do a bunch of advertising. We generally paint the buildings. We're like, you know, we come in with a ton of energy and we've had cases literally, it's happened a couple weeks ago, about two stores up in, up in Allentown. It's kind of a funny, kind of funny story though.
So we bought these two stores. They're both doing about a million bucks each and netting terrible margins. They were netting, I want to say it was two 200 grand. Maybe less than that 100 grand. Well, one, what was it? What's the percent margin? Well, so these, you know, we, we run about 12% roughly all in his company. And these stores were netting what? These netting were like half that. Let's call it six, five. Okay. So keep it up. Yeah. Do about two million dollars between both of them, a million each, netting about 100, about 100 grand. So barely making any money.
And so we go in there, we buy these two, these two stores and the first store, everyone's like pretty excited for the change. We put on these new comp plans. We don't change much more. Immediately, they're 50% up. So now we're going from 20 here into 22 grand a week. We're now doing 30 to 35 grand a week. How? Same exact people. Same exact advertising. And the things that. How'd you do that? I have no idea. No, like what happened? You just came in and they saw you and they're like, let me work harder. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's that and like, you know, and comp plans help. Like they had no upside. Everybody was hourly. And so they had no incentive to move faster. Okay. That's meaningful. So you move them to like the technician based or, yeah, the the Tex or commission more commission driven have an hourly guarantee, which actually was the same, like pretty high guarantee that they had before. But now we give them an upside. This is, hey, if you produce over X, like once you hit your nut, like you get a percentage of everything over that. And so that was the first door.
The second store, everybody was like against all the changes we wanted to make. And they all quit after three weeks. And so we've, we've now restaffed that store. But why quit? I don't know. We don't, they all just disappear on a Saturday. They dropped their keys in the lockbox and, yeah, you know, the benefits of multi unit ownership is like, we don't skip a beat because we just can just rotate other guys in there and. Oh, so that's what you typically do. You'll just rotate from another. Yeah, another shop to another one shop to the other. Yep. If needed.
So, and how are these stores doing now?
The two stores you recently purchased? Yeah.
So the ones up, I mean, we're having record month over record month.
I mean, it's doing, I don't know, because it was doing about 80 to 90 grand a month.
And now it's doing 130 to 140 a month.
The other one's about, about down a little bit still, because of the restaffing.
But how are you finding techs?
How are you finding technicians?
What do you do with that? Yeah.
It's, indeed, it's, it's everything else, you know, it's, it's referral based.
I mean, we, we, when we bring out new people, we're trying to find out who they know that we're, that we're also good techs and, and bring them on.
You know, we, we try to provide a good culture, which is, you know, you've got this upside, you know, our best guys, I mean, our best guys can make our best best guys, three grand, four grand a week.
I mean, are they crush it?
And they're machine, what about an average, an average tech, average guys making, in 60 grand?
Something that range? A year.
So, but, but how do they really like, how's there so much variability, right?
Like, is the, is the work just there?
And it's like waiting for them to take the job and, and fix it?
Or, you know, like, like, why is there so much variability between techs?
Yeah, a lot of it's, I mean, hey, it's, it's, it's motivation.
Are they motivated to like, you know, hustle, right?
Bring in the car, check it out efficiently, you know, instead of like, talking, they're on the neck, they're pointing the next car, they're helping the new tech, like look under it, right?
They're hustling to, to do a good job.
That's a big part of it.
You know, skill set, obviously the guys have been doing this forever.
They know what to look for.
They know the tricks, you know, when they do a job, they grab all their tools, they put it on a, you know, a cart and then the right by the car, the inexperienced guy makes like a million steps back and forth to his box, right?
And so, there's like time saving things in there.
That's a big part of it.
And then it's a leadership, like speed of the, speed of the leader, speed of the team.
And so the leaders, sometimes a lot of that new manager come into a shop and they're all the same techs.
And he's hustling and he's saying, hey, guys, he's pushing the guys to, to say yes and to, to do more work.
And he's talking about factory central maintenance and all this stuff and, and all of a sudden, all the techs are producing twice as much as they were the week before, right?
Wow.
And so a lot of it, a lot of it is, is culture based.
And that's kind of a lot of our successes is trying to create that as much as we can.
因此,很大程度上,很多都是基于文化的。而我们很大一部分的成功就是尽可能地去创造这种文化。
What are your projected returns on an acquisition, like IRR payback period?
What are you looking for?
Oh, we don't really like, we're not that, that math driven in terms of IRRs, but like, you know, kind of at this point, we've built it, right?
So we've got, we got these, we got, we got other overhead.
We have district managers, we have COO, we have back office, we have all these kind of components.
So, we can add a new store.
So I'm working on right now buying another store that's in market.
We can add that store and have zero additional like incremental overhead, right?
Because I've already got all the overhead set.
And so, you know, we buy this thing, you know, I'm gonna buy it for, I don't know, would say 150 grand.
I'm gonna buy this thing.
It's like not making any money.
It's like an asset sale.
And so, you know, if I, if it can make 50 grand a year, like I have a, I have a 33% return on that, that capital, if it can make 150 k a year, I'm gonna have 100% return, like all my money back in the first year, and then each subsequent year, you know, 150 after that.
And so, that's a little bit different than if you're, you know, if we were going into a new market, or if it was like an hour and a half away, it was like this big new thing, you know, when I have to put a district manager and I'm gonna have to hire more office people, and I'm gonna have all this overhead associated buying that store.
Like that one, we're gonna have to build out a couple stores and it's gonna be a different model than, you know, I've got all my fixed costs covered.
This one stores, it's totally incremental.
We can transfer people like to it from it, promote it.
We already have customers in that area, right?
Like I've got all these synergies already to add one more is not like a huge deal, and a big part of like the bigger you get, the easier that becomes.
Are there any tax shelters you're taking advantage of?
I mean, I'm gonna have to assume that you mentioned you own seven of the properties that those come with some, you know, some good real estate tax shelters.
Yeah, so it depends.
Yeah, so you can do like cost-sigs, or you buy and depreciate the building, but that only really matter.
It depends how you set it up.
If you make it part of your existing company, like in treat that as active income for tax purposes, then it can wipe out some income that we make from the stores. If you keep them separate, like separate LLC and separate, you treat it more as like a passive income play. You can do that cost-sig, but it only affects like other passive income. It can affect your active income. So, you know, we have one of them that we do is like an active income one, all the others are more considered passive. And then we have other passive losses to offset that.
The main thing is, you know, when we buy these things, there's a lot of assets, right? And so, the main thing is has to do with like bonus depreciation, where we can, we can bonus, we can accelerate a purchase and, you know, even though we finance it, especially seller financing, we might put 50 grand down and buy something for $300,000 and of that 300, 200,000, let's say, is assets, we can then write off basically $200,000 that year, even though we only had 50 grand into the deal. And so, that's the primary tax benefit. But then you kind of get on this hamster wheel as you do these deals because like you buy it, you get all these assets, you depreciate it. But then the next year, now you have all this income from that new thing plus your other stuff. And if you don't do another deal, like, you know, our taxes, you don't have the depreciation. We don't have the depreciation. Now, granted, like things are always breaking. We're always putting in roofs and lifts and alignment machines and all this shit. But like, it's not the same as like the acquisition that gets us the one big chunk in it in a single shot.
So give us some juicy stuff. What's your best deal, your worst deal? Let's start with best.
Yeah, so the best deal. I mean, I've got a couple, it depends how you define it. But we had a store, we bought the end of 2018 that was doing about a million dollars, it was netting like, let's call it, let's call it 100 grand. So the purchase price was 350. It's about three and a half times as like a multiple. But we, it was a first seller finance deal we structured. And we paid this guy $50,000 down, right? And then he held a note where we paid amount of three grand a month, let's say for the next five, five years, it was amortized over 10 years, but like five years of payments with the balloon.
And so that store was a funny one, doing a million dollars, just like not much like average back then. The manager was like, a million dollars just top line sales revenue. Yeah, no, and then netting like cash flow is about 100 grand, like 10 years. But manager was like terrible. He like goes to casino every night, it's a truck, like something, except when he runs a store, like, not not good. And not good. But techs are like one of them is drinking on the job, like not good. So we completely clean house within a month, basically, we bring in, you know, we had P we knew this was happening. We had kind of guys in the wings at some other store. So we brought in kind of our guys to the store. And literally overnight, the next year we did 1.8 million, we doubled, we almost doubled the sales, we made like cash flow is about 400,000. So we put 50 grand in this thing, we made 400 grand the next year. And then that store consisted, we've now the newt's paid off totally. And you know, it produces roughly that 400 grand a year. That's probably one of my best in terms of like, you know, what's a cash on cash return? We get eight times our money on that. Like, I don't know what the IRR is, but I could tell you it's pretty high.
So that was that was in that was in one year, right?
That was in one year.
那就是在一年中发生的事情,对吧?
那是在一年中发生的事情。
Wow.
Yeah.
哇。是的。
What about worst? Yeah, so it depends. You know, in terms of, I have a couple stores that are our losers, like I lose money at and one of them was part of a package deal. We bought a bunch of stores in New Jersey. And this store was just used to be one of the best and just got beat up and beat up and beat up with with manager changes, tech changes, like no consistency. And when we after we bought it, we lost $100,000 in like nine months. So it burned, you know, kind of kind of wipes out all the gains we're making at other stores, right?
And you know, we kind of thought, oh, we'd go in there, you know, we're like these pros and, you know, we'll get the thing making money in no time. But like it, it, it, and so today it's like now it's only losing like two or three grand a month today. And so we're, we're, we're slowing the burn down, you know, but it takes time. Like, sometimes these stores that like, and people know, like you've, you know, you've been in these shops and like every time you go, it's like a new face and then you stop going because like, there's so much inconsistency. Yeah. And so, you know, that was this store just for years and years and years. And so sometimes we think we have this magic touch. But like, honestly, sometimes just takes time to get the markets laps you into face and salmons frustrating, but we're making, we're working through it.
Yeah, but you're not going to divest it or anything. You're going to hold on to you're going to get at the profitability.
Yeah, I had an option to, I mean, I had an option after 18 months to not renew it, not renew the lease and just just like walk away. But I could, my ego is too big. I can do that. Plus we figured we figured we get the job. We're like, we only been doing this for 80 or 12 months or whatever it was. And we're like, we'll get it. It's on a major road. It's great. It's a great neighborhood. We got a great team now. And so it's, it's, it's coming back. But that, that one's tough. We've had some other ones too similar that like, you know, we just, we just struggle on getting the right people in the store and, and they lose, they lose money until we, until we get the right people in.
In terms of the actual shop and the work you sell, what's the, you know, what are the margins, just like run me, you know, at a high level, like oil change, tires, mechanics, like, how does it actually work? What do you want to get the, you know, the consumer to do, spend, like, how does that whole process work for you?
Yeah. So I mean, it depends on the service, right? Tires of the lowest margin, probably have about 25% gross profit on the rubber, right? And then with installation and stuff, it's like 40 or 45 on service work. So we're doing like suspension or tire, or not tire, like breaks, like a radiator, that kind of, that kind of thing exhaust. You know, our goal is to be somewhere around 75 to 80% gross profit. So if it's like a thousand dollar job with parts and labor, we want to be, have a cost of goods of somewhere around 200 to 250. And that's kind of like a top, top line numbers. That's between cost and labor. Just, just, just materials. Just, just using just parts got it. Yeah. And then payroll, like our tech payroll, we want around 70 around 15% is the target and in front shop laborers. 15% of what? 15% of the sales. Of the sale. Yeah. Got it. So total all in, if you said roughly 15% labor, and how much was the parts cost? 25. Got it. So roughly about 40% cost, 60% margin. Yeah. If you take technician labor and parts costs. Yep. Got it.
And then is it, do you try to, like, how do you try to bring customers in, right? Like, for example, come get your oil change and let us upsell you. Like, what's that, what's that strategy for you?
Yeah. So the main things that work to attract people are oil changes and tires and Pennsylvania we have state inspections. And so there's a kind of like the three, like leaders to attract customers. And because people don't, and generally, you know, they don't like, I'm not going to go, like, just get my like, epicent, factory, federal maintenance done, right? Like, they come in for oil and by the way, can you check this or hey, by the way, I'm hearing this noise or like, there's some other issue that maybe they've been deferred, but like, it's the oil change or the state inspection, or sometimes a tire, a tire related issue that drive it. And so, those are the three primary call to actions.
You know, in a franchise, there's like many layers of advertising. You know, there's like national advertising, which is going to be, you know, on TV and YouTube and like Pandora and all this, you know, Google and SEO and all this stuff, you know, and then I have a local budget that I spend. And we, we focus primarily on direct mail. And so we do like large format, huge, like eight by 11 or huge pieces, huge pieces. We hit 5,000 homes within like a mile radius of the store once a month. And we spend a lot of, we spend half a million bucks on it a year. But that that was that. Is that across the entire organization? Yeah.
And that works. That works really well, because we can track all that from like, what are the mail routes that we mailed to? And then, when customers come in, you know, we can do a match back to see, you know, we mailed to them in April and they came in in June and they never heard a customer before or like, we haven't seen them next amount of months and they spent X amount of dollars. So we can, we can hone in on a pretty good ROI on the direct mail spend to sales. We can then like fine tune that to see what routes perform better. And sometimes we'll see that certain routes we mail to like, we get, you know, we mail these pieces and not a single customer comes in and other ones, you know, might be bonkers. And then we can also see where our customers coming from, like what mail routes, but then we're not mailing to. And so then the assumption is like, you know, that customer profile, you know, their neighbors might also need our services. And so then we try to mail with those people. So it's kind of this, you know, trying to dive into the numbers and the data to figure out, you know, how do we, how do we get in front of these people?
Then it's just consistency. Then it's like, to be successful in direct mail, you got to do it like all the time, every month, every month, people do it like one month, every six months, or God, it's not working. And it's like, well, people, people only get the cars fixed like twice a year. So like, you've got to get in front of them the two times a year that is that true? Is it only twice a year? Two, three, I mean, you know, it's, it depends. Like, you know, change intervals are getting longer, right? People get the oil change, the state inspection done usually in the same visit. And then it's, you know, maybe to have some sort of issue, but they're not coming once a month. They're not coming once before. Yeah. You know what I mean? So two to three times, let's call it per car. And then, yes, you got to be in front of them when in top of mind when they need the service.
Yeah. So I mean, let's take care of your car, right? And we've had late, we've had, we had this one lady who had a Toyota Avalon and think she like 400,000 miles of a stick, like original engine, original everything. She was like, always getting the high mileage. And like the oil changes, which are kind of like, you know, better for, better for the motor. She did all the FSM. She always like took care of everything, right? She was like, she was like an addict around like making sure and she drove a ton. She was like a traveling sales salesperson. That was one of the what I was one that like, and I knew her pretty well when I was out working on the stores, because she's coming every three months.
And you know, the people that take care of their cars, like they last longer. I mean, it's a known fact that people that like don't and they're going like way past oil change intervals. And then we check the dipstick and there's like no oil and it's super low. And you know, that's not that's not good for the cars. It's not good for the fuel injectors. It's not good for all these all these components. And so that that's a big one. I would say the main one.
Do you track like the lifetime value of your customers?
您是否跟踪客户的终身价值?
No, not it's it's a number we're working to get. You know, that's one of the challenges out of our point of sale system is some of those more advanced metrics are not tracked. And we are we this is like our internal IT team in the Philippines here of trying to develop to figure out what are some more, you know, habits of certain customers that we can track to determine like lifetime values.
But one of the biggest things is that, you know, we offer a number of payment options for people. So, you know, they have like a car, might as car, they can get like six to 12 months, where we have like a subprime option that they can get 90 days, whatever interest free. And then it turns into, you know, a pretty high interest product.
But what we see is that the consumers that do these products, they visit us twice as often when they when they come, they spend twice as much. And so, the consumer that we can get on a payment plan will spend with us four times as much as a customer who does not utilize one of these plans. We see it because of the why, right? The loyalty factor is that, you know, do you have like a Home Depot or Lowe's credit card? I don't. Okay. I'm very I'm very picking on credit cards. Okay. So most people actually just made a third just for a very specific reason.
Yeah. So most people will have only one. They go to Home Depot and have a Home Depot card or they go to Lowe's and they have a Lowe's card. It's pretty rare to find someone who is both, right? And so part of that is because like they get the card, it creates this like mental connection to them. And then they consistently go back to that location and they go there for all their stuff. And they don't use their Home Depot card every single time. But, you know, they get comfort about it. And it's the same thing in automotive. Like people get a Firestone card. They'll get a Macamavus or Pep Boys or Midas, whichever whoever gets it first generally will keep that customer until they mess it up. And then they'll then they'll try someone else. And it's so that's the that's the main thing. There's also promotions. You know, it's it's whatever interest free and in high interest environments. And we can help make this like large unexpected expense affordable. And so our we pitch it to our guys like you sell cars, which is like set of paying, you know, $1,200. It's $200 a month, right? And we try to focus on payments instead of focusing on a large number. And then we find that we're having more and more success in that in terms of increasing lifetime value of customers is financing the key for us. Yeah, it makes total sense.
And by the way, on that topic, I mean, what are you seeing in terms of your average, you know, order per user or, or, you know, average revenue per job, like whatever, I don't know what's the metric you're tracking? Like how are you seeing these, you know, orders just rise in cost right now after all this demand for owner repair and inflation and whatnot.
Yeah, yeah. So our average we call it an average RRO or average repair orders, like got it. And yeah, I mean, it's up. I mean, we're at about three, three 50 a car right now. I'd say we were like 300 a car prior. And so it's probably up at least 10, 10 or percent 10 15%.
You know, the other factor though, is our car counts down. So we're seeing less cars. And so that's interesting. Part of it too is that, you know, it's, it depends on the store, but like, especially lately, car counts been down, you know, I don't know, five percent, something in that range, two percent something that range. And so, you know, I think a lot of what we're losing is kind of the maintenance, the smaller, you know, dollar repairs. And what we're seeing more of is these, these higher cost repairs, right? Is that how that to me? Like, how do you reconcile that?
Uh, how do I, how do I view that? It was just like, when we look at the distribution of, of like, the size of the tickets that we're doing, we're getting more, you know, more expensive tickets and less, you know, lower cost tickets. So less of the maintenance. So someone comes in just for like an oil change, we're seeing less, like we're seeing less oil changes and less of these smaller tickets, right, which lowers car count. But because we're also removing some of the, the lower dollar sales, like that also increases your average, right? Because you're getting rid of the small ones.
Why do you think that is? What are those people doing? Like, why is, why do you think the lower car count is down? I know it's totally the gasket due to gas, but why do you know, I mean, I know, I mean, it's, I, I throw some ideas out there.
I think people are driving a little bit less, right? I would think from the work from home aspect of it. Interesting. Some of the, you know, and new cars have longer intervals on oil changes, right? It used to be 3000 miles. Now it's like 7000 miles. So I think, I think all those, I think that and then the work from home, and I think just the people are extending out their visits, right? And I think that's part of it. And that's like, that's like nationwide. That's not just here that we're seeing this car count, just like soft, softening.
But, you know, sales are up though, because like I said, we're seeing more of these bigger repairs. Maybe they're not coming as often, but when they come, yeah, you know, they've got this stolen catalytic converters. I'm sure you see them like, yeah, yeah, we dealt with a ton of those cats, right? The installing and replacing those are, you know, break jobs and stuff that just the cost continues to rise. And so, you know, sales are up. I have my own opinions a dealer, but I'm sure you do too on this topic.
What are some cars that you would tell consumers to stay away from? I think we're similar. I mean, high mileage, land rovers, BMWs, Mercedes, like, you know, it's like if someone comes up with a land Rover with a check in July, we're like, we don't even want to deal with it, to be honest, because we'll try to fix it. But then that like it won't solve the problem. And then that leads to another problem. And we guys like think we made all this money. And then by the end of day, we're like lost money on this job, let alone all the overhead costs. And so, a ton of problems that just lead one to another, great as new cars. But like, you know, the best ones, the best ones are, you know, the Toyotas and the Hondas and this, my wife has a Subaru. We love it. Turn on her. So yeah, you know, it's just that the complicated luxury cars, you know, electrical issues, you know, either we have the right tech for that, or if we're not comfortable, we'll just send it out. Or we won't deal with it at all. But it's definitely the right move. Because then you just get buried in these cars. And like you said, someone comes in for breaks, you know, then they tell you that you messed or trunk latch or something. It doesn't even make sense. But sometimes it's not even worth dealing with it. So I get it.
Let's take a bit of a step back now. When you think about your business and this industry and just everything we've gone through over the last couple of years, right? Like there's been tailwinds, there's been headwinds. I mean, it's been very, very volatile with everything going on. What do you predict for your industry to auto repair business? How does it evolve over the next five years?
Yeah, five years. It's going to continue to grow, right? I mean, auto has grown consistently over over decades, right? Your cars don't fix themselves, right? I mean, you know, we can all joke about AI and all this stuff. But like that's not coming towards us. You know, we can't into like EVs and all this other things. And you know, what do you do about EVs? What do you do about that? I'm doing nothing right now. But the average car we work on is seven to 10 years old. All right, something in that range. So even if 100% of cars on EV like tomorrow, like we still have seven to 10 years or whatever, of all these, you know, gas cars, right? There's this huge like we don't see them for a while. So a we have this long headwinds. Number two is like 60% of our businesses is wheel well. So brakes, tires, steering, suspension, right? Every EV has all those components.
I think a couple of things. I mean, I have a lot of thoughts on it. But one of them is that, you know, they need they burn through tires, right? So I think tires become a bigger business. I think that there's consolidate. There's massive consolidation. So there's going to be less bays just in the market. So then the ones that are left, right? So maybe the market shrinks a little bit, but there's going to be less bays. So then it gets consolidated more market share major players, right? We see it all the time. These independent shops going out and they become not automotive, right? So we lose those the market loses those bays. There is a whole new suite of like technical things that that what we can do, right? We're talking about ADOS, which stands for like a advanced driver assistance system. It's like the LiDAR and the backup camera and the lane detector or all this crap.
And so there's like a ton of sensors related to all those sensors and all that smart technology. And so it gets to the point where like, you're going to replace a light bulb and you got to take the bumper off. And when you take the bumper off, then you got to recalibrate, you know, all these sensors that have all this fancy stuff. And that, you know, that reset on that, there's sensor recalibration is going to be $500, right? And it's going to have no cost of goods and it's going to be pretty profitable.
And so I think there's this whole new suite of other repairs that we're going to need to do that we don't even know about today. You know, we think about EVs like this, you know, the average car we work on today is 100,000 miles. Like, what is the average GM electrical vehicle with 100,000 miles going to look like? Like, we don't, we don't really know. Nobody really knows, right? And the whole new suite of issues that's going to have.
And then I've got this other thing I like a select your take on this. I've heard that there's like, so manufacturers can make these things, right? There's no, there's no limits there. But it comes to this issue with grid capacity and that the grid can only like, you know, generate enough electricity to charge a certain percentage of the market share. And then after that, it's kind of a capacity. I've heard it's been like, I don't know, eight to 10%, something like that of market share. And then, and then they have to like build nuclear power plants or there has to be some sort of like new energy source to overcome a grid capacity issue.
Yeah, look, I've been speaking with a lot of smart people. And I think that there's going to be challenges along the way for even continued EV adoption. But I don't think that's going to stop it. For me to say this, like, I don't have a horse in the race, right? I just love observing and seeing how this is all growing. And you know, I'm really, my audience is both sides of the aisle quote unquote. But I do think that I just, I never bet against innovation. I think there's a market for internal combustion. There's a market for electric vehicles. But I think that as long as there's demand and demand is growing for EVs, I think that the market will find a way to be able to, you know, fulfill that demand one way or another. So I think there's going to be challenges, but I wouldn't say like, I'm not in of the belief that like suddenly like hypothetically, if there's all this demand for electric vehicles, that, you know, the grid wouldn't, I'm not I'm no grid expert either, but that it wouldn't be upgraded or whatever needed to be done. However, it needed to be done the right lobbying groups, whatever in order to make it to make it happen. So that's my, you know, non technical opinion.
Yep. But I also think we have, you know, there's a long time till it gets there. Yeah, right. Like market share is not growing. It's not doubling every single year or anything like that. It's on exponential yet. And so I think that's, you know, it just buys time for these advancements to happen, especially if we've gone through this like zero interest free period, where, you know, consumer spending was just like off the charts. And now we're, you know, entering more of a contraction. So I think, yeah, I think it's going to all get, all of us figured out over time, I have no idea what that market share looks like on the split, you know, in 10 years. But I do think it grows from here. The question is how much and how far?
Yep. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. And that's the main. I guess that's my, I think the people think the adoption is really quick. But I think that the, it's a much longer rollout. And, and what does it look like in the end? It's probably a mixture of you spoken about this. I know where it's not 100% EVs, but there's EVs, there's like plug and plug and gas or whatever where it's got both. And then there's all gas. And then maybe there's, you know, maybe there's hydrogen or another, another fuel type as well. But at the end of the day, all, all them need to get fixed. Right.
What about robotics? Like, have you heard of Robotire, the company, Robotire? You heard of that? I've heard of it. I've seen him. I've seen him. I know discount tires got a bunch of them or testing them out West. And it's interesting. You know, we don't do enough tires to like justify it. But yeah, I guess if we get ever robot change breaks one day, that'd be cool. But I think it's, I think we're a long way away from that.
You don't seem too enthused. I don't, I don't, I think there's so many other little things I got like these cars. We think about these cars, right? Like, it's not like it's a putting together car in a factory where everything's perfect. Like, yeah, things get rusted. You got to spray. They got to soak things, got to like something breaks. They got to like a stud breaks, right? They got to be able to like pop out the sun and put a new stud in like, yeah, the idea that a robot is going to like figure all that stuff out or like, or decade or a real chemical. It's not like a pizza here.
So, yeah, well, we saw that ended up. Yeah, right. Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see, you know, what, what really how that does evolve. I think robot tire, what it what impresses me about them. By the way, I'm, I'm a small Alpian robot tire through a fund that I rested in, but they are the fact that are actually operational. And you could actually see them replacing tires. It's pretty damn impressive.
Okay. So check it. Maybe rope, maybe I don't know if robot tires, the one I so it does it actually change the tire from start to finish? Yeah. Yeah. It does. It's pretty, pretty remarkable. But I think I think you're right. I think discount tires and what it's tested. I could be wrong, but I'm looking at this. Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see for robotics, you know, I don't think it was different. I think it was one that just it didn't take it off the car. It just changed the whole thing. Like you put it on the, you know, and it took off the old tire, put the new tire on, but then a human had to like bolt it to the car. Oh, got it. It was just the machine, machine part of it. But yeah, could be could be the future. Could be my shop, just a whole bunch of robots fixing cars, changing tires and like one employee with a kiosk.
What's next for your group? Are you, you know, continuing to be inquisitive, looking to make more acquisitions here? What's the deal? Yeah. So I mean, it's, yeah, we're constantly looking at, you know, buying out a other, other franchise units, other, you know, independence that we can convert. We're looking at new markets. You know, we've looked at, you know, DC, we've looked into like Northeast, we looked into the Midwest, we looked at Florida, you know, but part of it is for us, like we want to go in, we want to buy a group of at least five stores, four to five stores existing mituses, right? And then, which gives us enough like payroll to be over dollars to be able to hire the district manager to live in market and to manage it. And then from there, we got to build it up to like six or seven in that market to really like, yeah, so you're looking, you really want to have a district manager over all those GMs. Oh, yeah. So I got one district manager, kind of my structure is like, we've, you know, we have got, it's me, my brother, we have a COO, and then the COO has four district managers that report to him. And then each one of those four district managers oversees roughly eight stores. And now, all my stores are like pretty consolidated. And so it's, it's thinking it, you know, from 15 minutes from one to the next, that makes it easier to manage anything more than that. They had 10 stores or 12 stores that becomes too many, right? To actually like get in the wheat to actually help and not just be like high level. But they've like four stores. It's kind of like not enough to justify the payroll costs that that person that we invest in that person. So, you know, for us, and who does the COO report to me? Got it. I understand. Yep. And so, you know, so for us, it's kind of like if we can fill a store in market, you know, almost zero incremental overhead, besides like the store level, right? But if we talk about going into new markets, then, you know, I can't just buy one store in Maryland. I can't buy one store in like New York, like, for it to make sense, I gotta have a group of them. And so we're looking at that.
You know, it's also, you know, listen, like we could, so we do about 40 million right now in revenue for our 30, 32 locations. How did I not ask you that yet? I don't know. But you can, you can add it sooner. But yeah, we do about 40 million. But like, you know, my best store, so 1.2 million a store, my best stores do over 2 million, my worst stores do like, you know, 700 or whatever. So in theory, like, you know, if I can get all my stores to 2 million, which is totally possible, I mean, we could be doing 60, 70 million in revenue and in very strong margins, right?
So what's the net margin on 40 million? 12%. Got it. We make about 4 million or so. Is it? About 150k store. And so, you know, we look at like, you know, we can double the sales, we more than double the profits too, because like a lot of the fix overheads covered, right? And so that's kind of like our primary focus. Yes, growing acquisition side, but also like, harvesting and getting a lot more out of what we already got here. Fascinating.
Brian, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for just sharing your knowledge and experience. Super interesting. And as again, as a dealer, I didn't know these numbers, the economics of an auto repair business. It's just not something to be focused on. I'll have ever focused on again, we're not a franchise where, you know, service is a big part. And even if so, like franchise dealership business is still very different from the, you know, standalone auto repair business. So just fascinating insight.
For the audience that's curious about this, once to learn more about you, your platform, where can they go to learn more? Yeah, but Twitter at Brian Beers is where I'm the most active. I have a podcast as well. It's called Business with Beers. You know, I primarily focus that on helping other people get into franchises, not just automotive, but all types of different franchises. And so, you know, I'm spending a lot of time on that as well, which is a whole another business and conversation itself. But, you know, franchise has been great to me and my family. And, you know, I think for, it just happens to be an automotive, but, you know, the opportunities exist in home services and all different types of models. So, that's the best place.
And why did you start that? I'm curious. I have some, I'm speculating. I have some many reasons why, but in my head, but why did you start, you know, just kind of media business on the side? Yeah. So, I mean, you know, I was, I was on Twitter, I'm talking about growing, how, you know, growing our franchise business here. And so, I had always people come to me asking like, how do I, you know, I don't want to do automotive, but how does this, you know, how can I do this in X, Y, or Z, or what should I look for? All these questions. And we've, we've bought and sold other franchises too along the way. My dishes are most successful one, but we, we had some others. I've, I've some, some pretty good experience in all kind of facets of it. And so, you know, I was like looking for ways of how can I help these people and how can I, you know, make some money on it. And so, there's this whole world of franchise consulting, franchise brokering, whatever you want to call it where, you know, we kind of act as, you know, middle, middle men to help, you know, I've, I joined this network, I've got like 700 brands that are part of this network.
And then people come to me, you know, I kind of figure out, you know, and I have this team, I'm, I'm building, but, you know, we figure out what are their goals, what are their skills, what's their budget, where they located. And we can take all the information and then kind of filter through the 700 brands to say, here's like, whatever, four or five options to start with that, that can meet all your expectations. And then, you know, we make introductions to the, to the brands and doesn't cost the candidate anything. And if they end up signing up and, you know, we help them find a brand they love, the franchise or pays us a referral fee. And so, wow, that's kind of the business model. And that's cool.
And anyway, I'm like pretty good at it. Because I have like, I actually, I know what I'm talking about where a lot of people that do this, who are in this industry come from corporate America, like they have no idea. They've never owned a franchise. Like, you know, there's an urgent routine stuff they learned on a course. And so, I have a unique perspective on it. Yeah, it's fun to, you know, like, for me, at least the media as a creative outlet, you know, it's a place to just be very creative and try new things. So I definitely resonate.
Yeah. And just connect with the people, I connect with all types of cool people and private equity guys want to learn more about franchising and automotive. And I, you know, I make, I make a lot of new friends. So it provides a good outlet for that, too.
Well, dude, this has been great. Thanks again for coming on. And that's just been a true pleasure. Goal.
嗨,伙计,这真的太棒了。再次感谢你的光临。而且这真的是一次非常愉快的经历。目标达成了!
Thanks for having me. All right. Hope you enjoyed that episode. Please give the podcast a rating. Consider subscribing to the show and check the show notes for links to what we talked about. Thanks for tuning in. I'll see you guys next time.