Owners, Your Team Wants To Be Mentored with Doug DeLucca and Karina Kuecha

Speaker 1 00:00:00  This is the Automotive Repair Podcast Network.

Brian Walker 00:00:09  Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Auto Repair Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Walker, and today I have Doug DeLucca and Karina Kuecha from Boca Auto Fix in Boca Raton, Florida. And I was having a conversation with Doug recently where he was telling me about some mentoring that they were doing, and I thought it would make a great podcast discussion. So we'll take a second to thank our sponsors, and then we'll get right back to the episode. Are you ready to convert clients to members? AppFueled specializes in creating custom apps tailored specifically for auto repair businesses. Build client loyalty. Get started today with your own customer loyalty app. Visit appfueled.com. Hey Doug and Karina, how are y'all?

Doug DeLucca 00:01:01  Good. And yourself? Ryan.

Brian Walker 00:01:02  I am well, Karina.

Karina Kuecha 00:01:04  Doing great.

Brian Walker 00:01:05  Good. I'm glad to have you all with me today. Excited to talk about this topic, Doug. Tell us a little bit about your shop and then let's talk about the mentoring.

Doug DeLucca 00:01:15  Yeah, absolutely. So as Brian mentioned, I'm Doug DeLuca. We've been in business a little over four years. It's being recorded October 26th. We opened in July of 22. Started by myself and worked about nine months alone. And then have brought my wife in to help become our client advocate. And we've grown since then. So I have a mechanic, a specialist on board that's helping me in the shop, and Karina joined us about five months ago. So we're growing and we have four lifts. We've grown about, you know, 70 or 80 cars a month and running to 25, 30% increase revenue year over year. So it's been exciting times for us. We're definitely in the growth phase with the business.

Brian Walker 00:01:57  Okay. Awesome. And Karina, you are a client advocate at Boca and your background is you were a technician, right?

Karina Kuecha 00:02:05  Yes, I came from Chevrolet, so I went through General Motors ASAP program and was working full time at the dealership during that time. So about three four years of dealership experience.

Karina Kuecha 00:02:17  I left this March actually, and they were able to find me and now I'm here and it's been a wonderful experience. Definitely a really big change.

Brian Walker 00:02:28  Awesome. Well, Doug, we were talking about this mentoring. And you know, I'm curious like, well, tell us a little bit about the mentoring that you're doing. And then, you know, where did the idea come from to start doing this?

Doug DeLucca 00:02:41  Yeah. So a little bit of context. So there's a team four of us here, right. Myself and my wife are in our, you know, mid to late 40s. Right. And and Karina and Nico are in their early 20s. So there's an age difference there. Right. And one of the things as the team was growing was important to me. As basic as having lunch together, right. Breaking bread every day. And we were doing that pretty regularly. And one day I decided several months ago to do just like the state of the business. You see the board behind me there? It's just a part of our break room here where we eat lunch and put some numbers on the board where we were in the business, and it was just the start, Brian, of trying to bring some transparency to the conversation.

Doug DeLucca 00:03:23  Right. The team's been wonderful in the sense of, you know, they wanted to stay actually in the building while we were eating lunch. And that meeting kind of kicked off the next round of transparency, which we kind of do like lunch and learns. Right? And we do it now. I don't know, Karina several times a week, and it doesn't have to necessarily be about the business. So we can talk certainly about the business. We've talked about other things like personal finance or what's going on with everyone's lives. Right. And since we've been, you know, around the block a little bit longer than the team, right? The conversations go down some great paths and it helps us understand, you know, some of the challenges that might be facing the team members every day. Right. And then it also helps us, myself and Alyssa, as leaders, understand those gaps and how we can help fill them. Again, it's just pretty, you know, informal conversation and just see where the conversation goes.

Doug DeLucca 00:04:22  And now we're to the point now where Karina or Mr. Nico will bring up topics to discuss in the future so that I can almost plan for, you know, what we want to talk about. And we just see this, you know, continuing on indefinitely at this point.

Brian Walker 00:04:38  So, Karina, what would you say is your favorite topic that you all have talked about so far?

Karina Kuecha 00:04:43  Like you said, we talk a lot about finances. So me and Nico, you said we're I'm 22, Nico's 21. So we're younger people getting into the world of things. We're both just moved out of parents houses. I just moved out into my own solo apartment, so. Personal finance has definitely been one of the best topics to talk about because. You don't learn that in school. You know, I have technical knowledge. I have a. Lot of general knowledge. But finances, credit debt, high yield savings account. That's one thing that we talked about a lot. I had no idea about any of that.

Karina Kuecha 00:05:15  You know, 401 K's. All of that fun stuff that we've been able to go over has helped me kind of guide myself to being to a better position financially. As you know, that takes off stress in your general life. So, you know, it helps ease everything at work when your personal life is less stressful.

Brian Walker 00:05:32  Like, what does that meant to you to have leaders that you work for that are willing to share those kinds of things with you?

Karina Kuecha 00:05:38  It's a very big difference coming from the dealership. And like he said, you know, we enjoy staying inside the shop. So working at a dealership, as soon as it hits 11, 12:00, everyone's run for their cars and they're like, I can't wait to get out of here. And I was a part of that. You know, you have managers that sit in their office all day and never make it outside the shop except to yell at you rather than having bosses. But they're more so employees, colleagues that, you know, put themselves in the same level and talk about finances and everything.

Karina Kuecha 00:06:09  And I really enjoy them, giving us a bigger picture in the business side of it that you wouldn't really see dealership wise. You know, all of the nitty gritty stuff that no one talks about, about owning a business has really been eye opening as well.

Brian Walker 00:06:23  Yeah. So, Doug, when you started doing this, you know, it's easy to, you know, have like lunch and learn where you're just talking about business, but, you know, you're getting into the personal side of things, you know, personal finances and I'm sure some other things as well that aren't related to the business at all. It might be easy for someone to think to themself, well, that doesn't really belong in the shop, but you obviously have had a different opinion about that. You know, what are your thoughts on that?

Doug DeLucca 00:06:52  I would agree with you, Brian. If you asked me four years ago we'd be having this conversation. I'd, you know, would dismiss it immediately. But Karina, Nico's line of questioning when we started those business conversations is what led us to open up.

Doug DeLucca 00:07:06  Right. If they're curious about it, why not share the knowledge right across? I mean, there's some things, you know, that we don't necessarily discuss, but it let me down a path that, you know, transparency is key, and I would rather them hear some of the questions that they may have come from myself and Alyssa, right, than from TikTok or whatever the young folks use nowadays. So it was really their questioning, right? That led me down that path. And now that we're down that path, it's really been very meaningful to me to help them along their journey because as you know, Brian, the things we wish we would have learned at 21, 22, knowing what we know now would be life changing. And we're just starting with the basics when we talk about some of these things, right. You know, we're just discussed last or this week. You know what KPIs are. Right. I didn't know what a KPI was at 2122. And I was in corporate America at the time.

Doug DeLucca 00:08:05  So and to Karina's point, it's a holistic approach when we look at, you know, mentorship and what we discussed. Because if we can have the team holistically, their personal life, you know, that much better than the professional life gets that much better, right? And we're in this building together for eight, eight and a half, nine hours a day, enjoy each other's company, help each other out. I'm a big proponent, Brian, of a flat team layout. We all have very important roles. They're just slightly different roles, so I don't view myself any, you know, differently than Karina or Alissa, right? And I hope that comes through right for the team sharing knowledge. And we learn from them too. Right, Brian? Like our clients are getting younger and younger, and the older I get, the less in touch I am with that. So they help bridge some of those gaps, especially Karina being a climb advocate she has to deal with, you know, our clients day in and day out, right? And so she can help us guide the business and do things differently with what we can do to, you know, attract that type of younger cloud.

Doug DeLucca 00:09:11  Right. So it works both ways for sure.

Brian Walker 00:09:13  We live in this world now where there's so much information out there. It's like just about anything that you want to learn. You can go learn from some influencer on YouTube or social media or something like that. But it's different when you're learning from someone who you see, you know, doing things and who you have that personal relationship with. So I'm guessing, Karina, that the things that they're talking about, you get to see that in their lives.

Karina Kuecha 00:09:38  Yeah. Like I said, it's very different coming from a dealership than being here. The general energy of it, you know, people don't like working on their cars. You know, it's something that they don't want to do. So having to kind of bridge the gap between getting people, you know, to understand why they need to maintain their car rather than being at the dealership and scaring them into maintaining their car. It's definitely been a different kind of situation. Like I said, coming from the technical side, I'm so used to, you know, just seeing something and say, oh, you need it when there's real know basis behind it, rather than having something that actually needs to be done and educating people on what needs to be done, why it needs to be done.

Karina Kuecha 00:10:23  And there's a lot of misinformation online. So that is definitely a difficult part of it. People say, oh, I rent this. Oh, I did that. AutoZone scanned my car like I can help you, but you know, you gotta help yourself.

Brian Walker 00:10:37  Yeah. And on the mentoring side there obviously having like Doug and Alyssa or having those conversations with y'all on the business side about how to talk to the client and teaching instead of just kind of throwing you to the wolves and expecting you to know everything.

Karina Kuecha 00:10:51  And I will say, the difference here is that, you know, being transparent with your employees and how we do have these conversations and how they're open about, you know, the business practices and whatnot allows me to be more transparent with the clients. It just pushes you to be an honest person, which is not something that you feel when walking into most shops. You know, you see the office behind me. There's not anything car related here, and that's on purpose because we're not trying to force the car stuff down your throat.

Karina Kuecha 00:11:23  You know, we're here to educate you on why your car needs to be maintained, but, I mean, we're all car people at the end of the day, but that doesn't have to be pushed onto someone that isn't, you know. And me being a female, I have a unique position in it, too, because a lot of young women are taken advantage of in this industry. And people see me here at the front desk and they're like, oh, I'm so relieved to see a woman there. And, you know, it's Both sides of it are. It makes it a little easier to kind of get people to understand.

Brian Walker 00:11:54  So speaking of that transparency, Doug, what kind of things do you share with the team when it comes to the transparency?

Doug DeLucca 00:12:01  So on the business side, every number except for payroll between the employees is available. We have a dove into every single number at this point. But going into the business, I definitely had reservations of that. I was just brought up and had probably maybe a different era of corporate America or whatnot.

Doug DeLucca 00:12:18  It was certain things you didn't talk about. I've since, in the last six months pivoted to the opposite, where it's like all fair game, because I would rather create a Nico or any of the team members be comfortable asking me about why that number is. That way, whatever questions they may have then come to draw their own conclusions, which typically human nature is on the negative side, and they're the next generation of shop owners and operators and team members and employees, and we've taken it as far at a high level, Brian, about what is the even the exit strategy look like? What is the future of Boca auto fix? What is dug into this is plans as owners and operators so that the team especially, you know, Karina and Niko can see, hey, that this is more than just a quiet advocate role or a mechanical specialist role, right? There's a horizon out there and it's of course it's years away, at least for us. And then that would hopefully allow them to understand some of the tactical short term numbers of KPIs.

Doug DeLucca 00:13:28  Gross revenue. Right. We talk about things like average apparel or whatnot, which might for some operators be very well known information that they've been dealing with for years. But for a young team like we have, they may have never heard about it before. Right. And again, why not learn it from us? So to answer your question directly, everything on the business, almost everything on the business is on the table. On the personal side, if we use personal finance as an example, we've talked about different accounts that we hold and right, different avenues and ways of, you know, saving money by taking money apart, making money sort of disappears. So you don't go to spend it. Right? Because again, if I look back 25 years ago and I was listening to myself speak today, I would be in a different spot. And if they asked something that's something that I would not comfortable discussing, then it's just not discussed, right? The team has been surprisingly more open than I expected, right.

Doug DeLucca 00:14:28  And I think it's great and it just works. And to Karina's point, the more transparent we are in the break room, the more transparent our clients are going to see it. You can't say that, right? You can't know SMS system, CRM system, right? None of that is going to shine like Karina. Having a ethical, transparent, education based conversation right at the counter.

Brian Walker 00:14:53  Yeah, we all do an excellent job with the transparency. I know of one of the blogs on your website that talks very transparent about for every dollar that comes in, here's, you know, how many pennies go to upkeep of the business or into owner's compensation and, you know, paying for parts and all of that. And it was even on the wall in your intake area prior to expanding your location. Have you ever had any clients that have talked, like said, anything about that transparency?

Doug DeLucca 00:15:26  Well, yeah, Alyssa has stories. Yeah. Before we moved into space where Karina is at now. Yeah, we had that wall up and people I couldn't even see from the shop, right where people were looking at it and reading it.

Doug DeLucca 00:15:37  And, you know, you had reservations doing that originally. Again, it was kind of against the grain. And I got to a point where it's like, what do you have to lose? Here we are talking about it on your podcast grinding and there's never been whether it's talking to Carino, the team in these, you know, luncheon learns or the wall or the blog posts. Nothing negative has come about it. Nobody said, oh, that's too much money for the owner or that overhead is out of, you know, range or what. It's just doesn't exist. And it differentiates it as it really does. We're trying to build a sustainable business, right? Something that can deal with the ebbs and flows of whatever happening in the world and the economy and whatnot. Again, back to that, putting it all out there, that transparency, they ask you answer, which you graciously turned us on to. Again, there's no negative to it that we can see it. All right.

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Brian Walker 00:17:51  It would say that that the one thing that your team wants the most is access to you as the owner. Like they want to be able to talk to you and have those conversations and all that. And Karina, you've talked about the dealership world and how how far this is from the dealership world. Like, what has it done for the culture of the business from your standpoint? Karina, to be working with owners who are willing to give you that time and that transparency.

Karina Kuecha 00:18:20  It's very different. It's not something I'm used to. It is very odd, but it's in a good way. You know, like my mother is an entrepreneur, so I'm used to seeing somewhat of a business side of things in my own family growing up, but going through school and then going through a dealership, you know, all that kind of changes when you see they're so far away. You know, there's the managers, general manager, service manager, and then there's the owner of the dealership with his name on the wall and people that I don't even know their names.

Karina Kuecha 00:18:49  I don't even know their first names, you know. So it's a very different energy here. It shows that you can truly put real work into something and see it grow. You know, instead of just getting paid to do something. And, you know, even when I come in here and people come in and talk to me, Alissa will come in and I'm the owner. Nice to meet you. You just want to see how you're doing. Like, every time, it's such a personal experience. And even when we do evaluations on cars, Doug records a video. So he's got his face on there. He's talking now. He's. I am the owner. I'm your technician, blah blah blah. It's a very different experience and it makes it so much more personal for the client.

Brian Walker 00:19:27  I remember when I was the dealer technician, when, on the very rare occasion that the owner of the dealership would walk in, it was like he was a celebrity and someone at the same time, like, you can't approach him.

Karina Kuecha 00:19:39  It's almost a bad thing.

Brian Walker 00:19:41  Yeah, it definitely was. So I can see where this would be huge. So I'm curious. You said a lot of it comes from just conversations that you're having, but where do the ideas, you know, for the mentoring come from. And like what are some of the, you know, do you have any things coming up in the future that you're really looking forward to talking about?

Karina Kuecha 00:20:01  It kind of all depends. You know, sometimes something we say in the shop will, you know, trigger something in our mind and say, oh, we should talk about that at lunch. Generally just things that happen in our life. You know, we're going to ask car I'm going to NASCAR next month. So we talk about, you know, getting team outing ideas. So things in ways to reinvest into the business, which is, you know the team and our own morale here a lot of stuff like that. So there's definitely some good topics to talk about. But it really just comes up with day to day conversations and new things that happen in our life.

Doug DeLucca 00:20:38  To piggyback on that, Brian, I'm looking at the board through my screen here, and we talked about KPIs before we actually had a conversation. A higher level than that, just about business in general from a PNL standpoint. Profit and loss. Right. And, you know, talking through that, you know, profit's not necessarily a bad word, right? Profit is one of the most important things to the business, and I quiz them. The way I approach it is I'll ask for a point blank, like what is the most important KPI in a business? She probably doesn't know much about what a KPI is, at least in her business. Nothing against her, right? It's just how it is. Because I want to see the depth, or lack thereof, of knowledge, and that helps drive those conversations. Right? So we are going to do a deep dive in the next coming weeks on KPIs, and then start drilling down with different layers, right as how those numbers intertwine with each other.

Doug DeLucca 00:21:32  That then translates back to what his gross profit look like cost of goods sold, net profit, those type of things. Again, it's so informal. We don't know where the conversation goes. And then the next day could turn into I don't know what the interest rates are doing. I will say today's account because I saw that they were going up recently. Right. And you know, so it really all depends. We're in the process of hiring another mechanical specialist mechanical specialist too. And we had a conversation this week about how our hiring process is. And one of the things is an on site interview. And everybody did a vote on that person. Right on. Is it a good cultural fit? Because skills are you can teach skills and can't teach attitude. Right. Walking them through the process. And as a quick side note, he found us through AI Ryan because I did a blog about flat rate. He wants to move from a flat rate tech to not a flat rate tech. So it's interesting how these conversations that you might think are relatively narrow, almost all of them intertwine with some form or fashion, right?

Brian Walker 00:22:32  Yeah, absolutely.

Brian Walker 00:22:34  I tell people all the time about how the marketing that they do for their clients. It's the same exact marketing that they should be doing to bring in new team members. But getting back to what you were talking about on the KPIs, I think that is something that every one of the business owners who's listening to this should really consider is to be transparent about the numbers in the business, but then to educate the team, because it's so easy for somebody to look at a PNL and go look at that bottom line, they just think that all that money is going into the owner's pocket. They don't understand things like, well, taxes still have to be paid out of that, and debt load still has to be paid out of that. They will often think that, well, the owners just getting rich. But when you start educating people on the inner workings of a business, then you know, it can be very eye opening. And I've seen that through the conversations that I have with my own team.

Brian Walker 00:23:30  So I love that you're doing that.

Doug DeLucca 00:23:32  And to piggyback off of that, Brian, one of the things that KPIs do for us is, and for most people too, if you look at them properly, is takes the emotion out of it. So for full transparency, we've had a slow last few days. Car, couch just down. People are fine and it's been days. It's not earth shattering to the business, but I ran reports just this morning and we're still above last October for this time frame. You know, of double digits showing that to Karina and Niko and the team, like, hey, yep, it might feel XYZ, might feel like a negative experience. But here's where we are with the business. We hope the business is up and to the right where it's always growing. And maybe one day it has a hiccup somewhere. But back to your point that KPI doesn't lie, right? If your numbers are good, your books are good. Clean, right? Nothing nefarious going on.

Doug DeLucca 00:24:22  And then I can go home, drive home at night though. Yeah, today was a little bit off. Karina. We you know, you don't make any rash emotional decisions and pretty for a younger team, you know, set of team members to see that it's like we'll help mature them, you know, as team members and show them when they become leaders in whether it's a leadership in process or people or whatnot, that KPIs are going to be pretty much almost the center of every role in the organizations.

Brian Walker 00:24:50  One more question about the meetings that y'all do. Are they something that's like. Is it scheduled or do they just, you know, a conversation is happening out in the shop and it's like, hey, you know, let's talk about that. And it just kind of happens when it happens.

Doug DeLucca 00:25:04  So things come up when I see something we're talking about, I'll write it right on the board in the corner just because I'll forget, right? We do the best we can to do lodge. We typically eat lunch together for 20 minutes or so, but, you know, the demand of the day could change that.

Doug DeLucca 00:25:19  We just again, let the conversation go to what we have on the board to talk about. Karina is probably the hardest person to keep it in the lunch room because the phone's always ringing, right? No, nothing against her, but it's somewhat formal, Brian. Right. As far as it's more focused around the lunch, right? Sit down, break bread together, eat. And then we're just talking while we're eating. We do morning huddles. 745 for five minutes. That's just, you know, tactical for the day. And then sometimes if the day allows, well, we'll meet at the end of the day, but typically, again, that's more on a tactical side. But the team is well aware that, you know, if anything comes up that they want to discuss, let us know or just write it on the board or ask us just point blank and we'll talk about it. Sometimes we have a lot, you know, with list of things to talk about. We'll get to 1 or 2 items.

Doug DeLucca 00:26:04  We're only here 8 to 4. Right. So it's an eight hour day. So we try to maximize every minute of every day. So we don't have as much time to do like a formal like one hour. Here. We do meet with the team members on a quarterly basis just as a check in. Right. Not a performance review where you say, hey Carina, how are things go? What can we do to, you know, make things easier? What should we stop doing? That type of thing that's more of a like a one on one mentorship session. Karina meets with the list. I meet with my mechanics specialist. But to back to your question. Yeah, the good thing is and so one of our values there is, you know, value consistency. And the consistency there is lunch every day. Let the conversation go where it may go.

Karina Kuecha 00:26:45  And also one of the more important things that we talk about and see it on the board behind and to the left is our wins.

Karina Kuecha 00:26:51  And that's something that is definitely unheard of for me, talking about things that are actually improving, you know, and dealership world, you only get a meeting if something's wrong, you know, not when something's going good. So that's something that I definitely appreciate that we don't necessarily need to talk about. But it just being recognized is it's nice to see, you know, when Nico does an evaluation by himself for the first time or a customer, you know, got work approved under warranty and, you know, stuff like that where it's wins for everyone and you'll see at the top clients, team and business, you know, we separate them because wins for different people mean different things. You know you can win for the business but not for the client. So I'd like to encourage wins for everyone.

Brian Walker 00:27:34  That's awesome. Well, y'all. I really appreciate you being on and talking about this. Doug, I've referred to you and your business on our podcast many times without necessarily saying who I was talking about because of just the excellent job that y'all do over there.

Brian Walker 00:27:49  You know, thanks for being on and sharing this with our listeners. Is there anything we didn't talk about that we should have?

Doug DeLucca 00:27:57  No, I think that covers it for all the listeners out there. One of the ways I've gotten to where we are, what we're talking about now is literally listening to podcasts, right. I can we were just talking about it in one of the lunch sessions. Right? I've got hundreds and hundreds of hours. And then putting it into practice is what can be challenging. But once you get into that rhythm, right, and you try something new and you may have to pivot and move around a little bit to see get what's right. But my biggest guidance from what I've learned in the short time we've been talking about what we're talking about here, is kind of get out of your own way. Like if it feels right or it feels like something that would provide value to your team, just do it. Now, granted, we're a relatively small organization, so a four person team is different than a 20 person team than a hundred person team.

Doug DeLucca 00:28:44  But it's rewarding professionally and personally.

Brian Walker 00:28:48  Awesome. Well, thanks y'all. For our listeners. We really appreciate you listening. And remember, we are one of a handful of podcasts on the Automotive Repair Podcast Network. You can find the others at AutomotiveRepairPodcastNetwork.com. I hope that you'll listen in again next week. And until then, go fill those bays.

Speaker 1 00:29:08  You've been listening to the Auto Repair Marketing podcast with Kim and Brian Walker on the Automotive Repair Podcast Network. Download our exclusive podcast app at Automotive Repair Podcast Network. Com because the best conversations in the industry start here. Marketing questions. Well, the walkers have the answers. Check the show notes for their email.