He Went Alone, But Came Home With a Family with Aniz Lavji - Ep.177 Pt. 1

Aniz Lavji (0:06)

But then, I looked over, I happened to see you there, you're standing with Brian Pollock, and I was like, all right, you know what, I'm going to go say hi to Jeff, and then go from there. So I went over, and we had about a 10, 15 minute conversation. You're a Canadian as well, and I'm like, okay, I kind of felt like I had some kind of connection with someone right away. And from that moment, I started to go to the classes, meet other people. You have one familiar face. You don't need 7,000 people that you're going to go there and see. You need one person that's going to literally take your hand and tell you it's going to be okay. You're with family. You're with the automotive family now. And that's the feeling that I got when, after maybe about an hour or two, I'm like, I feel like I'm at home. Like ASTA is my home.

Jeff Compton (0:57)

Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to another exciting albeit technically difficult, challenging, I love computers episode, The Jaded Mechanic Podcast.

It's a Saturday morning. No, I'm not on the boat. We're trying to knock out something when the schedule's aligned. And again, all the technical gods smile down on us. But I wanted to bring on a good friend of mine, almost my brother at this point, Aniz Lavji. Aniz, how are you today, bro?

Aniz Lavji (1:24)

I'm good, man. How are you?

Jeff Compton (1:26)

Oh, I'm a little sore as always. We had an interesting Friday yesterday, like, as you know, my co-worker is never in on Fridays. He gets Fridays off. So Fridays at the dealership are kind of like chaos day, right? Oh, yeah. And we were pretty lucky in the sense that it wasn't all that busy. So I actually got a chance to change the failed power steering pump on my Jeep and get that done, which I don't know. It said it's supposed to take like two hours to do it. And I had it done in like 45 minutes. So I don't know.

Aniz Lavji (1:55)

That's been a long time coming.

Jeff Compton (1:57)

Yeah, it's been it's been a little sketch, not sketchy, but hard to back a boat in with no power steering.

Yeah, for about two weeks now. So I finally got it done. There's other things that still need to get done. It still needs the engine oil cooler, like all the Pentastars need to get done. It needs to be done and I need to change my vacuum pump. That's still not done. And then I need to replace my radiator, order some new tires. So yeah, it's a Jeep thing, bro. So you know what they're like when they come in, right? Yeah, they're money makers. So how was your week?

Aniz Lavji (2:34)

It was good. So like we've been talking often. So I finally hired a service advisor and we got a license tech. So we have two license techs now, which has been a game changer. It's been a lot easier to kind of run the whole operation.

With the flow of things, I'm not kind of running around and trying to make sure that this car is getting done, and this car is getting done, and is there someone assigned to this job? So now I'm kind of in training mode for my new advisor to kind of take some stress off me, so I can breathe and think, and like all the coaches say and everyone, you don't want to be working completely in your business, you don't want to be working on it. So that's the mode that I'm in now.

Jeff Compton (3:23)

And that would have been pretty hard to bring in a technician at the same time without the advisor, because that just ups your car count, it ups your responsibilities on all the estimates, and at the same time with no help for you. So this could have happened at a better time. A lot of people might look at two new employees at the same time, Aniz, and go, oh, that's too much, but for you, this seems to be working great.

Aniz Lavji (3:46)

I'm okay with it. Even if we were only getting the tech and we didn't get the service advisor, that's okay, because that would just go with the flow.

And the thing is, I'm able to serve my customers better too. I'm not telling them I'm not gonna be able to get you in in the next couple of days, it might be a few days after. So, now I'm able to get that vehicle in, have it dropped off, inspect it, send off the quote. But because that's less stressful than telling them, hey, you know what, we're slammed right now. And the worst thing you can tell a return customer all the time is, oh, we're slammed, oh, we're slammed. They're like, you know what, this place is the worst place because I can never get in. And then you're gonna lose that person that you've been nurturing all these years. So all your marketing dollars go to crap.