Is Flat Rate Destroying the Auto Repair Industry? | Steve Blanchard

**Steve Blanchard** (0:07)
Good management should always figure out a way to reward the people that want to produce, right? So no matter if you're flat rate or paid by the hour, whatever it is, you can still create those incentives for the guys that want to do more. Without penalizing the guys that, you know, they need to get home because they want to get back to their family. Everybody has different values, right? You'll still get the young guys that are gung ho and they want to make more hours, give them the opportunity, right? They don't have to be on flat rate to do that.
It's the way I see it, you know? It gives the technician a little bit more power to feel that they're in control of what they're doing.

**Jeff Compton** (0:45)
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome back to another exciting episode of The Jaded Mechanic Podcast. Bonjour mon amis for my French friends that listen once in a while.
Today is really special. I have a friend, a new friend, Mr. Steve Blanchard, who reached out to me.
And Steve is Québécois, Canadian. So that's kind of the first one that we'll ever have on here. He's not 100% Québécois. You can explain that to me. He was an arm cat and moved around. But we drove some of the same roads and worked in some of the same areas. He is from Ottawa. We're currently living in Ottawa, Ontario, which is my old stopping grounds. And so we have reminisced quite a bit before we just hit record now. And he wants to share with me kind of his background in how he kind of come up on the Quebec side of things, which I didn't know a whole lot about. And I find it fascinating because you've heard me talk about the differences that I saw in Quebec versus Ontario technicians and shops and all this door rates and pay and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So Steve reached out to me to kind of like share some of that. So welcome, Steve. How are you today, man?

**Steve Blanchard** (1:53)
Thank you. I'm very good. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

**Jeff Compton** (1:56)
Yeah. Part of my French is not great. So, you know, I'm just a square head Englishman, right? So I don't do well.

**Steve Blanchard** (2:05)
Well, you know, my language is broken in both French and English now, so it's kind of a mess. I try to do my best.

**Jeff Compton** (2:11)
Yes. You're kind of you've been doing this quite a while now. You're kind of an older gentleman like myself and got quite a few experience. How many years in are you?

**Steve Blanchard** (2:20)
So it's 30, it'd be like 30, the 32nd year.

**Jeff Compton** (2:24)
Yeah. Long time.

**Steve Blanchard** (2:26)
Quite a long time. Yeah.

**Jeff Compton** (2:27)
And originally from, you said to me, kind of started out in Quebec, Quebec City, Quebec.

**Steve Blanchard** (2:34)
Yeah, that's right. So my background is big. I come from a military family, so I moved around a lot.

**Jeff Compton** (2:41)
Yeah.

**Steve Blanchard** (2:42)
Basically, every four years, we jump from one place to another. So I was born in Quebec, which was Le Redville at the time.

**Jeff Compton** (2:49)
Yeah.

**Steve Blanchard** (2:50)
And I moved to New Brunswick for four years, and then I moved to Germany and Europe for another four years. And in 89, we basically moved back to Quebec because my parents' family were all there. So that's when I ended up completing my high school. And then looking for what avenue interests me, and I applied in a lot of different places. But anything mechanical was a passion of mine. Ever since I was a little kid, I'd tear up my parents' lawnmower just to see how the thing worked. And as one of those kids that just needed some kind of engine to mess around with, so I had this really big interest in that. And automotive in my mind was a sure thing because I was like, everybody needs transportation and I'll never go out of, you know, I'll never be out of work. So it was kind of my reasoning at the time. So I joined, there was a college program in Quebec City at the, it was called. And it was like a year and a half of General Mechanics. And then you could do six months back to back of specialty, like in electrical, alignments, air conditioning, things like that. So I did the full program.
So from that point on, I was lucky enough to get hired. I was the first apprentice to ever get hired in a 35 year history of Laillet, Poncec, Buick. Like I could name them because they don't exist anymore. They got cut in 2008 with all the other giant, you know, GM. On the other ships. But it was a great place in terms of, you know, everybody there was friendly. They were all very competent.