AutoFix TechnologyCast

Chris Cotton [00:00:06]:
Here's your host, Chris Cotton. Hey, everybody, this is Chris Cotton from the autofix Technology cast. This is going to be episode number one. Hopefully you went back and listened to episode zero where I talked about what we're trying to do and everything. My apologies for not being in the studio and we have some makeup equipment here, but we had a family emergency and had to get out of town. So that's where we're at. So today, guest number one, episode number one is Steve Fafel or Steven Faffel with Auto Ops, slash Steer. And we're just gonna get right into it.

Chris Cotton [00:00:47]:
So how are you doing?

Steven Fafel [00:00:49]:
I'm doing pretty good. I. I feel honored. Guest number one. I appreciate you having me on and yeah, excited to chat.

Chris Cotton [00:00:56]:
Well, sometimes it pays to be, you know, alphabetically the A. Right. So I, I made my list and I did it alpha in alphabetical order. And I'm like, okay, Auto Ops. So I'm going to email you first and then here we are.

Steven Fafel [00:01:08]:
There you go. Yeah. I did not think about the benefits of having autopsies an A, but it has paid off. And a lot of lists, you know, when we're going to conferences, auto at the top.

Chris Cotton [00:01:16]:
So, yeah, that's the same with auto fix, the same way. I never really thought about it that way. But a lot of times we're, you know, we're up there as well. So. So tell us a little bit about yourself and then talk about Auto Ops a little bit.

Steven Fafel [00:01:31]:
Sure, yeah. My name is Steven Fafel from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, one of the co founders of Auto Ops. Not a. Not many tech companies more Amish furniture comes out of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. But yeah, so after seeing my father and a couple other people at a different company doing online scheduling in the home services space, we saw, and I thought through how valuable it could be for auto shops to be able to have true real time live scheduling. And that's when we started Autopsy back in August of 2023 and have been building it ever since, staying very focused on online scheduling. We did merge with Steer, which is a CRM platform, but it's kind of nice because it continues to let us focus on schedule scheduling while letting Steer focus on the rest of the CRM components.

Chris Cotton [00:02:20]:
And tell me about that. How did that work? Like, do you own Steer? Does Steer own you? Do you own each other? What is the symbiotic relationship you guys have here?

Steven Fafel [00:02:31]:
Sure, yeah. So, yeah, it started when Parker Swift, the CEO of Steer, formerly known as Mechanic Advisor, we Had a bunch of mutual customers going into, in the end of 2023. And yeah, I think Parker just said saw a lot of, he enjoyed our focus on just scheduling and he saw that we had a lot of happy customers, saw a lot of people who really enjoyed our product, engaged a lot with our product. He saw it as new cutting edge software and they had a scheduling tool. But it really, they wanted to put their resources into being the best CRM possible. And then yeah, in August 2024, that's when we were under the same parent company. Stick Steer Steer is a parent company, two separate products. So people don't have to use, you can just use Auto Ops.

Steven Fafel [00:03:18]:
But if you use Steere, Auto Ops is included.

Chris Cotton [00:03:22]:
Right. And then so for everybody out there, we use autops in our shop, but then we use Cinch for the CRM side of it and both work together. Great. So let's so talk about Autops a little bit more like what it does, how you drive customers and things like that.

Steven Fafel [00:03:42]:
Sure. Yeah. Really, the, the intent of Auto Ops is to focus on it as a conversion point. When we're thinking through converting customers, we're looking at what a shop is currently spending on marketing and saying, okay, you're spending and I forget, Chris, what do you, in general, what do you coach shops to spend on marketing for established shop? What do you coach them to spend on marketing in terms of their total revenue?

Chris Cotton [00:04:05]:
So I don't really coach to, I really don't coach to have somebody with zero growth. Right. But if somebody just want, wants to maintain and they have a ton of cars, you know, we're looking at like 2%. But for our shop, you know, that we just took over, we're, we're spending about 5 to 8% and so that's a big chunk. But we're seeing the results of that too, you know. And then so to give you an idea, we're, you know, on a shop that's going to do a million five this year, we're spending right at the seven to eight thousand dollars a month mark. And that's, that's, that includes everything. That includes you guys.

Chris Cotton [00:04:45]:
That includes shop marketing pros and those type things.

Steven Fafel [00:04:49]:
Yep. And I was asking that because the whole point of auto up saying okay, on that, let's say eight grand, we're spending a month. How are we making sure we're utilizing that the best as possible? How do we make sure we're converting on that we're spending eight grand to get these viewers. How do we make sure they're Actually getting the entire way through the funnel and getting into my shop. Really what Auto Ops focuses on is the very bottom of the top of the funnel. We're saying, okay, we have the viewer. If we just show them a contact form, if it's just a boring contact form where they're like, is someone going to get back to me? Is this going to go to anyone? Are they, they going to be out of enough information about my service. How many customers are you losing? And that's really what Autops came to fix, to say, can we provide a tool that's going to a help convert more viewers into customers by making a really smooth, seamless, easy to understand experience? Can we do that while also giving all these benefits to the shop? Can we help them save a lot of time through the integration with their shop management system? Can we give them better information about the service that's going to be coming into their shops? Can we give them better data about where their appointments are coming from? Great.

Steven Fafel [00:05:56]:
I'm working with a great website provider like Shop Marketing Pros how many appointments I'm actually getting through my website. So that's really what Auto Ops started out tackling in the beginning. And now we're just as we kind of conquered the basics. We're getting into more in depth items such as saying, okay, so we recommend declined work. That's a big feature of Auto Ops is pulling declined or deferred work from the shop manager system and recommended to the customer. Now we're saying, okay, can we get to the point where we recommend all customers something if a shop wants to. So right now with decline deferred work, that's obviously just current customers who have already been in my shop. What about when a new customer is coming in for the first time? If they say they want an oil change and they give us their vehicle, can I understand the vehicle and maybe recommend a piece of preventative maintenance that would be valuable to them.

Steven Fafel [00:06:47]:
We'd love to get to the point of giving shops the ability, if they want to at least recommend one helpful service to customers. Just so you're always giving everyone an.

Chris Cotton [00:06:57]:
Upsell opportunity and, and I think that would be great. So, so I just want to talk through this a little bit. So say somebody goes to the site or goes to the online booking and types in oil service or oil change. Could we tailor it so that anytime they request the oil change that it recommends a tire rotation?

Steven Fafel [00:07:17]:
Yep. So we do have people who actually currently do that in kind of a roundabout way. Once again, it's not, not Smooth. That's why we're working on it. But you can, in the issue tree, you know, as you're going through autopsy, you select an issue and say oil change. And then it can ask questions. We do have people that every time they select oil change, they built out their issue tree so it says, would you like a tire alignment? And then it can actually tie into a specific service where it adds that. So you can do that now.

Steven Fafel [00:07:42]:
But it is better in the flow where we have the decline to work, which is after it recognizes the customer. So yes, that would tie into what we're trying to do is saying, okay, these are the services I want to recommend every single time a customer comes in.

Chris Cotton [00:07:56]:
Well, and talking about the decline work, like that's something I've noticed in our shop. So we use TechMetric, we use Auto Ops. And I've noticed that when people make appointments, they come in and it's, it's okay. Oil service, do you want anything else? And they're, they're asking for transmission services, they're asking for other stuff. But when you look at it, it's because Auto Ops recommended it because it was declined work previously. So having said that, I want to say this. This is why it's so important for your service advisors to build the estimate and if they don't sell it, decline the work instead of deleting it out. We have a lot of shops that for some reason they show 100% sale rate and it's because they delete out everything that gets declined.

Chris Cotton [00:08:42]:
And as a shop owner, you're spending money to gather that information and send it out to the customer. And then Autops is trying to send it on your behalf. And if you're letting your service advisors delete that and not keep that deferred work in there decline work, you're just hurting yourself. And then so, you know, for somebody that doesn't know what Autops does, can you talk about like the Google Online booking and some of those things? Can you take us through the bottom of your funnel?

Steven Fafel [00:09:16]:
Sure, yeah. So when it comes to Google, Auto Ops was the first company last April to have an integration with reserve, with Google. There's now I think six companies that have this integration for auto repair shops. And yeah, I mean, this is huge giving, putting auto shops on a level playing field with restaurants, with hair salons who all had this ability to say when they are on the Google Maps, when they're on Google search, giving customers the ability to click a button, adding a button there where it takes them directly into Scheduling where they don't have to go through your website, find out how to schedule an appointment. It's all about reducing the friction, getting closer and closer and closer to the customer. And as I'm sure you know, you know, what is it, 77% appointments start with a Google search of some kind.

Chris Cotton [00:09:59]:
Right.

Steven Fafel [00:09:59]:
They all involve Google and Google is trying to get. And it's not even just, you know, on your phone when you're on Google Maps, there's a button on your phone when you're on Google Maps. So you know, Google spends billions of dollars to make sure their Google business profile is used. And a lot of times they almost wanted to get in front of the website. So that integration has been huge for us. I can't talk this too much but yeah, there's more possibilities. Google is releasing all kinds of new things constantly. I know the one thing and I talked to the Google team about this.

Steven Fafel [00:10:33]:
They launched Google local service ads which I think you said you were using Chris.

Chris Cotton [00:10:37]:
Yep.

Steven Fafel [00:10:39]:
Right now. Soon they're going to be able to use auto ops like in that scheduling flow around the Google local services ads and like. Ok right now the tracking is a little. Google has not set up the tracking for autops to count as like which is actually beneficial for shops at the moment. But they'll be working on it and it'll give shops better tracking. So. And Google, yeah, they're always messaging us about new products so we may have more opportunity to work with Google. We love working with them.

Steven Fafel [00:11:09]:
They're a great partner. And yeah, it's cool for it's, it's, you know, it's cool for me, it's cool for our team to be able to work with a company like Google who they're, they're pretty sharp.

Chris Cotton [00:11:19]:
Yeah. So if there are people out there that don't know the Google services, several years ago Google had it set up so that if you were H Vac company or a plumbing company that you could go in and part of the path to this is you have to fill out a bunch of information. I think we had to send in our corporation documents. I think we had to send in our insurance policy. But now when people are looking for your services in the area, it shows that you are referred by Google basically and then they hit the button and then they call you. But what I'll tell people, like our average repair order is very high. Like we're over $1,000 average repair order on these tickets because most of them are breakdowns. We see some from people locally but most of them are people traveling through and where our shop is.

Chris Cotton [00:12:10]:
We're in a big tourist area so that's really, really huge for us. And we get anywhere from right now about it used to be three to five, but I'm gonna say we're probably in the five to seven a week range. And each one of those that we're able to book out of five, we're able to book four. And that's another four grand a week we got coming in. That in essence is really, really cheap. When we originally did that, Shop Marketing Pros again helped us set that up. I think they told us our ad budget for this recommended by Google local or service ads was about 500amonth and we're averaging on, on those tickets about 60 to $80 a week. So we're, we're way underspending in that category.

Chris Cotton [00:13:03]:
But when you look at like return on investment and everything else like the like, that has been huge for us personally and I think it will continue to be like that. But anyway, Google and just like the last 45 days has said, okay, we're going to let auto repair shops be a part of and then let us back in. And so that's really, really good. So you're talking about this. So now they see the ad, they click on it and it basically calls the shop. So are you saying that eventually that somebody would be able to click on the ad and go straight to the appointment scheduler and book online or.

Steven Fafel [00:13:42]:
I have to look into it a little bit. I haven't been super familiar about it. Shout out to Brian Walker from Shop Marketing Pros. He was, he was on it early. Yeah, I, I think right. If I'm correct right now they can, I have to look into it. I'll get more.

Chris Cotton [00:13:57]:
Okay.

Steven Fafel [00:13:58]:
Because I don't know right now if it goes to it. I think in some versions it does go to our scheduling, but I know that it does not trigger a conversion yet.

Chris Cotton [00:14:05]:
Yeah, the one thing I was worried about when I started this was I was like, oh, all of our local people are going to see that first and click on it and then we're just going to be paying for all these clicks and phone calls. But I think, I think out of all the phone calls we've got in the last month, month and a half, I think two have been current customers. So that was, that was really interesting. So the other thing I wanted to talk to you about is Auto Ops Voice. I love this feature. I think everybody should have it. But can you tell us what Auto Ops Voice is and how people should be using it.

Steven Fafel [00:14:43]:
Yeah. So auto ops voice is really focused around converting better on phone calls when you guys are at the shop or don't want to pick up the calls right now I'd say, and I know you were testing it out during the day most shops are using it, use it after hours. That's the best after hours when you can't take calls instead of just saying hey we're closed, leave a voicemail. I think another thing to determine if is autob's voice a good fit for you? For shops who are getting 10 voicemails a night or over the weekend they come in, they have 18 voicemails that they have to sit there on Monday morning and go through and call back. And sometimes you can't get in touch with people autopsy voices, especially for those shops. But what it can do is a, you can fully customize voicemails in any different ways in a bunch of powerful ways. But I'd say the main use case they're saying hey, can we customize our voicemail to text people? Link to schedule an appointment right away. So instead of just saying hey, this is Steven's auto, we're gone.

Steven Fafel [00:15:42]:
Leave a voicemail. Could say hey we're Steven's Auto. Press 1, we'll send you a link to schedule an appointment, a live appointment. Right now you could set it up to forward to your towing company. You could set forward up to an after hour call service. If you have that and you can track those links. You could see great how many clicks, leads and bookings that you get from that link. You can manage your voicemails, you can see your voicemails.

Steven Fafel [00:16:02]:
We're working on some transcriptions and things like that for voicemails. Yeah, it's really just converting after and.

Chris Cotton [00:16:09]:
So really I want to talk about the way we were using it just a little bit. So our shop was mainly tires and auto repair. But the interesting thing since I took it over, we basically flipped it to auto repair and tires now which is great because the margins are better, average repair orders higher, everything. Um, you know we bill out about 80 tickets a week with two service advisors. And what we were doing is just the phone call volume before we turned auto ops voice on was just ridiculous. And we were getting robocalls, we were getting all the other calls. So I told the, I told everybody in the shop, I'm like look, we're going to switch over to autops voice. Let that answer during the day.

Chris Cotton [00:16:51]:
It'll handle the scheduling. People can leave messages and we did that for two or three months. I loved it. We already talked about it before we started. Like the one, I don't have an issue with it and I would tell people if your call volume is just insane and you want to focus on the people coming into the shop, try auto ops voice and let it answer during the day and see what happens. People, people will use it, they'll convert, they'll have a ton of people scheduling online. But our issue with it was the Google services ads. We were having trouble getting those phone calls through and the only way we could figure it out was to turn off the auto voice.

Chris Cotton [00:17:29]:
So nothing. No, no fault of your guys. I think it's a great product. The one thing I would say though is like number two in ours, we forward it to the towing company. I wish there was an announcement at the front of that that said, hey, this call was provided by Firestone of Durango. That way they know where that phone call is coming through coming from. Because we, because we were having people call and hitting the number two and they were. This is part of Google's issue too.

Chris Cotton [00:18:04]:
They were hitting number two to go to the towing company and the towing company didn't know where they came from. So we were sending people, we were getting people sent to other shops that didn't know where to go. So I don't know. Anyway, that's, that's on my wish list. If you could do that, that would be awesome.

Steven Fafel [00:18:20]:
Yeah. And yeah, we still, we want to collect more data and more anecdotal from shops on really, what's the best menu to have? How should you set it up? Especially if you're gonna. During the day. Should it say. Should the first thing, hey, you called Firestone Durango to speak to a service advisor, press one and then hey, press two if you want to schedule an appointment or press three. So yeah, I think we still. And you know, it's what we released it maybe five months ago. Yeah.

Steven Fafel [00:18:48]:
So we're still collecting a lot of data on how should this best be used.

Chris Cotton [00:18:53]:
Yeah. And that's about the time we started using it was like. Right. Like I think it was a brand new feature when we used it and again, I love it. You just have to figure out how it works in your system and everything. So one thing I do want to talk about and I didn't have any numbers before and maybe you can, I don't know if you can help with this or not, but we've been really, really consistent ever since the very first month. So we started in September of 2024 and 33% of all of our customers have been new customers. And that's, that's it.

Chris Cotton [00:19:31]:
I don't know that it's fluctuated more than a percent up or down each month. And so I don't know if you have any data or can speak to that on people, people not having the book online, not having auto ops to having auto ops and what those numbers look like.

Steven Fafel [00:19:46]:
Yeah, I'm looking at your, your dashboard right now and it is, yours is pretty standard for what we see for most full service repair shops that are heavy in auto repair right now you have 340 appointments and 145 of them are new customers. So yeah, about a third, maybe a tiny bit less. But the interesting part and I, I didn't even look at this yet, I wonder if we look at just the Google button you will see that yeah, 30 of those were a much higher percentage. So you got 55 appointments through Google and 30 of them were new customers. That's over 50% of the ones through Google are new customers. Which once again that is about we see in general when we look across all of our shops about a third of customers schedule are new customers and 50% are when you're looking at just the Google ones. About 50% of those are new customers. So you're a little above, you have a little more on the Google side, maybe 55% but that is about we see and I think that's just because once again the people who are in your area who they're on Google searching auto shop near me, brake repair near me, tires near me.

Steven Fafel [00:20:50]:
So you're going to find more of those customers who aren't familiar with your website and aren't going directly to your website.

Chris Cotton [00:20:56]:
Right. Well I think the other thing is like we're the only people in our market that have a book online feature. Hopefully the rest of them don't do it like so if we, if we could keep them from it then that would be great. And Yeah, I mean 33% new customers, that's pretty good. I like it. And the other thing I will tell you is because all the notifications go to me through email when somebody books online, I'll wake up in the morning and People book at 11:59pm they book at 2:30 in the morning. Like it's insane how like I don't know why the hell these people are not in bed asleep but they're up when it's convenient to them booking people where we wouldn't be there. To answer the phone anyway, like they're, like they're booking and booking good jobs.

Chris Cotton [00:21:48]:
So again, love it.

Steven Fafel [00:21:50]:
And your shop, you guys are a little less than this, but we see a lot of shops where 30% of their appointments are after hours. And yeah, like you said, I was a, I was doing some late work two nights ago. It was 1A. It was 1:24am and that day already, meaning from midnight to 1:24am there was 212 appointments, 212 people. That's between all of our shops, right? That's 212 people who are up at midnight where they're. Yeah, they're busy during the day, they're working, they got a kids. The other cool thing I'm seeing on your dashboard is, yeah, you have 340 appointments, great. But 121 leads, which is I think a healthy percentage where it's, it's sad, but that is the default for what you're going to see people dropping out.

Steven Fafel [00:22:34]:
People just, they'll start scheduling, they'll get distracted, they'll go to look at their own personal calendar. They may even get confused. Now we have customizable notes to help them hopefully not get confused where you can better explain the experience. Um, but you know, those are 121 people that if you had a contact form or we didn't have this feature that you would have no idea. You had no idea they engaged with your shop. I saw, I saw you haven't checked off. We do have some new features we just released a couple days ago just to help manage a little better. You can delete leads, you can mark tasks for them, you can.

Steven Fafel [00:23:04]:
What's some of the other features I was looking at? Yeah, you can close the lead. You can quick add an appointment so you could say, hey, this lead I turned into. So a lot of cool things you can do with managing those leads and seeing how far they got through the experience for bailing out. And we have really good stories where if you call them, and I think calling them as quickly as you can has given the best results. But even if it's a slow day, a couple days later, call them, you might still be able to get them in. But for the shops we have who call them right away, there's been great stories where they were like, oh, I was about to call a Meineke or I was about to go in the Meineke down the road. And then, yeah, you guys call me back, yeah, I'll head on in.

Chris Cotton [00:23:41]:
Well, and I don't know, excuse me, I Don't know if this is a metric that you can check or track, but can you further check to see if that lead went ahead and booked in later anyway, like a con. Like a leads conversion?

Steven Fafel [00:23:56]:
So we are working on that. I know that that's. Sometimes it's hard to. Yeah, we need to. Yes, we, we will. But it's. Sometimes it's hard to see where it's like, okay, did someone start this? Then they booked it. They booked it like two minutes later.

Steven Fafel [00:24:08]:
So should they have been counted as a lead? So there's all kinds of things, but yeah, we're definitely working on some conversion.

Chris Cotton [00:24:13]:
I. I think on our side of it, what would be good? And so we do. We go back and call everybody. Like, try to, like the minute we see the lead, we try to go back in and call them immediately and be like, hey, I saw you're trying to book, but for some reason you weren't able to. What can we do? And I would say, again, we don't track it. It's something we should do. 75% of those leads were able to turn into an appointment. And so I wish, I wish there was some sort of a button on there that we could push or something that says.

Chris Cotton [00:24:47]:
Because there's notes where you can leave the notes in, but there's not a button so you can track it on your side. That we followed up with a phone call and we converted it to an appointment. That way you could further that funnel and see what it was.

Steven Fafel [00:25:00]:
Yeah. Especially if we gave you guys a button and we kind of did a little more manly where it's like when you guys click it, then we could add some statistics up top. Hey, this is how many. Yeah, so that's something, right?

Chris Cotton [00:25:11]:
So I think that would. I think that would be great on.

Steven Fafel [00:25:13]:
That already for all I know. Yeah, I heard they were doing some more stuff.

Chris Cotton [00:25:17]:
And the other thing, which you guys probably don't want to do, but I would love to be able to click a button and send those people a text, like immediately.

Steven Fafel [00:25:26]:
Yeah, you were. You beat me to it by 10 cents. That is something that we're releasing with Steer, I think, like in the next few weeks, add those leads to a campaign. We're looking at giving them an export. Once again. We have lots of people who are not on steer. People are on cinch. People are on all kinds of other platforms.

Steven Fafel [00:25:43]:
So we'd like to give them the ability to text them out. We may have like an export where we can. You could export them and then maybe upload them.

Chris Cotton [00:25:49]:
And text them.

Steven Fafel [00:25:50]:
But I know austere. Yeah, it'll be, it'll be built into the platform where you could just upload them right to a steer campaign and then shoot some text out.

Chris Cotton [00:25:57]:
No, that would be excellent. Any way we can do that? But really with techmetrics, pretty easy. We can add them as a customer really, really quickly and then just shoot them a text through it. The only time I do that is if it's like late in the evening or first thing in the morning, I'll send them a text rather than try to call them. And then one of the other things that we have is we have the widget on our website so people can look up tires and pricing and we sell about, I don't know, right now we're selling about 8 to 12 tires a week just off of the website. But as soon as it sends it through, it tells me at the bottom like how the customer says, how would you like to be contacted? And they all say text. And then so we just follow up, say, hey, we got those tires ordered. They'll be in X.

Chris Cotton [00:26:49]:
Go ahead. You have something there sparked?

Steven Fafel [00:26:51]:
Yeah, question. Because we have, we're very excited. We're starting it getting into integrating with tire purchasing platforms where they purchase the tire on that platform and then it directly and smoothly goes into, okay, you purchase this tire, then it goes into Auto Ops for scheduling. But it does it where it already has, it shows a picture of the tire in Auto Ops. It already has everything pre selected. It could even take their name and just go right to the scheduler because so the question is what tire, what platform do you use for tire purchasing on your website?

Chris Cotton [00:27:22]:
So well, they, they can't go on and pay for it. They can, they can fill out the information, tell us when they want to do it and then it sends us the email and then we order. So we use Tire Connect, which is a Bridgestone, which is a Bridgestone Firestone feature.

Steven Fafel [00:27:37]:
So yes, that integration just began testing yesterday. So that integration should be live to everyone in a little bit. So when you go through the tire connect process of selecting a tire, finding a tire, going through the checkout at the end when it says schedule appointment, it used to be a contact form. It will now for people who are customers of Tire Connect and Auto Ops, go right into the autopsy where they can then schedule that appointment to get their tires installed perfectly.

Chris Cotton [00:28:04]:
Okay.

Steven Fafel [00:28:05]:
So yeah, I'm very excited about.

Chris Cotton [00:28:09]:
So yeah, if you're ready for people to beta that then after we get off here, all we can hook that up because that, that would be perfect. But the only thing I'd have to look at some stuff on tire connect side. But anyway, yeah, I would love to see that because it already has their information anyway. It has their, they, they put in their vehicle information, they put in their phone number, email, all that. And then if we got, if we were able to capture that and not double duty the work, then yeah, that'd be awesome. Anything else that you can tell us that might be coming up new or that you're working on or.

Steven Fafel [00:28:47]:
There's always new integrations, there's always new features. Yeah, like I said, around leads, there's a lot of new features, some integrations with steer when it comes to campaigns. Working on the recommended services instead of previously declined services. And we have a town hall coming up. Oh no, I forget the exact date. I'll send the link over afterward. And we have a town hall coming up. That's where the product team really gets on and gets all the things they're working on and tells everyone about that.

Steven Fafel [00:29:14]:
So everyone who's an Autops customer, even if you're not, you'll probably still get an email. We're talking about our town hall. So yeah, that's a great time where we go over everything that we're building right now. There's a ton of features. Need to talk to the product team and get all the recent updates. Maybe they'll make me wait to the town hall, but yeah, my father's on that. My father leads the product team, so I should be able to get some good information about what they're, what they're building.

Chris Cotton [00:29:35]:
You would think. You mean need to have him over once a week or you guys go out to dinner and be like, hey, like over a hamburger. Be like, hey, tell me what's going on.

Steven Fafel [00:29:42]:
Well, listen, the, the issue with that is I try to do that and then my mom's like, stop talking about work at the table.

Chris Cotton [00:29:48]:
Ah, okay. Well, you're gonna have to, gonna have to not invite mom or do another meal or whatever. Yeah. So absolutely. Shoot me the links to whatever you want to have and we'll make sure and get, get them out with this. Anything else you want to say, anything you want to close with or do you want to give them some contact information right now so that they can reach out?

Steven Fafel [00:30:11]:
Yeah, Feel free to reach out to me directly. My email is Steven S T E V E Nauto ops comm. Phone number 717-440-7702. I always tell people, shoot me a call, Shoot me a text. Love to talk to any shop owner. Even if you just want to talk about your scheduling, what you're currently doing, there's ways you could even improve your current scheduling. Even if you're not ready for a scheduling tool, which I'm biased, but I think everyone should get on.

Chris Cotton [00:30:35]:
I think 100%, everybody should have a scheduling tool. And so for. For all of the people that don't know, you know, I own a coaching company called autofix Auto Shop Coaching. Like, that's. We recommend that to all of our customers and clients. Like, it's. It's one of those things like having techmetric doing a digital vehicle inspection. It's a must do in shop.

Chris Cotton [00:30:55]:
Like, you need. You need an online scheduling tool. There are other companies out there that do it. I'm partial to auto ops, but it is what it is. So thanks for being. Thanks for being guest number one. Thanks for being here. I love everything you guys do.

Chris Cotton [00:31:12]:
We're gonna have a conversation when I stop recording and I'm gonna be like, hey, you need to shoot me all the beta stuff so we can try it out in the shop and see how it's going and go from there. But. Yep. Thank you so much, Steven.

Steven Fafel [00:31:24]:
Awesome. Thanks, Chris.

Chris Cotton [00:31:29]:
That wraps up this episode of the autofix Technology Cast. Thanks for tuning in and being part of the conversation about the tools and technology driving the auto repair industry forward. A special thank you to our sponsor, Cinch, for making this podcast possible. Remember, Cinch isn't just a tool. It's a game changer for your shop's customer retention and outreach. I use it in my shop and I know it can help yours, too. Don't forget to check out Cinch IO Autofix to claim your free onboarding, a $3,000 value. And as always, rise and grind, folks.

Chris Cotton [00:31:58]:
I want you to keep pushing forward. Stay on the cutting edge and keep your mindset positive. Together, we'll keep driving success in the auto repair industry. Until next time, take care and keep thriving.