In this episode of Repair Shop Reckoning: Race to Zero, Kevin and Jason go straight at the root problem most people keep dodging.

Flat rate is brutal, but the real villain is wasted time caused by bad leadership, weak policies, and broken processes. When the parts department is late, when the advisor does not verify parts, when approvals drag, when meetings steal wrench time, when techs are forced to do unpaid DBIs and research, the technician eats it. Every single time.

Kevin breaks it down in a way that is impossible to ignore, using simple math that hits you right in the paycheck. Ten minutes a day turns into thousands per year. Fifteen minutes here, twenty minutes there, and suddenly you are working for free while management stares at an “efficiency” report like it is your fault.

Then it gets real with a story that nails the whole system.

Kevin takes his team out for a big dinner and the restaurant absolutely melts down. Out of basic items. Orders coming late. Chaos in the kitchen. And the only person keeping the experience from turning into a full dumpster fire is the waiter, running his tail off trying to cover for everybody else’s incompetence.

Now imagine that waiter is paid by survey.

That is the dealership CSI nightmare in a nutshell. The tech can do everything right, fix the car, go above and beyond, and still get crushed because the coffee was bad, the snacks ran out, the wait was long, or someone else dropped the ball. A survey based on the whole experience would kill him even though he was the only one doing his job.

If you are a shop owner, a manager, a service advisor, or a tech who is sick of getting robbed by inefficiency, this episode is for you.

You will learn:

1. Where flat rate time really disappears (and why it is almost never the technician’s fault)
2. The policies and procedures that protect technician paychecks
3. Why you cannot “fix efficiency” by stopping production with more meetings
4. How leadership can build a support system so flat rate stops becoming unpaid labor
5. Why techs have to start pushing back when the system is designed to drain them

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/repair-shop-reckoning--6688688/support.