Building the Future of Heavy-Duty Repair: How Fullbay is Scaling Shops with AI and Data

In this episode of Know to Grow, host Chandler Kohn sits down with Scott Gordion, Chief Product Officer of Fullbay, to discuss how shop management software is evolving alongside the heavy-duty repair industry. From the five stages of shop growth and the shift from paper-based processes to digital operations, to AI-native platforms, predictive maintenance, and the future of connected fleets and parts suppliers, Scott shares how technology is helping shop owners scale while maintaining efficiency, margins, and control.

Chandler Kohn: You are the chief product officer of Fullbay. Most people listening to this are going to know what Fullbay is, but for some adjacent listeners in the space, maybe not heavy duty. You know, take us, take, take them kind of at a high level and tell us what Fullbay is, how many employees work for Fullbay, how old the company is, and then we’ll get into some questions.

Scott Gordion: Fullbay is, provides shop management software for primarily focused on heavy duty truck repair but used in a wide variety of cases from yellow iron and agriculture. We even have some marine folks on there. We have a customer is kind of fun down in Florida who, who provides tank rides and tracks all of his repair and maintenance of his tanks with Fullbay. So we have a, a growing diversity of customers in, in the types of units that they, they, they manage in Fullbay. The company’s about 10 years old now and, and was start a good old, you know, classic garage startup with two founders and one of them worked in a shop and thought like there’s got to be a better way than, you know, paper and pencil and Excel and QuickBooks. And so the idea of Fullbay was born and yeah, so it’s been a really fun journey. I’ve been here for two years and, and just been having the time of my life spend a career at Microsoft and Amazon for a long time and before kind of moving to a smaller company and really enjoying it. We have about just, just at 200 employees right now.

Chandler Kohn: Okay, fantastic. And one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is because you guys obviously developed the platform based kind of on, you know, really on what the customer needs. So I think, you know, from your perspective, you can see, you know, what, what the universe is looking for in a software solution, maybe not what they’re looking for. And through that lens, you know, our listeners can, can, you know, take what they want with regards to growing and scaling their own operation. So let’s, let’s jump into some of the key questions here and talk about how you guys view, you know, shop scaling. I think you mentioned that full base see shops move through, you know, through distinct stages as they grow. I think you mentioned that there’s kind of five stages that you guys look at. Yeah, walk us through that framework and what each stage is.

Scott Gordion: Yeah, thanks. We’ve seen, we’ve onboarded thousands and thousands of shops, you know, over the, over the decade, and we kind of see it break out across these five kind of levels, if you will. The obviously, the first one is your good old solo solo entrepreneur, your mom and pop shop just getting started. Many of those are mobile technicians. So, you know, they’re out in, they’re, they’re, they’re going out to their customers and all of their parts and tools and everything are in a truck. And, and then what happens is, you know, that the shop is successful because the technician’s good, right? The owner is a good, a good technician, good mechanic, fixes things, does quality service, and demand grows. And so now this is probably one of, one of the biggest transitions is that solo entrepreneur becomes a manager, right? And now suddenly has an employee or a couple of employees and needs to, in addition to doing everything that they do, they need to manage, manage employees. And they’re still wearing many hats, right? They’re the technician by day, they’re the office manager at night. And, and so really at that stage, Fullbay is just helping them scale, right? Helping them create invoices efficiently, get invoice, get them out, get paid quickly, keep track of parts that are going on, trucks and things like that so that you don’t forget to charge for them. And then that’s kind of that first stage. Then as you, as you hire more and more employees and you figure that out, you know, many, many shop owners go into business because they’re really good at fixing things, right? And you got to learn the business of, of managing people, managing processes, managing systems, and, and that’s really that growth stage. You know, we see that like kind of three to nine employees still, single location, maybe you got a number of trucks now and, and then pretty soon that that base gets big enough to where the man, the shop owner can’t manage it all themselves. And so now they start hiring specialists, they have a parts manager, they start to see service writers coming in, office managers to perform those, those basic tasks of a, of a shop. And, and that’s kind of, that is going from growing to establishing that single location and really performing, keeping your margin, you know, really maintaining your, your profit margin, your efficiency, measuring tech efficiency.

Chandler Kohn: Super important.

Scott Gordion: I had an interesting conversation with a customer at Diesel Connect and he said to me the second time I found a three thousand dollar part that hadn’t been included on an invoice, I called full day. Right. And, and that’s really what the software does for you is it’s your eyes and ears looking out for the shop owner, making sure process and procedures are being followed.

Chandler Kohn: Awesome. Any more to add that or is that good?

Scott Gordion: Well and then your last ones is just expansion. Right. So now you, you see from that established single location you start to see them rinse and repeat that into multiple locations. There’s a big trend right now in the market of buying up, retiring. You know, you’ve got shop owners who want to retire and so either younger owners are buying up those shops and, or a private equity is actually come into the place, come into the market and is buying those shops as well. So a big area of growth for us that we see is in the multi location kind of realm of, of the shop’s growth.

Chandler Kohn: Yep. And one of the, one of the challenges for any software provider is, is mirroring, mirroring the business into a software solution. So I know you mentioned, you know, once you hit three to nine employees, you know the, the owners becomes a people manager. You know, obviously we know kind of what breaks on the operational side of things, but what in terms of using the Fullbay solution or owners not doing the correct thing in Fullbay to mirror their business in and can capture the business day to day. What, what are some of those challenges as an owner scales that business out into the Fullbay platform?

Scott Gordion: Yeah, I think, I think the, the big one is just, you know, when you’re, when you’re, small you can keep everything in your head.

Chandler Kohn: Right.

Scott Gordion: And, and the really good ones are able to do that very effectively and that, and at some point that just breaks down. Right. And so visibility into what is going on in the shop. One of our shop owners I love to talk to, she will say it’s about transparency and accountability. Right. And and control those, those three things are really what a shop owner is concerned about as they grow. It’s, you know, what is the status of any, any piece of equipment in the, in the shop. Right. What, what estate is it in, who’s working on it, what parts are going on to it are. If parts have been ordered, where are they, where are they in that process? Money leakage is a big one. Right. And that’s not stealing. That’s, you know, not accounting for labor hours, for example. Right. Or losing track of parts, losing track of supplies, those type of things. And, or just aging ar right. Where you’re going out beyond 30 or 60 days on your accounts receivable because you lost track of invoices that aren’t paid. So those are the types of things that you really see a growing business struggling with and where shop management software can really come in and help.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah, you know, we, we’re, we’ve, you know, obviously we have several opportunities where, where owners come to us to, to look to exit and manage that process. And I’ve seen too many shops still doing paper based.

Scott Gordion: Oh man.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah, right. I mean it’s 20, 26 papers everywhere, you know, and physical file cabinets still in place. Is it really that hard for somebody to switch from a paper based process to a digital process? What’s your viewpoint on that?

Scott Gordion: Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, I think that sometimes people are like, hey, it works for me. You know, I think the one thing that we always think about, I always remind the team at Fullbay is people show up at the shop every day not to sit in front of a computer and type. Right, right. But to wrench. And that, that’s the ultimate goal. That’s what their customers are paying them to do is fix, fix equipment and, and so the software really needs to get out of the way as much as possible. And so I can, you know, it’s, it in many ways it’s tough to beat pen and paper. It’s, it’s very flexible. Right. It, it’s easy to use, it doesn’t run out of battery life, it works with a greasy hand, those type of things. Right. So I get why people might be reluctant. But what we have found as, as, as folks that maybe aren’t as computer savvy didn’t grow up with computers and grow up with the Internet. As they retire and they’re replaced by the younger generation, they’re obviously much more tech savvy. They look for and demand technology to, to help them manage and run their business and we definitely see that, we definitely see a growing kind of need for more sophisticated technology to run in the shop, especially in the worlds of diagnostics and repair information. There’s so much data coming at a shop owner, a technician now with all of the real time data, sensors on the vehicles, you know, gps, telematics systems that are constant, camera systems that are just constantly generating data. And so it’s really, I would think almost impossible now to, to run a shop and, and repair modern equipment without sophisticated software.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah. Particularly if you’re looking to gain market share.

Scott Gordion: Yeah, for sure.

Chandler Kohn: Let’s, let’s continue the digital theme here in terms of AI. Everybody knows it’s, it’s where the, the public markets are focused right now. You guys just acquired Pitstop Connect.

Scott Gordion: Yeah.

Chandler Kohn: Tell, tell the listeners about that acquisition. It’s your first acquisition AI I believe and it’s a great opportunity for you guys. So tell us, tell us what that means for you.

Scott Gordion: Yeah, we’re super excited about Pit Stop joining the Fullbay family. Uh, Shiva and his team have done a phenomenal job with the technology they built. Shiva’s interesting story. He, his dad ran run still today, a garage up in Toronto, Canada. So he grew up as a, as a kid, you know, sweeping floors and, and doing oil changes and tire rotations. And he was always fascinated by this idea of preventive maintenance or predictive maintenance. Right. And so he actually has a engineering degree. He built a, a one of the first kind of GPS type units that you stick plug into the, to the vehicle and, and get data back from it to try to diagnose. Right. And that’s how he started and they’ve been very focused on that whole idea. He has a vision around preventing breakdown Right. Through predictive maintenance. And so that’s what really excited us. We think that’s definitely the future of repair is, you know, downtime is so expensive way beyond the cost of the repair itself.

Chandler Kohn: Right.

Scott Gordion: The opportunity cost, the lost time and, and efficiency all come into play there. And so we want to arm our, our shops with the latest technology, the best tools they can so they can service their customers. And we thought that this made a really nice fit with, with where we are headed with our AI strategy.

Chandler Kohn: Yep. And I know Shiva very well, so was able to catch up with him at Diesel Connect and I’m very happy for him. It seems like a great marriage between Pit Stop and Fullbay. You mentioned that, you know, you’re a 10 year old company and this new platform release is kind of for the next 10 years. Yeah. So I think AI is kind of the under underpinning solution rather than kind of a bolt on to Fullbase new platform. Tell the listeners a little about, a little bit about what this new platform is and then what it may mean in practice for a shop owner.

Scott Gordion: Yeah, thanks. You know, 10 years ago AI was in its infancy. You know, we called it machine learning back then and, and the, the infrastructure that Fullbase started with being cloud based. Everything else was client server at the time time. So it was pretty innovative in its day, but AI didn’t really exist and this, this idea of, of real time, steady streams of data coming into a system really wasn’t a, a trend. And so we knew that in order to skate to the puck, right, and to take our customers not only where they are today, but where they want to go in the future, we needed to build a state of the art backend data model infrastructure to be able to handle those things. And so that was kind of the genesis of why we built Fullbay next. And then the other thing you mentioned, AI is a bolt on versus kind of, we call it AI native bolt on. Just means it’s just like an aftermarket accessory that you add to the truck. It works, but it’s different if you built it from the foundation. And so if you’re just cleaning up tech notes from a technician and making it customer facing, that’s pretty easy today. That’s what I would call a bolt on feature. Not a lot of deep integration with, with the, with the shop’s data necessarily there. But if you want to, we really think about it from jobs to be done perspective. Right. And so every job in the shop should have an AI assisting them, AI agent assisting them. And so if you want to get to that level, you need to work with their data. And that requires, that requires rag models and MCP servers and that’s something that you want to make sure your, your infrastructure can support. And so that’s, that’s what we’ve been busy doing here for the last year.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah, that’s super helpful. And for the folks that are maybe against AI, they don’t feel like, you know, they want to learn it at this point in their careers or lives. Any, any commentary around that?

Scott Gordion: Oh yeah, great. Glad you mentioned that. You know, we, we talk if you’re in technology, you can’t avoid AI, right? You eat, breathe and sleep it these days, as they say. But one of the things that really we feel strongly about at Fullbay is that AI is just a tool, right? Just like many other tools. And really, like at the end of the day, I don’t really want my shop owners thinking about AI, like oh, am I using AI or not? It’s just inherently part of the system and the system is just smarter, it’s more efficient, it makes your job easier, it surfaces information, it really works for you. And that’s our goal. Not to hide it by any means, but just to make it an everyday part of your job. Like, like, you know, the Internet is today. Nobody ever questions like should I be using the Internet or not or should I be using a mobile device? Those are just tools in your arsenal to, you know, make yourself more productive, more efficient, get the job done. And, and that’s how we see AI is, it will become that way too. It’s, it’s an amazing technology, don’t get me wrong. It’s revolutionary. Whether you want to use it or not. It’s coming. The world is rapidly adopting it and, and, and you know, you have to put guardrails around it obviously. But I think for the most part it’ll be a tremendous benefit to, to the industry for sure.

Chandler Kohn: And let’s get a little technical here for a minute. You’ve borrowed some of the scaling architecture from companies like Amazon, I’m sure some of your experience and others experience previously their careers. I know there’s a more robust data model in the new solution on medallion reporting layer. What does that mean?

Scott Gordion: Yeah, thanks. One of the things you learn working at Amazon is massive scale. You know, if you think about a typical day, you know, on Amazon, you go to a product page and it loads up quickly, the cart works, you know, efficiently etc. And then you go on to the Amazon website on Black Friday for example, where you have, you know, hundred times the number of people on the site at the same time and the product still just works, right? The cart just works, pages load properly. That’s the, the Amazon architecture. And we, we learned a lot. I, I learned a lot. There’s several other others of us that worked at Amazon previously that learned a lot from on, how to do that, how to scale a system to meet that kind of demand. And so we’ve brought those best practices here to Fullbay and, and we, we have the same thing. You know, you see especially like in this world where PEs are buying up shops, they suddenly have 300, 400 employees on, on the system. And so we, we want scaling to be a no brainer here, you know, for full basic. So we brought a lot of that. And, and one of the things that is tricky that’s challenging for any shop management software is you have transactions that are happening. That’s the, you know, I’m building an estimate, I’m processing a work order, I’m ordering parts, I’m, I’m processing invoices that those transactions are happening. But at the same time owners and managers are wanting to run reports and, and pull data off of that same. And you put that same load on the, the single back end system, you know, it can become problematic especially as your data set grows. And so one of the things that we, we implemented in the new platform is what we call medallion tiered reporting layer, which medallion just fancy term for you have a bronze, silver and gold data layer if you will. And so bronze layer is just literally listening to all of the events that are happening in the system and pulling that data. The silver layer, Silver layer then cleans it up. It does what we call ETL on the, on the data and gets it ready for reporting. And then the gold layer is where the reports hit or pull data from. Right. And so, so we can be making changes, we can be listening and gathering data, we can be transforming it without it affecting the real time reporting. The system is much more robust, much more accurate on the reporting data, etc. We’re super excited to get that into our customers hands.

Chandler Kohn: Good. The platform now tunes itself to shop type and unit type. What does this mean? Why didn’t it do that before? You know, give an example of how the app adapts to a specific operation or situation.

Scott Gordion: Yeah, well as I mentioned, you know, Jacob, one of our founders came out of a shop and like many startups they’re built with that idea of that single shop in mind. Right. That workflow that that shop used. So in our case a heavy duty diesel repair shop. And, and, and so the, the application kind of, it built from that vantage point. And, and what we found that as, as Fullbay has become more and more successful and as you have more and more customers, they’re, they’re working on a more and more different types of units right from yellow iron to emergency vehicles like I mentioned earlier, marine etc and, and what we found is as we listen to these customers, they say hey, Fullbay is great but it’s clearly built for heavy duty diesel repair like class 7 and 8 heavy duty diesel repair. And so we wanted to build more flexibility into Fullbay so that it will adapt when you, when you are working on a different type of unit. So for example an emergency vehicle has a different workflow than a typical semi truck and so we want to support that. When you, when you choose, when, when you pull up a, a fire truck that you’re working on and Fullbay recognizes, oh, you’re working on a fire truck. Okay, so there are some additional steps in the workflow. There may be different parts vendors that you’re gonna, that you’re gonna want to see or pull data from, etc. Versus a forklift right where it uses, it doesn’t care about mileage. Right. It doesn’t, it doesn’t have a vintage, it has a serial number, you track hours, etc. Different parts vendors, again, so as these different unit types are loaded up in, in Fullbay next, these, these other pieces or components of the application will adapt to that unit. And so super excited about that and I think that it will, it will greatly benefit our customers that are specialized in things that aren’t class seven and eight. Like, I met a guy in Chicago, all he does is work on forklifts and he’s like, yeah, I love full bait, but it’s clear clearly for trucks. Right. So I want to serve him. But also bigger shops have their own equipment so they’re working on and they, and they serve customers with the diversified list of equipment. So even, even a large shop from, you know, from repair to repair, it could be a different type of unit. And we’ll support that.

Chandler Kohn: And let’s, let’s, let’s hop into the vision. I appreciate you answering those. This may be the most exciting part of the podcast for any listeners. I think the vision is to bring the shops, the fleets and the parts vendors onto one platform. Yeah, tell us about that, how long that’s going to take to implement and what that means for owner operators.

Scott Gordion: Yeah, thank you. We’re super excited about this. You know, we’re expanded already from the shop management piece and we’re now with pit stop acquisition, we’ve added the fleet maintenance piece, if you will. And that’s really about, it’s not necessarily about us getting into the fleet maintenance business. There’s plenty of fleet maintenance providers today that’s really about helping shops better support their customers who are fleets and owner operators and, and help and help with things like predictive maintenance like fault code management, those type of things. And, and so we’re, we want to provide a platform that facilitates this transaction, this relationship that the shops and fleets have. And then, you know, the third leg of that is their parts suppliers. And so having, providing a place for them to come, just like Amazon did with third party resellers, you know, place for the parts suppliers to come and to participate on the platform and to share information. Right. So you get to these places like just in time, inventory. I think one of the biggest challenges that a shop has is like what do I stock in inventory and what happens if that stock starts to age. Right. And so having, giving the parts suppliers more data on, you know, you use that predictive maintenance to anticipate the needs of the truck, but you can also share that information with, with the parts supplier too. And, and so now they’re better informed about what the demand is and, and, and what they need to deliver or provide to the shop and to the fleet. So, so that’s our ultimate vision. You know, and then the other important thing, and you mentioned platform and I really appreciate that because we’re moving from an application to a platform and what that means. An application is really that point solution that I talked about.

Chandler Kohn: Right.

Scott Gordion: We built something specifically for Class 7 and 8 heavy duty repair. And now what we’re doing is we’ve built this flexible platform that I’ve been talking about. And part of a platform is its extensibility. It’s the ecosystem that it enables to come along partners, telematics partners, parts partners, other service partners like fleetnet and things like that can participate and use our extensibility through our public APIs to, to connect to full day and deliver greater value. So really what we hope is that shop owners have, and fleets have one one place to go. You don’t have to load up six different tabs to, to get all. To get everything done that you need for, for maintenance and repair. You can just go one place.

Chandler Kohn: Makes sense and I appreciate you jumping into that discussing that. You know, if I guess, you know, a lot of people here using Fullbase still, you know, it obviously is pretty customizable. Folks that just aren’t adept with the, with applying software to their businesses struggle maybe. Let’s talk about some of the basic reporting metrics that folks should be aware of and how they actually implement those. So efficiency, utilization, some other reports. Let’s just kind of.

Scott Gordion: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, you think about it, it starts with sales. Obviously you want to know where you are A lot of. I think a really good best practice for any shop owner is to have a key performance indicator, a KPI that’s targeted at sales.

Chandler Kohn: Right.

Scott Gordion: And incentivize your, your employees to hit that target. And so that’s, that’s kind of where you want to know first. Right. Is how are we doing against that target on a daily, weekly, monthly Quarterly basis. Second is, as you mentioned, is efficiency. So the other side of that is you’re monitoring your revenue. Yes. But now you have to also monitor your costs. And labor is very expensive and can quickly erode your margin. So tracking your tech efficiency is super important. And that’s something Fullbay has always been focused on from day one is, is being able to give you that, that visibility in how your, your operation, your, your operational efficiency. Then as you get into, you can, you can tie up a lot of money in inventory. And so tracking inventory, tracking the movement of it. Inventory cycle counts. You know, what, what is the status of special orders? I think, you know, the two universal questions every shop owner in the world has to answer to a customer is how much is this going to cost? And, and how long is it going to take?

Chandler Kohn: Right?

Scott Gordion: And so answering those questions requires the application to be tracking that information. And so if you have a, a part on order, right, you got to know like, well, when is it anticipated to be, be here? And is it stuck somewhere? Is it, you know, is it, is it sitting in the, in the, in the shipping area? Is it on the truck coming? Is it still on back order, etc, those type of things? So those are, those are, I would say, kind of your, your top three areas that you want to watch be watching on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.

Chandler Kohn: That makes sense. And for the inventory side of things, you know, there are folks in very dense markets where they can typically get delivery next day. You know, what is, what is, what is. You know, they may argue that they don’t need an inventory management system through full day. How would, how would you think about that as, as kind of the product officer at Fullbay?

Scott Gordion: Yeah, I mean, certainly if you’re in a, if you’re in a populated area where, you know, multiple vendors are available and can deliver next day, a lot, a lot of our customers have that. You still got to be careful. You know, like Covid kind of proved that point out that any type of disruption to, to the ecosystem and suddenly, you know, you, you don’t have parts available. And so I think there’s that, I think there’s also special. Ordering parts is expensive. Right. And so being able to understand what are you ordering, reordering frequently and maybe if I do a bulk order and I can get a volume discount on it, right. I improve my margins and, and so forth. So I think in, just because you can, you can kind of order it at your fingertips doesn’t necessarily mean that might be the best thing or the right thing to do. Ultimately, you always are wanting to optimize your, your, your costs there. And, and so keeping track of those things is the start, right, that visibility on what is happening so that I can make informed decisions.

Chandler Kohn: Yep, okay, that’s helpful when the, when the parts marketplace eventually launches, you know, besides maybe making it easier for the owner or site managers to kind of manage the process, will it impact pricing at all vendor choices? Like, what does that look like? Like.

Scott Gordion: The parts marketplace? What it, what it looks like is a couple of things for, for the shop itself, hopefully what it looks like is better selection. Right. Better visibility into who provides what we can do interesting things like negotiate, just like a, a part consortium could, you know, negotiate rates, negotiate shipping rates for our, our shops, et cetera. But also what we know is that there’s a grow, a growing number of our shops that do a healthy business selling or reselling parts. And so part of that marketplace is for them to say, hey, you know, I got this great deal on a bunch of oil filters or a bunch of pipes or etc. Hoses. And, and so I want to, you know, resell those to counterparts. And so I can, you know, one of the ways you could do that is through this parts marketplace. So there’s a number of benefits there, both from purchasing of parts as well as selling parts to the community.

Chandler Kohn: How many of these fleets are currently doing, you know, predictive efforts versus just pure, pure reactive efforts?

Scott Gordion: Yeah.

Chandler Kohn: Is it still early? Is it?

Scott Gordion: It is, it’s very early. It’s interesting. There was a Fleetio actually did the survey recently and they said only like 5% of fleets are using Predictive Maintenance act actively, but 65 were investigating it. So I think it’s a very much an emerging technology. I think the big question on everybody’s mind is can you rely on it? Right. Is it accurate enough? And that’s a big question we keep asking ourselves is how accurate does it need to be in order for a shop manager to feel com. Confident and comfortable recommending a preventative service? So that’s what we know so far of predictive maintenance. It’s getting better and better. And, and I, I think here’s the key is, you know, we, we have millions of service records, tens of millions of service records in our database today. We had over 5 million service records created just last year. And so that data is critically important in tuning the predictive maintenance engine. Right. And, and I think that as we are able to leverage that data more and more in our new platform, I think the prediction accuracy will go up tremendously and become more of a staple, more something that people rely on every day.

Chandler Kohn: And with, with predictive maintenance, you would think that a fleet would say, all right, you know, either way, I’m going to have to have some, some downtime maybe, you know, during a profit hour, maybe like during the weekend where the truck’s not running, but I’m gonna have to have some downtime. So it’s, it’s gonna cost me the same price on that part. Regard. Regardless of whether it’s reactive or proactive, are they kind of thinking, well, from a predictive maintenance standpoint, maybe I replace this part too early and it has another 20,000 miles of life in it that’ll add up over time. Is that kind of the, the, the main blockage here to, to using predictive maintenance?

Scott Gordion: Yeah, I think, I think there’s an element to that for sure. I think, I think it’s just such a new technology. And, and I think one of the things that we talk a lot about as you implement AI, because this is essentially AI under the hood, right. Do looking for these patterns and trends is it. I think today too much of predictive maintenance is a black box. It’s this magic, this magic box that, you know, you ask it a question and it spits out an answer. And I think one of the things we’re working on is two, two, two parts of, of our approach to AI. One is you always keep the human in the loop. So the AI isn’t doing the job. It’s assisting and being transparent to what it’s doing so that the human being can evaluate it and discern. Like, yep, that looks right. Or no, you went off, you know, you went off the rails. As we all know, I hallucinates from time to time. And so I think that’s really the important piece, and I think the industry is still trying to figure that out is, you know, how do you, how do you find that balance between transparency and accuracy and just making it easy to use?

Chandler Kohn: Yeah. And it may never be perfect. Right. I mean, and then that’s. That’s kind of okay. Right. I mean, there’s so many variables that go into the, the end of life of a part.

Scott Gordion: And, you know, parts are relative of. In the equation of repair. You know, depends on the part, obviously. But most parts are relatively the inexpensive piece. Right. So whether that part had 5000 miles left or 1500 miles left is pretty immaterial because it’s all the labor it takes to get to that part and replace that part. And more importantly, it’s the downtime. Right. That you prevent. So I think that, I think that this, the math there, people are starting to really do that, do the math a lot more and, and figure out like, yeah, you know, being super accurate about getting. Squeezing out every last drop of that part is probably not the area to gain efficiency on. It’s really about minimizing downtime.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah, that makes sense. I get that. Let’s wrap this up. I think this has been a really good conversation for a shop owner who wants to grow without losing control of margin or quality of their work. What’s one thing that they should consider in a shop management software?

Scott Gordion: Yeah, I think, I think the really important thing is that the software grows with you. You know what, you don’t want to do this. This becomes a. The operating system of your shop. It becomes mission critical. You, you generate a lot of data, you store a lot of data, it becomes your system of record. It drives. You know, there’s a lot of training and understanding that goes on with your employees. And so you want to choose a system that will grow with you. Right. You don’t want to outgrow your shop management software anytime soon. And so I think that’s probably the most important thing. So as, as you grow up in, in the levels of complexity and sophistication and how you operate your. Your business, you want to make sure that that shop management software is going to have the features and functionality you need to be able to go with you. Right? Right. You last thing you want to do is have stop and re. You know, and switch to something else, retrain your staff on it, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that’s, that’s super important. You know, Volay is a very mature product now. We’ve had 10 years to build and tune it, and it has hundreds of features in it, you know, and hundreds of settings in it to give shop owners a tremendous amount of flexibility and power. We’re super proud of that.