From Wrenches to Workflows: Scaling Heavy-Duty Repair with Software

Chandler Kohn sits down with Fabian Bonjean, founder and CEO of Foothills Group and ShopView, to unpack how he scaled a multi-location heavy-duty repair business—and built purpose-built software when existing tools failed. Fabian shares lessons on labor, cash flow, KPIs, and why operational discipline and the right technology are separating industry winners from laggards.

Chandler Kohn: Welcome back everybody to know to grow a light to heavy duty podcast hosted by myself, Chandler Kohn with FOCUS Investment Banking. Taken a few weeks off recently due to a welcoming of a newborn into our family and the holidays but nevertheless here we are. Excited to kick off 2026. Really bullish on the heavy duty industry and automotive aftermarket in general. Today I have Fabian Bonjean on with Foothills Group and Shop View based out of Calgary, Canada. Serial entrepreneur and very excited to have him on the show. Fabian, welcome and let’s go ahead and kick it off. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your background and then we’ll jump into our agenda today.

Fabian Bonjean: Yeah, thanks for the, for the the intro Chandler. A little bit about me. I’m the CEO and founder of Foothills Group. Scaled a multi location heavy duty truck repair business over the last several years and through those struggles over time we had a lot of software issues, a lot of management issues that we tried to solve with software and so we ventured out and we built our own full scale shop management software. Also founder and CEO of that company called Shopview. So we have total employee count is about 130, 135 people today between the two companies. Shopview is based out of the US focused on the US market and also the Canadian market. And yeah today looking forward to the continued growth, the growth of Foothills Group and also the continued growth of ShopVue.

Chandler Kohn: Excellent, appreciate it. Let’s, let’s, you know, let’s kind of start with Foothills Group. Tell us a little bit more about what you do in terms of auto coverage, heavy duty and heavy equipment and what industries in Calgary are driving that.

Fabian Bonjean: Yeah, good question. So when we started originally I was working at a heavy duty shop before I went on my own working at a heavy duty shop that also did automotive work. So I did a lot of auto work and then kind of at the tail end of my, my period there I was working on the heavy duty side. And so when I went on my own and started Foothills, it started in the automotive space. We did strictly automotive for it was maybe about a year. So it was obviously much easier to start. I started out of a garage so it was I can’t get heavy duty trucks in there so it was much easier to get diesel pickup trucks in there. And then we ventured into a smaller space into a shop and that’s when we started doing heavy duty work right away. So today that’s the primary portion of our business, heavy duty truck repair. But we have a dedicated automotive shop and then we have two dedicated heavy duty Shops. And then we have a third kind of satellite location that does mining equipment repair, and that is more of a remote location. So we just run service trucks on one of our clients sites. And then at our heavy duty truck shops, we also do mobile truck repair or we do mobile repair, servicing construction equipment and yellow iron equipment. And generally what’s driving all of that is, you know, if you’re in any sort of city that has a decent population, there’s. There’s several services that are there servicing the. The population of that. Of that area. So we’re in a city that’s growing at a quite a rapid pace. So that generally just brings in a lot of construction traffic, heavy duty truck traffic trades. Even our automotive business, it’s all B2B. So it’s. It’s basically an automotive fleet. A fleet shop. Yeah. But then in the heavy duty side, if there’s new buildings going up, if there’s new roads being built, there’s obviously heavy duty equipment and heavy duty trucks required to construct all of that. And that’s primarily what drives the industry here.

Chandler Kohn: Okay, makes sense. You know, a lot of folks we talk with either want to specialize in auto or, you know, specialize in heavy duty. And often there is overlap. Is there, was there ever a reason or a business case to just specialize in one versus another?

Fabian Bonjean: You know, we did automotive just because it was kind of the easiest thing to kind of get us off, to get us going. Yeah, the goal was always to really specialize in heavy duty. And so we just kind of kept the automotive shops separate. So it is kind of a separate, fully separate location. So the shop itself is specialized, and then the heavy duty shops are also specialized in heavy duty. They operate in completely separate buildings with completely separate teams. So we do have some. We have some fleets that have auto and heavy and construction equipment. And they will use all of our services. So they will send the different equipment to the different specialized shop. So as a whole, like the shops are kind of specialized in that sense.

Chandler Kohn: Okay, and what year did you start Foothills?

Fabian Bonjean: I started foothills in 2017. So we scaled. Yeah, today we have about 80 people. So we’re almost. We’re 20, 26. So we’re nine years in. And we got to. Yeah, we got to about this size after about seven years. So we grew very quickly in the industry. We became the leading truck repair shop in southern Alberta in. We were probably there in five, six years coming from nothing. So yeah, we had a really good scaling path.

Chandler Kohn: Good. And has the vision changed at all from the Original founding. Yeah, talk about that.

Fabian Bonjean: The vision has changed drastically. In the beginning when I started, it was kind of the goal was just to have a shop and own one shop and that was kind of going to be it. But then as soon as I got into it, the ambition immediately changed to a bigger shop, a second shop, a third shop, a fourth shop. And then, you know, it really turned into a consolidation play. Like is this an industry that we want to try and consolidate? And so that’s kind of what we’re looking at now. It is, it’s very centered around mom and pop shops. There has not been a ton of consolidation in the industry. It is kind of starting. There are some companies out there that are starting to roll it up. But so our vision has obviously gotten a lot larger. And now with the software side of things, we’re onboarding now about between 30 and 40 shops a month onto the software. So the software is really starting to scale. We’re all across the U.S. all across Canada. And so we’ve developed a very large vision for the software as well.

Chandler Kohn: Excellent. And then when you were thinking about expanding locations and services, did, did any early assumptions change or did any assumptions change from early on versus kind of later for you?

Fabian Bonjean: I wouldn’t say so, no. We were always pretty confident during those expansion periods and the assumptions that we made were correct. So I wouldn’t say anything major changed. We were always, we never had the vision to do a software. It was more through kind of the struggle of we used five different softwares, always trying to find a software that really worked for a heavy duty shop. And then we just, we couldn’t really find it. So we ended up, ended up building our own. So I guess maybe that assumption changed that we would be able to find something out there that we could scale with because that’s when we really started to struggle is when we started to scale. And I wasn’t running the shop myself and I was hiring managers and general managers to run the locations. And you know, they didn’t look at the same things I did. And I had limited bandwidth and I was running all over the place. And I thought that we could solve a lot of these issues with software and that’s why we ended up venturing that way.

Chandler Kohn: Okay, and we’ll get into that in more depth here in a minute. In terms of, you know, expanding the location, obviously you had some market visibility. You know, you thought there was, you know, market share penetration that you could kind of work your way into were capital or people. The toughest challenge to Expansion.

Fabian Bonjean: That’S a good.

Chandler Kohn: My guess would probably be labor.

Fabian Bonjean: But yeah, people were. Was the hardest. Capital was not too big of an issue for us. You know, we operate fairly efficiently. But the people side of it has been the most challenging part. To find good people who care about the business, who want to grow the business as much as you do. Especially when we started venturing into a different city where we had. There was a further distance between us. So that’s been the biggest challenge, hands down, is the people. And generally we’ve always had a really good culture within the company. So we’ve had really great people. But once you start stretching that workforce and you start to work multiple hours away in different cities, it does become more of a challenge. And finding people in those cities that are as committed has been a challenge. We’ve been able to execute on it well and we have a really stable team today, which we’re very happy with. But over the years that has been one of the biggest challenges.

Chandler Kohn: Great. And then in terms of capital, have you ever had to take a line of credit or any long term debt to fund that expansion?

Fabian Bonjean: Yeah, yeah, we took a $300,000 working capital loan. It was probably six years ago. It was when we first ventured into a second city. And that was great. It got us in there, it got us through. But we got that paid off a little bit early, which was nice. Now a big focus of ours has been paying off some debt. We have extended financing on a lot of service trucks and mobile equipment. And so we’ve had a lot of equipment financing, but a lot of that is coming to an end as well. We’ve paid off a lot of vehicles, a lot of trucks. So that’s one of our big focuses today, is to reduce our debt load. And so we’ve paid off, I think it was about $2 million of debt in the last year, which was really good. It just gives us a little bit of extra breathing room.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah, definitely. And then what does the competition look like in Calgary?

Fabian Bonjean: Yeah, it’s competitive, I would say, but we don’t really look at our competition too much, to be honest. We really just kind of focus on ourselves, focus on what we’re doing. The competition is obviously there. We don’t. It’s very rare that you lose a customer due to maybe, let’s say a competitor calling on that customer. If you’re doing a good job, you’re going to lose the customer if you’re not doing a good job. So if you take care of your customers, if you communicate well, with your customers, you’re not going to lose them. They stay loyal just from good service. The customer is not going to risk leaving good service to gamble somewhere else in hopes that the service is going to be better. So if you’re doing a really good job, you’re not going to lose the customer. So we don’t really focus too much on the competitors. They’re obviously there and there is, it is a competitive space. But generally we’re a leader in price as well. We’re a little bit higher than most independent shops, which we have no intentions of changing. At the end of the day, this is a service business. We win. We win business based on service, not based on price. Obviously we have to be competitive, but the biggest part of this is offering a good service to the customer.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah, uptime is the most important thing in B2B, you know, offerings. Are you able to share what your labor rate is?

Fabian Bonjean: Our labor rate is $149.95 an hour. That’s our fleet labor rate.

Chandler Kohn: That’s Canadian dollar.

Fabian Bonjean: Canadian dollar, yeah. Door rate is 165.

Chandler Kohn: Helpful.

Fabian Bonjean: Yeah. Thank you.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah. 2025 is probably a good year to look at in terms of inventory, procurement, management and optimization. Has that been a challenge, getting parts in 2025 and help us understand that you have to pre order increase your, your working capital to, to procure those parts to satisfy customers. What did that look like for you?

Fabian Bonjean: It’s not really an issue, honestly. There’s some modules and things like that that are maybe a little bit challenging to get, but for the most part, we’re in a big city. So there’s lots of warehousing and lots of warehouses we have on our own, we have about 1.5 million in inventory. So. Well, we have a bigger inventory than most heavy duty shops. And a lot of it, even if a lot of it is not I turn inventory, we still stock it out of convenience. If it’s a small, like a lot of small little parts, we might sell that part three times a year or something, even twice a year, we’ll still inventory that part if it’s not super expensive, just out of convenience. Because when it comes from an efficiency perspective in the shop, if, if you have to stop a job as a technician to wait on a $10 part, that’s far more costly to stop that job and go to another job or find another truck and the bay is down. Stocking that $10 part is way ch downing a bay because you’re waiting on that $10 part and maybe it’s coming tomorrow or coming later this afternoon. So we’ve bulked up. We’re pretty bulked up on our inventory. We don’t have any debt or anything on our inventory, which is nice and we don’t have to do any financial manipulation there. But we generally we try to stock obviously our highest moving parts and then a lot of these small convenience items. So when you look at like bolt bins and brass bins and like we have a mass load of that stuff out of convenience because it’s so annoying in a shop when you’re hung up looking for that one special threaded bolt or that one little piece of brass that, you know, some shops won’t order because you use it once a year while we have a shitload of that stuff just to keep the efficiency in the shop at a high level. Good.

Chandler Kohn: And then, you know, I’ve heard some, you know, some chatter about like, you know, suppliers like Dayton Parts, you know, doing a lot of suspension products. Have you seen any categories where the suppliers are lagging behind production?

Fabian Bonjean: I haven’t myself. That being said, I do have a parts manager who really runs that whole side of the business. So she would probably have more insights there than I do. Dayton is a big one of our suppliers, but I haven’t heard any issues there. And we do always have secondary suppliers and things like that. So if one supplier doesn’t have it, you know, we will buy from another supplier. We do buy some. We do buy a lot of wholesale parts as well. With the volume of parts that we have. A lot of things are bought in skid quantities, especially the high moving parts. We bring containers over from China. So we’ll spend, yeah, we’ll spend like 60, 70,000 US dollars on a container to bring it over. And then we will distribute that and sell that to other shops, other fleets, municipalities and things like that as well.

Chandler Kohn: Interesting. We’ll get into Shop View here in a second. But generally from a technology standpoint, what are you using in the shop and where do you kind of see the industry going as far as like, you know, diag and all that?

Fabian Bonjean: Yeah, so obviously the shop management software is a key component to running an efficient, profitable shop. But we have, we have a lot of OEM diag tools. So we have Cummins, we have the DD tools, we have the Navistar tools, we have cat, we have John Deere, we have, yeah, we have most of the OEM suite. Obviously it does cost quite a bit more because we’re paying pretty expensive annual subscriptions on those. We do have Universal tools as well. We have the diesel laptops off road tool. That’s the, we have the Texa one. So that’s through diesel laptops, it’s Texa. We have the off road version and we have the truck version. And then we also have the coach Alley JAL test off road version and truck version. So we’ve. Yeah, we’ve spent a lot of money on diagnostic equipment. We have probably 15 diagnostic laptops, 20 diagnostic laptops, you know, all the OEM break diagnostics. So we are focused on the OEM side because some of the aftermarket tools just don’t, they don’t have everything that you need them to have. So they’re great to have as kind of a universal tool, but sometimes it doesn’t have the function. And if you don’t want to send the truck out to the dealer or something to get it done, you got to buy the OEM stuff as well. Interesting. But we’re big, we’re big supportive. We’re big supporters of the aftermarket tools. They are great and they are convenient. You can hook it up to any truck and you can get right in there. You can do a lot of body stuff and body, body control module things. So we have, we utilize both.

Chandler Kohn: Excellent shop view. Let’s talk about this one. This is an interesting section of this podcast for our listeners. So you ended up building the system you couldn’t buy and really want to jump in here and discuss the operational frustrations that led you to kind of going out on your own and doing this.

Fabian Bonjean: Yeah, we, you know, we never wanted to do it. If we would have found a good software to run a heavy duty shop on, we would have never done this. We used five different softwares over the years, always finding issues with it. We tried a bunch of these automotive softwares and they always, you know, they’re very focused and tailored to automotive. And so they don’t have things like, you know, you start working on a generator and the software is asking you to put in a VIN number. The software is calling things vehicles. You can’t track engine hours and just little specific tweaks that heavy. That’s specific to heavy duty. So we kind of jumped around a bunch of softwares and then we, we moved to a heavy duty software specific to heavy duty. And it was, it was a big challenge for us. You could just tell that a lot of these softwares, they don’t know the industry that well and they probably get a lot of feedback from their customers and things like that, but they’re not Actually using the software every single day. They’re not spending the time with their customers to actually see how does a shop actually work in the real world. And so eventually, you know, we had some pretty big. We had scaled that year we did $18 million, $18.3 million in revenue. And then the next year we lost over a million dollars in cash. And I thought, yes, we had some management improvements that we could make, but the software could have prevented a lot of these things, these issues that we were having. And so every time I was kind of analyzing these problems, it was very apparent that a lot of these issues could be solved with software and we could basically eliminate these issues altogether and prevent them from happening. And when we really started to have the issues was when we got into Multi Location, when I wasn’t the one running the day to day operation. When I was running the day to day operation, I could see everything. I ran all the invoicing, I ran all the work orders. It was a lot tighter. But as soon as I kind of stepped away and then we had multiple managers all over the place and I was managing another level of managers. That is when. And in addition to that, not only was I just doing that, we were really aggressively trying to expand. So a lot of my focus was on the expansion side. So I had kind of stepped away from the management side. And through those struggles, it was very apparent that we could solve a lot of these issues to really build a software that was scalable, that we could scale with to help accomplish the goals that we have for Foothills Group to grow into a larger multi location company. And so we’ve built our own full fledged software. We have it implemented obviously. We have it obviously implemented in our own shops, hundreds of other shops as well. But since we’ve implemented that, we went to profiting over $2 million in a year with almost hands off management. I don’t spend a lot of time on the shelves anymore. And the software.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah, I was just going to tell our listeners this is another section in the podcast. Fabian spends about, you know, two, two hours a month. Right. Kind of, kind of managing Foothills and is focused on Shop View. So we’ll, we’ll talk about the management style that enables that. You know, a lot of these folks, Fabian are, you know, they grew up turning a wrench. Now they own the shop and manage.

Fabian Bonjean: It at a higher level.

Chandler Kohn: Some owners are still involved in the, in the day to day. Can you provide some more specific examples of the gaps in the software and what you essentially built into Shop View?

Fabian Bonjean: Yeah. So what we see, and we see this, I, you know, we talk to hundreds of shops every month. What we see is very common is that as those owners go from being maybe a mechanic at another shop to owning their own shop, then having multiple mechanics working for them and then they’re running and owning the shop, a lot of them don’t actually know what are the highest, the most important business metrics to look at that drives a high performance operation. So in a lot of the softwares, the reporting is very complex. There’s a thousand different items that you can select and pick from and they kind of, they build it like that because ultimately those are all the different statistics that are available, but there’s only like really a key, a handful of key statistics that are really important to driving a high performance business and bringing those reports and those statistics to the forefront in a very easy manner. And it, you know, within shop view, it’s two clicks away at any time. So basic things like tech efficiency, your billing efficiency, your effective labor rate, by making those things very easy to get to and always kind of, I don’t want to say in your face, but very readily available, it really enables the ownership and the management to be able to share those statistics with their teams so that their team knows how they’re performing as well with those owners. A lot of times what we see is they might be looking at some numbers, but their team doesn’t know the numbers. Their techs don’t know their efficiencies, their service advisors don’t know how they’re doing. The service advisors don’t know what their billing efficiency is. That’s something that a lot of software don’t actually have. You don’t have the ability to look at billing efficiency on a service advisor level. So we make that very easily. So our service advisors are looking at their own performance on a daily basis, comparing to others, comparing to each other. And then naturally people want to do a good job, people want to do a great job. So if they don’t know what the numbers are, how can you expect them to improve? So we’ve really just made it very easy to access, Given access to the service advisors, we share the technician efficiency reports with the technicians every single month. And we’ve just made it easy to do. And then if the team sees it and the team knows it, you set some expectations around it, the team will naturally just try to accomplish those goals.

Chandler Kohn: Excellent. And can you spread this horizontally across heavy duty, Aldo, and maybe even heavy equipment repair?

Fabian Bonjean: It’s the operating metrics between the Three automotive, heavy duty truck and equipment are honestly basically the same. The, the core of the business is you work an hour and you sell an hour. All three of those sectors work on the same model. Yes, there’s parts obviously that are involved in that as well. But the core is work an hour, sell an hour. So if you’re not selling the hours that you’re working, that’s a death spiral. And we’ve had this before with previous software that we used. Our utilization of our technicians was 65%. So only 65% of their time was actually on work orders. And so our service advisors, it appeared that we were billing a hundred percent, but we were billing roughly, we were billing roughly 100% of only 65% of their time. So it’s very critical that you have a time clock software running in your shop. Most shop management softwares have one. Whether they run the way that we used to run, it didn’t work very well. The way Shop View is built, we’ve completely solved that kind of micromanagement issue that we had from before, eliminating the 65% utilization issue altogether. That’s basically with Shop View, it’s basically not possible if you set it up properly. But between the three different sectors, the operating models are very similar, the numbers are a little bit different, but generally the model is almost the same.

Chandler Kohn: Very, very interesting. You know, you talked about some of the key KPIs, and at the end of the day, cash flow is what matters for the health of a business. Like that’s if you work down, you know, kind of a reverse pyramid. You know, you’re trying to figure out how do you maximize that. So you made that, you know, you basically produced a platform where you can see the effective rates and some other clear KPIs. But anything else that you intentionally did not build into Shop View?

Fabian Bonjean: Yeah, it hasn’t been. It’s not like one specific like feature or anything that we are not building. But we’ve been very intentional about not making it over complex to the user. At the end of the day, people at shops, they want to run shops, they want to fix trucks. We don’t want to have to try to hack through a program through over complex workflows. We want the software to work, we want it to be fast. So we look at the workflow in a shop and then we build the software to kind of meet that workflow. We don’t build the software and then kind of force the workflow to follow the software. It really stems down to the customer first. The operation first and then we build the software to overlay with that and work really well and efficiently. So previously we used to like if you would review, reviewing a 50 line work order might take an hour. Today it takes us 15 minutes to review. It’s just much more streamlined. So there’s been a big focus on the user experience within the application to make sure that they can do their job fast and efficiently. Because we don’t want people on our software. We want people fixing trucks and calling customers and communicating customers. We don’t want people having to hack through the software because just to work with the software, we felt previously we were almost hiring extra people to manage the software and manage the process and the software, which is the complete opposite of what it’s supposed to do. Today it feels like we can do the same amount of work with less people because we spend less time on the computer.

Chandler Kohn: Really, really helpful. Thank you for that. And you know, I know that you are, you know, jump into this next section. You wholly own Foothills Group and I’ve spent a lot of time with previous guests talking about, you know, how do you step away and focus on scale and growth of your business? That’s really the whole crux of this podcast. Scale growth. You know, valuation is a key theme, but in order to do that, you have to, you have to step back. You have to focus on growth and strategic direction of the business. You don’t have to be a Harvard mba, but you do need to step back. One of the key things that enables that is middle management. And in a good workforce, what had to be true for you to be able to effectively spend, I don’t know, two to five hours a month, which is nothing on Foothill Street.

Fabian Bonjean: Yeah, that’s a good question. It really comes down to the people. And I know you kind of touched on that, but it’s so hardcore true that if you don’t have the right people working with you that you’re not going to be able to step away. Obviously you have to have a very good leadership sense where the people are loyal to you and loyal to the business and they want to work hard and you want to treat them really well. But without that people part of it, I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing. We have a very disciplined operating framework and kind of a structure that we follow with the way, with the reports that we do and the meetings that we do with each service manager at each location. We have fairly disciplined financial controls with monthly financial reporting with every single location. And it’s very Disciplined. It’s very on time, it’s not delayed, it’s never late, it’s never skipped. Those things cannot be skipped if you want to make sure that the operations stay tight. So I do have a general manager that manages all the other managers and then we have HR management, we have financial management, we have me as the CEO kind of overseeing all of it. But without that really great team of people below you, it’s going to be a challenge.

Chandler Kohn: What was the biggest responsibility or you know, responsibility that you had to back away from and just let somebody else handle the decision making?

Fabian Bonjean: Some of the things that I think I held on for too long was like just more like administrative stuff like insurance and like financing agreements and like big financial purchases, even things like that. Like today the team will make, you know, up to $50,000 financial payments without, without my involvement at all. If it’s for equipment or new vehicles or trucks or you know, whatever that is, new scan tools, things like that. So I think it was the larger purchasing that it was a challenge, a little bit of a challenge for me, but generally I’ve done it for quite a long time now where I really encourage team independence, leadership independence, below me on kind of leading a team of leaders and coaching them to be leaders within their own departments of the business. So it’s probably the big financial decisions. But other than that there hasn’t been too much that I myself struggled with. I’ve always, it’s always been fairly clear to me that I needed to get the people to be independently operating on their own without me if I was ever going to go down this path.

Chandler Kohn: Within the org chart, is there one position that you know for a multi location shop that you think was critical to getting right?

Fabian Bonjean: Hands down, general manager who oversees all of our locations or whatever you want to call that person might be called different in different businesses, but without that, that really gives me the ability to step away and give all of the other managers somebody else to report to. So I do still have communications with them. It’s not like I’m a complete ghost. I do visit the shops once in a while. I don’t go into too often, but that general management position has been critical. I had shifted through a few different general managers over the years and it took me a while to find the best one and the one I have now. He was my first employee. I went to high school with him. Great friend, very loyal to each other. The team knows him. Obviously he’s been here since day one. So the team has a lot of respect for him, he’s able to keep, keep the team cohesive with each other and if there’s any sort of internal disputes, he’s really the best person to solve those. And I made some mistakes earlier on and I tried to put some other people in and those, none of those worked and the answer was staring right in front of me. And I wish I made that decision earlier, but today I’m very, very happy that he’s in the position that he is.

Chandler Kohn: You live and you learn. This is a 4 CEOs by CEOs podcast here. How do you, you know drift can be one thing when you take a step back even if you’re not micromanaging, but you really take a step back like you have and focus on other things. How do you detect drift or problems in the day to day? Obviously I would think this the shot, the software solution that you’ve developed is helpful, right? But maybe tell us a little bit about that.

Fabian Bonjean: I myself problems, to be honest, don’t really get escalated to me. They’re really handled at the location level. If they’re going to go beyond the location level, they’re going to the general manager. And very rarely would I get pulled into something but I do biweekly calls with the general manager. So I do get, you know, general operating updates. We do a monthly financial meeting with the financial team and the GM all at the same time. So I get insights there. But if there’s like general data day drift, I’m not really involved in it. But if there’s financial drift or financial issues or like location, financial health, I will see that on the monthly meetings. And we do our financial meetings between the fifth and the seventh day of the following month. So our financial team is extremely strong where we are fully closing our books for the month before the fifth working day and then we are reporting on that immediately. So we are able to take basically immediate action. Yeah, we used to be 30 days. Well we used to, it was garbage before. We had basically nothing. But then we really saw the importance in the financial side of things. So then we got it down to 30 days and now we are five days and then we report on it by the seventh working day of the following month. So that really gives me very deep insight very quickly into the performance of all of the locations.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah, very good. And you know, in heavy duty and auto service, even in just, you know, enthusiast businesses, wholesale distribution a lot, the, the average day that I, I see is probably the, the 12th through the 15th, 16th, but it still varies. So that’s A good data point. I like that.

Fabian Bonjean: Yeah. 12. I mean, 12th to the 16th is still really good. That’s. That’s high performance. Yeah, that is very high performance. Most. Most shops we see, they don’t do it at all, to be honest. So if. If you’re a smaller shop, even if you’re a bigger shop, but if you’re not doing your financial reporting on a monthly basis, you can really get a lot of insights. And you can. You could. I. If you do that, you will almost guaranteed you’ll observe that your business is not performing as well as you think it is. And if you start doing that and get some better financial discipline in your business, not only do you, you know, you make more money, you have deeper insights into business, into your business, you’re able to take true action on those things that you find and things that you want to improve. You’re not guessing anymore. Yeah, you’ll make your business more attractive to other people or investors or partners or whatever you want to do in the future. But it is a good muscle to exercise. And so if you’re not financially disciplined, my recommendation would be to either hire somebody or find somebody that you can outsource it to. But a monthly report should be absolutely minimum, and not only just a P and L, but a cash flow statement is absolutely critical to report on every single month. You know, we’ve made this mistake years ago where we didn’t watch our cash as much. And yeah, your P and L might look good, but you. Your cash went down 250 grand in this month and you’re wondering why. So, yeah, monitoring your parts, your inventory spend, monitoring your ap, your AR very closely. It’s very critical. Yep.

Chandler Kohn: You mentioned diesel laptops earlier. Tyler Robertson, I had him on the podcast. I didn’t ask him how he managed the requirements that would go into the software. Have you done that with a team or have you been kind of driving that?

Fabian Bonjean: Yeah. That’s good. Tyler’s a great guy. I know Tyler and Dan and the team there as well. We’re working on an integration with them. So ShopVue is going to be directly integrated with Diesel laptops that’s currently being developed as we speak. So a lot of the initial product requirements were driven by me, especially the first MVP when we first got it into market. But now it’s really driven by our customer base and the users. We have over a thousand people using it every single day, so we get a lot of insights from our current user base, what they want to see. And as a team, as A Shop View team. We have a lot of people from industry that work for ShopVue. So we’re able to take a lot of these feature requests or enhancements from the user base and we are able to build them how they should be built in a shop. We’re able to really analyze that and build it with the shop optic in mind, not just how we think it works in a shop. So we have a lot of knowledge and insights behind what actually gets built. But we take a lot of feedback from our current user base.

Chandler Kohn: Great. Makes sense. Let’s talk about the road ahead. Right, we’re out of 2025 now. You’re my first guest for 2026. The industry is cyclical. Vocational outperformed freight last year and kind of the tractor repair. But where do you see the. From a service side, where do you see the industry going over the next three to five years? You know what’s going to separate the winners from the laggards?

Fabian Bonjean: Yeah, I think we’re going to see quite a bit of consolidation. There is some players out there doing it. We have seen it start up at a higher level in 2025 and I think that’s going to continue to accelerate over the next three to five years. I think at five years there’s going to be quite a bit of consolidation done. Generally, I think the repair market is very stable. It’s very strong. Obviously, electric trucks are coming into play in the heavy duty side. In the vocational side, they don’t have as much traction just due to obviously battery duration and battery life. So I think diesel will perform very, very strong. Generally there’s very big civil and industrial expansion in the US and in Canada, lots of civil projects and stuff. So I think there’s going to be strong demand for the sector. And as trucks get more expensive, which they always are, a lot of fleets and a lot of companies will run older trucks for a little bit longer and they will service them and fix them. So independent repair shops are usually a couple of years obviously behind the dealers because dealers are doing all the warranty work. But once they come off warranty, most customers immediately leave the dealer and go to an independent shop. They get better service, better price, a little more white glove. They’re able to find people who really will take care of them better. I’m bullish of the industry. Very bullish. Over the next couple years, I think it’ll do very well.

Chandler Kohn: Good. And from the M and A side, obviously this is my M and A is doing my. Yeah, that’s my day job. We just recently released a port a report on consolidation. I think the deal activity in 2026 is going to be 50% more than it was in 2025. There’s just some kind of market drivers impacting that and you know, heavy duty consolidation, it is undoubtedly five to six years behind Tire and Service, Auto Service and Collision that’s kind of dried up. Like Collision for example, the, the, the single generalist body shops pretty much gone here. We’re still very fragmented and the Fleet Pride Pro merger that is shifting the balance of power but there’s you know, no dominant player and these regionals are heating up and getting some more traction. Yeah, just spoke with the True North Fleet guys at Garnet Station Partners yesterday and they, they had some interesting perspective as well. So a lot of folks are, you know, continuing to compete for market share. It, so it will heat up but you know, back to the road ahead. You know, let’s talk about Shop View now and kind of shop management software. Where do you see Shop View in the next three to five years and you know, what do you have to implement to make that happen?

Fabian Bonjean: Yeah, I think in the next three to five years Shop use the number one software out there right now, Fullbase probably got that number one spot in the heavy duty side. It’s going to be ours. I know their program very well. So it’s very apparent that their program was built from outside of, outside of industry. And we’ve just seen such a great response in industry and all the customers that we’re doing demos with, whether they’re from all different softwares, a lot of them are coming from QuickBooks or Pen and Paper, no software at all. The response that we have seen is very, very positive. It’s very clear that people need and want a software that is built for them that is really built by somebody that knows what they’re doing, that knows their business as well as they do and it’s very apparent when they use it that it’s going to help make their business better. Right. So shops can, you know, ultimately shops are free to pick whatever software they want to and pick whatever’s best for their business. But I think it’s very clear to a lot of people when they do demos with us that this is a software that can actually improve their business and improve their lives and allow them to operate with more clarity, less chaos and have a higher performing, higher performing business.

Chandler Kohn: I’ll be tracking this progress and I definitely wish you the best of luck. It sounds like a great platform and when we’re Done. I like to dig in a little bit more with you on it, maybe get a demo. Let’s, let’s wrap, let’s wrap up with some owner to owner wisdom here and try to keep this under, you know, 50 minutes. The, the again, the podcast is about scale and growth here and I think it’s very important that owners remain focused on this because, you know, with consolidation, with, you know, consolidation driving valuation compression, as larger assets become more valuable and I think the industry becomes more competitive. What’s, you know, what’s one non obvious mistake that you see founders making or that you’ve made that quietly stalls their growth?

Fabian Bonjean: I would probably go to the financial point I talked about earlier is that they don’t, they don’t think it’s important. And you know, you might run your business and you think you know everything about it until you actually look at your P L. If you’re in. A lot of P Ls are messed up. They don’t have proper GL accounts and they’re honestly. Yeah. So, you know, you’ve looked at enough of them. We’ve seen a lot of them. We do a lot of like QuickBooks integrations and stuff and we help people set up their GL accounts and we’re literally like advising people how to set it up and helping them get that done. Um, which is great. Like they, they need that and they need that assistance. They need that help. But I think that’s probably a very kind of silent killer is just not knowing the actual numbers. And once you start looking into them and digging into them and seeing them accurately reporting on them every month, I think people are usually shocked by how much better they can actually make themselves and how much more profit that they can make. The other thing on that is most businesses in any space, you know, service space, product space, but what we’ve seen here in the heavy duty space is the owners and the team, they always focus on revenue and they always, it’s, it’s always focused on top line. Top line. You need to pivot that to just look at the bottom line. The top line’s somewhat irrelevant. You really want to care about the profit that you make at the end of the month. That’s the money that actually ends up in your bank account. So we made that shift several years ago, but we used to do this. It was just grow at all costs. Grow, grow. And it was always just grow top line revenue. But little did we know that our bottom line was shrinking. And then you go and lose a million bucks in a year. Even though your top line is bigger than it’s ever been before, it’s not a fun feeling. So pivot from looking at top line, top line revenue and really focus on that bottom line profit. Yeah.

Chandler Kohn: And you know, you have gross margin, which is just revenue minus, you know, your cost of goods sold. But then you have that kind of the bottom line. And in us, in the industry, we refer to that as EBITDA because it builds in expenses, not just cost of goods sold. And that’s. Yeah, you know, like if an investor is looking at your business, that’s, that gives them the true profitability of the business. Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. It’s very, very important to know for all business owners, it’s, it’s a very similar metric to cash, actual physical cash flow.

Fabian Bonjean: Yeah, obviously we report our EBITDA as well, like on a monthly basis. We are reporting our bottom line profit on P L with, with locations. But yeah, if you don’t know what mo. And that’s the thing, you know, you ask. I’d say nine out of ten. Stop. Owners most honestly probably don’t know what EBITDA is and most are not going to know what it. They’re not going to know what the term means and they’re not going to know what the actual number is, nor are they really going to know their profits until the end of the year. And they do their financial statements and then there’s a big question mark over their head about, hey, I did two, three million dollars in revenue. How come I only made 50 grand on paper, but also I have no cash left and my cash went down. And so these are a lot of just questions that people have. And there’s a, there’s just low financial discipline that we see in the industry. So I would encourage education on that side, get some advice, get some advisory services. You can get some financial management from a third party. If you’re big enough and you can hire somebody that has the experience, then that is the best. We used to outsource it. Obviously we brought it in house many years ago, but we have a full financial team that helps us manage that.