Who is Going to Fix Your Car: Jay Goninen From Wrenchway

[00:00:07.110] - Dan Paulson

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Books and the Biz. I am back here with Rich Veltre. Rich, how are you doing?

[00:00:13.870] - Rich Veltre

I'm doing fabulous. Dan, how are you?

[00:00:15.940] - Dan Paulson

I'm doing great. And we have another guest today. So we're continuing our interview series. And I want to welcome Jay Goninen. How are you?

[00:00:23.550] - Jay Goninen

I'm doing great, guys. How are you?

[00:00:25.840] - Dan Paulson

Wonderful. So give you a little bit of background. Jay owns a company called Wrenchway. And from there, I will turn it over to you. I'm a car guy. I also know you. So a little caveat, I've followed your progression over the past several years. But you have a lot of interesting stuff to talk about. And I think we can definitely tie back and forth with some of the things that we're working on as well. So what is Rentschway?

[00:00:51.260] - Jay Goninen

Wrenchway is ultimately a job board for mechanics, or in our industry, we call them technicians. And that could be either on the automotive side or the diesel side, so on and off road diesel, so construction equipment, AG equipment, truck. But ultimately, it's a job board on steroids. So a technician can go out, really learn about what type of job they're going to be signing up for in a way that really goes beyond what you would see in an Indeed ad or any other type of job posting. So really be able to share with them what the shop looks like, maybe some videos of their staff to get an idea of who they'll be working with. We actually have an under the hood section that answers a whole bunch of questions about what they're signing up for, right? So a lot of questions that are elephant in the room types of questions that might not come up until after the interview process is done, and you've made a hire and started somewhere. And so hopefully we're answering those questions up front. Now, the other really cool side of the platform is we do a lot of work with schools.

[00:01:58.330] - Jay Goninen

So we have a piece of the platform called School Connect. And basically the whole point of it is, we want to grow these automotive diesel and collision departments within high schools and post-secondary technical schools. And I think a lot of people talk in just general conversation about a lot of these tech-ed programs going away. And what we see is that is in fact, the truth, right? We're not seeing shop classes in high schools like we used to. I was actually just talking with a high school teacher a couple of weeks ago, and he said he's having to teach his kids what a screwdriver is when they're getting to high school. So when we look at there, there's a gigantic skills gap in our industry, and mostly everywhere right now, right? But specifically to us, the technicians in the amount of jobs that are available to those technicians, there's a gigantic gap. So really trying to attack the core of the issue rather than trying to put a bandaid on it is really important to us. So we offer a free resource where schools can essentially go out and ask for things, so they can ask for donations for their program, even if they don't have an automotive program, right?

[00:03:07.740] - Jay Goninen

If they need somebody to come speak to their class, if they need apprenticeship or job shadow type of opportunities, they can do it through the platform. And the hope is that we shine a light on all of the opportunities that this industry has to offer those young people in hopes that we grow that community and really be able to get more people to fill these jobs that are desperately needed.

[00:03:32.130] - Dan Paulson

Well, that's quite a robust platform then compared to what you, as you point out with like Indeed and stuff like that. I also found it interesting that a lot of the things you were talking about weren't technical skills-based when it came to the technician searching out companies. It sounded like a lot of it was cultural-based. What type of people are they working with? What's the environment like? What can they expect to do? And you really don't see a lot of that in your tradition traditional job postings.

[00:04:01.940] - Jay Goninen

You don't. And I think that's what a lot of people want to see, right? Is because this is one of the biggest decisions they're going to make in their life, and especially with a technician, because most times they have a toolbox, they have their own tools. It's not like a white collar job where you can say, Ah, screw it, I up and quit, and I'm going to the next place. They have to move an entire toolbox. They have to move basically their life in a shop to a different location, and it's not easy to do. And if you've ever been in a shop and And saw the amount of tools that some of these guys have, guys and girls have, it's like moving a small house, right? There's so much there, and so much pride in their tools and their toolbox. And so if you're moving it, There's a chance for damage. There's just so much more that goes into it than a typical white collar job.

[00:04:51.420] - Dan Paulson

Should also talk about the investment in that, because I've seen the price of Snap on tools. It ain't cheap.

[00:04:56.320] - Jay Goninen

No, there's plenty of technicians that have a hundred $10,000 plus of tools, especially on the diesel side. An average starting technician, they can expect to invest 5 to $10,000 right off the bat just to be able to do their job, which is insane when you think about it. And I grew up in the industry, and it's just always been that way. You just always assume that you're going to buy the tools, and a lot of these people go into a great deal of debt to buy these tools and put themselves in a bad position. I've always scratch in my head as I've grown up in the industry that the lowest paid person in the shop or dealership or wherever you're at is the one that has to make the most significant investment to do their job, which is just at the end of the day, stinks, and it's just become over the years an industry accepted practice. But we are starting to see more and more shops adapt in that capacity. So more and more either offering some type of tool reimbursement We're seeing a lot of shops putting together entry level sets to get the person started, and they'll oftentimes tie that to some form of contract saying, Hey, if you stay here for three years, you stay here for four years, the tools are yours after that.

[00:06:16.050] - Jay Goninen

And so they're using it as some form of incentive to get them in the door, and then they can build on their tool collection after that. So we actually had just done a webinar about a month ago on that very topic, and I think we have to, as an industry, get a little bit more inviting to that young person. And one last thing I'll mention is, so many in this industry are just really bad at onboarding, and really bad at mentoring, and bringing along and training that young person to actually understand what they're doing. Ase, who is an accreditation association within the automotive and diesel world, they have a stat that roughly 42 % of technicians leave the industry within the first two years out of tech school. So we're essentially eating up and spitting out nearly half of our incoming audience, which doesn't seem like a recipe for success.

[00:07:14.350] - Dan Paulson

That is pretty rough, and you see that across a lot of organizations. I don't think it's unique to the automotive industry. I think if you look at most organizations, they all suffer the same fate because they're still in this 1950s mentality. Now, Jay, you mentioned you were in the industry for a while. Well, you've pretty much grown up in the industry. Maybe give people a little bit of history on yourself and what's given you this experience.

[00:07:38.160] - Jay Goninen

Yeah, so I started off almost involuntarily at a really, really young age. My dad had been working at a shop in Dodgeville, Wisconsin, and another opportunity came up with the same owner to run a shop in Mineral Point, Wisconsin, so neighboring towns. And so he My dad is very, very young. He had me when he was 17 years old. So he went and he managed that shop. One day, the owner came to him and said, You know what? I don't want this location anymore. If you want it, it's basically yours, right? You just take over the rent and whatever. So he took over the shop at the ripe old age of, I want to say, 26. Oh, wow. Yeah, and so he was running it and didn't didn't have any money, didn't have any help. And so it ended up with me just being in the shop, in a little two bay shop. It's actually still there in Mineral Point. A little two bay shop where he's working 16 plus hours a day just to keep the lights on. And so it resulted in a team of my great grandmother and myself answering the phones, doing deposit slips, doing all of this different stuff.

[00:08:57.150] - Jay Goninen

I was nine years old, so I would answer the phone like, Dan's AutoCenter, this is probably wasn't the most professional thing in the world, but I knew enough to be able to get by, right? So I could answer the phones. I still, to this day, had used lessons that I learned from when I was nine. I remember getting yelled at because I answered the phone and said hello, and my mom went crazy. How would you do that? Why would you think that's okay? So just learned to never do that, but it really started off there. And As dad was able to grow the business, I started to take more of a role in the shop. And so it started with just cleaning the shop in the office each night. So washing the floors, taking out the garbage, a lot of probably a similar story to a lot of people, where you start off with those jobs where maybe it's not the most desired job in the world, but I actually loved it. It was so peaceful at night in the shop by myself doing all of that. And eventually, you work your way in to actually working on cars.

[00:10:02.310] - Jay Goninen

And so it's probably when I was 15 or 16 years old that I started working on cars, doing different things, and eventually went off to tech school. And a tech school, and a tech school to work on cars, came back to work for my dad, and found out that I was terrible at it. Just wasn't very good.

[00:10:23.430] - Dan Paulson

You were one of the 42 %. Is that what you're saying?

[00:10:26.040] - Jay Goninen

I was very much, very much. I like to say the industry put me in my and it wasn't supposed to be in a shop, which is hard. I mean, when you're 20 years old and all you've done all your entire life is you've watched people work on cars, and it's been pretty much your life up until that point, it's a really hard pill to swallow because you're not good at it. And so at the time, I really, really beat myself up a lot. But looking back, it's probably the best thing that could have ever happened to me because it really propelled me into different positions that led to different types of sales and management types of positions, which far better suited my personality. I was far happier when I got to talk to people, right? And I think in the back of my mind, even back then, I knew I liked working on people and with people a lot more than I liked working on cars. But I still had a really, really deep passion for the industry. So it parlayed into different positions throughout the industry. I worked for a manufacturer, very I'm very lucky to work for a manufacturer.

[00:11:31.660] - Jay Goninen

I think corporate America, I would recommend to any young person getting into the, not only just this industry, any business, because it allows you to travel to places you'd never travel to. The training is far superior to a I think a lot of other businesses. I think when I started at Bobcat, they put me through six months of pretty intense training. You're all over the US going to different trainings, and they just did it the right way. And so when I got into the field, and I was a territory rep, in the Midwest, I was pretty confident going in. And of course, you learn lessons along the way. But I was able to, I think, do a really good job there. And that ultimately led me to running the parts and service department for a six or seven location. I can't even remember, six or seven location, John Deere dealership in Wisconsin, and at the age of 30, had a lot of employees, and that was scary, too. So ultimately, through all of that, there was always this underlying issue that there wasn't enough technician talent to fill all of the roles that were out there.

[00:12:36.930] - Jay Goninen

So in 2017, my wife and I made the call to start our own business, and started a company called Find a Wrench in the basement of our house. And it was basically just me reaching out to industry contacts that I knew, knowing that there was a problem, and recruiting technicians for them. It was more of a traditional recruiting type of firm, And I was doing the recruiting, I was doing the selling, I was doing literally everything alongside a newborn baby, my son, Bo. So really was able to grow the company from there. It probably grew way too fast. I think when there's such a need, it's really hard to turn down business, and especially those early days, you're trying to cash flow any way that you can. And so we probably took off more than we could, we bit off more than we could shoot, right? And I think it hurt our customer service a little bit. Also, there's a problem where there's just not enough people. So you could do everything in your power to recruit people, but not be able to actually find the person for the shop. So that led to us going to more of a technology offering, merged with a buddy of mine in 2020 to create Ranchway, which is the platform that everybody sees today.

[00:13:57.120] - Jay Goninen

So sorry for the long winded story, but a lot of different steps to get to this point.