Episode 041 marked a handoff for Do It For A Living. Kevin Dubois, owner of the Evolution Dynamics performance shop and co-founder of My Shop Assist, had just taken on more of the hosting. In this episode he introduced the listeners to his MSA business partner, Todd Earsley, who was joining the show to contribute business tips, book reviews and tool reviews.
The conversation was recorded around the start of 2016. Todd was a mechanical engineer with an MBA who had spent years in aerospace before he tried to help run Kevin's shop. That attempt went badly, and he was candid about it.
This article covers Todd's path from aerospace to the shop floor, why big-company project management does not scale down to a performance shop, what one forgotten part really costs, how the two partners split their roles, and Todd's action item for every shop owner, which was to find the bottleneck.
From a barn-find Camaro to aerospace
Todd grew up in Lubbock, Texas, in a car family. At 15 he got a barn-find Camaro, and he and his dad spent about two and a half years restoring it, bagging and labeling every bolt and photographing each step. That project showed him early how much time real work takes.
Entrepreneurship ran in the family too. His dad and uncle ran a plastic injection molding company that grew out of his grandfather's machining business.
He moved to Dallas for college and finished a double major in mechanical engineering and math. As a co-op process improvement engineer at a picture frame manufacturer, he first read The Goal, the process improvement book that comes up again and again on this podcast.
After graduation he worked as a liaison engineer for an aerospace company outside Dallas, designing repairs when mechanics damaged parts on surveillance aircraft. The work was fast, stressful and well paid, but he saw that nobody in his group ever got promoted, and that the project managers running the builds all had business degrees. So he went back to school for an MBA.
The internship that fell through
Todd's MBA program required a summer internship. He had one lined up at a company in Dallas that built out corporate jet interiors. Three or four weeks before summer, the company lost the contract he was going to work on, and the job disappeared.
At the time he was at Kevin's shop constantly with his Evo, and the two had been brainstorming business ideas for the industry. Kevin's idea was to find a better way to run a shop. Todd came on to help manage Evolution Dynamics that summer. He described his effort there as a failure.
The second year of his MBA, Todd took a two-part class on writing a business plan. He put hundreds of hours into a plan for My Shop Assist, somewhere between 50 and 80 pages of market research, financial projections and org charts. The year before, he had pitched a different idea in the school's business plan competition and finished dead last. This time the MSA plan won.
Why write a business plan you won't follow
Kevin pointed out that within about a year, every financial projection in that MSA plan was already wrong. Both partners still called the exercise valuable. The professor who taught the class put it in a way that stuck with Todd.
A business plan, you write a business plan to not do a business. You do all the research to not mess up.
Several students in that class learned their idea would not have lasted six months. For anyone thinking about opening a shop, Todd's advice was to do the legwork first. Build a following of people who know, like and trust you, and charge for advice and installs as demand grows. Think through everything before you rent a building, buy a lift or commit to a dyno, because once you make that plunge you are committed.
Why aerospace project management doesn't fit a shop
In aerospace, Todd sat in daily status meetings with 30 to 40 people just to talk about how one plane was going. Whole teams did nothing but update Gantt charts, which lay out every task against time with each step depending on the one before it.
Kevin had tried a Gantt chart as Formula SAE team captain, with 17 people and several hundred tasks for one car. It was always behind because nobody updated it. Todd's point was that a Gantt chart manages many people on one project. A shop is the reverse, with a handful of people working on many projects at once, and a shop doing 10 or 15 cars a month would need a full-time person just to keep that chart current.
Meanwhile, most shops he visited, and he had visited hundreds, had almost no system at all. They ran on whiteboards, printed invoices and brute force. His view was that if you keep doing it the same way, throwing more hours at the problem just gets you more problems.
The real cost of a forgotten part
Todd's biggest personal struggle was memory. He could not keep names, dates or schedules straight. When he worked at Evolution Dynamics, he couldn't remember who he had talked to, whose car was whose or which parts had been ordered. Kevin held all of it in his head, with no process to get it out.
It turned out Kevin wasn't remembering everything either. Their example was fuel pumps left off the bill. Todd walked through the math. Say a pump costs you $80 and you sell it for $100. If you forget to charge for it, you lose the whole $100, because you already paid the $80. At $20 of profit per pump, you have to sell five more just to make up for the one you gave away. On a part with a 5 or 10 percent margin, it can take a year of sales to recover one missed line item.
His fix was to write everything down. In the shop, he put customer information, scheduled jobs, tasks, parts and order status into MSA so he no longer had to remember any of it.
Splitting roles in a partnership
Kevin and Todd were 50/50 partners. After Todd read The E-Myth Revisited, they set clear roles because both had been doing the same work. Todd took accounting and QuickBooks, advertising and flyers, trade show trips, new customer trials and tutorial videos. Kevin took the podcast, new feature development, social media and support for existing customers.
They admitted they argued a lot. Kevin's view was that a partner who always agrees gives you no second perspective. Todd's warning for shops was that a common setup is a good mechanic paired with a partner who has money, with no clear agreement on who does what. Without those boundaries in writing, it tends to blow up.
Find your Herbie
Todd's action item came from The Goal. In the book, a Boy Scout troop on a hike keeps stopping to wait for one slow kid named Herbie. They move him to the front, lighten his pack, and the whole troop speeds up.
A chain is only as strong as the weakest link. That's how a shop works too. If you've got one process that's really slow, it doesn't matter how much you improve the other ones.
He used a real example from Kevin's shop. Pulling and tearing down a blown engine took a day or two. Getting it to the machine shop took about a week. Once the machined parts came back, the engine could be assembled, broken in and tuned in about two weeks. The machine work itself was taking four, five and sometimes eight months. Kevin's fix was to spread the work across more machine shops, which cut total engine rebuild time roughly in half.
Todd's point was that revenue is tied to throughput, and cars sitting around waiting on one thing are expensive. Find that one thing and fix it first.
Key takeaways
- Write a business plan to find the reasons not to start, and expect the projections to be wrong within a year.
- Build a following and charge for advice and installs before you commit to a building, a lift or a dyno.
- A forgotten $80 part you sell for $100 costs you the full $100, and it takes five more sales to earn it back.
- Get job details out of your head and into a system so nobody has to remember them.
- Partners need clear, written roles, especially when one brings the skills and the other brings the money.
- Find the single slowest step in your shop and fix it first, because throughput drives revenue.
Running your shop on a system today
At Evolution Dynamics, every detail of every job lived in one person's head, and that was what sank Todd. My Shop Assist exists to move that information into one place. Each job holds its tasks, parts and purchase orders, techs track their time against the task they're working on, and zones and kanban boards show where every job is sitting, which makes a bottleneck easy to spot. Parts added to a job flow to the invoice, and the invoice exports to QuickBooks, so a fuel pump doesn't fall off the bill.
You can see the full list of My Shop Assist features for running a shop, or start a free 30-day trial and put your own jobs into it.
