Finding the X-Factor – Speed tactics that will improve your work today.
Get yourself to “Level 4”
A Dent Legend and His Speed Tactics
In 1998 I had opportunity to be among 20 or so techs in one shop. This was a satellite shop of a local dent company in Denver, Colorado.
Up to this point, hail cars were done much the same by all hail techs. Prop the hood up and strap it down. Do the best you can on those hinge corners and just know you can’t get it perfect.
This was the first time I saw someone take a hood off.
At the same time we were hidden away in the satellite shop, a legend was being born at the main location.
This tech’s name was Jeff and the shop owner, Jim, also a tech, was amazed at this guy’s speed. Jim would come over and tell us about the big hail jobs he was conquering at lightning speed.
Some of the cars from that storm were really hit. Stuff we might turn down was being fixed the legendary Jeff.
Legends are made bigger when you try to figure out what the X-factor is. In this case, just what made Jeff so good and so fast?
Adding to the enigma was Jeff’s quiet personality. He really didn’t like all the attention and just wanted to push and be left alone.
Some mistook his being a man of few words for being slow of tongue. One well meaning individual was so impressed he called Jeff an Autistic Savant. He likened him to the person who can’t talk but can play the piano like a master after hearing the song only once.
Over time, we came to understand Jeff was as normal as any of us. Of course normal is subjective.
As we got to know Jeff, his legendary super tech status started to fade and we then began to see if we could imitate his speed methods.
He became the guy to call to your storm if you had one in your town. So in 2000, I hired him as subcontractor.
Why is he so much faster?
As mentioned, he’s quick to pull a hood off to fix the hail. If its a door panel and the dents are large or inaccessible, he’ll take it off too.
Remember, there wasn’t any glue pulling back then. It still was in its infant stages.
How could spending time taking a panel off improve speed? You have at least one more direction from which to access the panel and this will add speed that more than makes up for the extra time.
Soon enough, all the guys who wanted to be faster began to imitate Jeff’s methods.
I had another tech come through for just a couple of cars that same year. He had been working around Jeff for some time. His improved speed since I saw him last was very clear.
Once you have extracted all the visible methods someone is using for speed, what’s left?
Is there some kind of Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods intangible that makes them stand out on a consistent basis?
I say yes. You can study them and never find it or see it.
Does Jeff have this intangible?
Possibly, but I just recently worked around him again, and the gap between him and other techs is narrowing.
He’s still very fast and super high quality in his repairs.
What’s his strongest asset?
Focused Concentration.
He arrives in the morning and works till lunch. Some guys like to visit and flap their jaws, not Jeff. Sometimes people think he’s in a trance. He won’t take his eyes off the panel just because you’re trying to talk to him.
Go ahead, flip a glue tab at him just for giggles. He’ll never look up.
You almost never see him talking on the phone or walking around with no purpose.
Maybe Jeff does have something in his DNA that allows him to go into this focused concentration mode.
What I’m interested in is how much of his behaviors can I learn? What can I imitate that will translate into speed and ease of repair?
I may never be a Super Star pusher, but I can improve what I do have.
What I can do is look for ways to concentrate more. To focus better and recognize the little time wasters which cost me money.
What you measure can be improved
One thing you quickly figure out on a storm is the cars will start looking the same after a while. You’ll get an occasional tough one or easy job here and there, but overall the damage in a big storm will average pretty well. You see this especially when you are estimating. The cars start falling into a certain groove on the charts and you’ll start knowing the end price before you add in your panels.
I always wondered what this might look like to an insurance company when they take all the bids and place them on a spreadsheet. Oh well, can’t stop that.
Since the cars average so well, when you are in a group of techs, you have a pretty good comparison model to use to check your skills against. If you have ten techs working together, you can see where you are.
You might have to throw away some of the data, if, for example one of the techs is noticeably lower in quality or very new.
All that’s left now is two variables: time and money. How much did you make today, or more accurately, last week. Many things can be skewed in a day, but these will even out over the course of a week.
When you get a chance to work around someone faster, grab it. See what you can observe and imitate.
The good news is you don’t have to watch like a hawk. You really only need to look for a few small things that make a big difference.
The Rule of 80/20
Have you ever heard the saying, “Little hinges swing big doors”?
There’s a great deal of truth in that.
Improving your speed of repair is an excellent place to apply the 80/20 rule. Sometimes its referred to as the Pareto principle.
This is a phenomenon where most of the movement of a given activity will be caused by a small number of the participants.
It happens over and over in business. Often, just a few of the products offered by a given company will bring in most of the profits. It won’t always be 20% bringing in the 80% but it will be some number like this. Its definitely going to be something way more off balance than 50/50.
You’ve likely heard the remark that 80% of the world’s assets are owned by 20% or less of the population.
What’s interesting is how the principle occurs over and over. Within the 20% who have all the assets, 20 percent of these folks will own 80 percent of that group’s wealth. You can pretty much keep slicing and dicing like this and it will keep going until you get to just a few people.
I was explaining this to my son and I think his eyes glazed over.
He’s playing in a Fantasy Football League where you choose players from all over the NFL. The statistics of a given player on his team helps him or hurts him in his score against the other Fantasy team owners.
When I asked him how he was doing, he told me he was “OK” because 2 of his players were scoring very well.
I told him this was 80/20 in action and he got it right away.
Applying 80/20 thinking is the fastest way to improvement in anything.
Software guys figured it out when they looked at the number of decisions a computer makes and saw the imbalance. 80 percent of the processing power was being used by 20 percent of the decisions.
Even Google has it built into the Operating System behind their powerful search engine. If a large number of searches occur for one keyword in a given day, that term and those that relate to it will be “cached”. This is somewhat like taking a book off the library shelf and putting it out front because people keep asking for it. Easy access means fewer steps and therefore less load on the system.
Applying 80/20 to Dent Speed
Now, back to watching the fast hail guy. What are the small things he does to be so fast?
We talked about Jeff’s intense concentration, but how does he do it?
The opposite of concentration is distraction and he avoids it as much as possible. Really, he’s avoiding many distractions, for rarely is it just one thing trying to grab your attention.
Its the cell phone, the radio, the guy next to you, the shop tech walking by or even the urge to take a break.
Did you see it? Concentration leverage. Its not as if Jeff is unaware of these things. Rather, he puts 80 percent of his attention on the 20 percent that makes him money, in this case the dent right in front of him.
At the end of the day or the week, Jeff will out work and yes, out earn most around him all because of the little decisions he makes on a moment by moment basis.
Now, let’s flip the principle and show how it can work in reverse.
When learning a skill, there are basically four levels which one reaches in mastering it.
1. Unconscious Incompetence – where the student is unaware of the benefits of knowing the skill or areas where they are lacking.
2. Conscious Incompetence – the student is aware of the skill and sees the benefit of learning and adopting it.
3. Conscious Competence – the skill can be called upon at will, but still requires conscious effort.
4. Unconscious Competence – the skill is so ingrained that the practice of it happens almost without thought. You might hear it called “Second Nature”.
As you practice dents and you reach level 4, you’ll know it by the way you feel. You almost forget the struggle you had at first as that memory is replaced by a feeling of natural flow. Some call this the “flow state”. Everything about the repair in front of you just seems to click. Before you know it, that beat up panel is done and you didn’t even notice the time that passed by. It can trick you into believing you were born to do this. It is at this point I believe where it almost becomes addictive.
When you don’t fix dents for a few days and then you start back up again, that part of your subconscious rewards you with some interesting endorphins or chemicals in your brain that signal well-being.
The dent Phenom Jeff and all fast guys use this to advantage.
Since he’s at the level of Unconscious Competence or level 4, only 20 percent of his mental capacity is needed for dent repair. The rest he uses to make himself even faster. He actually glances quickly at the dents nearby and takes mental note of the access of the one he’s working on. Without losing focus on the current dent, he’s also thinking about the way he will access the next. Sometimes while working with his right hand on the current dent, he’s grabbing the tool which will fix the next one with his left.
Almost daily, I hear someone say they just can’t imagine being able to concentrate as we do while pushing dents. I always laugh inside and thank them for the compliment.
When you reach level 4, you’ll understand how a tech can just put their head down and push and seemingly not look up for 4 hours. Each move is interesting, even exciting as you realize a higher level of repair. The over pushes become rare and the frustration fades away.
I hope you are feeling dent bliss. If you’re not, don’t give up. Its coming soon. I promise.
Perhaps the best part of all this is your newfound understanding of your own abilities. The confidence gained by mastering the skill of dents or any other is highly valuable.
You begin to ask, “If I learned this, what other high value skill can I also learn?”
Just be sure to use the 80/20 principle to determine if that skill will help you make the most you can with the least amount of effort in the smallest time possible.
By now you can understand why I call it,
Happy Pushing,
Tim