I Want To Hear Your Story
I Want To Hear Your Story
#01 - AJ Scordio - Why Dave decided to start this podcast
In the first episode of the podcast, AJ Scordio interviews Dave Bloom, the owner of Pine Aire Truck Service. They discuss Dave's journey in growing his small business and the reasons why he decided to start this podcast.
I was 25 years old. I put everything on the line to open this business. The reality is that 50% of small businesses fail within the first five years. To be a successful owner, you need to adopt the mindset that you work for your employees enough with theory. I want to hear from somebody who's been there,
Speaker 2:done that.
Speaker 1:I want to hear your store by Dave Blue, a podcast that offers real life lessons, education and inspiration for small business owners and employees. Hey, this is Dave, this podcast interview small business owners and employees whose experiences educate and inspire others in the midst of their journey. This is our first podcast and I'm hanging out with Aja score. Dco handles all the marketing for pioneer truck service. Today we'll be discussing a little bit about my background and why I decided that it was important for us to put together this podcast.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Let's talk a little bit about when you were starting out, and I know a lot of the hardships that you entered in your early years. Talk a little bit about your story and kind of the low points where you felt like, am I going down the path?
Speaker 3:Really? I don't want to talk about the low points, but I guess we should. Well, let's put it this way. Let's, let's start off from the beginning. I was never into going in the school and even still to this day, if you put me in a classroom situation, I'll start drifting off and thinking about other things and forget what the topic was. Even struggle with it. Initially I thought that there was something maybe a little bit wrong with me that I should be able to learn more in a classroom situation that maybe I should have gone to college and I should've learned all these things, but with me personally, like it never would've worked. Like they could have accepted me into any college they want and I would have flunked out of it. Actually, I wouldn't have flunked out of it because I didn't flunk out of high school either. I was just very particular on what days of the week I felt like going and not going, which kind of drove my mom crazy more than anything. I really didn't have a whole lot of focus on things at the time. I changed jobs a couple of times. My Dad was a real estate broker, so when I basically figured out after half a semester at community college that I wasn't going to be a college student. It was a pretty easy transition to get in the car and go to work with him. But after being in a very, very bad economy and actually losing my dad who passed away at that time, I started to think like, what do I want to do? That would be interesting to me. That would be more of a sustainable income at that point would thinking about what my passion was and stuff. It went back to my early days of being in my garage and taking things apart and putting things back together. Starting with a riding lawn mower that I belt that was really cool looking and had an exhaust made out of my mom's vacuum cleaner. I, which was devastatingly fast but tore up our lawn really bad and I was told actually I wasn't allowed to put it on the lawn anymore and then started thinking like, what do I want to do? Like what would be fun to go do every day and get paid for it, and it brought me back into the automotive field and where I started with my first job as a tire mountain. I thought that that would be a good path, but I never really looked at it as entrepreneurial until I started not liking some of the bosses that I worked for.
Speaker 4:What do you feel like you were talented at?
Speaker 3:I thought that I was talented mechanically, but I always thought that I just had good people skills and I had the ability to let people know that I'm ethical and trust in me and build relationships with people. That is, I would say always been my strong point, but owning my own businesses also very interesting and shows you how unclear a path that I actually had because I was an auto repair. I went back to work as a manager for the tire shop that I originally was a tire mount or, but after deciding that I wanted to own my own shop, I bumped into somebody who was actually selling a truck repair shop and I thought, I dunno, order pay a chocolate pear. I don't know how difficult could it be to figure this one out. And it seemed like a better opportunity at the time. So I actually switched over from auto repair to truck repair and bought a truck repair shop without ever even having driven a truck or a worked on a truck before, which was a, it made my first couple of days especially. Very interesting. You really dove head first into the pool. Yeah. Yeah. And to like very shallow pool.
Speaker 4:When you were starting out, you mentioned that your wife was an integral part of it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, my wife Cindy is, if I had to like say the one reason why we were able to stick it out as long as we had, it's because of the hard work of my wife and our ability to just kind of make it on one income until we were able to get things going and started actually take home a regular paycheck. Yeah. But, um, a lot of people,
Speaker 4:but don't realize that, that there's, you need that support. No one gets there on their own. Even if people do say, Oh yeah, I started from nothing. I, you know, built it myself. There's always people along the way that have helped you
Speaker 3:still gotta eat, you know, and um, and it's kind of funny and look, listen, they were times when it was pretty difficult between us with this kind of stuff. And I remember this one absolutely specific time. I could tell you why. Who are, we were on the Robert Moses Causeway Bridge and we're coming back from something and we're in a car and it was just two of us and she looked over at me and said, when do you think this business might start producing some income? And I just remember fucking losing it. Like, what do you want me to do? I'm working 70 hours a week. I'm going crazy. I can't do anymore. You know, and, and like the height of total frustration when it's not even just that you're failing yourself, but like when you feel like you're failing your family and stuff. Oh, so you know, you read about people having that back up against the wall. He read about people, you know, burn your boats so that you have to take the island is no going back and things along those lines stuff. And that was the situation I was in because I absolutely would have gone out and got a job working for somebody else and I absolutely would have made pretty decent money working for somebody else with my experience and my personality and whatnot. But I couldn't go back because I owed so much money. I owed money to vendors, I owed money to tax people. The tax people were the worst because even if the vendor's hated me forever for for bailing on them and not paying them more, if I had to go work for them and do stuff to make it up, that's all great. But the tax money that I owed, I owed sales tax money. I owed federal IRS withholding money from people's paychecks and things like that, and there was no going back like I had to keep going in order to have any chance of ever paying this stuff off. Now backtrack a little bit with the IRS stuff. You know, just so people don't think you're a crook, but I am a Kirk age. Explain a little bit about that. What was the route like? That was, what was it? Oh my God. My tax struggles came. They actually started immediately in business because I hired like the absolute cheapest accountant that I could find. I think it was like$50 a month or something like that. And I thought that was a great deal. And again, I wasn't a crook, I was just don't be kid who like didn't take it seriously. I just thought I knew everything. When I went into business, I started to realize that being, being a businessman isn't always so cool. So the IRS, I owed the money and I would get a notice and the notice said notice of intent to levy and I'm like, I don't exactly know it. Levy is like, I thought there was like something to held back, Lodge Bulls of water or something. And then I got a call from Mr[inaudible] from Bank of Babylon at the time and he said, Dave, he goes, the IRS took all the money out of your checking account this morning. And I said, well, Mr[inaudible] like how does that happen? And he says, no, then you get any notices from them or anything. I said, well, I got this thing notice of intent to levy. And he's like shithead. He goes, they told you they were going to take your money and you didn't do anything. I said, all right, I don't know what to do now. He says, well, I'll tell you what you're gonna do. You're going to come up with the money. I have a bunch of checks that are posted to be cleared by me and if you don't come up with the money, I have to bounce them. So it wasn't just that they took money out of my account that was laying in my account. They took money out of my, that was covering checks that were in the mail to people and one of the things that I never ever didn't in business, I would tell somebody, I don't have the money before I bounced check. I don't know that I've ever intentionally bounced a check ever. I would just not do that. I would just rather come clean and just take my whipping and go, I don't have the money. How low are you? At that point? This woman came down from New York state sales tax, sat in my office and she let me explain how I was catching up and I was going to do better. And Jill let me speak for about 15 minutes and I thought I was doing great. I was telling her how much better the businesses doing and how I'm looking forward to catching up on the money that I owe them. And I went on for about 15 minutes thinking this lady is absolutely gonna hug me and leave and everything's going to be fine. And then she looked up at me and this is exactly what she said. She said, are you done now? And then I knew I was in trouble and I said, yeah, she goes, now let me tell you how it's really gonna gonna work. You're gonna Pay New York state back the money that you owe them and you're never ever going to be late on the sales tax payment again, or I'm going to come here next week and padlock every door on this building. Do you understand me? I remember being in the shower and washing my hair and with the eyes closed, just like dreaming and wishing that you didn't owe anybody money so you could just go get a job. Did anything change that got you out of that hole? A lot of the things changed through a very gradual change. Almost like when you feel like sometimes you're not progressing and then you have to stop and look back 10 years and say, wow, I really did progress. So there was like a such a gradual progression up to I'd say around year 20 that got me to the point where I had money in the bank, I had good employees, I had a nice shop, but there was a huge void in me as a business person because I was still waiting for the accountant to tell me how I did every month. And I created systems to track some of these things on my own without even reading anything. I just figured out ways, saw tracking things and keeping my own most rudimentary, uh, sets of statistics and stuff like that. But I was sitting at my desk one evening in and looking at the pile of shit all over it and deciding whether or not I had the energy to keep going or if I was just going to go home at that point. And I get a call from a company named drive, formerly known as management success. And the gentleman on the phone said, listen, we, we teach automotive people how to become business owners. And it just happened to be like, you could think in life that sometimes things are just guided to you. But I wish they would have guided them to me 20 years before that. But at least at that point it was guided to me. And I said, wow, my god, that sounds amazing. So what do I have to do? And they said, well, we have this two day seminar in Boston and Boston's like a five hour drive to where it was. But I was like, all right. And they say, well, wait a second, the one in Boston next week, but we have one next month, five miles from your house. And I said, you know what, I, I don't want to wait another month. I don't want to wait another month. So I booked a hotel room in Boston and Cindy came up with me and we sat through our first seminar and had to become the proper shop owner. And from there like the, the, my life changed from those just amazingly different. What was different about it? I started to realize that if I educated myself with the background that I had already developed at that point, if I educated myself and I tweaked a couple of things that holy shit, like I could become a legitimate business owner, I might be able to actually make money at this and maybe have some time for myself. Is there anything you would have told 28 year old version of yourself based off of what you know now? Around year 10 when I started actually taking home a paycheck, like a regular paycheck, not a stack of paychecks and my draw. So what I started doing was I just started inventing different systems for myself, different ways to measure how we're doing on a weekly basis. Things that would have been probably a three hour class took me five years to figure out on my own. If I had to look back, I would say like get some like learn from somebody, don't try and figure all this shit out for yourself. It's not worth it. It's tough early on because you're also doing the work, right, so you're actually executing the craft. Yeah. Which is an amazing problem in itself and Oh man, we're like, we could talk about this vow is this subject because one of the things that I even speak to my managers about is that there were times when you don't feel that you really did work unless you could actually measure it, if you could lift it and move it or install it or something like that. So especially as a young owner, I always wanted to prove like I was in the game like that. I was working really hard along with my crew. But one of the things that I learned from business training and stuff like that is that especially in our industry, that you don't actually start being successful until you put away your toolbox or if you really want to keep your toolbox but find somebody else to do the administrational stuff in the business. So to try and find that balance between doing the physical labor in the company, which meant a lot to me, I always felt good when I went home and you know, I could say I did a whole clutch job today on a big truck or measure something like that. It really was the times when I was doing that that the company itself was struggling the most and what I learned was that it's difficult to give up that of progress and doing something and stuff like that. But from the company's standpoint, you really hurting the company by doing that. If you think about like what I would say would be really successful business, you would actually have people in that business that were all masters at different tasks. So you as a business owner would be masterful at, at looking at the future and coming up with innovations to move the company forward. And you would have different people in different positions that they were masters at. So you would have in the truck repair, you would have a master technician in the shop and then you would have a master, a service person to make sure that the customers were being treated properly and that things are going on. You would have a master at finance because that person would be handling the financial aspect of the company. So realistically, I don't know that many people that can do all those different things mastered fully, but when you're starting out as when you're just getting the business going, don't you have to do all of them in order to get to the point where like, okay, now I have enough revenue that I could think about bringing in someone else to help me. And then let's try to scale this. Yeah, but not for a long period of time. I think that if you're a great technician, okay almost everybody that starts out and truck repair starts out as a technician who just says like, I don't know why I'm doing this for this guy. You know, I'm the one that's carrying the load and I know everything, you know, and I was in that position, I was in that position more as a management person working for somebody. I think it's kind of a in a way like an immature way to look at being in business and probably a good reason why so many young businesses fail because you get so wrapped up in things you can't, I worked in the shop so I can tell you I would be underneath the truck and thank God like eventually we had cordless phones because in the beginning we actually had a fricking why are on the phone. Like we had two phones hanging over the workbench and it was like, you know, one was one line and one was the other line and you had to actually be within the core distance of that phone to speak on. It just shows you how fucking old I though. But, um, and I think they had dials on them too. I don't even think they will push button, you know, and, and uh, once we got called this phones like it was a lot better and then I could actually lay under a truck and reinstall the transmission while I'm speaking to a customer about a different truck and my bookkeeper is standing next to the truck cause I could see a feet ready to ask me a question about some of the wasn't paying us or somebody we owed money to that we didn't have the money to pay. You know, how, how do you run a successful business like that? You know, you do, you go home and you feel exhausted and you feel like you're never going to get anywhere and where, what are we doing with this mess? I guess what you're saying is valid. Like you have to start off somewhere but you can't stay like that for very long and be successful or else you're just going to be sticking the bills in your drawer that you can't pay. Right. You'll burn out. You'll definitely burn out. You'd definitely need burn out pretty quick too. And what one of the other things that happens, and this is like something that happens with almost everybody in auto and truck repair, is that all right? So you working in the shop, you focuses in on the business, you focuses on what jobs are there in the shop and how am I going to get these things back to the customer right away because they're counting on me. That's really your mentality at that point. Okay. But there are other things that are going on. You not handling. One of the worst things is writing the invoice. Okay? So you're working on this truck and he'd get it done and you're like, I pull that side road test, it's ready to go. And then you're like, oh well like I need sat truck tomorrow so I'm going to go right over there. So you don't, even in the beginning you might not even write down all the information you need to properly bill this person out. Right? So now you have the, the invoice of the pots laying on your desk and you make some notes maybe on at first, maybe just on a piece of paper you don't even have like a written work order or anything formal like that. And then you throw that on your desk and then you run out there and start working on the next vehicle and then when you're done with that, you run in and start working on next vehicle and then you go back in and you're going to get changed and you're like, I'm to tie it to write these invoices. It's just more important for me to fix trucks at this point. Cause tomorrow this other guy needs his truck back right away. Then before you know it, there's two weeks where the pots spills on your desk and two weeks worth of scraps of paper that you can't necessarily make out all the information on and then you realize, hey, I have no money. Well of course you have no money. They haven't written a bill in two weeks. Not to mention, you know, marketing, sales, marketing, who'd listen. I think you're the first person ever invented mock, you know like it wasn't marketing like we had, this is how marketing, we had the yellow pages but I couldn't afford that. Advertise in the yellow pages. Yellow pages is expensive, right? Like if you even, it was like um, that Steve Martin movie the Shark, like the first time that our name was even in the yellow pages or even the white pages, it's like, look, we're in the phone bug. We're in the phone book. If there was a section for say truck parts in the yellow pages and that yellow pages book was on a desk in our shop. You didn't have to look through it alphabetically. You just look for the dirty pages because those are the ones they went to every time you, you could like throw the thing on a desk and it would open to the page that you want that almost, you know what other advertising was there. There was, you know, getting your car and knock on somebody's door and say, hey listen, I'd like to work on your trucks. There was no other advertising we met. What is it, a year, year and a half ago. Right. And I remember you telling me saying, Hey Jay, I would never have entertained this a year before. So what from the year before
Speaker 4:to the moment when we met and the idea that you were open to marketing.
Speaker 3:I think I remember the day I met you actually, we were at a golf outing for the, uh, Long Island builders institute. Libby and I was already reaching out to people and I was already communicating to people through newsletters, but I realized that I needed help. I really needed help in getting my thoughts and my writing and my newsletters and things like that out to people and the people who I interviewed because I decided I was going to actually hire somebody to come in for a couple hours a week and be able to distribute my media better and stuff. And pretty much everybody I spoke to either didn't have a clue what they were doing or just thought that I was absolutely insane and the things that I wanted to do. And then I had a chance meeting with you and you initially didn't think I was crazy, so I was like, wow, this guy's pretty cool. It was just as crazy as crazy too, you know? And some of the ideas that you had in some of the ideas I had kind of sounded like fun and it was like, all right, let's give this thing a shot, you know? Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I think that's what's cool about what we're doing is because it's genuine. It's true to who you are. Right. And at the same time it's also serving a longterm business purpose because you are branding yourself. You're getting awareness.
Speaker 3:As much as I want to encourage people to want to do business with our shop because we are really a great shop and we have great people that really, really worked very hard at being an expert and everything that they do. Besides that, when I look back and I think about how do I want to be remembered, what's going to be my legacy? What? What inspires me, what makes me feel good about what I'm doing? It always came back to helping other people. They were times, and there were even times recently where I would just feel so withdrawn and like not know what truly inspired me. And then I started really looking into what did inspire me and what made me feel better. And really it always came back to helping other people. So as much as we wanted to use our marketing stuff and the stuff we've been doing for the last year to encourage people to come to pioneer chalk service and to have faith and trust and pioneer truck service, it really kind of like morphed into how can we share our experiences with other people and make other people's lives better. Because as selfish as it sounds, that's really made me feel good. So if I can be selfish because it makes me feel good to help other people and I'm helping other people, well, wow, I want to be like extremely selfish.
Speaker 4:What has it meant to you in your lifetime to build the business up until what it is right now? Every time that
Speaker 3:I speak to somebody and tell them that we've been in business for almost 33 years now, it's a great sense of pride because of the fact that there really aren't too many businesses anymore that had been around for 33 years. So there's a tremendous amount of satisfaction and pride in just saying that there's a tremendous amount of satisfaction and pride in the fact that I care more about my employees than I care about myself. And I truly, truly believe that and me and that. And to see them be successful and to see we were pretty young staff, so to help them accomplish things and stuff that I struggled with in my life. Those are the things that make me feel great. I'm so blessed with a beautiful healthy family, you know? Um, just finding at 57 years old how important it is to be grateful for the things that you have. And you know, it's easy like when you're down and out sometimes to say to stop and go, stop, let me think. This is all good and this is a grateful. But honestly, like if you don't actually work at it on a daily basis, it never really sinks into the back of your head and you'll always feel unfulfilled. So helping other people as become something that is really, really kind of like my goal in life and the reason that we're doing this right now. Foot survival in today's day and age, like you have to be business savvy, like you have to have some education and you have to have people to mirror and mentor and ask people questions and stuff like that. And if anything, maybe this podcast will open people up to looking at people to mentor the more wa or you know, making people have conversations with them about things that they need to work on.
Speaker 1:Hey guys, I hope everyone enjoyed our first episode. I'm really excited about some of the guests we have lined up. You can hear our podcast and find out more information about us on our website, pioneer chuck.com or on Apple podcasts, soundcloud and Spotify. Don't forget to hit subscribe and follow us. Talk to y'all soon.