A Personal Support System for Independent Auto Shops With George Kingman of Advanced Shop Leadership

Episode 111

George Kingman

Advanced Shop Leadership

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George Kingman is the Founder and CEO of Advanced Shop Leadership and BlueSky Tire and Auto Service, a burgeoning chain of stores with five locations in under five years. After beginning his journey in the tire and automotive industry as a teenage tire tech, George took a 17-year hiatus where he managed two businesses and held a senior analyst role focused on enhancing operational processes for one of America’s largest banks. His passion for the automotive industry eventually drew him back, leading to a successful run in various roles, from stores and districts to corporate positions. After briefly overseeing the original 20 Group, George established ASL to enhance the quality of life for independent tire and automotive service retailers, emphasizing efficient operations, teammate satisfaction, and financial growth.

In this episode…

In an era where independent automotive businesses are easily overlooked, one person has realized the need for a more personal and passionate approach to serving independent automotive businesses — and has acted.

George Kingman founded Advanced Shop Leadership to provide a continuously evolving support system for independent automotive professionals, catering to their unique needs. ASL offers various services, including bookkeeping and workshops for store managers, entry-level individuals, and experienced leaders. It focuses on fostering growth, leadership, and a positive culture within each group. George says ASL’s success lies in the sense of community it fosters, where members become like family, sharing their experiences and understanding the challenges of the automotive industry.

On this episode of Gain Traction, George joins Mike Edge to discuss recognizing gaps and common weaknesses for independent businesses in the tire and auto repair industry and creating a service that addresses those. He talks about the areas where consultation and assistance are most often needed and how his company can help. George also discusses his other business, BlueSky Tire & Auto Service, and shares its origin story.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Why George Kingman needed to start working at a tire store as a teenager
Why George is not a believer in implementing a standard system across multiple independent stores
George explains why he prefers working in the tire and auto repair industry over banking
BlueSky Tire & Auto Service’s origin story
Where George first conceived the idea for Advanced Shop Leadership
The multiple areas of focus and coaching provided by ASL
Why bookkeeping is often an area in which tire and auto shops need coaching

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to the Gain Traction podcast, where we feature top automotive entrepreneurs and experts and share their inspiring stories. Now let’s get started with the show.

Mike:

Welcome to the Gain Traction podcast. I am Mike Edge, your fearless podcaster. We have a great guest for you today. Before I get started, I want to invite you to visit our website, GainTractionPodcast.com, take a look and review all the guests that we’ve had on the show the past two and a half years. We have had some tremendous guests with some great, great stories. I think they all offer something for everyone, and I’m grateful for their participation in making our show such a huge success today. Our sponsor today is our parent company, Tread Partners. Tread Partners specializes in four core areas for multi-location, tire dealers and auto repair shops. These four areas are websites, PPC, SEO, and IP targeting. Tread Partners does not try to be all things to all shops. Tread Partners specializes in core areas that have to do with revenue and car count. So what does that mean? Well, it is like going to a general practitioner for your doctor, but when you have a serious problem or you need more expertise, he refers you to a specialist. That’s Tread Partners.

Tread Partners are specialists when it comes to numbers and revenue generated from PPC, SEO, and IP targeting. Tread is interested in two things, increasing revenue and car count. No other data points really matter. Contact them today at TreadPartners.com. So today’s guest is George Kingman. He is founder and CEO of Blue Sky Tire and Auto, as well as founder and CEO of Advanced Shop leadership, otherwise known as ASL. George, welcome to the Gain Traction podcast.

George Kingman:

Mike, thanks so much for having me. I’m looking forward to spending some time with you.

Mike:

Well, I think you and I have had the privilege now of meeting before doing this podcast, and it’s always exciting for me to be able to do that. So for the sake of our audience, we got to meet at SEMA this year, last week in Las Vegas and had a great dinner. We also had you introduced me to Drew Ordisay, Routes Tire Pros, who’s a phenomenal young man running a shop. So yeah, we’ve gotten to know each other with a long dinner.

George Kingman:

We had a great time and we shut down Sinatra’s, which it’s pretty tough to shut down a restaurant in Las Vegas. Right, Mike?

Mike:

I didn’t think about that, but you’re right, George, you don’t really ever, we were asked to leave. We pulled that one off. I mean, they were pulling the tablecloths off and everything, but the food was phenomenal there. I recommend it for anybody. Sinatra’s.

George Kingman:

It was definitely super fantastic. I have shut down some restaurants when I was a young man. I certainly have never shut down a restaurant in Las Vegas.

Mike:

No, I didn’t even think about that until you brought that up. And it wasn’t like we were going wild and crazy. We just kept talking and then the room just kept getting emptier and emptier.

George Kingman:

It was.

Mike:

So for the sake of our audience, our podcast is biographical in nature. So let’s back up. When you were a kid, where’d you grow up?

George Kingman:

I grew up all over. I would call Charlotte my home because from about the second grade on, I was living in Charlotte, but dad worked for Firestone at the time and we actually, we lived in Akron of course, and we even spent some time in England. Dad ran the stores over in Europe for a while, so I got to spend some time over there. But Charlotte is truly home. That’s where my heart is.

Mike:

That’s great. So as a young man, did you work in a shop or what was your experience?

George Kingman:

So I sure did. A lot of people, they hear this and they’re kind of surprised, but I’m a high school dropout. After the 10th grade I played football, but I was bored and it was just one of those things and I dropped out of high school and actually started taking some college courses while I then went to work at a tire store. That was something my dad was pretty insistent on if I was going to drop out of there I better get my butt to work. So I started out changing oil and sweeping floors and doing whatever had to be done around the shop.

Mike:

That’s awesome. I love your story of being, because you’re a very intelligent guy, George, and it’s like you like to learn. It’s just that you didn’t like to learn in that environment necessarily. Is that fair way to phrase it?

George Kingman:

I don’t love systems, Mike. I find that everybody is unique. Everybody has something to bring to the table, and systems really confine you. And same as is in our store. We’re independent owners and we’re independent owners because this is what we’re passionate about. We love the freedom that it gives us and we can create a culture, a company, a business that has our own personality and then we work, whether we own it or don’t own it, if we work and in one of those shops, we worked with them because they don’t have the heavy structure of corporations where you’ve got to do it this way and they allow you to think outside the box. And it’s so much easier to be passionate when you’re in the independent, when you’re on the independent side of the business.

Mike:

Well, and I think there’s a lot of good tools out there. There’s a lot of good vendors out there, but there’s never really a one size fits all. The reality is you’ve got different markets, you’ve got different personalities, you’ve got different store setups, you’ve got different combinations of the ratio of how many tires you sell versus service, et cetera. So there’s so much that the independent has to think about. Is that fair way of phrase?

George Kingman:

Yeah, a hundred percent. A hundred percent.

Mike:

And he needs that freedom versus having that top down centralized voice of someone. It’s kind of like you and I have seen this with these large, large companies that have enormous footprints if they have that one size fits all … I’ll just even step out as the tire industry for a minute. I’ll just say the banking industry in my hometown, I’ve seen a very astute, large regional bank pretty much disappear in my town because they were doing everything top down, centralized.

George Kingman:

I used to work for a bank, my story, I had lots of twists and turns before I really finally found my place back in the tire business.

Mike:

Well, you’re like a lot of people, they just lead for a little bit, but then like you said, the rubber gets back in the blood and it’s, or it’s always there. It just kind of decides to surface again.

George Kingman:

Hey, some of the best tires are re-treds, right?

Mike:

I love it. Yeah, absolutely. That’s awesome. But go ahead.

George Kingman:

But I tell you, when I was working with the bank and I was working with Bank of America, and don’t get me wrong, I mean I still bank with Bank of America, so it can’t be that bad of a company.

Mike:

No, I got you. I got you.

George Kingman:

But it’s limiting. It’s handcuffs, right? It’s, “We’re going to do this.” And it was always about budgets and hitting the budget. What was so funny, it’s the opposite of what you would think of. So we could get so much done in a shorter period of time than we really needed, but our bosses in an effort to save their budgets and head count really needed us to slow down so that we wouldn’t be laid off. So the banks, large corporations, it’s just so different and you don’t see a whole lot of passion. I don’t know if you’ve seen a lot of bankers that have a whole lot of passion about what they do. I mean, certainly maybe some investment bankers are passionate about making money.

Mike:

Absolutely.

George Kingman:

But you look in our industry and people are passionate, they care so much about the people that they do business with. They care about their employees, they care about their name and their honor, their reputation. They care about passing it down from generation to generation. It’s funny-

Mike:

It’s kind of like this. It’s also like this. I know one of the local tire guys in my hometown, I mean he likes giving to youth sports. It’s not that he’s doing it for the marketing aspect, he likes it. You know what I mean? And I feel that with a lot of these guys that are connected with their community, they like giving the money or being involved or what have you. It’s not like what you’re talking about there with the corporate banks or whatever. And, “Well, we do this as a percentage because we expect to get a return.”

George Kingman:

Yeah, it’s definitely different. It’s such a fun industry.

Mike:

Let’s fast forward to Blue Sky. When did you start Blue Sky or get involved with Blue Sky?

George Kingman:

Let me tell you, once I got back into the tire business, I went to work with Bridgestone, and I got to tell you what an amazing education I got working with Bridgestone, running stores, running districts, working in corporate. And my last job with Bridgestone is we had what they called the lab program. And we had seven stores from all over the country, from Atlanta all the way to Minneapolis that no longer reported to the region. They reported to me. It was my job to essentially throw stuff up against the wall. I had a seven figure budget that I could just throw stuff at these seven stores and see what stuck, see if there were any great ideas.

Mike:

Anything come out of that for you while you were there?

George Kingman:

What’s that?

Mike:

Any of them come out from what you did that you said up against the wall?

George Kingman:

So what the amazing thing is every great idea we had when we presented to the leadership, to the C-suite, what happened was everything had at least a seven figure price tag. Well, we had gone through four presidents in five years. None of them wanted to invest seven figures into something that wasn’t going to have a return for a couple of years. Because it’s one thing, when it’s a single store to make a change, it’s not very expensive as a percentage. And we’re like a speedboat. We make a left-hand turn, we’re going left. But when you’re dealing with twenty-two hundred stores, you make a left-hand turn today, maybe by about three o’clock tomorrow. It’s like driving an aircraft carrier. It takes a long time to make that shift, to get it to move.

So all of the great ideas, which are things that we do in Blue Sky and things that many of our independents do, they can’t do. They just can’t get their arms wrapped around to invest the money because they don’t know if they’re going to be there next year. This year’s bonus is what they’re focused on. So many of my lab managers that worked with me we’re kind getting frustrated. We have all these great ideas. We have all these customer focus groups, we know exactly what the customer wants. And we had always talked about starting something up ourselves. So when you say I’m the founder, I guess in theory I’m the founder, but really I’ve got Javier who runs my stores in Illinois, and Tom, who’s the VIP of Ops of Blue Sky, Tom Hicks, who runs all of my stores, the whole corporation. And these two partners really helped us found and get it started and get it running.

But I’ve only been doing it … We started it four and a half years ago and we’re already up to five stores. And of the seven lab stores that we had, three of those lab store managers are actually running Blue Sky stores. So we’re taking a lot of those great ideas and learning from it. And we still test, as a matter of fact, blue sky thinking, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the term, but blue sky thinking is the idea of looking up into the sky and just thinking about things that might be possible. And that’s what Blue Sky, that’s really where it came from, is that blue sky thinking, thinking outside the box to come up with something super fantastic.

Mike:

I was wondering that. I liked your name and I was wondering if it had anything to do with that thought process because you’re basically saying. “We’re open. We’re going to be creative, we’re going to do whatever it takes.”

George Kingman:

We’re trying, we learn and some things we don’t like. But the best thing, and if I could tell this to anybody, change is hard. The best thing I could tell your listeners is if you change and you don’t like it, you know what you get to do it again? Change it back. It’s so easy. Just change it back.

Mike:

Yeah, no, and that’s what we tell people about the digital world or the world I came from. “Look, you don’t like it. You can change it. It’s not stuck out in the print.” I mean, we try it, put it back.

George Kingman:

And I know that you have done a lot of different things and we don’t have to go into a lot of them, but so where did you get the idea to start ASL, Advanced Shop Leadership. Believe it or not, ASL came before or roughly right around the same time of the stores. So I eventually left Bridgestone and it was a really tough call. I mean, Bridgestone had been good to my family. We were making a good living, but we were going to have to relocate again and we really didn’t want to have to relocate.

Mike:

And your dad retired from there, correct?

George Kingman:

He did. He retired. We’re talking about around 1991 right after Bridgestone purchased Firestone. And if you have any legacy Firestone people listening, they’ll know that as soon as Bridgestone took it over, there was quite a massive jump in stock price. So here’s a guy who had been working with Firestone since he got home from the Korean war, and so he had decades of building up some Firestone stock.

So it was time. He retired at fifty-seven and hasn’t worked a day since. He’s 90 now and just celebrated his 90th birthday. So to the point that he’s been retired longer than he actually worked for the company.

Mike:

Good for him that he came on the top there. No, really, a lot of people don’t. They retire. And then how many people we know they retired and then they die in a couple years or something terrible. But that’s awesome. So he got the best of them there. But go ahead in regards to Advanced Shop Leadership.

George Kingman:

So a great friend of mine had been trying to recruit me to come to work for Dealer Strategic Planning. And it took me four years before I finally said yes, and I finally had enough of corporate and I went into the working for the 20 Group and eventually running Dealer Strategic Planning, but so many other companies, it was owned by a publishing company and then it was owned by Investment Capital and it was trading hands multiple times, and it was no longer about the passion of the independent, the person that we’re actually doing business with.

And I decided I needed to do something different. The 20 groups, a lot of them get stale over time. And so I took some former clients who had already left or were in the process of leaving and they wanted something different. And that’s how I started Advanced Shop leadership. It’s something that continuously grows, so it doesn’t become cyclical, it doesn’t get into the same rhythm and routine as the people inside each group grows, the whole group grows. So it’s a stretch. The goal is that we never stop learning. We’re always on to the next thing. So we have different groups that are all at different levels of their journey.

Mike:

So based on your experience, you saw, I mean you were filling a need in the market. You saw a vacancy in the way these were being run and thought “We need to get back to the basics with independence.”

George Kingman:

Yeah, so what happens is if there’s so many great programs out there, and don’t get me wrong, please, whether you want to work with ASL or somebody, work with a coach, somebody. They all have something to offer. But what we wanted to do is to take those people that had their, let’s say a standard 20 group is like your bachelor’s degree. We wanted to take them onto their master’s degree and their PhD. So it gets into high level leadership. Now we have plenty of people that are in elementary school. So I’ve got a group that’s new owners, people who have opened up their shop within the last couple of years, and we’re on that growth. And we have different, we are full on. So we are very careful to fit you with the group where you’re at right now so that you can get on all the way to that PhD level. So that’s really how we started. But like anything else, we discovered a lot of other needs. We discovered that some people really have a bookkeeping issue.

Mike:

That’s what I wanted to know. I remember we talked about this.

George Kingman:

We have a couple of people that work for us that understand the [inaudible 00:18:27] of Automotive business, have been bookkeepers for multi-units, know how to do it remotely, so we have a bookkeeping side. We do workshops, we have store manager 20 groups, we have 20 groups for the entry level people, and we have 20 groups for the people who have been doing it for a while and want to keep growing their leadership and their culture. And we’re focused on different things. Each of these things are at a different stage. And I tell you, it’s so much fun, we get into so much stuff in every group. Every group has its own personality, has its own pulse, and each group is so family oriented. These people would give anything to anybody in the group. It’s because it’s their family. It’s somebody who truly understands what they’re going through. And of course we do coaching.

Mike:

I mean basically you’ve created a network for different levels within the Independent Tire Dealer Group in a sense.

George Kingman:

Yeah, it’s so much fun. I’m so lucky. I was with a client in Kentucky this morning. I’m spending the rest of the week with a client in Nashville, and we actually work inside their store and I get to meet their staff. I get to work with their staff, we have team meetings and we get their team engaged in finding ways of improvement. And they’re excited. They’re excited to see the growth and the change. And it’s man, Mike, I’m the luckiest guy. Luckiest guy in the world.

Mike:

That’s awesome. Well, and I can feel it in your voice. I mean, you’re very passionate about it. And George just based on talking to you and getting to know you in the last couple of weeks, I mean, you really do love your clients. I mean, I mean you really care for them up and down the line.

George Kingman:

I truly do love them. And I tell them that.

Mike:

No, and I noticed that. I mean, when we ate with Drew and you brought Drew to dinner, man, what a fantastic young guy he is. And I don’t want to make light of the fact, but it’s pretty exceptional that I believe Drew’s around 30 and being very successful with the store right now. And the sky’s the limit for that kid.

George Kingman:

It’s less than two years ago, his store was losing money, and here he is at 30 and double-digit profit. He has gone from having high turnover to almost no turnover, and his parents are so proud of him.

And what’s really fascinating is he’s to the point is he’s not having to work in the business very much. So one of the things I really try to help people is to pull themselves away from the business and to start looking at a higher level instead of being in the business, work on the business. And what happens is he’s able to develop the next level leaders within his company because he’d like to grow to multiple stores. But when you’re working in the business and you’re the one running that counter, it’s really difficult to build the skills with your team to get to that piece. Or right now he is all in, right? He’s only in the store maybe 20 hours a week. He’s playing golf. Life is really good. He’s having a great time and a ton of fun.

Mike:

That’s awesome. Well, I could see it. And he had a lot of energy and a lot of passion about what you guys have brought to the table for him. And I remember at dinner, he was very high on the fact that he hires you guys to keep the books for him. I mean, the bookkeeping seemed to be a challenging aspect for him that he just doesn’t have to worry about anymore.

George Kingman:

So Mike, I can’t tell you how many clients that have been taking advantage from their bookkeepers. And it’s so hard to bring that aspect. You’ve got to have a good handle on the numbers to run the business effectively. And it’s really hard to find the right person that you can trust. The way we do books, we don’t have access to your financials or to your bank accounts and stuff like that.

We can outrun payroll and things like that, but we’re not paying the bills. What we are is taking the bills that are paid and making sure that they’re in QuickBooks correctly, making sure that you have numbers and finances and it prevents that thing. “How do I find this person who isn’t going to steal from me, but it’s going to know all the secrets.”

Mike:

Yeah. How do people reach you or reach anybody at ASL now? What’s the easiest way?

George Kingman:

I mean, they could call me directly. I’m (704) 506-2164. But AdvancedShopLeadership.com is our website. And you can learn about some of our bookkeepers, some of our people. We’ve got some amazing people, Richie and Leslie’s, the president of ASL. She helps keep me focused. And the rest of our team, we’ve got Richie and Wes and Lee, and we’ve just got some absolutely amazing people and we’re growing the staff again to handle some more new responsibilities as we continue to grow.

Mike:

Well now I’m going to take you into some deep water with our podcast. We’ve got this segment called Make Us Laugh. So you got to share with the audience a story of your past. Now, it can be self deprecating, it can be something about something that happened at a store or experience that you had. But tell us a funny story.

George Kingman:

I got to tell you, I’ve got got plenty of screw-ups that I can talk about, some mistakes that I have made and I still continue to make, right? Nobody is perfect.

Mike:

Hey, listen, I told you one of mine last week, I think I had you and Drew laughing pretty hard.

George Kingman:

I did. It was a pretty good story. I won’t repeat it. I think you’re kind of surprised that you ended up sharing it with me. But I tell you, so I started in the business, right? And I’m a young teenager, and I’ve been with the company two weeks. I mean, when they hired me, I didn’t even know how to drive a stick shift. And I’ve now been with the company two weeks, I barely learned how to change oil and change tires. And back then we had the old 40-40 machine. It was pretty basic. You didn’t have turntable machines back then.

And so this car comes in. So we just opened on Sunday, two weeks after they hired me. And of course, I’m the young person on the totem pole. So I’m the person working in the shop on this Sunday. It’s the store manager and me, and again, barely know anything. And I get into this Honda, it’s an old mid-eighties Honda CRV, and it’s a stick shift. And I’m like, “Okay, all right.” I’m good enough to pull a car in, I get it pulled in, I get it racked and I change the oil.

Can’t remember if I rotated the tires, put it all back together. I lower it down. I can’t get my feet into the footwell to press down on the clutch. So I knew so little about cars. And here I’m running the shop here this day. I know so little about cars. I had lifted it under that little rail underneath the floor pan, and I had bent the floor pan. Well come sitting here thinking, “I can’t tell my boss, I’ve been here two weeks. I’m going to get fired after only two weeks.” So I’m going around the shop hoping he doesn’t see what I’m doing, saying “What’s taking so long?” And I find a little five pound sledgehammer and I’m banging the heck out of the floorboard in the shop hoping nobody hears me banging it to press this thing down so I can get the car pulled back out of the shop.

And you know what? My feet fit in there. Luckily the carpet hit everything. I look back now and I would say, “Please don’t ever do that. Just tell me so I can fix it with …” but back then when you’re-

Mike:

How old were you?

George Kingman:

17 years old, you just-

Mike:

You just tried to make it right, is what you’re trying to do. “I put a dent in, I’m going to bang the dent out.” Right? Oh my gosh.

George Kingman:

That’s it. I did. And you know what? The guy never came back with an issue. We continued working on his car. And every time I’d see that car come in, I’d look at the bottom of the floor pan and see that dent in there and I’d know I did it.

Mike:

Oh, that’s beautiful. That’s a great story. Thank you for sharing that one. So another tough question on the biographical level here. What’s your all time favorite hobby? Or not be all time, but let’s say right now, what’s your favorite hobby?

George Kingman:

I’m a car guy. I’m addicted to cars. My wife and I we’re actually talking about it this weekend. We were talking about-

Mike:

Hold on. You were talking about cars or your addiction to cars?

George Kingman:

Yeah, I’m addicted to cars. I love classics, I love muscle cars. I love a great model A, I love old British cars. I love JDM cars. I love it all. We actually, we have a few, I’ve got a Grand National, which I’m sure many of your audience can remember is the old Grand National from Buick. I’ve got my wife, so this is how you do it, guys, if you want to get more cars, you buy them for your wife. So I bought my wife a sixty-five Mustang convertible. It’s got a two-eighty-nine. We changed the whole suspension and put a ride tech suspension and [inaudible 00:28:45] brakes. And those of you who are car guys can get it and understand what we’re talking about.

And then I’ve got an old Triumph, an old TR6, and we’re looking at one right now, an old Jensen Interceptor. And most people won’t even know what it is, but it’s an old Jensen Interceptor convertible and I’m trying to figure out a way to talk my wife into it. I told her it would be hers, but she fell for it once. She’s a little bit slower on fall on for it this time.

Mike:

Yeah.

George Kingman:

The one we’re looking at is actually the Jensen Interceptor that Linda Carter used to own while she was filming Wonder Woman. That was the car that she drove back and forth to the studio. So it’s a really cool car and I think it’s a bargain, and I just need to convince my wife it’s the right thing to do.

Mike:

Well, do you have a timeframe on this or are you pressed for time on it, or what’s the circumstances?

George Kingman:

Well, I’m trying to buy as much time as I can, so I’m trying to convince the seller to give me till next year. So we’ll see what happens.

Mike:

That’s awesome.

George Kingman:

So get me through the holidays and give me another couple of months to work on my wife.

Mike:

Well, George, I got to tell you, it’s been a pleasure getting to know you first of all, but having you on the podcast is a real treat. And thanks for being part of Gain Traction.

George Kingman:

Mike, it’s been a true honor. I look at the list of the guests that you’ve had, and I’m just honored to be a among them. So thank you so much for thinking of me.

Mike:

Well, and we’ll have you back sometime.

George Kingman:

I look forward to it.

Mike:

So to all our listeners out there, thank you for being part of our podcast. If you would like to recommend a guest to us, please email me at [email protected]. Till next time, be safe and have a great day.

Announcer:

Thanks for listening to the Gain Traction Podcast. We’ll see you again next time. And be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.

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1 In this episode…

1.1 Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

1.2 Resources mentioned in this episode: