Shaping Pros Through Innovative Training With Scott Blair of T.R.A.C.K. Auto Training and Network

Scott Blair is the creator, host, and an instructor at T.R.A.C.K. Auto Training and Network. He is also Managing Partner of 2U Tire of Alabama and Co-founder of 2U Mobile Solutions. His automotive journey began in 1993, diving into the industry with American Racing Custom Wheels. In the late ‘90s, Scott developed and patented the Wheel Fit, a specialized aluminum jig for measuring custom wheels. He prides himself as someone who is always learning as he continues to shape his diverse career in the automotive world.

In this episode…

As more and more automotive employers look to address their onboarding needs, can they be confident that new employees can receive thorough training in a relatively short amount of time? Fortunately, Scott Blair says, training programs in the automotive industry have made significant advancements over the past two decades. 

Scott’s approach combines adaptability, bite-sized content, and real-world applicability, enabling seasoned technicians to experience substantial knowledge gains within 15 minutes. His program starts with a prerequisite class of seven videos, branching into specialized paths for technicians and salespeople. The content caters to both the front and back of the house, and aligns with the demand for immediate and accessible learning. 

In this episode of Gain Traction, co-hosts Mike Edge and Matt Peters delve into the challenges of auto industry training with Scott. They explore the evolution of training programs and the urgent need for tailored content which addresses both technical aspects and sales. Scott shares valuable perspectives on adapting training methods to novices’ needs and availability, ultimately ensuring consumer confidence in aspiring automotive professionals.

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

• Scott Blair recalls his entry into the automotive industry, working with American Racing Custom Wheels
• The significance of training to ensure consumer confidence through quality service
• Scott elaborates on the development and patenting of the Wheel Fit
• How a lack of industry standards and budget constraints contribute to the hiring of inexperienced personnel
• Scott shares T.R.A.C.K. Auto Training’s four distinct stages of training programs
• Why Scott’s interactive training program is uniquely beneficial for aspiring auto pros

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Scott Blair on LinkedIn 
• T.R.A.C.K. Auto Training and Network 
• The Wheel Fit  
• Mike Edge on LinkedIn
• Matt Peters on LinkedIn
• Tread Partners

• 2U Mobile Solutions
• Gain Traction Podcast
• Matt Peters
• Mike Edge
• Scott Blair
• Track Auto Training
• Tread Partners

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:

Hello, folks. Welcome to the Gain Traction Podcast. I am Mike Edge, your host. I’m also joined today with Matt Peters, of Tread Partners.

Our sponsorship today is by Tread Partners. Tread Partners specializes in PPC marketing. I know everyone knows how to do it, and everyone has someone doing a great job for them. But, are you sure? Do you have a partner that specializes in tires and auto repair specifically? Do they have a list of 4000 negative keywords to make sure you’re not wasting money with Google? Did you know that you can get an outside assessment of what you’re doing right and wrong, as it pertains to PPC digital marketing budget? Tread Partners discovered tens of thousands of dollars per month in wasted spending with Google for its clients and those that wanted an unbiased audit. Many of these shops were very successful already, but Tread showed them that they could spend less and still do a lot more. Get a second opinion. Visit Tread Partners today at treadpartners.com.

Hey, I’d also like to encourage you to listen an interview I did with Jeff Mullersman. He’s with Midwest sales director at ATTURO Tires. Check it out at gaintractionpodcast.com. Jeff’s a great guy, we had a lot of fun on the interview, and just had a unique perspective, from his experience in the industry.

Scott Blair is our guest today. He is the founder of T.R.A.C.K. Auto Training, and is also the owner of 2U Mobile Solutions. If his name sounds familiar to you, maybe it’s because he was on Gain Traction about two years ago. So we’re glad to have Scott back. Scott, welcome to Gain Traction again.

Scott:

Mike, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Mike:

Yeah. Let’s pick up where maybe we left off a little bit and tell the audience who you are, and where you come from, and what your background is in the industry. And then, we’ll touch into T.R.A.C.K. and the training services that you offer.

Scott:

Yeah. I started in the industry in 1993. I actually went to work with the original American Custom Wheels, American Racing Custom Wheels. Didn’t know anything about automotive much of anything. I didn’t even understand wholesale and three-tier distribution to be honest. It was an eye-opening experience coming out of college and walking into that. But as I tell people quite often, “it was a round peg in a round hole,” to quote Forrest Gump. Essentially, it was everything that I had ever been created to do, which was to deal with the custom wheel industry.

And then, throughout the ’90s, interesting thing is, most people these days maybe don’t recall because they’re not old enough to even remember something smaller than a 20-inch wheel. But back in the day, we sold 13-inch custom wheels, even when I started. Which is hilarious to even think about now. But through the ’90s, as the wheel manufacturers kept increasing diameters, we started to get into what’s called plus sizing. Went to work for the actual processor to American Tire Distributors, which was Heafner Tires and Products, the J.H. Heafner Company out of Lincolnton, North Carolina. I was a wheel specialist in 1995, is when I think I started. I was there during that process of the industry growing in larger diameters, and in working with the retail tire dealers, struggling to try to figure out how to do these things. What wheels, and then it was what tire to put on there.

Then, that led me to developing and patenting the Wheel Fit, which is an aluminum jig type device for measuring custom wheels and fitting the tire on there in three-dimensional space. So I got a US patent on that in 2000. And then, I continued to develop training programs of my own, through the ’90s and then into the early 2000s. Then, I became a TIA ATS instructor, at that point.

My career has progressed, essentially adding more different, diverse things to it.

Matt:

If I might jump in here, one of the things that just dawned on me is the fact that you really … Training had to be extraordinarily important because no one had really seen wheels like you were seeing entering the market. It was this whole new animal entering the zoo, no one knew how to feed it, or take care of it, or anything. You were basically able, with your experience, to go in and say, “Here’s how you take care of it.”

Scott:

Yeah. You got to think about it, when I came in the industry, we were selling aluminum mods and saw blade steel wheels. That was the custom wheel industry, and then Cragar SS’s. That was it.

Mike:

Yeah. No, that’s a big difference. You went onto TIA, and you picked up a lot of training experience there?

Scott:

Absolutely. Really brought into focus a lot of the aspects of how technical tires are, that I really, truly wasn’t ever aware of. Of course, there was no industry training. You just plopped down, and whatever you knew, you knew. You either got it through attrition, or you told people what you thought was the truth and it just propagated, and everybody thought, “Okay, well this is what it is.” That was an eye-opening experience that TIA brought to the table, over 20-something years ago.

Once I saw that and realized, “Okay, I’m not the big dog on the block and don’t know everything that there is,” then I took it on a personal level to continue, as we talked about previously at the end of my last podcast, always be learning. In today’s world of electrification and everything else, I’m learning almost daily something that I have to then turn around and create some sort of content to get out in realtime to our industry. That’s actually what we’ll be talking about here shortly.

Matt:

Well, it’s interesting to me when I think about this, because I have the tendency to go with relationships, and I think about if a mechanic or somebody in the auto repair services businesses, you get to know him over the years, you just trust him. It doesn’t matter what he’s going to charge, I just know it’s going to be fixed. I’m sitting here thinking about but he’s one man and he’s running one shop. But what happens when these people grow their businesses to multi locations? Or what happens if you’re dealing with larger corporations that have hundreds, if not 1000 stores, they really need some form of uniform training that is paramount to this industry. And from talking to you, it’s missing.

Scott:

It is. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons Matt Peters and I, we’ve been working together for over 20-something years. Just a quick, quick history. I actually had a video library training program. Matt, what was it, almost 20 years ago? At least 18, 19 years ago, I had taken what I had be developing on paper in the ’90s, and teaching one-on-one, we actually had created a library of DVDs that we actually sold through a previous company that he and I both worked with. Ironically, we struggled with getting people to actually adopt that almost 20 years ago.

Here we are, now in 2024, and the large companies, as you spoke about, as well as things I’ll talk about here in the last year-and-a-half of my life, of putting mobile tire bands on the ground all over the country for independent tire dealers, we’re out of competent people to run in the shops. We spoke about it briefly, they’re just hiring whatever they can get off the street.

Mike:

Yeah.

Scott:

They’ll pass a pee test, good to go. Stick them out there, and let the previous guy, who may not have been there but three months, and he’s the senior person now, teach them what they’re supposed to do.

Mike:

You put me with just coming in and listening to you, and I’m a consumer, that scares the fire out of me thinking that I’ve turned my car over to some folks that are that inexperienced, and you’re telling me this is normal because there’s no standards in the industry in that regard, of training. And yet, I’m turning my … Less important about me, but my wife’s car over to you.

Matt:

Mike, let’s be clear. These shops are not having people work on your vehicle that are not experienced or have any training. They’ve got training, there’s ASE training out there. The training that Scott developed 20-plus years, that he and I were bringing to the marketplace, was so far ahead of the industry that they weren’t ready for it. Even at that time, Scott had developed an on demand video training course that dealers could sign their staff up for, they could get online, take the training course. At the end of the training course, they would be provided with a quiz or a test, and then the results of that test would be sent to their supervisor. But that was so far ahead of where the industry was ready. And even the internet. The internet wasn’t ready. It was a lot of content, a lot of buffering and trying to get that video to play. Scott was well ahead of the industry.

I remember doing projects with Scott and clients, and getting their shops trained up. It was so far ahead. And now, here we are, fast forward to 2024, Scott is pulling back into the mainstream of our industry, a well-needed training solution. If we think about the industry as a whole, and Scott, you’ll agree with this, you look at the manufacturers, you look at the distributors, they do not a very good job at helping to educate the distributors and/or the retailers. Everybody is trying to push and promote products and services that, sometimes, these counter salespeople really have no idea what they’re talking about. They’re selling at the counter, and they’re selling based on price because that’s what they’re comfortable in trying to sell is based on price, rather than quality of products and services that are available from a variety of manufacturers.

Man, I’m excited for Scott and this new training solution that he’s developed through T.R.A.C.K, and then the training facility. One-of-a-kind in the country, I know of nobody else that has put together a training program or a training facility the ways Scott has. Scott, are you pretty on-par with my thinking, as far as manufacturers and distributors falling short, and this where you can fill the gap?

Scott:

Absolutely, it is. You bring up a great point there, Matt. As we all know, margins have been squeezed for decades. And budget constraints, particularly in marketing. Because anything of this kind of an expense, from a tire manufacturer, even a wholesale distributor, falls under just a pure expense, typically under their marketing division. And with marketing dollars either being allocated toward internet or other ecommerce type things, things that Matt does, and you guys do, that training aspect is just fallen by the wayside. The available funds for that have just gone away.

So where are we? Where does that leave us? We have no industry standards that are required. We have good stuff out there. Nothing’s required, as we’ve already talked about. Anybody can walk in off the street, grabs a wrench, and they’re working on a car.

Mike:

Yeah. You bring up something on a personal level that’s important, though. If I know it’s something that a shop can brag about, and say they’ve been through XYZ training, and that training included ABC. I may be ignorant as a buyer or a consumer, in regards to how to repair a car, but at least seeing that gives me some level of comfort to know there’s continuing education in this shop. Which, at least gives me some comfort to spend money, just like any consumer would want.

Scott:

It is. That’s actually one of the reasons why what we’re doing is so much more advanced than even what we offered 20-years ago, which was just pure technical knowledge transfer to individuals, primarily, with some dealing with sales.

In our present curriculum, we start with one prerequisite class of seven videos, and then it divides out. Then, you’ve got technicians that can go down their career path, and you have the salespeople that can go down their career path. Of course, they can jump over and take a different one any time that they would want to. But I’m creating content that addresses the needs of the front of the house, as well as the back of the house. That was actually, the sales aspect of that, was what really struck the nerve for a lot of these large, national accounts.

I have heard, for several years, from just the independent dealers that we’ve been providing training in what we call our live, interactive training and education. It’s called our LITE program, where we use video conferencing, and have students all over the country that sign up for a four-and-a-half hour class. I’ve been hearing this for years from the independents. So what we’re doing now is they kept asking, “I need something for onboarding. I can’t wait for a class that might be four weeks out. I need somebody that can do this.” What have we bred for the last two generations? Someone that can do this right here, push a button on the phone and watch a video. That’s what we’re bringing to the table.

We’ve adapted the programs to be current socio status of the individuals that we’re trying to foster into the industry. But also, creating content that has enough bite to it that a 15-year seasoned technician, within 15 minutes, is going to gain knowledge that they’ve known. I have testimony proof of that, on video, on our trackautotraining.com website, that anyone can go see and hear directly from the people that we’ve taught.

Mike:

That’s fantastic. Real quick, let’s just go through a scenario here. Hypothetically speaking, let’s say that there’s somebody out there listening that runs a big organization of multi-stores, et cetera. Say 10 or more, maybe get up to 50 or more. But what would they do, how does that process start with them? A lot of people can think about, they can visually say, “Oh, this sounds awesome.” But let’s go through some of the initial steps. What do they do to get started?

Scott:

Well, first thing, they would contact us. We would get them set up. If they want to go into the program, we have four distinctive stages.

The first one is the video on demand, which is exactly what Matt and I are talking about with the large nationals here, this week. I’m creating a program that will take someone and grow them professionally in our industry to have a career. So the first step is we get them signed up with all their people, salespeople and technicians, and management. I want everyone to the CEO to go through this program. We can set them up on a trainer platform that we have, give them logins, and then they can go in and start just viewing that curriculum in a sequential order. We are looking at licensing this program, because many of these large people have their own learning management systems. We are looking at a license option for that as well.

Let’s take it like this. The individual, they get in there and they start watching these videos. Three minutes to eight minutes in length typically, some’s a little longer, but [inaudible 00:16:20] content. Let’s say they start going through this and man, they get excited. We’ve seen this. We’ve seen this happen immediately after we’ve done our LITE training, that the individual got up, went straight to the owner and said, “My God, why wouldn’t somebody tell me this when I started?” Here they are, a 15-year veteran and they’ve never been told this stuff.

Here’s how it works. They go through the video series. They get excited. They start going through more video series. The management now sees this individual is really showing some interest. “Now, we can start spending a little bit of money on him, on an individual basis.” Where we, then, go to the second stage which is our LITE, live, interactive training education, where they then participate with other people from around the country. And all in various stages of their career. And then, they interact with me or one of my instructors. Because I have more than just me, I have Troy here, and I have also another gentleman that I’ve trained to do this type thing, so there’s more than just me.

Once they go through several of these LITE interactive programs, and the management now sees this person really has some interest. “We should probably look at investing in them. This could be a career potential person for us.” Then we offer our stage three, which is they come here to the training center for three days. They can fly out or drive in on a Monday, we have them for three days. We put them through a very specific curriculum that starts to broaden their knowledge. Real world, actually bring vehicles here in the shop and go through real world scenarios.

Once they’ve done that, then they go back. Later on, as they take that knowledge and then they’re really doing well, and they’re like, “Okay, I want to be part of this company for a long, long period of time. I want to take this knowledge and I want to share it, and then be a part of their organization growing.” Then when they come back for a five-day program, that is our Train the Trainer program. At that point, now I’m just burning their brain cells for five full days. We’re running through a full gamut of things that now, they go back, and they become that person in that organization that can now start getting that information down the line.

Matt:

The beauty though, to me as I listen to you, is it’s a step-by-step process. It’s not a one-size-fits-all, it’s a progression. The upper management gets to decide how far each person may go. That’s awesome.

Scott:

Absolutely. Think of what would happen if all the businesses in this country had an individual, maybe not to the full level of what I do. We’re not trying to make everybody into a Scott Blair. But, if we got 70 to 80 percent of that knowledge out there in the field, with those rare individuals that really wanted to go to that really high level, what I consider almost a doctorate level of knowledge for this industry, we wouldn’t be having this conversation about the poor service that the consumer gets every single day.

Owning 2U Tire, which is a mobile tire service that I started about 10 years ago with my business partner out in Phoenix, we’re hands-on. I don’t just stand here and train all day. I’m out there in the field. I could be in a mud puddle, or out underneath a brand new car that just showed up. The Rivian’s are starting to show up in our area now. Who’s going to touch that at a normal tire dealer? They’re scared to death of them even getting near the building, much less trying to pick them up or knowing what to do to pick them up.

Mike:

Yeah. Oh, that’s so interesting. Well, what’s the easiest way somebody can get in touch with you, Scott? If they listen to this podcast and say, “Guys, I need to talk to Scott, I need to do something here?”

Scott:

A couple different ways. They can reach us through trackautotraining.com website. Or, they can dial us directly at 251-309-2500, and then we can obviously interact with them then. Or they can email at [email protected].

Mike:

And T.R.A.C.K is T-R-A-C-K, folks.

Scott:

It is. That’s actually an acronym. It stands for tire, rim and chassis knowledge, which is exactly what we do. Basically everything under a car. Not just tires, wheels, but chassis setup, vehicle dynamics. That’s some of the future videos I’ll be creating this year is what happens with different types of tires on the same vehicle that aren’t really necessarily correct. They may be the right size, they might be the right performance rating, but if their internal construction is wrong, that can actually lead to a vehicle imbalance in regards to drivability.

Mike:

Man, that’s just a whole nother level of a conversation that I’m sure a lot of techs just don’t know. How would they know? Just getting in the industry. Yeah.

On a personal note, a lot of people know Scott. I do my interviews, make them a little bit biographical. But because I know where you live, I’m going to ask you a really tough personal question. What’s your favorite food?

Scott:

Anything I can make spicy and Cajun. We’re down here on the Alabama Gulf Coast, so I’m not too far from the beach. I’m just a few minutes off of the Mobile Bay. Seafood is pretty prevalent in our dietary requirements down here. If we can harvest it from the water out here, we can either fry it or blacken it, man.

Mike:

And you know how to spice it up for sure, I know that. Well, it leads me to think about this, too. If someone’s going to come see you, they’re going to fly into Mobile, correct?

Scott:

That, or actually Pensacola, Florida is many times a better option.

Mike:

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Scott:

I’m between the two. I’m 45 minutes from either way. They’re going to be changing the Mobile airport to downtown here, in about the next one or two years. It puts it barely a 20-minute drive at that point. But right now, Pensacola is probably one of the ones that most people would fly into. A little quicker for us to get over there to it.

Mike:

Good to know. You got my mouth watering, thinking about the food. I’m thinking I might need to go get a cup of gumbo today, on a cold winter day up here.

Scott:

Yeah. Yeah. I’ve got some dark-

Mike:

Hey, Scott, I can’t thank you enough for being on the podcast again, with Matt and I. We wish you the best of luck. Keep us informed as to what happens with your T.R.A.C.K. training and how it grows. We hope to have you back again someday.

Scott:

I greatly appreciate that. Mike, thank you much. Matt, appreciate it as always.

Matt:

Thank you.

Mike:

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]. Til 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.