Subscribe to this podcast

In this episode host Casey Seymour of Moving Iron LLC sit down Wayne Brozek of WB Global Services. In this episode we turn our attention to the aftermarket side of the business.

Wayne provides his background in the parts department and how that experience led him to creating his own consulting business which now helps train dealerships across the U.S. in aftermarket best practices.

Wayne will be joining us this July 26-27 in Iowa City as a presenter at the Dealership Minds Summit — Next Level Service Management. To learn more and to register visit www.DealershipMindsSummit.com.

Full Transcript 

Kim Schmidt:
Hi, I'm Kim Schmidt, executive editor of Farm Equipment. Welcome to Farm Equipment's Used Equipment Remarketing Roadmaps podcast. In this episode, host Casey Seymour sits down with Wayne Brozek of WB Global Services. Wayne previously worked in the aftermarket side of the business at various farm equipment dealerships before starting his consulting business. He'll also be presenting at this summer's dealership mind summit, Next Level Service Management. If you haven't already registered, I encourage you to head over to dealershipmindsummit.com to register now, as we are nearly sold out. And if this is your first time listening, you can subscribe to the podcast on any of your favorite platforms. Okay. Let's jump in. Here's Casey and Wayne talking about how Wayne got his start in the form equipment business, and his calling to the parts department.

Casey Seymour:
This and the entire podcast is brought to you by WB Global Services. So I have a really good friend of mine named Wayne Brozek, decided to go out on his own and start his own consulting firm. And it's not something that Wayne is not familiar to, he's done a little bit of that stuff in the past, but Wayne's really a guy that understands parts and service like no one else I've been around. So Wayne, thanks for being on podcast, man.

Wayne Brozek:
You bet. Glad to be here, Casey.

Casey Seymour:
So talk about what you're doing now, man.

Wayne Brozek:
Well, so after I left the John Deere aftermarket, decided that I've been doing consulting in the past, obviously, as you know, and I decided, you know what, I'm going to open up a consulting firm and we're going to call it WB Global Services, because we've trained in South America, Central America, had a lot of fun in Argentina and all those things. But decided that there's a real need to improve our aftermarket operation, and now is the time to do it. Everybody, as you know, can sell anything and everything they have on their lot, but the real progressive dealers and the dealers that are paying attention know that pendulum's going to swing back someday. And when it swings back, we better be ready in parts and service to be carry the load of the dealership expenses.

Wayne Brozek:
And so really a big focus on aftermarket performance. What we do is we have WB Global Services and we go out and we'll do training to service managers, parts managers, and we also have a program we call The Edge that is dealership training. It's a year long program that you sign up for, and we give you a hundred percent fee guarantee. So if that training costs $25,000, for example, if we do not generate an additional $25,000 worth of gross revenue for you, that next year you pay us nothing.

Wayne Brozek:
And we'll come out, we'll do an initial interview of all your people that deal with parts and service and come back, formulate a plan, get the dealer principal and the executive team's buy in to say, "Yeah, I think those are our weak areas. We could definitely use some improvement in those areas." Then we go to work on that and then throughout the course of the next 12 months, we'll be on site two more times. Okay?

Casey Seymour:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Wayne Brozek:
But we'll do monthly calls or quarterly calls to keep a finger on the pulse to make sure the metrics are moving in the direction we need them to move. And if we have to come out and handle a special meeting or something like that, we'd be more than happy to do that stuff too. It's been a lot of fun. It's been a lot of fun.

Casey Seymour:
Yeah. So talk a little bit about your background. So start back to the beginning, kind of how you got into this business and how you ended up here.

Wayne Brozek:
Well, so in high school I started delivering parts at the local Ford dealership. My uncle got me the job, and I really enjoyed that. And I wanted to work the counter, I wanted to help the guys on the parts counter. So the two guys that I worked with were helping train me on basic part numbers. And when I moved away and go to college, I needed a job. So the job I knew was training in parts. So I went to the the dealership in Colorado and talked to the guys and they said, "Yeah, we'd love to have you come on board." So started there working the back parts counter, and built some really good friendships with technicians. And really started to see the frustration on the technician's faces and their language and all that when they asked for a part and I couldn't provide it. Because those guys were paid to put those parts on, get the next vehicle in and out.

Wayne Brozek:
So after I graduated, I decided I was going to move away. That never happened. I stayed right where I was at. 20 years later, I'm still working the same Ford dealership. But loved it, great deal. But my passion became parts inventory management. When we typed it in and we showed one, I didn't feel like we should have to run upstairs or downstairs or across the dealership to find that one part. If it showed it, we should have it. And back in the day, when I was working the parts counter, we could show three of a fuel pump or whatever, and I'd have to physically go put my hands on one of them. Our inventory was so jacked up.

Wayne Brozek:
And so the plight became, I really wanted to understand the science of parts inventory management. So when the assistant manager left, they promoted me to assistant parts manager. And I told the parts manager at the time, I said, "Hey, you know what? I really want to understand this. We got to improve our accuracy." So I started studying the inventories and how other dealerships were doing things, and realized that we did inventory once a year, we didn't do a perpetual inventory. So I told my parts manager, I said, "Hey, I want to start doing bin counts every single day. And I think we should make every other parts guy do it as well." And there was five of us in the department at the time. And we started doing perpetual inventory counts, bin checks. And we checked the parts and we'd clean the parts and seal the parts back up. It wasn't just count the part and make sure you had it.

Wayne Brozek:
But we started gaining a lot of accuracy and we started realizing that, hey, we have more shrinkage in our parts farm than we really recognized. And then the parts manager moved away and I became the parts manager. So now, I was in total control of that. So I said, "We're going to do this every single day. There's daily processes and daily tasks that we're going to do." And we were turning our inventory about three to four times a year in the automotive sector.

Wayne Brozek:
And after we started really refining our processes, we shrunk the depth of our inventory, increased the breadth of it a little bit. And we started noticing our turn was improving. We went from three to four to about six to seven and seven to eight times a year, which was really good. And off the shelf fill status, because that's what everybody said next, "Oh yeah. Your turn was really good because you're relying on the manufacturer to stock all your parts. So what's your fill rate?" Well, our fill rate for stock status parts, we had two classifications, stock status, which is what you'd sell three times or more a year, and non stock was special orders and things you might sell one or two times a year. But our stock status parts, our fill rate was 95, 98% all the time. So we did really well at that.

Wayne Brozek:
And about seven, eight years after that, we moved to a brand new dealership, built a brand new store, and the service manager retired. And so the owner came to me and said, "Wayne, would you like to be the service manager?" I said, "Heck yeah." I was always getting chewed out by the service department as a parts manager. So I said, "Heck yeah, I'll jump the fence. And I'll just start doing the butt chewing." And so I move over and realized, well, the grass isn't that much greener over there because those guys really get ran through the meat grinder on the service side.

Wayne Brozek:
But did that for about, oh, I don't know, seven, eight years. And then Ford kind of switched their mentality. And they said, "Hey look, we would rather have a fixed operations director versus a parts and a service manager. One person in charge of both." So I took that role and we had a great, great deal, great team working for us. And I always said I want to go into the sales side, because those guys... Parts and service, you get chewed out a lot. People aren't real happy when they come in to see you. But the sales guys, they always get cookies and cakes brought to them and people are smiling and joking. So I said, "I want to move over there." And so an opening came up and the owner moved me over into used sales. And I started understanding the sales side of the business. And then went from use to new, we had a second location, I became a general manager of that store and still ran the fixed operations at the main store. So that was a lot of fun.

Wayne Brozek:
Well, when I was in Nebraska and was going to high school, where I very first started, that dealership came up for sale. So I asked the owner, I said, "Hey, we're growing. We now have two stores or three stores. And would you like to buy this one?" He's like, "No, I'm not interested at all." And I said, "Oh, I'd really like to buy it." But I only had a slight problem, Casey. Well, I had about 1.7 million of these little problems. Cash, right, I just didn't have that laying around. But the owner said, "Hey, you know what? I'll partner up with you and we'll buy it." So we went to Ford, said, "Yep, no problem." Ford Lincoln Mercury said, "Yes, go to Toyota. Visit those guys." And they said, no. Even though his family had been... He was a fourth generation. We had all the experience, we just couldn't get it done.

Wayne Brozek:
And so another group came up and said, "Hey, we'd like to buy that store. But we'd like to have an onsite general manager partner." And I said, "Okay." Well, I checked it all out. I thought, "Great." So we went into that. And I tell everybody, partnerships are a lot like a marriage. Some are really, really good. And some are really, really bad. Mine was the latter. Mine was not good at all. And so I got out of that, but I learned a lot. And then my neighbor had John Deere stores and they asked, "Hey, would you like to come aboard as a general service manager?" And I thought about it and wasn't really interested at first because I didn't know that much about ag. When I grew, up every summer I got shipped off to my uncle's farm. And at the time, I hated it, because all my buddies were at the baseball leagues and swimming pool and the skating rink. And here I'm in junior high school and I'm 150 miles from a loaf of bread. But it taught me some really good work ethic and it taught me general mechanics and things like that. How to weld, all those are basic things that my buddies didn't get.

Wayne Brozek:
But I decided, you know what, I don't know anything about ag, but I do know parts and services, and I know technicians are technicians and parts are parts. And it doesn't matter what you're stocking, it needs to turn and you need to have a good fill. So went to work there. And at the time, I think there was four stores in the group, and we went from four over the course of almost 16 years to 16 locations. And I got a chance to meet you and talk to you and become good friends of yours. But then after that I decided... During that same time, of course, I met several managers in Deere and things like that and joined a performance group and DPG, and met two guys, George [Waykazer 00:10:35] and Steve [Huble 00:10:36], and still really good friends with both those guys.

Wayne Brozek:
And Steve Huble asked me to come with him, because I gave a lot of input into our dealer performance group, and on a metric that we started to... George and Hubie had a rough idea what they wanted for labor performance, but together we all tweaked it and became what we all know today in the dealer world as labor performance. And so they asked me to join them and teach labor performance to other John Deere stores while I still worked. And I said, "Sure, I'd love to." And I had a ton of fun doing that and sharing my experiences with other dealers, and just watching people get it, the aha moment when they truly understand, how do I alter my gross margin percentage? What really affects that, and how can we change it?

Wayne Brozek:
And so that's been a lot of fun for me, Casey. And I really get a lot of enjoyment out of that. So opening WB Global, actually it started years ago with a couple other large, large dealer group managers, we'd get together and we'd meet twice a year and we had our own little teeny performance group, and we'd hold each other accountable for little things. And that was the start of WB Global, the dealer to dealer peer group. And then it grew into our meetings, and then it was just kind of a natural fit that when I was done on the retail side to do this on my own. So it's been a ton of fun, it really has.

Casey Seymour:
Yeah. It's life's journey. It's always fun. I'm like you, there's no reason why I should be in this business. All I knew is combines had the big wheels on the front, that was about it. So that whole journey is something there.

Wayne Brozek:
Yeah, it's a lot of fun.

Kim Schmidt:
We'll get back to Casey and Wayne in a moment, but I wanted to take a quick second to invite you to this year's National Strip-Tillage Conference, July 28th and 29th in Iowa City, following the dealership mind summit. Come learn about the growing strip-tillage market and learn how to serve your customers who are actively investing in the practice or considering it. Listeners of this podcast are eligible for an exclusive $50 registration with code podcast. To learn more and redeem, visit www.strip-tillconference.com. Now back to Casey and Wayne, as they continue their conversation sharing some of the ways Wayne's consulting and training business can help dealers improve their aftermarket operations regardless of their size.

Casey Seymour:
So talk a little bit about what you're doing, how that process gets started. I'm a dealer principal, I want to talk to you about, I need some improvement in my parts and service department. How are you going to help me?

Wayne Brozek:
Sure. So the easiest way would to be go to wbglobalservices.com, and on our website there's a link, you can contact us, you can send me an email. A lot of dealerships, I meet people through doing whether it's a training event for some other dealership group or doing a talk or maybe send out an article and some dealers will call us and talk to us. And it's real simple. We'll come out and do an evaluation. First I'll talk to you on the phone, we'll figure out what your needs are, what you're struggling with. And then we'll come out and do an onsite visit, do an initial assessment, and then build our action plan from there.

Wayne Brozek:
We've done two store locations, we've done 28 store locations. So it doesn't really matter the size, we have a program for each. And speaking of the program, we call it the Dealer Edge, it's The Edge program. And the fee structure's based on how many locations you have, but the fee is a hundred percent guaranteed. So say the fee is $20,000 for your stores, if we do not generate an additional $20,000 worth of gross margin for you and your company over the course of our training, the 12 months, then you pay us nothing. But we haven't paid that out yet, and I don't plan on it. I know that our training brings a lot of value. And we've got a lot of dealers that'll tell you, "Yeah. It's been really helpful having them here to help us."

Casey Seymour:
So talk about a little bit some of the future plans you have.

Wayne Brozek:
Well, okay, so the future plans are, I'd really like to keep growing the consulting side. But what I really would like to see is our performance groups, the dealer to dealer performance groups where you can hold each other accountable. And there's a lot of those out there and there's different programs, but these would be targeted just for aftermarket, not the entire dealership. A lot of times when you go to a dealer group meeting like that, they'll have two or three for sales and one for aftermarket. There's not a lot of activity and gain from one meeting. You don't build the trust, you don't build the camaraderie. But in our performance groups, you do, you build that trust and you're more willing to be more open and candid with each other and really hold each other accountable. Because that's what I find a lot of times, you look on my shelves, there's training materials back here that over the years, you go to a really good class and you think, man, you're all jazzed up. Your employees are all jazzed up. They want to get after it. Then you get back and the battle starts happening. And that material gets pushed on a shelf and there's tons of good advice in those books or those manuals and ways to make more gross margin and that profit, all those kinds of things, help your turn, help your fill, all those things.

Wayne Brozek:
But we get so busy working in the business that we don't have the time to work on it. So our performance groups really make it so that if you say you're going to commit to something, we're here to hold you accountable for that. You're just not going to put it on the, on the bookshelf and forget about it. Yeah, so we'd really like to see it grow into that. And heck, maybe eventually do even the sales side of it.

Casey Seymour:
Yeah. The parts and service side of the business, I think, as the evolution, especially on the farm equipment business of how machines are being sold and what those look like and the technology that you can add on to older equipment now to make them newer, the aftermarket side of the business is going to really excel even more than it is now.

Wayne Brozek:
Exactly.

Casey Seymour:
Right now everyone shoots for that hundred percent absorption rate, that's what they're trying to get to. I think that in the future, that parts and service side of the business is going to be at a hundred percent, because if it's not, I just have a hard time believing that there's going to be enough... I don't know that the selling of equipment's going to be the same way we see it now where there's this perpetual turn and we see a lot of people doing stuff. I think we're going to look more at a construction model, where you might be buying stuff based off of a job. But you're also looking at throughput. Is it cheaper for me just to rebuild that than buy a new one? Where does that line start to come in? And I think that's where park and service is going to have a big play in the future.

Wayne Brozek:
Yeah, and that's what we push our dealerships for is, we want a hundred percent absorption because we want to bulletproof your dealership. No offense in sales, but you guys get the opportunity to sell the first one, maybe two. But if we don't have a good aftermarket team supporting you, you could be the greatest sales guy in the world, and I know you are, Casey, I know you are, but if I don't support it in parts and service, they're going to [crosstalk 00:17:58].

Casey Seymour:
That's what I always tell people, I'll sell the first one, the parts of service department sell the next ten.

Wayne Brozek:
Amen. And I totally agree.

Casey Seymour:
And that is the honest to God truth. If you don't have the support structure, if you ask any customer, for the most part, and you ask them, "Does your parts department have parts?" Most of the time it's no.

Wayne Brozek:
No, never have the parts.

Casey Seymour:
Because they think about the last time they went in there.

Wayne Brozek:
That's the only time they think about.

Casey Seymour:
But the previous eight and a half times or nine times they were in there, they had the part. It's just that one time when they needed that one part, they didn't have.

Wayne Brozek:
It's like anything in life, you remember the bad experience, not necessarily all the great ones.

Casey Seymour:
Yep. But if it's a perpetual problem, it's going to be a thing. And also, from a big picture perspective, we start looking at the developing countries that are coming in, like Eastern Europe, I know there's the war going on over there right now, but you start looking at Eastern Europe and Africa and Asia and places like that, where you're starting to see more of this modern modernization of farming come into play. And you've been to foreign countries and been through departments, and I've been through foreign countries I've been through. And we're sitting in your office here, and this office is probably, what, 10 foot by 15 feet, 20 feet, something like that. And that was one guy's entire parts room. They had space on the shelf still to put stuff on it. Like you said, as those machine's population grows and different aspects of how to keep those machines running start to grow-

Wayne Brozek:
It's a challenge.

Casey Seymour:
It's a challenge.

Wayne Brozek:
It really is.

Casey Seymour:
Growing that parts and service business across the spectrum to keep the world fed is going to be a challenge.

Wayne Brozek:
Yeah, as things go. But the exciting part is is the telematics involved.

Casey Seymour:
Absolutely.

Wayne Brozek:
The equipment is getting so smart. And what's really fun and challenging for me is, parts inventory management, I love that science, I really do, but to get our parts departments to be more predictive is the cool part. Because now we have so many ways to capture the data. And as dealer groups expand and grow, maybe they have one that's farther down south, so maybe that harvest time starts sooner. Well, you can notify your Northern stores, "Hey, get prepared for this wave because it's headed your way. These are the parts that we see breaking." The more we're able to track that and say, "Hey, at X amount of hours, between 500 and 800 hours, here's a couple common parts that fail." Well, now we're becoming more predictive. We've been really good for the last 80, 100 years of being reactive. Stock order, that's a reactive thing. But putting parts on your onsite cabinet at your farm saying, "Hey, your machine population and aging is getting into this group, we ought to put these parts on that onsite cabinet." So we know that at about 800 hours, that water pump's going to fail. So here's the belt, here's the pump, here's the fluids. So that's the exciting part, I think. The telematics is really helping the parts departments become more predictive.

Casey Seymour:
And the other side of it, too, is as this machinery gets more smart and things and you start looking at the component tree that goes into them, rarely when I go in the shop and sit and listen to what the techs are doing back there, the last thing that they're doing is actually fixing a physical component on it. They're chasing electrical, hydraulic issues, some sensor some place that's not doing what it's supposed to be doing. So they're spending a lot more time with the test light and doing diagnostics than they ever have been in history.

Wayne Brozek:
Amen.

Casey Seymour:
And so back to your point of being proactively, being able to engage those scenarios as things come through, make a big difference in the way you look at customer service.

Wayne Brozek:
Right. Well, a hundred years ago when I got started in the business, you'd tear everything apart and you'd have grease all the way up to here. And it used to be pretty commonplace to go into a shop and see at least one transmission apart, or maybe an overhaul going on over here. You don't see that in our shops hardly at all anymore. It's exactly what you're saying. We've got our Fluke meter out and we're chasing a cracked wire or broken wire, and that takes a ton of skill. You pull open some of these connectors and there's 84 pins in there.

Casey Seymour:
Sure You have 84 wires coming out of that thing. And that's the craziest part of that, because you sit there and watch those guys do it. And it's these just like you said, these technicians and parts people, as we come into this brave new world that we're headed into, you've got to be able to sit back there. And like you said, with the size and scope of these dealerships that we see now, the data points that you get to collect are just massive. And it's crossed a broad spectrum of, what happens in Bridgeport, for example, or Scotts Bluff, that's a totally different farming area than Cheyenne Wells. It's totally different. Irrigated, row crop, dry land, wheat. And cattle production, all this stuff [inaudible 00:23:14]. So the data that you're getting from down here, just like you said, even though it's not the same crop, but what's breaking here will probably break here in the fall. We start [crosstalk 00:23:27]. At and just similar things and start chasing those things and building that data point to bring it all back in, it makes a big difference.

Wayne Brozek:
Makes a huge difference. And as dealerships keep getting larger and larger, I think that one thing we fail to utilize is our economies of scale. We should look at it, and it gets a little touchy and sensitive, but it's truly one inventory, especially in the parts inventory, and even technicians to a certain degree. You can share technicians, you can have technicians that get really proficient at a recall or a PIP notice or something like that, that if you send one guy or gal out to do five or six or seven of those PIPs or those recalls, they get really proficient at it. Where you don't need three locations, each one of them doing one or two and not hitting the time. So there's all kinds of little things like that that sometimes we just got to think outside the box and how can we put these pieces together and make it fit a whole lot better.

Casey Seymour:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Wayne, tell people how they can get ahold of you. What's the easiest way to go?

Wayne Brozek:
So. The easiest way is to go to WB Global Services online, wbglobalservices.com. Or you can always reach out to wayne@wbglobalservices. There's an email right there. Or heck, they could reach me through your podcast as well.

Casey Seymour:
Sure. You have social media? You on social media at all?

Wayne Brozek:
LinkedIn.

Casey Seymour:
LinkedIn?

Wayne Brozek:
Yes.

Casey Seymour:
Okay. What are you, just Wayne Brozek on LinkedIn?

Wayne Brozek:
Yes.

Casey Seymour:
Right on. I'll have to check that out. Well, Wayne, it's good to see you again, man.

Wayne Brozek:
Good seeing you too.

Casey Seymour:
Always enjoy seeing you, dude. It's always a good time, sit down and talk with you and go from there. So with that, I am Casey Seymour with Wayne Brozek. You can find me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, Moving Iron LLC, LinkedIn, Moving Iron podcast. You can go to the Moving Iron podcast YouTube channel, check that out. And you can also go to Moving Iron LLC website for everything Moving Iron related there. So with that, I'm Casey Seymour with Wayne Brozek. Let's [inaudible 00:25:22], folks.

Kim Schmidt:
Thanks Casey and Wayne for sharing their conversation with us. You can keep up on the latest industry news by registering online to receive our free newsletters. Visit www.farm-equipment.com. For Casey and Wayne, as well as our entire staff here at Farm Equipment, I'm Kim Schmidt. Thanks for listening.

Sound Effects: Jahzzar - Magic Mountain