Lee talks about why keeping your equipment Fox always pays off. Check us out at https://www.junkra.com Subscribe to this channel for all the best junk removal industry info Like and follow us on Facebook at Junk Removal Authority
Good morning! Good morning everybody! I hope everybody is doing wonderful today. We got a beautiful day in North Carolina. The weather’s nice throughout much of the country. Hopefully everybody is really hitting it hard today. Making a lot of money. Get your schedule full and just staying as busy as you possibly can. That’s what everybody’s goal is. We’ve been pretty busy here this week. We’re getting some of our truck issues. I don’t know we had some maintenance issues. I don’t know if I told everybody about we had the transmission problem, that transmission problem was actually caused by a blown fuse. I’ll give you the background. The guys, it was a Charlotte location. They must hit something in the landfill where it broke one of the tail lights. The reverse light grounded to the frame which blew out the main fuse which killed all the dash gauges.
Well they decided they were going to finish the day out and just drive like it was. Anyway, they didn’t realize or they didn’t care one of the other that the transmission wasn’t shifting. A $1 fuse board up and it’s a $5,000 transmission new, but it’ll be about $2,000 to $2,500. Probably about $2,500 to get installed. A $1 fused caused a $2,500 problem. What I want to talk to everybody today about and that was one truck. We also had an issue with truck one that the old dog. The original big bird one, it had a fuel injector go out and it was dumping so much fuel into the cylinder. It actually calls the cylinder to hydro lock. The motor was actually locking up because of the diesel. A lot of you have some mechanical knowledge. Basically, you have put in so much raw diesel fuel that when that piston was coming up. It can’t compress that fuel, so it was causing the engine to actually stop turning. That had been a problem where when you first cranked it up, it was running real rough. You could tell it was running down on one cylinder. We’d just kind of assumed that engine has gotten a lot of miles on it. We figured it out, maybe something fuels related but it smoothed out once you get going. So, we kept going with it for several days. Luckily, we didn’t cause any major issues, but the truck did break down. It started running really bad. It broke down on the side of the road and we had to pay about $200 to have it towed back to the office. Then we had to coordinate getting our guys back and all that kind of stuff. We had to coordinate the schedule.
Kind of what I want to talk to you today about is deferred maintenance. Never in my life has deferred maintenance ever paid off. I still try and get by with it today. It’s easy to do because you want to keep on schedule and you don’t have the downtime. You really don’t want to spend the money. Deferred maintenance is easy to do, but you always wind up spending more at some point.
When should you do deferred maintenance? Suddenly like an exhaust brake is like $400 on one of these trucks and maybe you can hold off a little bit on that until the part gets in. Then you take the time to bring the truck down and get it fixed or whatever. That’s also creating extra wear and tear on your brakes. It’s not really a safety issue because it still brakes, but I mean it’s creating wear and tear on your brakes. Certain things that maybe are conveniences. Window motors going up and down and air conditioning. You know, stuff like that is okay to defer for a little while, but you still want to get it fixed.
What you got going on is one, typically deferred maintenance cost you a lot more. Two, employees/team members morale. The team members hate a notice stuff that is wrong with trucks. If they see that you’re not keeping up on truck maintenance, they’re not going to do as good of job themselves because it looks like you don’t care. If the owner of the business doesn’t care, they don’t care. They’ll start abusing your equipment even more. It might even spread to other areas of their work. They might not do a good job with customers. They might not be as careful around their property, so they might damage or scratch walls whatever. All that stuff, team members pick up on all that stuff. Consciously or unconsciously they’ve got something going on in their head where they’re computing that. It’s going to reflect in their work ethic. Like I said, it might not be a conscious decision they make, but they notice what’s going on. Subconsciously their work ethic could very well suffer. The most of the time, I’ve deferred maintenance. A lot of times it wound up costing me a lot more money. This fuse issue, we trained our guys well enough and asked the right questions about it. We realized this thing. The transmission wasn’t doing right and we have gotten the truck on back. We would have rented a truck or done whatever. Rotate another truck there. Whatever we needed to do, to get schedule complete. Instead we kept running that truck and blew up a $2,500 transmission. Instead of having an hour and a half repair on fixing the tail light assembly. We were down for several days with that truck and add a few thousand dollars getting it fixed.
Perfectly good transmission. It was a junkyard transmission. I covered the junkyard stuff over the weekend. It was a junkyard transmission. Still was doing great, but we parted off of a $1 fuse going out. Do your best to not defer maintenance. I will tell you it wears on you because as soon as you get one truck completely fixed. Something else is going to go out. It’s easy to tell yourself that I ain’t going fix that one thing. As soon as I fix that one thing, something else is going to go out. What you’re fixing had nothing to do with the next problem. It just seems like it was. Instead you’re just going to have two problems going on. As far as air conditioning, windows and all of that I mentioned, you can defer that.
Again, that goes back to the team members’ comfort. They done a real hard job. They deserve to be able to get in a truck that blows cold air. Listen guys, we’re not perfect with this whatsoever. We’ve got always stuff on trucks that needs to get done. We’ve got so many vehicles. We got one mechanic, so many vehicles. We have to prioritize what we’re going to work on. We need to do a better job on getting stuff fixed sooner. We’ve got a lot in the works right now. We’re going to hit it hard this month. Get everything to where it’s working pretty well. We got used equipment guys. Some of my guys just want to go out there and they want to buy brand-new trucks. I mean that’s a thousand bucks a month and a payment.
It’s a $65,000 vehicle, thousand bucks a month. We’re adding trucks. You know, we’re still in growth mode. It’s not like we’re at the point now where we can afford to trade in a truck and get another truck because we’re going to need to add one more truck here soon. We’re buying new trucks. We’ve got to keep this stuff we got currently going and running. Maybe in a year or two, it doesn’t appear that we’re going to expand Junk Doctors really any further. We’re going to make all of our efforts be on Junk Removal Authority. Helping out junk removal businesses throughout the country to get started and grow. That will likely be able to start replacing some equipment in the next year to 2 years. Right now, we got to keep going what we’ve got going. One of the keys to that is not deferring maintenance. If you got any questions about any of that, call me +1 919-466-9322. Talk to everybody soon. Bye!