Speaker 0 | 00:09.627
I am going to hit record. And if this conversation is great, like they usually are, we just turn that into a show. So do you go by John or Jonathan?
Speaker 1 | 00:19.576
John. All right.
Speaker 0 | 00:22.638
Everyone out there listening, we are speaking with John Comstock, Director of IT at… Burger, Chevrolet. Is it burger? Like literally burger.
Speaker 1 | 00:32.713
You’re going to say it a little French for sure.
Speaker 0 | 00:34.874
Burger. Burger.
Speaker 1 | 00:37.355
It’s always better at Burger than get our advertisement.
Speaker 0 | 00:43.838
It’s always better at Burger.
Speaker 1 | 00:45.078
It’s always better at Burger.
Speaker 0 | 00:47.599
I am a Chevy fan. I did send you a picture of my Chevy van. That is, I took it in for its inspection the other day. Still going strong. a hundred and seventy seven thousand miles and uh i’m a big fan and i want to know berger chevrolet why i cannot get a chevy 3500 express van that can pull the weight that it used to pull i have a feeling that the chassis is still the same and it can pull the weight but for some legal reasons we now say it can only pull 5 500 pounds um because here’s the thing i have again eight kids and if I want to pull a 33 foot trailer behind that thing I must buy a Chevy pickup truck which I have no problem doing and I would love to do that but I don’t think you guys have an extended cab that will fit eight children so thus my dilemma and this is an IT show by the way everyone this is this is an IT show and I do not know the technical answer to uh
Speaker 1 | 01:51.650
Express 3500 not being able to pull you know, more than 5,500 pounds, which is quite surprising because my 1500 Silverado was rated for 12,000 pounds. So maybe the four wheel drive gives it a little bit more. We would, I would gladly put you in touch with a specialist that can answer those questions in order you have any, but good luck getting one anytime in the near future.
Speaker 0 | 02:17.661
Oh yeah. This is why I just keep rebuilding my, I keep rebuilding the one that I have. I’ve repainted it. I have ripped up the floor. I’ve sprayed the bottom with bed liner. I’ve redone all the rims of tires at least three times. Let’s see, what else have I done to this thing? Welded in another seat in the back that can fold up and down. I have redone the headliner. There is a lot that I have done to this van. I still…
Speaker 1 | 02:43.431
We have crate motors all set ready to go. You can basically put them in, plug them in, and hit the key and roll. So it’s a matter of getting parts. We also have a website. We ship parts directly to you.
Speaker 0 | 02:57.597
There we go.
Speaker 1 | 02:57.997
That’s GM Parts Now, if anybody wants to know. A little more advertising.
Speaker 0 | 03:02.459
GM Parts Now. GM
Speaker 1 | 03:04.760
Parts Now.
Speaker 0 | 03:05.681
What’s it like being IT? What’s it like being, you know, you’ve been at Berger for 19 years. So there’s got to be something fun about being in IT at a Chevrolet, at a Chevy car dealer company. It must be family owned. Let’s see. What else can we get into?
Speaker 1 | 03:19.687
It’s family owned. It’s, um. You know, I started here as a contractor. We pulled up. I used to be, me and a buddy started a networking business. We’re going to pull some cable, set computers up for people. We pulled up to Berger Chevrolet because they heard through the grapevine that we were the guys that could do it. They said, okay, we’re going to tear down this building, put everybody out in trailers, and then rebuild the network. Can you guys do it? We looked at each other and like, yeah, sure, we can do it. And then ride home. It’s like, you know. How are we going to do this?
Speaker 0 | 03:55.401
Classic.
Speaker 1 | 03:56.781
Classic. Just say yes. Yeah, just say yes. Sure, we’ll do it. No problem. And so me and another guy, we had two homeschooled high school kids that worked for us part-time. Perfect. And they helped out. And we came in here and moved everybody out into trailers. And at that point in time, they had five PCs on dial-up, about 38 green screens. material connections yeah um and yeah that was about 1998 they built a new building in about 2000 uh we built a network here pulled all the cables and then and um yeah 2002 april 1st of 2002 they said do you want a job because you’re here all the time anyway so yeah so you
Speaker 0 | 04:52.424
How old was the homeschooled? How old were the homeschooling workers at the time? Because I have a similar situation right now.
Speaker 1 | 05:01.795
Yeah, they were 17 and 18.
Speaker 0 | 05:03.356
That’s perfect. So mine’s 15.
Speaker 1 | 05:06.859
Levi and Isaac, I dragged them all over. We did a lot of work on the weekends when we had the networking company. Nice. Specialized in car dealerships. We’d go in and cable car dealerships, and I’d run the job. My partner would sell the job. I’d take the two homeschool kids with me. We’d go in and cable it all up, get it all done. And, you know, sometimes Saturday and Sunday all day. And then we would run, you know, service calls through the week or do jobs where we could work during the week.
Speaker 0 | 05:42.614
Nice. My wife keeps yelling at me because I take my son Gabriel and I’m like having him do work. He’s like, Dad, how do I learn this? And she’s like, you know, he’s not doing his schoolwork because you keep taking it. taking him off the job of schoolwork. Anyways. Okay. We went from green screens to let’s see, green screen, old green screen, a few computers on dial up to fully networked car dealership. How did that change things? Do you remember? Where people are like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. Or they’re like, I don’t really care. I got a desk.
Speaker 1 | 06:24.122
Because we were doing it for some other people, setting up networks and getting away from the net. We found that GM used to require their own network and own network cables for their equipment. So that meant you had to have two PCs sitting there or two network cards and a PC. Well, you know, the magic of… VLANs and different things. We figured out that hey you really can run them over one network card So we save these guys who use network The car dealers a lot of money through that process of putting it all on one network And so how did it change? Well when I first started here in 2002 we ordered 44 PCs For the sales staff because they wanted to bring in a new CRM and then we fired up 44 PCs on this new network and CDK is a company that car dealers use for their dealer management systems. They held the stranglehold on the network for a lot of years and then finally I’m like, no, we can do this much better. So probably four years ago, it went completely rocky. Thank you. gutted the entire closet and put all the Meraki switches in. But it’s gone from when we first had bandwidth in here, you know, we’d have T1 1.44 megabits per second and then, you know, it’s like, okay, well, we’ll bump it up to a cable modem that’s like eight megabits per second and now we’re running SD-WAN with, you know, a gig circuit in here and a 200 megabit per second backup.
Speaker 0 | 08:14.641
get about 600 to the desktop now so speed of things have changed how does that change being just from a car dealership standpoint because i’ve i’ve worked with numerous car dealerships in the past and i grew up my first job ever in technology was was um actually selling a dynamic was selling dynamic allocation via cisco iad over t1 so and we’d have this great presentation like you know you’re getting a t1 and it’s so awesome because when you’re not on the phone you can actually use that bandwidth at the same time we don’t have to have a fractionalized t1 this is this great new technology right and uh they’re like well what about this comcast cable circuit that’s coming in they said that that’s like six megs like no no this is a t1 but um how did how did you it sound it actually sounds like you were a car dealership or group of car dealerships slash company that was ahead of the curve as far as technology goes could you see a difference in in sales or production or did you guys were you able to to map that out or you
Speaker 1 | 09:27.365
know did you get more data the the growth has just been phenomenal probably the last 10 years for sure one of the things that i really want to say about our owner berger is that He’s an incredible guy. They’ve been building muscle cars since 1965. They’ve never done any research on Berger SS’s. There’s a storied history out there. And so… I’ve always felt like it was my mission to build a network that would match one of his muffle cars.
Speaker 0 | 10:00.002
Oh, man, you got right in his head. That’s perfect.
Speaker 1 | 10:03.925
I just, it’s like, okay, this is what we got to do. We got to be the fastest. You know, we have redundant UCS chassis here on site, two different parts of the campus. We are only one location. It’s 22 acres. So. Yeah, a couple of pure storages with those UCS chassis. He’s not afraid to let me invest in the dealership and making things easier for the people here. When COVID hit, we had to figure out how to e-sign. That was the first thing I did when I went home. I was like, okay, how do we get people to be able to e-sign here? So technology was just completely driven by that.
Speaker 0 | 10:52.573
Are you saying people were buying cars online, like signing for stuff online? What was the e-sign?
Speaker 1 | 10:58.797
Yes. We’re at a point now where we can sell you a car in Maine or Connecticut, send you the documents, you can e-sign them, and then we just ship you the car. A lot of different stuff happens where you have to wet-sign a contract. Some of Michigan’s… And some of Michigan’s banks will only allow a wet sign contract, but we’ve found most of those where we can now e-sign a contract and have it fully funded. And, you know, we sell cars all over the place. So before you’d have to sign a driver, kind of like Carvana does. Car, drops a car, you sign the paperwork, right away, we can e-sign that.
Speaker 0 | 11:51.809
Are you guys dealing with the, clearly there’s a shortage of new cars, yes or no?
Speaker 1 | 11:55.970
Yes. The car business is changing, for sure.
Speaker 0 | 12:00.852
And is it still that way? Are we, are used car sales up? Are the prices up? The premiums up? This is all what I’m being heard, what I’m being told.
Speaker 1 | 12:11.697
If you can not buy a used car right now, I would suggest you try what you have if you can, because prices are up. That being said, we are still selling a lot of used cars. We’re selling, you know, I think in October we got 135 new cars in and we sold 135 new cars. Yeah. Our business has changed. Now you basically want to order. They’re ordering what you want and then it’s being built. And then when your car gets here, it gets here.
Speaker 0 | 12:43.200
So if I order a new car now, how long? This is perfect. It’s good and bad for you guys. It’s bad from the standpoint of, I guess, volume sales. It’s good from the point of, do you want this or not?
Speaker 1 | 12:54.772
I really wouldn’t want to say how long because I don’t truly know, but that’s kind of how it’s happening. I just truly don’t know how long it takes. I’m kind of waiting on the, I would like to have a ZR2, a Silverado ZR2, and I can’t even order it until probably January or February of 22. So even though it’s a 22 model, let’s go.
Speaker 0 | 13:21.716
So how did you, what was your first experience with technology? What was your first computer? Considering you’ve been at Berger for 20 years, what was your first computer?
Speaker 1 | 13:34.503
I was thinking about this the other day. My first experience was playing Hangman Teletype in junior high. library against Western Michigan University. We played hangman. We, you know, the ATDT command, attention dial tone, put the number in for the university, call the university, you’d pick up, and then you had to call up the hangman program. And we’d sit there and play hangman. And it’d be like a minute before you found out you got the button wrong, you know, sometimes. But then in about 10th grade, we got Apple 16K computers. that we were saving our programs on cassette tapes right little cassette tapes and then the next year we got apple 256k color and with a floppy disk and we thought we were going to rule the world five and a half inch floppy by the way so yeah i remember that so uh you know back then i i did a blackjack program that was about eight pages long Got really good grades in that and also asteroids, we mimicked asteroids that were in Yarking. You know, I actually built that one and a lunar lander as well. So that’s my earliest, and that was probably 1981 was my senior year in high school. So older than probably most people here. And then after that, I kind of always had computers as a hobby. My first personal computer was a 286 that I bought, used from a car dealer, actually, for 50 bucks. And I brought it home, got it to work. It was a sad day. BMW on a splash screen, but it was old and archaic, and reformatted that and got it on Windows 3.1, I believe it was.
Speaker 0 | 15:34.826
Win.exe to load?
Speaker 1 | 15:38.167
Yeah, I mean, it was super old school. My first new computer I bought was a Pentium 133 Packard Bell, and it was just a… horrible horrible machine and made it a whole 16 megabyte ram but it had back then they had like packard bell library over the operating system so it was kind of it was wrapped in its own packard bell dude trying
Speaker 0 | 16:12.871
to create trying to create sticky
Speaker 1 | 16:16.598
sticky customers or trying what was the point of that to try and make people fall in love with packard bell yeah so you had like a library and made them hate it and said we hate you it was actually a picture of library your room there makes me think of that because you would if you wanted the document you would go to the bookshelf or if you wanted to go search some house you’d go out the window type thing and uh yeah it was it was pretty horrible that lasted about a month just
Speaker 0 | 16:46.350
to win the house. Yes, for everyone that cannot see my library right now that I’m sitting in, COVID was beneficial from a housing standpoint of me being able to sell a house and buy two houses for the price of one house. So when you look at houses during COVID, you look at I got handy with kind of fixing and flipping things by mistake. I never really was like, I’m going to do this type of thing. But for whatever reason, I became handy at redoing kitchens for my wife that she really loved her dream kitchens. And then having people say, hey, we’ll buy this house from you for like way more money than you actually paid for this house. And like, just because of the kitchen? They’re like, yes. Like, sorry, honey, say goodbye to your dream kitchen. And so and then when you go to look at buying another house, they’re all ridiculous. Like if you were to buy a house like the house that you just left. So instead I buy these older houses that for some reason are half that price and then build the kitchen that you want. You know what I mean? So you are looking at a very old, I think there was even some asbestos on one side of this house, an office right off the kitchen, which it has this, you can’t smell it, but you can smell that old wood smell. I know you can smell it. You know what I mean? There’s like this like smell of this old house in here. So yes, this is going to have to be. This is going to have to be gutted, but it doesn’t make dissecting popular IT nerds look very futuristic whatsoever. It looks like I should have that peckered bell sitting on the desk in the background. I want to make a lab, actually. I kind of want to get all these old computers and just have a bunch of them just so I can re-experience what it was like. I don’t even know if I’d be able to load. I think if you gave me one of those old Apple IICs with the double disk drive, and like you said, Phil, load up a word processor, type something, save it on a disk, and then print it out on this document.
Speaker 1 | 18:42.506
matrix printer i don’t think i’d be able to do it i think i’d have to read a book what scares me the most is i’ve probably forgotten more about computers than i know because one thing i found nowadays is i have to learn something every single day you know new about the network or about how applications interface or security has been the big push the last three four years i don’t learn something new every day i’m not doing my job And so I’ve forgotten a lot of that basic coding. And, you know, I know it was fairly simple stuff back then, but, you know, I’ve forgotten most of that. It’s kind of sad in a way.
Speaker 0 | 19:24.059
It is. Yes. Like, why do we have F1, F2, F3? What are these function keys? They’re still there. They’re still there.
Speaker 1 | 19:33.383
Most people still use the CKDMS, the card that’s pretty old. that’s kind of dark space no but it’s uh it was based on unix actually they came a very very long way but the old school stuff was red hat wrapped in a thing they called reality and that gave you all the f-13 functions and The F1 and the F2 for detail and F9 to search. So F4 to cancel. People don’t think about that, but we’ve got people here that are keyboard literate and they buy parts, sell parts, all with those F keys all day long.
Speaker 0 | 20:21.941
What would you say is the hardest thing? Four to five things that an IT director deals with that could be difficult. One would be training end users, dealing with legacy silos, upgrading stuff.
Speaker 1 | 20:38.831
And I’m not trying to steal this from somebody else. It’s protecting users that don’t want to be protected themselves. They don’t want to do the training. They don’t want to learn how they can be fished.
Speaker 0 | 20:55.710
Okay, so how do we protect those people? What do we do with them? Force them to dual-factor authenticate? I don’t know.
Speaker 1 | 21:02.795
I was thinking about it.
Speaker 0 | 21:04.477
Oh, exactly. Do we whip them?
Speaker 1 | 21:08.260
I’ve been taking and sending out phish campaigns, and when somebody fails it, if they fail it more than once, I personally go talk to them, and I’m good to be a little bit of a scary guy around here just because I’ve been here so long.
Speaker 0 | 21:23.852
You’ve been phished.
Speaker 1 | 21:26.814
And just go talk to them and say, this is why you shouldn’t click on stuff. Please don’t click on stuff.
Speaker 0 | 21:33.098
Do you realize how long I have been here? Do you realize that? I built the chassis.
Speaker 1 | 21:43.023
He built this network. Don’t break it. I’m pretty proud of that, as you can tell.
Speaker 0 | 21:49.987
You’re handing out knives on a plate. You’re sending them. fishes wrapped in newspapers, you’ve been fished.
Speaker 1 | 21:57.651
That’s not a bad idea.
Speaker 0 | 22:00.273
I might use that.
Speaker 1 | 22:01.594
One of my favorite things to do when they don’t lock their computers is put a Google Richard Simmons images and put it all the way across their computer and then lock their computer and walk away. So as soon as they lock their computer, they have Richard Simmons all across their computer.
Speaker 0 | 22:17.182
I will humiliate you all over the place. What other fun things can we do at work in an environment where HR is our friend?
Speaker 1 | 22:32.005
You talked about challenges and security obviously is a whole new challenge. We’ve spent on security between cameras more money in the last two years than we have in the prior five years.
Speaker 0 | 22:50.620
Are you saying physical security? When you say cameras, you mean physical security?
Speaker 1 | 22:55.067
Yeah, like Meraki cameras as well.
Speaker 0 | 22:57.249
Okay, okay. And?
Speaker 1 | 22:59.290
Why? Well, we had guys coming in with crowbars, smashing showroom doors out, coming in to get keys and, you know, and then going back.
Speaker 0 | 23:09.657
Did the security help? For real? And, like, you never found the car again? Or did they get caught because they’re stupid and you just don’t do that? No, they always get caught.
Speaker 1 | 23:18.243
They always get caught eventually. But, like… One crew was so smart, they took a Traverse, a beautiful Chevy Traverse, brand new, ran it so hard, jumping it, I don’t know, reverse slams or something, basically took the transmission out of it by the time we got it back the next morning. And so we bring it back by a tow truck, so they still have the keys. Two nights later, they come back in, break into the fence. find this car try to steal it again but it won’t even make it across the park so i mean it’s they were bold that and they got caught i mean they had did they get caught we’re gonna see some of them got caught yes we did manage to you know apprehend some perpetrators but during covid times we talked to the police and he said well i seen six stolen cars on the way over here you don’t choose them he’s like no that’s what they want They want you to change something.
Speaker 0 | 24:24.050
Really?
Speaker 1 | 24:25.411
Yeah. So, I mean.
Speaker 0 | 24:28.252
Well, there is, that’s another conversation. That’s like a.
Speaker 1 | 24:31.153
That’s probably another conversation. But that’s one of the challenges IT somehow gets involved in.
Speaker 0 | 24:37.496
Does, okay.
Speaker 1 | 24:37.976
Security cameras.
Speaker 0 | 24:39.297
So we don’t talk, I haven’t talked about security cameras much, but it’s come up recently because I sit on. I sit on the board or administrative staff at other places and people are like, Phil, what should we do for security cameras? I don’t know. Let me call up my vendors. We’ll put up security cameras. I’ve had people break in. I have a friend that has a food truck. The generator got stolen off the back of the food truck, you know, all chained on and everything like that. And we have the guy on the security camera, but it’s not like a 4K camera or anything. So people always put hoodies on and stuff like that. So, yeah. What do you do? Like, what do you do with, like, how do we make security cameras effective?
Speaker 1 | 25:20.122
I’m a real big fan of having a lot of them. We’ve gone to 75 of them. And we have had a few instances where, like, my network admin, one of his chores or, you know, time fillers is he’ll look in the middle of the night, see if there’s any motion on the cameras. We had a car out in the employee lot that was sitting there overnight. Then a guy pulled right up next to the car, gets out of the car, crawls under to see if the converter’s still there. You know, he’s reaching back up like he’s going to go get a tool. And then he looks up and sees the camera. And he’s like, oh, maybe somebody’s watching. And he drove away. So that’s probably our biggest success story.
Speaker 0 | 26:04.842
So deterrent. So deterrent.
Speaker 1 | 26:07.143
Deterrent. Yeah, we’ve had. We’ve had guys walk through the lot with jacks and they like to steal wheels a lot of times off the high end. So we’ve had to look right up at the camera, you know, knowing you’re not going to do anything about it.
Speaker 0 | 26:26.158
I’m trying to find the guys that do the construction sites too, because the construction sites have the cameras that when you show up inside, they’re like, you’re being filmed. Like the cops, the cops are being called now. They have like the automated voices and stuff that turn on.
Speaker 1 | 26:39.304
That’s a paid service. There are people out there that will do that for you.
Speaker 0 | 26:47.788
It’s pretty cool. Yeah. You brought up a good point. I pay my other staff to look at the security cameras at night. What’s your general philosophy on, not IT leadership from the standpoint of selling IT to upper management, because you’ve done a very good job doing that. And I think there’s something to be said about, you know, painting the picture and doing a very good job selling it to, as a muscle car to people that build muscle cars, you know, that’s, uh, that’s, that’s beautiful. You know, that, that, that metaphor alone is making it fit in with the, just the dream. It’s not even, it’s not even just the vision of the company. It’s the dream.
Speaker 1 | 27:34.967
Yeah. We’ve, we’ve come to the conclusion that we’d rather pay you know, a million dollars up front for, you know, IT services in a few years than paying any, you know, bad actor, you know, a million dollars for a ransom. And I hope I’m not setting myself up as a target here, but we try pretty hard to, you know, keep security at top of mind, for sure. And when I do send out phishing campaigns, I must say, my phone will ring off the hook most of the day, depending on when somebody’s. Is this real? Is this real? Hey, I got this. I got this. You know, email. Is it real? Well, you tell me. That’s what it’s about. So that’s been worthwhile. But talking with the owner, he’s adamant about whatever we can do to keep this place up and running and keep people working faster, make their job just as easy as we can. He’s all in. And it’s worked. We’ve had, even with COVID, we’ve had three record years in a row.
Speaker 0 | 28:45.890
Was there anything from the standpoint of, well, obviously IT faster, faster, better, stronger, bigger, better, faster. Was there anything from a web standpoint or web sales or anything that you guys did working in conjunction with marketing or anything like that?
Speaker 1 | 29:00.974
Well, we do have our own marketing department and they do a wonderful job. probably one of our biggest success stories, and it’s been probably almost eight or ten years now, is GM Parts Now. You know, we decided we were going to start on online parts sales, and we thought, well, if we could get, you know, $10,000 a month off there, we’d be good. And then a year, we started getting $10,000 a day, and now it’s, you know, $300,000 or $400,000. a month off that GM person. That’s wild. that’s wild it’s uh it’s really ballooned um in our wholesale business we’re the we’re the biggest wholesale distributor for gm parts in michigan now or at least this side of the state for sure so uh if you had any piece of advice for other i.t guys out there growing
Speaker 0 | 30:01.679
up in the business maybe i don’t know what the equivalent would be to networking somewhere else now but Is there any general philosophy or anything that you take that would be helpful to other people growing up in IT?
Speaker 1 | 30:18.348
Don’t let the job get to you. And don’t be afraid to say your piece in the conference room or write to the owner. You know, there’s been times where I’ve sent the owner an email, even though the CFO is my boss, and say, you know, I kind of need some help with this. I don’t feel like this is happening the way I’d like to see it. Can we talk? about it. Don’t be afraid to do that, to take that chance. It’s important to know who you’re working for. I know it’s hard for big places to do that, but if you’re working for the CFO and you can’t tell him straight up how it is, maybe you’re not working at the right place. So that being said, I’ve been here 20 years and they keep me around for some unknown reason, but I’m not sure. I also seem to, I kind of joke that it’s the IT department, not necessarily IT. It’s electricity runs through it somehow, not its job. So just be open to keep the cash register open. That’s the other thing I could tell somebody younger, you know, identify where that cash register is. For us, it’s F&I, it’s a service drive, it’s the parts guys that are selling stuff. And if that cash register is open. you know make that your number one priority make sure that the business can get done because the minute that cash register you know register isn’t open then somehow you failed the you know purpose of you know the guy that’s paying your way so i would say it doesn’t make money but i i kind of disagree just shut all the computers off once you’ll
Speaker 0 | 32:07.330
you’ll see it makes money yeah keep the cash register open that’s a great metaphor um thank you so much for being on the show again um you know any last piece of advice um yeah make sure you reach out to your your
Speaker 1 | 32:23.180
fellow i.t guys talk to them you know i’m friends with competitors around town and we talk about the car business and how that goes uh so it’s it’s helpful to see their point of view too you don’t always know what you’re looking at so Make sure you talk to other people and see what they see as well. It’s always helpful.
Speaker 0 | 32:42.478
Talking with your competitors is, it’s something I tell people to do, but I don’t think we’ve ever actually talked about it. It’s vastly underrated. It’s kind of like why people go from Microsoft to Google and Facebook to Twitter. How did Netflix all of a sudden hire a bunch of people and pay them five times more? i’m not saying that’s what’s going on here but it’s it’s uh important to learn from learn from your peers because they do they might do things something some thing a completely different way or might know something that you don’t know right have a piece of knowledge that you might not be might
Speaker 1 | 33:24.166
be aware of well you don’t know what you don’t know right so that’s the big point you know i like the iq guys as friends as you know colleagues, but do I want their business to fail? Absolutely. I want them to not sell out.
Speaker 0 | 33:46.205
I think you should buy this router.
Speaker 1 | 33:48.586
As far as them personally succeeding, that’s what I want. I’m here to help people when I can.
Speaker 0 | 33:59.171
Is there an endgame for the… What’s the endgame for most people in IT? retire with a pension? I don’t think so. Is it?
Speaker 1 | 34:11.524
Well, I’ve got a number in mind and, you know, about, you know, I just turned 58 this year. And so I’m kind of hoping to, you know, get another five years in here at Berger and that’ll, that’ll give me a 25 year chip. And then I kind of want to go around and do some consulting. So that’s, I guess that’s my end game, but you know, I’m not going to retire a rich, rich man, but I’m.
Speaker 0 | 34:35.578
gonna be okay you don’t know that you don’t know that something could happen you know
Speaker 1 | 34:41.480
I kind of did what you did. I bought a lake house for 140 grand, you know, in 2007. A bunch of trees fell on it. We decided that we need an architect to look at it. So we rebuilt that house basically over itself. And this during COVID, we added a kitchen and a three-car garage. So now my wife has her dream kitchen and I have a five-car garage. So we’re almost happy and the house is probably worth it. four times what we paid for it now in 2007. So we’re kind of glad about that. So my kids will be happy, you know, when I retire, retire.
Speaker 0 | 35:22.140
When I pass on, when I’ve had the song. Yeah, if you heard any of that construction in the background, yeah, it’s my barn that’s being, that I’m, the house that I bought had this huge, kind of like this guy that had this weird little manufacturing facility in it. So I’m turning it into a massive gym and a jujitsu studio. So thank you so much for being on the show. And GM parts now, what do we have to buy from?
Speaker 1 | 35:52.057
GM parts now is our online parts. And we will ship anywhere in the continental United States. So our record, we will ship to military bases. They ship a Corvette class to a guy in the military in India. That’s the record. Wow. That’s a record. So we need high up. He’s got a Corvette over there.
Speaker 0 | 36:12.397
Corvette in India. So we’re trying to beat Corvette in India for anyone out there listening. When I do look at it, I have some Russian people listening to my show somehow. If I look at the map of where people listen to this.
Speaker 1 | 36:26.446
We are not allowed to sell out of the country.
Speaker 0 | 36:29.848
How’d we get it to you?
Speaker 1 | 36:31.329
There’s some guys that have you shipped to ports. Once the final sale is done, we have…
Speaker 0 | 36:37.489
Can we ship to a base in Dubai that’s like an Air Force base or something? Can we do that? Someone in Dubai is doing something.
Speaker 1 | 36:44.135
As long as it’s a military base, we can ship to it.
Speaker 0 | 36:48.278
I have a friend in the Air Force on a base in Saudi Arabia. Maybe we can… We’re going to beat this. India. Let’s see. We’re going to figure out a way to beat this somehow.
Speaker 1 | 36:58.667
We can send him something, I’m sure. But yeah, BurgersChevy.com, of course. This is… In 2002, we used to write that word. So that’s one thing about being old. We used to write that word and then upload it to the website. And now, I don’t know, it’s all magic now. I just watch them do it. The marketing girls take care of all that for me now. So that’s been a big plus. We used to put the inventory up in a data access file. And now the inventory is all… Live. Live and magical.
Speaker 0 | 37:37.242
Dynamic. If we say dynamic, it sounds more technical. Okay, dynamic. Dynamic T1.
Speaker 1 | 37:44.828
We have a dynamic T1. It’s all smoke and mirrors, and I’m just glad that they’re all pointing in the right direction.
Speaker 0 | 37:52.214
Yes, sir. Thank you. And so the lesson of the show is fish people and send them a dead fish wrapped in newspaper and lock their computer with something embarrassing on the screen. Thank you, everyone, for listening.
Speaker 1 | 38:09.435
Oh
