The Real Business Behind Paint Protection and Scaling a Shop

Transcript

Welcome to the automotive advantage. Grow your business and get smarter in just one hour. Isaac Baker’s here from Finishing Touch Auto Spa. Isaac, you’re only 27. Multi-millionaire. I’m going to be a little presumptive there, where you’ve got an incredible business going on. You’re expanding. You’re in Waterford, Michigan. You’re expanding to Tampa, Florida. I have visited your 50,000-square-foot facility here in Waterford. It’s packed with exotic cars, classics. And you are a paint protection expert. Welcome to the automotive advantage.

Thank you guys for having me. I don’t know about all the stuff in the beginning. But with that being said, I’m excited to be here. And I’m grateful for the opportunity to sit and talk with you. We’ve known each other for quite a few years now. And yeah, I was excited to have the opportunity. Awesome. Yeah, Isaac is my paint protection expert. I should be real clear. You’ve worked on my Corvette and the Trackhawk. Thank you for that.

I do want a little background from you, because I think at 27, people are going to be like, holy cow, how does this empire come about? You’ve been a paint guy forever. You’re a detailing expert. And you’ve developed these skills all yourself. You want to give me the quick, how did I get started doing this thing? And then we’re going to ask some business questions. Yeah, for sure. Well, long story, but the condensed version of it, it’s not all me. It was a team effort that has helped develop finishing touch into who we are today.

I owe a lot of credit to my dad, to my wife. Growing up, my father and I were best friends. He was still art to this day. And he was in the automotive world, but on the engineering side. And he always had a passion for cars. And that’s kind of what trickled down to me. And so he used to come home at night, and he would wash his car. And that would be like his version of therapy. And so I used to love the opportunity that I would get to spend time with him doing that. And so that’s where it snowballed for me. And when I was going to school, I never really enjoyed school. That was something that I’m very open about. And I knew that I didn’t want to go to college and go that route. And I also didn’t want to necessarily go into the business that he was in either, because the engineering part of it didn’t tickle me as much as being able to be hands on. And that’s always what I was good at.

So come summer times when I was younger, I would wash cars, and I would charge starting out at $7 a car, and then add $2 if the car was extremely dirty. And that first business, it was never an LLC or incorporated. That was extreme auto wash. And so I used to do that out of the back of one of his buildings in Troy, right off of Coolidge Highway. And that’s what got me the bug of doing it. I actually really enjoyed it. I loved the instant gratification that I got out of seeing a car come in one way, seeing it leave a different way, and also the customer experience. And also, it really showed me that it was a common denominator. Even if the person wasn’t really into cars, we still had the common ground that started from the car that snowballed into a conversation to where we could build a relationship. And so I loved that aspect of what I do. And so I wanted to turn it into a viable business. I knew I couldn’t really— because even though I wanted to be hands-on, I couldn’t build more than just me washing cars without figuring out a more value-add proposition to doing what I wanted to do. So then I started to polish cars, started to sand them, and then I had some really good mentors that extended their time to me, and I was very fortunate with that.

But one unique capability that I think I carry is going from the detailing side, paint correction sanding side, film installation side, coating side. All of the jobs— and I’m a believer in this for any company to be successful— whoever is going to lead it or try and grow it, they need to thoroughly understand how to do it. That’s just how I was brought up, and that’s my opinion, too. So I started out doing just basic detailing, then started learning the correction side, how to enhance paint, how to make it better. And then I wanted to learn how to protect it thereafter, and that’s kind of how it snowballed into where we are today.

Seems like the protection side really unlocked the market for a lot of people. There was definitely the detailing side and the care for your car side and the wash side. And then when PPF came along especially, it seemed like, OK, now we can build these big, viable businesses. Is that how it felt to you, or do you think it was all just kind of building blocks along the way where washing cars, detailing cars, protecting cars, were kind of equal steps in the business?

For me, personally, it was equal steps in the business. I think the ground breaker for us was the fact that we were trying to do it in such a way we were an expert level in each arena. And I think that you have a lot of companies out there that they either do one of two things. They specialize in one segment of it, and they’re really, really good. And then they offer a few other things in their kind of subpar. Or they try and do it all, which that’s where a lot of the companies make, in my opinion, a fatal mistake.

And it’s normal because the business that we’re in too is cash intensive. And so your cash flow is really, really important for growing. With that being said, though, for us, the building blocks were so important because that’s what opened the doors of opportunity for me. If I didn’t have the flexibility to do the paint correction as well as we do it, I wouldn’t have met some of the customers that we have that ultimately opened the door either for their car collection to then be interested in doing that to a car that it makes sense. For example, we specialize in pre-war classics all the way up to modern day exotics and everything in between. And we have a team that’s knowledgeable enough to do that. And that is a very unique characteristic of our company. So we’ll work on cars that are from 1912, from 1930, and then we’ll go to a 2025 modern day car. But we are able to treat those cars with the same level of detail, the same caliber of knowledge. And I think that’s— for me, if I would have just focused on paint protection film, we wouldn’t be where we are today at all. And it wouldn’t have opened the opportunities that we have as a company.

I think one of the things that separates you is you’re incredibly good with people. You talk about relationships. Can you talk a little bit about where that comes from and how valuable that skill is for what you build here? Well, I think that in business in general, relationship building is a huge aspect. And in today’s environment of social media, text messaging and everything like that, having a personal experience with your customer and providing that level of experience and having a team that also can communicate verbally in person or pick up the phone call and have— whether it’s a conversation that you don’t really want to have or you want to have, because that happens a lot in my business, right? Because a car comes in. We do a lot about estate business. And our job is to advise the customer on what we see on the car. That’s why they’re trusting us. So sometimes it’s not the easiest conversation to have. But you want to build that trust relationship. And I have always emphasized that with the building blocks of the structure of our company.

For me, I learned from my dad how to be personable and how to be a respectful relationship builder, meaning if I tell you I’m going to do something, I’m going to come through for you. And if there’s any reason in the world that I can’t do that, I will tell you why. Or I’m going to figure out— and I’ll also tell you I need some time to figure out how I’m going to do this for you or with you. So I treat every relationship, whether it’s a friendship, a business relationship, or a working relationship, I try and treat it with the same care. And then I’ve had a lot of great mentors that maybe started off as a client. And they loved what we were doing. And we’ve had the fortunate, I guess, ability to build those relationships out. And I’ve always been a sponge. I like hearing from other people. And I’m not afraid of constructive criticism. And I think that’s a big thing in the business world that people aren’t very receptive to the things that they need to hear.

And I was always taught as well that if you care about somebody or you care about something that they’re doing, it’s not always just telling them what they want to hear. It’s telling them what they need to hear. I embrace that. And I try and have our whole team embrace that mentality, too, that we need to hear the things that we need to hear. But I have a lot of people that have helped develop me as a person, I guess I like to say. And I’m a big believer in credit is due or credit is due.

And again, it’s been a part of that relationship building that has given me the ability to know in what direction we should go next, if that makes sense. Yeah, there’s something incredible about the paint space, wraps, PPF detailing, where like when you talk to someone and you’re like, oh, who’s your wrap guy? They’re like, it’s this guy. And that’s the only guy where you know, it’s like and it usually starts with like, oh, yeah, I took one car to him, two cars. Then I sold my company 50 cars, 100 cars. Right. So like I think a lot of people listening to this might be like, oh, OK, so I just get a shop. I go through the expel training. I get an Instagram account. I’m going to be swimming in supercars pretty quick. But like, it’s a long journey, right, to build trust with people. It’s a little bit of a black art. Sometimes when I listen to detail guys talk about paint, I’m like, bro, just make it look sick. I don’t know what you’re saying, but I do have to trust you to be able to do that. Right. And if you’re going to be putting stuff on my brand new car that in most cases I haven’t even seen yet, you’re the first one to see it a lot of the times. Right. Like I have to have a trust in you. And once you develop that trust, man, they’re not going anywhere else ever. Right. Because they’re like, this is my guy. I’m not leaving. So maybe talk to us even more in depth about how important it is in your business to build those relationships and how someone at home that’s listening to this that maybe isn’t in this market but is building engines or something like that, what they can learn from your industry and your experience here.

Yeah, that’s a great point. I mean, that is what I refer to as a fantasy side of what we do. And that’s typically the side that you see online. Right. You see it on social media or you see ad agencies saying that they’re going to do X, Y, and Z. And all of a sudden, you’re going to have $100,000 a month in business. And that’s just simply not how it works. For a company like ours, we’re a very diverse situation in the sense of everything that we focus on at the end of the day is related to enhancing a customer’s vehicle, protecting it, and then managing it. And the management part comes in. We run our own logistics site. So we have our own tow trucks, trucks and trailers. So we pick up. We deliver. We manage if a car needs to go from Michigan to Florida

anywhere in the country. And that’s been a great entry way for us, collecting new customers as well along the way. As far as the fact of the customer, it’s all about making sure that you actually found the right customer for your shop. That’s another thing. So for me, we don’t discriminate against any cars. We have done Toyota Camrys. We’ve done LaFerrari Pertas. We’ve done 1920s Duesenbergs that are worth $12 million. But my customer has the same thing in common. They care about their car. And they want something done the right way. And they appreciate when a facility is doing it the right way. They care about it. We’re properly insured. The facility that we have, all those things matter on the checklist of a customer’s point of view. Now, if a customer wants their car protected, at the end of the day, their only vantage point is the price. They’re probably not best fitted for my facility, because one, I have mouths to feed. I’ve got a lot of mouths to feed for our industry, our insurance for having a facility like we have and the vehicles that we take care of. We are over covered to make sure that our customer is taken care of. And at the end of the day, those things cost money. And we use the best products, in our opinion,

we also strive to do the best quality installation. So we also don’t turn a car around in one day. We have a car. It comes in, it goes through a thorough inspection process that is also shared with the customer. So photos, video, and documentation, written documentation of our evaluation of the vehicle’s condition. And what does that do for us? It advises our whole team is now aware of the situation with that car. So if there’s a stone chip that should be corrected or touched up prior to that film installation, it’s in our system. So our guys are aware of it. And there’s a process in place to make sure that we do, in fact, do the right thing for the customer. And also, we bring it to their attention. If something is on the car that may need fixing that’s beyond our scope of work, we’re able to then advise them and say, we found this on the car, and we think that this should be addressed before we move forward. They’re, again, providing value. We’ve had cars show up that have some miles on them, and there’s nothing wrong with a vehicle having miles on it prior to protection. But we’re also the facility that will turn away a job and not take money from the customer if we don’t think that we can do the job correctly. So if your front bumper has what we refer to, it’s a peppering situation where there’s a bunch of little stone chips and things like that, and it’s already farther gone than it should be, it’s a new customer car to them. But I will tell you, hey, you should invest in just doing a ceramic coating on the car

and making it the best that it can be, as opposed to paying us to put film on it because we’re just gonna cover up all this preexisting damage that’s already there that it’s meant to prevent from happening. And we’re also in a situation nowadays where we’re not hunting for every single job to stay alive, but we were doing that even when I was questioning if I could make payroll, right? But that’s what built our longevity and that’s what built the relationship.

That’s the hard part about this business that people don’t talk about is that there’s more to it than just slinging the film on the car, slinging the coating and making it look pretty. It’s a process and there’s a right way of doing that process and there’s a wrong way of doing it. And also, even if somebody gets to an end result where a coating is on the car, there’s a lot to take into consideration there. You can take a ceramic coating and put it on the car. And you as a customer, you may pick it up and you say, wow, it looks great. And to an untrained eye, yeah, it might look good. But when it comes to a coating, if you don’t have the right environment and you’re not installing it the correct way, it may look shiny for a little while, but it’s not gonna last you. The customer’s not getting the value out of the investment that they’re originally paying you for. And so you have to be careful with whether it’s a customer looking for a service provider or it’s somebody looking to get into the business. There’s a lot more to think about than just doing the actual job. There’s a lot more that goes into it. So that would be my two cents. Okay.

I wanna ask about the staff in Finishing Touch. And you have a lot of folks that work for you. What makes a great detail person, installer person? What do you look for as a manager? And then how do you develop people? Give everybody an idea of what you do to process the human side of your facility. Yeah, yeah, that’s a great question. I think that’s one of the biggest learning curves any company can go through is how to do the best job that you can for your team. And that’s something that I consistently

am over concerned with because I wanna do a good, I want our guys to be able, guys or gals, to be able to come into our facility every day, one, and be happy. And two, feel that they are on a road path to success and not just the company, right? Because it’s a team effort. Without them, company’s not gonna go anywhere. So one of the biggest things that I’m a believer in, we do not seek out people with experience when we are hiring. Obviously, if you come in to the interview with us, it’s not an issue if you have experience, but I’m certainly not seeking it out because we prefer to train from the ground up.

And when you bring to give advice on somebody that’s trying to start a company in this industry or one that may be in it and looking to grow, it’s not always the best option to, it almost feels like a way out, especially when you’re smaller and you’re, when I was installing all the film and trying to run the office and trying to do everything, it gets hectic and you look for a way out. And that’s just human nature. But I will tell you that the greatest investment that can be made is taking the extra time that it requires to develop your people and give them the knowledge that they need because no one’s gonna be able to teach them better than that of yourself or people that have learned directly from you.

And so when we bring somebody in, I look for a few characteristics. One, do they have any care or passion about what we do? They don’t have to be a thoroughbred born car lover, that’s not what I mean, but they have to have an interest in what interests you and wanting to learn and wanting to develop with our company. There’s gotta be something that makes somebody tick, right? And it can’t just be a paycheck. It needs to be, you’ve gotta love what this company’s doing because that’s the only way that you’re gonna be really successful too.

Second, integrity, right? That’s a big one that is a common word, but being able to seek that out appropriately, I think is something that you learn as a skill or you acquire as a skill over time through experience. And punctuality is a big one for me. When we run long hours at our facility, and that’s another caveat to this industry that a lot of people don’t understand. It is not a nine to five gig or an eight to five gig, at least in our facility. And it’s not because we do it on purpose, it’s just as nature of the beast. As you grow, it’s easier to manage that and put a cap on it

because you have more bodies that are trained that can execute the job the way it needs to be done. But it’s very hard to get to that point because you’re training people, this is the level of quality that you want, and you need to make sure that the product meets it before the car exits the facility. That was something that took us a long time to figure out how is that gonna work. And if our start time is our start time, if you’re late,

it’s an issue, right? Because if everyone else is willing to show up, you’ve gotta show up too. And that goes for me as well, right? For a long time, it was the first one in the door and the last one out the door. And that’s the mentality you want your people to have too, that they wanna be there, they don’t wanna miss anything, and they wanna enjoy seeing the project go from A to B and out the door.

So I think running with strict, very communicated lines of where the company’s expectations are, are really important, that you have to find a good way of delivering that message to the staff so they can be on board and they can do the same thing. And I think a lot of companies miss that, especially with what we do of communication with your team is really what it comes down to and making sure they understand this is why we’re trying to do something to this level, and this is why it’s important. And then everyone can get on board with supporting missions.

Make that actionable for me. So I know like 90% of the businesses in this market are built because one person is really good at a thing, they start doing that thing, they get busy, they have to scale, their temptation is immediately, okay, I’ll hire someone else just like me, that person doesn’t exist, surprise, surprise. And then fuck, now I gotta either do it myself and then stay all night and do another one to pay for this other person, or I have to train this person.

Training that person is definitely the move, but it’s really hard, right? We see a lot of shops run up against that wall and just stay there for decades. So walk me through how you deal with that moment in time and then what you’re doing in your shop to really actually communicate, to let people know what has to happen here. Because I think people hear that and they’re like, yeah, I’d love to do that. And then they go to their shop in the morning and they just go straight to whatever their task is. So give me kind of a playbook for someone at home.

That’s a great question. To be honest, I don’t necessarily recommend anybody does it the same way that I did it, because it’s not healthy. But those long, frustrating nights was most of my life, probably up until, to be quite frank with you, up until maybe just shy of a year ago, right? And we had staff at that point. Plenty of staff, not plenty of staff for our volume, but we had more staff than just being me and one mother person. But the problem is that there’s two things to focus on, what you just asked, and something that I think a lot of people, especially in this industry, don’t understand. There’s a difference between growing and scaling, right? The growing phase is where everything is this hard pressed,

how am I gonna pay for things tomorrow? How am I gonna train this person? It’s that growing part has to happen either alongside of the scaling, which is kind of what we did, or it needs to happen before the scalability aspect, because you need to have those people, procedures, and systems in place before you can move to the scalability part. For me, the way that I did it was I trained myself how to do everything that I do. I never took a training course from a pain correction place. I never went to a film installation company and got through their training course. And that’s what I mean by I don’t necessarily recommend going about it that way, because I didn’t even know how to operate a plotter.

And for our early days, we were just ordering film, like plots and stuff, and putting it on a car. And that’s how I taught myself how to put film on a car. But then you run into the problem, you order a plot, right? And then you mess up. And all of a sudden you gotta order another plot, you gotta wait two days for it to show up. So it becomes a very stressful scenario, but at the time, I couldn’t afford the $10,000 plotter for the amount of business that I was doing. It just didn’t work.

So then I started bulking, and that’s really where I learned a lot of very hard, valuable lessons on how to do film installation. And then when it came time for training, in my very early days of FTA, I’ve got an employee that’s been very close to me for a long time, and he’s been with us for eight years. And we did a lot of those learning experiences together. And we had a lot of nights where it was two, three o’clock in the morning, we would go home shower, and we were back at five o’clock. But that was for a long time through the development process. And what was happening is that through those relationship buildings,

we were getting cars. I didn’t expect to get the cars that we were getting, and then we had to figure out how are we doing this? And you learn a lot through those phases of trying to figure it out as you go. And I think that that’s the most valuable part of our experience as a company, is all of those situations and those stress points, and you make it over the mountain with that one particular job, and then you’re ready to go for the next mountain.

So to me, getting through those points, there’s no easy street out of not working those late nights, and just having the stomach to go through the feelings and the emotions that you’re gonna have to be able to keep going. And I think that’s what separates individuals, and also companies are set apart based on what they’re willing to do and the extent they’re willing to do it. And if they can become successful through those times, it doesn’t always mean that it’s gonna work out, because there’s a lot of things that have to go right for that you can work as hard as you want, but if you can’t do X, Y, and Z along with it, business isn’t gonna continue to grow.

So it’s a hard question to say, do this one thing, because there’s not that one thing to do. You gotta take head on with what’s coming after you, and you’ve gotta be willing to go after it and take charge. And as far as the leadership ability, again, having the right people at your side that are willing to go through the hard times, because in my experience of my company, we’ve had a lot of really hard times to get to where we are, and very, very uncomfortable experiences.

And one thing too that I will say to anyone that’s aspiring to do it, or is in the middle of that, especially as you get employees, people that don’t stick around through the hard times typically leave too early to experience the good times. And you’ve gotta be confident enough in yourself and what you’re doing, as long as you’re doing everything the right way, or you have the best intentions, because it’s a confidence degrader when you don’t have the right people at your side during the hard times. And I learned that lesson, and I allowed it to emotionally affect me. It didn’t affect me to the point where, I’ve had tons of days where I’m just like, I’m done. In my mind, but I’m not. And it’s the ability to keep moving through those moments. And the business that I am in, people look at your work. Your work is very visible. It’s not like we’re doing office work where somebody makes a glitch, and it’s like, oh boy, we need to fix this. It’s a serious issue. And we have made,

and I’m very open and honest about this, I have made probably every mistake in the book you can think of when it comes to what we do as a business. But that is where my value really comes in, is that I’ve been there, I understand it, and I’ve figured out how to not have that happen. And so then that’s where the value that you provide to your team, is you can only hope, they’re gonna make their own mistakes too, because you can tell them until you’re blue in the face, don’t do this, don’t do that. Or if you go about it this way, this is what’s gonna happen. And until they physically go through the own pain in their experience, they’re not gonna understand it the same way that you do. So you also have to have the ability of being a leader in allowing people to feel comfortable with making a mistake. So in my facility, unless somebody does something that is very clearly just totally negligent and inexcusable mistake,

we are very embracing of making a mistake. You put a piece of film on a car, and let’s say we get a lot of the first of a car that came out. So they haven’t installed on that particular panel, and we’re not just clicking print on a plotter and just slapping something on a car. Our goal is to execute it in the best way that we possibly can for an installation. So if they’re gonna make a failure on it, you don’t want them to be too afraid to make that mistake. But what you also need to keep a cap on is that they don’t make the same mistake three or four times, and then it just becomes a routine of, well, it’s okay to waste film, or it’s okay to do X, Y, and Z. So as a leader in what we do, you have to accept mistakes, and you need to create an environment that it’s okay for your guys to learn. Because the only way they’re gonna get better is by making a mistake. And I’m a big believer in that mentality. And I think that’s helped us get to where we are today,

is that type of thought process. I got a question I’m dying to ask you. And then we’re gonna change it up a little bit. But you see every car from every manufacturer. I wanna know who makes the best paint. What manufacturer does the best paint job? I’m asking that in a nice way. You could also say who doesn’t do a good paint job too. That would be cool for me to learn that too. But could you rank some of these manufacturers on the paint that comes out of the factory of some of these cars?

Yeah, I will. When I first started out in the business, I was extremely blunt in maybe ways that offended other people around. And that’s just how, I’m a very direct speaker. I say it how I see it. And again, in today’s environment, sometimes that’s difficult because people don’t necessarily love that. I don’t like talking bad about anything or anything. And I certainly don’t put it down, but I do say it how it is. And I will answer the question on the best thing. In my opinion, if you’re looking to buy a car from a quality standpoint and a paint job, I would always lean towards Rolls Royce. And as far as their paint work goes, it’s always very consistent. And there’s a lot to work with from a correction side.

But there’s a lot of companies out there that have good consistency, I would call it. Because again, another big thing in our business which we could talk about this is the consistency of what we do. And also being able to understand that on the customer vehicle and provide them with consistency. And I can elaborate on that aspect. But I would say Rolls Royce, as far as the best paint, as far as that one aspect, I mean quality overall, and Rolls Royce is typically pretty solid. Sports car wise, Porsche was always in my top tier as far as a quality standpoint when we pull things apart on the vehicle, like a mirror off the car. When we’re inside on the door panel, just seeing the craftsmanship of the way that they put the car together, it’s very well done.

German engineering for sure, you go pull things off on a BMW and life’s a lot easier sometimes with the door handle removal, because they were thinking ahead and you don’t have to pull 15 parts apart to get to one thing like you do on some other manufacturers. As far as a huge enhancement, if you look at Corvettes, you mentioned Corvette, if you look at C7 model, the paint jobs that were coming out on those, there was a lot of inconsistency problems. And when they made their enhancement at the factory,

the new C8s still have their things, but considerably better from a consistency sampling, right? So that’s kind of the way it’s going. Yeah, C7 paint leaves a lot to be desired for sure. Still probably my favorite era of modern day Corvettes, just on my humble opinion. We’re both C7 guys, so yeah, you got it right. Yeah, C7 is the best generation, we’ll say it right here on the pod. Yeah, I mean, C8, I think C8s are a great car for what they are after.

In my opinion, I would have kept an option in whether that be feasible or not, from the manufacturing side for GM, I’m no expert on that, but I think if there was still an option of a traditional Corvette, I would be a buyer. But the C8, I think, I get in the car and I’m not as excited as I used to be. That’s my only caveat. We did see, SEMA was last week, Tremec just dropped a manual transmission that fits in the same spot as the dual clutch in the C8, so.

That could be cool, that could be cool, you know people are already working on that for sure, so yeah, that would be exciting. What is the, what is one car that you’ve received where you’re like, whoa, this is way different than what I thought it was. It doesn’t have to be bad or good, but someone said, hey man, I just bought a new 750S, I’m dropping it off, you hadn’t seen one yet, it shows up and you’re like, whoa, this is either way worse quality or better quality, or has anything ever surprised you?

That’s a good question, I mean, I’m sure that there has been points where I have said that. Nothing that like strikes me, I guess my, I guess whenever a car comes in, I try not to have extremely high expectations, whether it’s, you know, X, Y and Z car, no matter what the value is, because I try and look at them in the same respect all across the board. You know, we had a Gunther Works that came through,

and I was impressed by the car, and it was amazing. I don’t know, it didn’t touch me in the way that I thought it was going to, I don’t know, maybe it was just a spec or whatever I had to do, but I’ve had cars that I maybe would expect, you know, from a quality standpoint, might be a little bit better than they are, especially for the price points that a lot of these cars are at nowadays. But nothing that it can be like this or that, you

Yeah, as soon as we turn off the camera, I’ll be like, you guys should have seen, (Laughing) this thing sucks. Yeah. It was, you know, one of the things I wanted to get can be a little bit more on the business, and you know, talk about a typical, if there is such a thing, paint correction and then paint protection package and the price of it. Could you talk about what drives the price of this segment of the industry? There was an idea where the cost comes

another great one that is so diverse because of the industry that we’re in. The challenging aspect of what we do or I would say maybe smaller operators or people are trying to get into it is really understanding what the market should be. And you have a lot of, I think the problem with the manufacturers that have made these products have made it too much of an open game of who can be an installer and who can do the job. And nowadays, you can almost get in with any of these companies. And I find that to be,

for me from a business side, I’m not very concerned about it in respect to because I’m confident in who we are. I’m confident in us as a company, and I’m confident in the value that we offer to our customers. But it is concerning because they’re not vetting these people at all. So he could say, well, I’ve got three years of doing paint correction, and all of a sudden he’s a certified coating installer or a certified film installation in place. And I think that in my opinion, it should be going another way, right? Now there’s a lot of people out there that are doing it, and the company should be looking more for the ones that are really doing a great job and not putting a bad name on the industry as a whole.

And then people to survive, this is why I don’t, a lot of guys will get out there online and they’ll say, oh, people are so stupid for price cutting and this and that, and they’re just looking at it one directional, in my viewpoint. I understand, some people are doing it with ill intentions, right? And then there’s the guys that are genuinely trying to do a good job and they need to survive. So what do they ultimately result in doing? How am I gonna get somebody to say yes to me? I’m gonna do it for half the price of anyone else. And they really don’t realize how badly they’re shooting themselves in the foot because you’re never gonna be able to do a long-term commitment to it. Because I’ve heard, we don’t deal with it very often as far as phone calls that come into our facility.

Oh, well this guy will do it for $900 cheaper than you. And that’s fine, I totally respect that, but my reasoning that I can is kind of what I said in the beginning. I’ve got employees, I have a great facility for your vehicle to be housing. We have all the proper equipment to do the job. Our insurance rates, I can’t compete with someone that is just a one-man band out of his garage from a cost point of view, because just my costs to get to the same point. No matter if he’s doing it equally as well or not, his costs are completely different than that of mine. But also, we do have a significant value over a situation like that.

We offer a lot more. We obviously are a very reputable company that isn’t going anywhere. Two years from now, you’ll be able to call me to do a maintenance job on your car or do your next car. Hopefully that’s my goal. So I think that in this industry, because of the manufacturers allowing everybody in to do it wherever and whenever, I think that that makes it harder on anyone that actually is trying to build a real business and scale up to do better for even that manufacturer, let alone just themselves or their people. So there’s a lot that goes into the pricing. For us, ceramic coatings, our basic package is 1950,

because we don’t offer, well, your car’s brand new, so we’re only gonna do one-step polish on the car and call it good. Well, that’s really not how that works, because when the car is new, you have domestic, you have foreign cars, and how they get to the end result, which as a customer, look very different. So it can either come across via boat, so it’s in a bunch of different people’s hands, and then it makes its way onto a truck, and then it makes its way to where? A dealership.

And we, with no disrespect, I mean, obviously the dealership’s goal is to sell you that car. They’re not trying to make it perfect before you get it, or to the best level that it can be. They just wanna deliver you the car. And so the porters wash the car, they wipe it down, or if somebody buys a car that was sitting out a lot, there’s so many different scenarios that go into it, and the decontamination part of making sure that a car is properly ready to be corrected, and or even polished.

And when you go to install the coating, the substrate that you’re putting it on needs to be correct. You can’t just slap it on and expect everything to be hunky-dory and last long-term for the customer. My goal is that a customer’s coming to our facility, and we’re selling them us, a service, and then a product. So it’s our job to do it the right way every single time, no matter what the car is, whether it’s brand new or it’s a classic. So we go through the same process on every car. Also another unique thing, our process works, whether it be that of a pre-war era car, or a modern day car. Our paint correction process does not change. Now, if it’s a pre-war car that needs sanding and things like that, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the fact of being able to work on old fickle paint to modern day, brand new paint job. Our process doesn’t change much because we’re not overly aggressive because we don’t wanna take off more than we need to. Then we’re doing the customer a disservice. And then you have some guys out there that say, “Well, if you do a paint correction on the car, you’re doing that anyways.” That’s not true.

There’s all different people in this environment that have their own opinions. And they’re all, “That’s okay. Your opinion’s fine to have on that. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it needs to be everybody’s opinion. And it certainly doesn’t mean that it’s correct.” So I’ve never been afraid of saying that I’m confident in knowing that this is how I deliver the best quality result to my customer. And I’m not looking to change to be like Tom and Harry down the road.

That’s what I think makes us who we are. So yeah, so we start out in 1950 for our basic level coding packages. Film is a different animal. Film, there is places out there that have like full front pricing, track pricing, like which would include all your high impact areas. And we have those packages. We have cruiser track package, full wrap. But each car is unique and each car is different. And you look at Corvettes, right? You have a Stingray, you have a e-ray, now you have the ZR1. And we just got done. We did two of the first ZR1s that were customer deliveries. And the rear hatch on that car is completely different than that of just a Z06 or a Stingray. So there’s more labor hours that go into it. There’s nuances of pieces to be put on that take more time. So it’s hard to say, well, you know, I can do this package on every single car for this rate. That is definitely a volume play. And there is guys out there that do it and get away with it. We know a generalized price range of, you know, a cruiser package when we wrap the full front of a car. We know we’re gonna land somewhere between X and Y. But the reality is you need, you have to treat each car differently because you are doing different panels and they require the labor time that goes into the installation, trimming, finalization, inspection time when we do a full wrap. Each car goes through, you know, a final inspection, a PDI. We have, you know, a very strict system of how we exit a car now. And it’s taken us a long time to develop that system because one, before we didn’t have the manpower to do it. And two, we didn’t have the systems in place to do it. So now that we do that, we have data on how long it takes us to do X, Y, and Z. And then we also have data on when we need to do better at something that we can deliver back down to the team. You know, hey, we noticed that this corner could have been tighter. We keep data on all of that now. And that’s how we continuously improve.

And so a continuous improvement environment is another way that we operate and we preach to our entire team. We always want to be 1% better every day. That’s our goal. And if we can do that, we’re quite a bit ahead over a 12-month stretch. Two thoughts there. One, I can’t imagine how frustrating and difficult it is to wrap a ZR1 rear wing and a split window thing. There’s just so many shapes going on there. So props to you guys for doing that. But two, for the young kids listening to this, and I’ve done it, everyone’s done it, when you see someone’s price and you’re like, they’re charging 10 grand, I could do it for 2,500, instead of thinking, they’re charging 10 grand, I could do it for 2,500, you should think, I can do it for 10 grand, they can do it for 10 grand, I can actually make enough money to be around in business for a long time, right? This idea of undercutting someone and then you’re gonna raise pricing eventually, somehow in the future, just never bears fruit, right? We always see people try to be like, oh, well, if a big agent, in my world, if a big agency is charging 250 grand for a photo shoot,

we could do it for half that, easy, why wouldn’t we? It’s like, well, the big agency is charging that, because they’ve done the math. And they know what it costs to properly insure it, and they know what it costs to have all the equipment, and the PAs and all that stuff. So like, I think what you’re saying is true, this temptation to undercut is so prevalent in this industry, but it’s like, just consider why their cost is that high, it’s not just to make Lambo money, right? It’s because that’s what it costs to do these things. And the top kind of sorts itself out eventually, right? If you go to the best PPF shops in the country, the top pricing’s probably pretty similar. It’s the bottom where everything gets super wonky, because people are making up pricing, undercutting, well, I’m just doing it out of my garage, blah, blah, but if you wanna grow a business, as I’ve learned the hard way, you actually have to make money at some point to be able to do that, right? So shout out to everyone at home, just getting into this game, but you gotta make profit at some point, right, to grow.

Yeah, so my question to, my rebuttal to what you just said on the part of, where they say, well, this guy’s charging 10 grand, I can do it for 2,500, that is the thought process that they’re having. My rebuttal to that is that, how did you get to the fact that you think you can do it for 2,500? You don’t know, obviously, that you can’t, right? So it’s not a matter that they can, just because you can buy the material for $1,800 does not mean that you can do it for $2,500, it just makes no sense. Even if you’re a one-man operator and you’re doing it out of a garage that doesn’t cost anything, you still, fundamentally, it does not make any sense.

And then you get through that job, how are you gonna buy the material to do the next job for the next customer? You’re gonna be in the same path. And I have learned the hard way, that’s why I say the difference between growing and scalability, because we’re still doing both right now. We are opening, we are open in Florida now as well, but Michigan is still in such a growth phase of development and cost. And I still, to this day, and cashflow is a huge thing, right? And it’s almost sometimes more important than profit during the growing phase, and you do have to eventually make a profit, right? But also, when you, for our business,

if you are profitable per job, right? And you are taking a little bit longer on jobs because of the nature that you are implementing processes, implementing procedures, things that naturally take time to develop the muscle memory to do them, or see if they’re gonna work or not work, that’s where the investment time comes into play. And you just have to realize, if your business model is, in fact, working, so if I’m profitable on the last 10 cars individually that I’m doing, but yet I’m still redlining overall, I know that if I can continue that and reach scale,

I’ve got a pretty good thing going, as long as the percentages make sense, right? When you’re growing, you’re adding on more people, but you may not have enough scalability yet to where it makes sense, but you can’t get to that next phase without investing and training them. Also, our business is very expensive to train because you lose a piece of film on a car, you’re talking about hundreds of dollars for one instance, depending on the size of the panel. The pain correction process, the liability that comes along with that is huge. And you have to have the wherewithal to train, devote time to it. And for a long time, we did not. It was just go, go, go, figure it out, figure it out, figure it out. And I think that’s the biggest struggle that is partially unavoidable in what we do to get to a certain point. It is a struggle for a while to get past it. And you just kind of keep moving.

Isaac, what do you think the paint protection industry operates as a margin? Do you think it’s a high margin across the segment? Or do you think it’s in the middle? I think because of what we’ve been talking about, that’s a very difficult question because I think everyone is kind of across the board. So you’ve got guys that are focused on volume. They’re doing, maybe they’re doing dealership work and they’re slinging plots all day long. Their margin might be smaller, but their overall

is probably pretty good. But the reality is in my world, you have to be floating, in my opinion, at least around 40% before you start taking your building expenses and things like that in order for it to really make sense. So the margins gotta be there. And film has a great margin if you get to the right point with it. But there’s a period of time where it doesn’t because you’re learning, you’re trying to figure out how to do it. How do you, and what if somebody calls them, they want stealth. Now you gotta make sure that you’re stocking stealth film and that can throw your costs off too, that you have to buy all of a sudden, you gotta buy 50 feet in two different sized rolls maybe to make it make sense. Now all of a sudden you just spend four or five grand and then you might not see a stealth job for two months. So it can, it is a daunting task sometimes in knowing and understanding your market of,

what type of clientele am I gonna be experiencing and knowing how to manage that as well. Same thing with Windows 10. Are more of my clients gonna want carbon film? Are more of them gonna want ceramic? And who’s gonna want this percentage and this percentage? And so once you get to the right point with it and you do have those things figured out, the margin is definitely there, but it takes a while to learn that. And I don’t think anyone has the exact blueprint for it because everyone’s situation is gonna be different. In the way that we’ve been going about business, there’s no roadmap of what we have accomplished in my opinion. There’s a lot of great companies out there that do a lot of really great work, great things, amazing installers out there.

But we have a lot of unique attributes that we’ve tried to do to set us apart to be able to get the clientele’s attention that we’re looking for and we’re seeking out. So I’m thankful that we’ve been able to navigate that. Speaking of growth phase, you talked about the Florida expansion. So I’m super interested in the Detroit facility is still on this great growth path, but at some point you make the decision to expand to Florida.

Like that sounds like a huge undertaking. Can you talk about how that came about and when did you green light that? And I’m sure you’re just getting up and rolling, what makes that win? And I’m sure folks are wondering how is he splitting his time between Michigan and Florida? How are you managing these two sites? So take it away, I wanna hear about how this happened. As far as the managing of everything, again, I don’t necessarily recommend it to anybody. But so one of the people that has been very influential in my life is Brad, Brad Olshansky, I think you guys know each other.

And I always had the dream of when we started FTA that we didn’t want it to just be the regular automotive enhancement job. And I wanted to build a company and a brand that had a future of growth, sustainability, and to be able to scale. But without doing it in such a way where we lost our touch of who we are and what started the whole following that we got. And we’ve been able to do that so far, which is really, really important to me.

Florida came about with the new racetrack that went up in Tampa. And we had always wanted to do Florida because we have a lot of customers that are in Florida and we’ve naturally been able to build off of that due to the location here. Michigan has a ton of snowbirds that go to other states. And whether that be Florida, I mean, we do cars in Arizona, we do cars all over the place. And it’s become our reputation. And the reason that people want to come to us is because of the experiences other people have had in the track record. So Florida made sense for us as a company because we already had existing contacts down there that could help with making it make sense, originally starting out.

So that’s really how the egg started rolling. It took a couple of years though of planning and trying to figure out if FTA Michigan was in a position to be able to support that. And that was a very hard moment in time to figure out how to do that. It still is, but we are doing it. It’s awesome. The director of operations that we have down there, he actually moved from Sioux Falls, South Dakota to open it up. And this is not some, I’m not calling them all, these is not some kid that didn’t have a life. This was a very established person that came with a lot of fantastic business experience. And it was very knowledgeable in what we do as well. And was very excited about our company and all that. So that speaks volumes to what we have going on too, is that you have somebody, him and his wife, pick up a life, they’ve lived there for 35, 40 years and move considerably far away to help do a startup.

And I couldn’t do that without the support system that we have between our clients, our amazing clients that have done nothing but show us support, be loyal to us, and really genuinely care about the company too. It’s so cool. We have clients that come into our facility and, I mean, they’ll stay there for an hour just talking. And obviously it’s a cool place to come into and see the cars, but they just genuinely love seeing what’s gone on. And we have customers,

our biggest business is repeat business. And that’s really how we built our business has been through that. And I would say to anyone out there that, that’s probably the best business that you can have in my opinion. I know and I’m sure lots of people say that, but there is a good way of doing that and developing those relationships where people want to do business with you again. So yeah, that’s what’s helped us get to Florida too. I have to give our customers credit for helping us get there.

The most expensive customer is a new customer, right? And people always forget about this. It’s like, oh, we’re just going to go get new, it’s like. The lifetime value of a repeat customer that’s on their 20th, 50th card, they’re not asking you for discounts anymore, right? They’re just loyal. They want to see you succeed. They love you guys. So when you move into a new market like this, though, there’s obviously, you got to kind of do some branding. You got to do some brand building. What’s your kind of technique moving in there? Are you like, okay, we got to build a social media presence? Or are you like, we got to go to events? Or are you like, where are the supercar guys at? Obviously you’re at a cool facility, so that helps. But like, give me your, cause Michigan was probably a pretty organic, slow build to get to here. Now you’re kind of in a unique position. What’s your like marketing strategy, one-on-one new facility?

Honestly, same thing. If I’m being completely honest, boots on the ground and doing it the way that I know how to do it best. And that’s really networking and building great relationships off of a handshake. I don’t have a wizard playbook of how I plan to build the company in Florida or the next one that we’re going to open because there for sure will be another one in the future. But I’m, I guess I’m just old school that way. But, and I think that’s also given us an edge where even though we’ve been successful here and you know, we’ve built a good company. I still wake up every day feeling like it’s day one. And so I’m going to treat Florida as though I’m at day one again and I’m, I’m going to grind it out. And now the only difference is I have an awesome team to help me do that. And so that for sure helps me sleep a little bit better at night.

But I would say that’s my biggest difference right now is that I’ve got a team that is so on board with it. So excited. And you know, not every single one of the team members has been able to travel in there yet, but you know, about half of them probably have made the trip in to do some form of training or help with getting projects done and to see them get to experience that and to be able to put my people on a plane, go 1400 miles away to another location, especially for the industry we’re in. That is a very cool experience to give them. And so that’s really my, my plan. You know, we obviously have, we have a good social media presence and that’s something that I’m, I really want to grill and do a better job at. We have, in my opinion, an amazing photographer and videographer that works at the company and he’s also a great friend of mine. And you know, but we’re, we’re trying to get out of that phase of organic growth and we’re trying to learn and navigate what is next on, you know, getting out there and getting the name out there. But really my expertise is boots on the ground and that’s really what’s built us up.

What, I mean, I think, I think you laid out a five year plan, but I guess for, for folks that are tuning in that are just becoming aware of you and your company, what’s the best way to keep track of Isaac Baker? Well, obviously following us on social media, our handles are all just finishing touch out of spot or Florida one is finishing touch out of spot Tampa. And, uh, obviously I think we have a great website that gives information, a lot of great information on what we do. And then, you know, coming by our facility, a lot of people don’t even realize that our facility is there. That’s kind of how we built it, uh, to be a little bit incognito. Uh, but with that being said, everyone’s welcome to come see our facility. It’s a great place to tour. Um, there’s always a cool car too in the facility. So, you know, that would be the best way for sure. Thanks

comes down to cars and I’m learning, um, this might be a problem for the pod in the future, but every one we talk to, there’s no roadmap to success at all. It’s always just like, well, don’t do what I did, but this, this is the way I would, uh, do it. So I love that the common denominator is just get out there, love what you’re doing, figure it out, don’t quit, and then you’ll be successful. That is the roadmap to success. There’s not like, Oh, I just follow these easy steps. That is not the case at

to end on that note, um, the, the best advice then is that kind of, like I said to you earlier, there’s no roadmap or road, man, there is no speed limit on the road to success. And that’s something that I’ve always believed. However, there’s going to be so many bumps and hurdles, which everybody and their brother talks about. The thing is, is that when you’re going into business or especially the business, like we’re in not forgetting about the clerical side of it and how important that is, you’ve got to know your numbers and you’ve got to know what you need to do in order to fuel doing the next step. And that is something that took me a long time to learn. I am not, uh, not really a numbers guy. A lot of people might think I am. I am good at math, but I never devoted the time to it because I didn’t think it was as important. Um, but then as the company started growing, I learned the hard way that the records and the bookkeeping and all of that stuff is so paramount to being successful because you want to go out and you want to do something. Well, no bank is going to touch you or look at you if you don’t have that stuff.

And you can’t do everything based on a credit card. And so those are things that I do believe can be articulated as far as a roadmap that a lot of business conversations lead out of is that, yes, it comes down to the grind. It comes down to the hustle, but there is stuff that you may not want to learn, but you do need to make it your priority to understand and engage in. So you can feel that girl.

This seems like the same thing as how you can’t learn paint protection until you fuck it up, you know, and everyone, everyone on the pod says this and it’s like, you got to know the numbers. You got to know the numbers. You got to know the numbers. And I feel like even me up until a year ago, like, eh, I’ll figure that out later. Like I’m just growing this business and that’s the only thing I care about. And if we keep getting jobs, we’re going to be fine. But the reason people on this pod say that so often is because it is true. It is true.

No, it’s, it’s, it’s completely true. But I think, I think one of the unique things, and I have watched some of the podcasts and I listened to other business leaders talk and very rarely do you hear people say often enough in my opinion about what I spoke about on the embracing the stakes side. I think a lot of people create an environment, especially our environment, where we want something to be so perfect. Most people would think, well, you can’t make a mistake. It’s true. We don’t want to, but you have to make those mistakes in order to get to perfection. You have to be willing to fail before you can be good. And so I guess if you really look at it, I failed a lot of times before we’ve gotten to this point. So, you know, I think that that’s an important thing to plug into somebody’s roadmap is to be okay with it.

A hundred percent. One little reframing thing that I’ve done lately is whenever I get to a point where something’s really hard and you just want to go home and quit, I just say to myself, this is when someone else would quit. This is when someone else would quit. This is hard. This letter I just got in the mail from the IRS or, you know, this rejection from someone or this didn’t go the way we planned. This is when someone else would give up. And if I can make it through this, I’m one step further down this road. Right. And it’s the same with making a mistake. Oh no, I just messed up on a brand new Elva that no one has a mat for. Well, yeah, of course. Cause you’re working on a brand new Elva and no one has a mat for it. Right. So it’s just like, you got to see those things as opportunities. It’s hard to do, but for sure you got to make mistakes. Right. That’s just how it’s going to work. Some of our earliest podcasts were with the light on members of disaster in here, but we just pushed through. That’s what you got to do.

It’s, it’s, it’s the name of the game in my opinion. And, uh, I would, I like to embrace those challenging moments in time, uh, because I’ve also learned that you can’t appreciate when things are good. If you haven’t gone through all of that. And I, that’s more of what I’ve leaned towards telling myself as opposed to someone else, uh, comparing my also comparing yourself to other people. I will tell you it’s probably one of the worst things that anybody in business can ever do because that’s what they want you to do because it’s getting their money, your mind is now on them as opposed to doing what you need to do. And your mind is a very interesting character in itself and it can control you in ways if you don’t pay attention to it and, uh, you know, don’t lose sight of what you’re doing and where you’re going. And, uh, another thing when you have a team, you know, I always give the guys an example of, you know, I’m standing down here at the ground level and I’m looking at the peak of a mountain and I’m thinking about how amazing the view from up there must be. And my reality is though, that view is never happening for me until I climbed that mountain, right? So we’re all climbing the same mountain. And one thing we say is that we’re not finger pointers or thumb pointers. And what that means is that when we’re all climbing the mountain, we’re all taking the wins together and we’re all taking the losses together. And so you can’t just, you know, be climbing the mountain and your teammates are right there, one guy trips or makes a mistake on a car and all of a sudden you look and you watch him, you know, tumble down the mountain. That’s not the way that a team works, right? We carry and we push each other up. Um, and that’s worked well for me and using an analogy like that. Yeah. Finger pointing is one of my biggest pet peeves and that was something that I had to learn how to fix appropriately in a team environment and, you know, always point the finger here before you point somewhere else. And as I’ve learned that lesson the hard way that, you know, if I’m having a disagreement or I’m looking at something that’s wrong, I always look at myself and say, well, how did I get to this point? Even if I wasn’t the one that physically did it, uh, because there’s always something that I can do better for them as well. And I want them to have that same mentality and respect back to me because I’m giving it to them as well. And so leading with that is very helpful.

Yeah. Isaac Baker finishing touch auto spot. I learned a lot about pain protection and a lot about running the business. Thank you for giving us your time today and we appreciate it so Thanks for having me. I appreciate That’s the pod.

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