Un-freaking-BELIEVABLE! I just scored enough red bricks to build the coveted garden wall at the downtown house and probably pave a couple of patios: for about 15 cents apiece!
The things are selling for 65 cents apiece at Home Depot. They’re practically brand-new: the “estate sale,” as it develops, was actually a foreclosure sale. The evicted owner had planned to build a circular driveway in front of the large tract house that he was forced to vacate. He never got the things on the ground, and so…his misfortune is my good luck.
The sale organizers advertised 1,000 bricks, but when I counted them I came up with 1,448.
Gerardo sent a crew in a decrepit pick-up to load the bricks. I had my van, too: there were so many bricks it took us two trips with both vehicles. The men loaded and unloaded all those blocks, one at a time. While Gerardo was at the estate sale, he picked up another job: some used furniture dealer hired him to transport a heavy, solid brass baker’s rack. So he did OK, despite not asking anything like enough for his and his workers’ time.
For some reason, stucco often doesn’t seem to hold up well to the passage of time. The foreclosure is in a district of aging stucco tracts that once formed an upper-middle-class Scottsdale suburb, now surrounded by development and fading fast. The houses were built in the 70s and the 80s. Mile after mile of houses, many of them spacious and once upscale, are now tired and run-down—and they’re just not that old. IMHO, a thirty-year-old house shouldn’t look like it’s ready to be torn down. Too many of these houses, which were anything but cheap at the outset, look exactly that way.
A few houses in the tract were built of slump block, and they still look very good. But the stucco affairs have weary and worn-out air about them. And since stucco is the predominant style in all new construction here, I guess that in twenty or thirty years, we’ll be seeing vast swaths of blight where developers bladed an acre an hour to cover the beautiful Sonoran desert with tens of thousands of look-alike fake-tile-roofed stucco “homes.”
So I’m feeling smug about the two sturdy, centrally located block houses M’hijito and I managed to get our hands on. Once we finish the landscaping project, we’ll be done with making the downtown house livable. Now that neither of us has any debt other than the mortgage on that little place, we should be able to ride out the depression, come what may. After the economy recovers, both these houses will be worth a lot of money, because of their location and because of the quality of their construction.
Now…all we need is to find an estate sale where someone’s trying to unload 65 tons of Madison Gold quarter-minus and a pallet of extra-thick flagstones…
An auto mechanic turned radio personality and Internet entrepreneur: Cary Lockwood is the first star of Funny’s new series interviewing men and women who find creative new ways to jump off the treadmill.
I came across Cary after finding his website, YourAutoNetwork.com. At first glance, it looks like an Angie’s List for car mechanics, except you don’t have to pay for it. On closer inspection, some differences arise: all of the businesses listed are local companies, and unlike Click & Clack’s reader-driven listing, the site offers few consumer reviews. Thinking what a great idea to bring in some side income, I gave him a call. Turns out the story is a lot more complicated.
FaM: Thanks for chatting with us, Cary. Would you tell us how you came to start YourAutoNetwork.com?
Lockwood: I spent 20 years working for General Motors, at the automobile proving grounds here in Arizona. When GM closed that facility, the company asked me to move to Michigan. Well, I grew up in the East, and my wife and I decided we didn’t want to move back in that direction. So I started a repair shop. It did well, because we emphasized customer service and did honest, high-quality work.
One day a friend and local talk show host, Charles Goyette, invited me to do a segment on his radio talk show. I said I’m not very political and might not fit in. He said they had a Saturday show that didn’t talk about much controversy. So I started doing it.
Pretty quick I realized we were getting a lot of calls from people wanting to know where to get their cars serviced and repaired. There’s a huge need, because—well, to tell the truth, people do run into dishonest shops, and that’s left them untrusting and wary.
That’s when I started the auto network.
The radio show, which evolved into Your Auto Network’s Calling All Cars, began to get bigger. It grew from a Q-and-A segment to a twice-weekly show that covers everything automotive, covering everything from fuel and batteries to windshields and tires, from gas-saving strategies to laws affecting car owners.
Meanwhile, the list kept growing, too.
After a while I had an offer to buy the shop. My wife and I decided to sell and go with making Your Auto Network our business.
FaM: How does an automotive shop get on your list?
Lockwood: I seek out the proven performers, but listeners and friends recommend them. I check them out personally, along with doing a lot of research. The shops can be doing any work related to automotive upkeep—repair, bodywork, painting, parts operations, window tinting, tires, and the like—but they have to be locally owned independent businesses, not chains or big-boxes.
I check out their experience, because that’s one of the things that makes a great shop: we have minimum requirements for the number of years they’ve been in business. They have to have an A rating with the Better Business Bureau. Often I’ll call without identifying myself, to see how they answer the phone or whether they shunt you off to an answering machine. Then I observe the shop itself and study the operation.
The standards are high, because my name is on it.
FaM: One of the problems with Angie’s List is there’s no way to tell whether an owner has had all his in-laws, cousins, nephews, and nieces send in glowing reports.
Lockwood: That’s right. And that’s why we don’t have a lot of customer reviews, although we do make it possible for people to comment.
Testimonials are great if they’re fair and honest, but they don’t give enough information about the business. We go there to meet them, and we work hard to make the listings accurate.
FaM: It’s hard for the average consumer to get a good picture of an automotive service outfit. Often it’s by guess and by God.
Lockwood: I’m on the Auto Repair Advisory Committee for the Better Business Bureau. We review and advise about consumer complaints to the BBB. One of the first things I do when we get a case is to check out the company’s BBB rating. It’s unbelievable! People will go to F-rated places!
It’s really important to check out service providers before you do business with them. If you find a good independent shop, you save a lot of money—and you have greater peace of mind.
FaM: Other than the obvious publicity, what benefit do the shop owners derive from making the YourAutoNetwork.com list?
Lockwood: We’re trying to offer benefits that come from the power of collective buying and pricing. For example, we’re now working to get collective pricing on parts and auto supplies. And we’re looking into ways to offer members group health insurance plans.
FaM: Do you charge shops for listing on YourAutoNetwork.com?
Lockwood: Typically, we charge a small fee. Most of the monetization is coming from ad revenues, especially from the radio show. We now own the show’s air time.
FaM: It’s quite a leap from auto engineer to radio talk show host!
Lockwood: Well, I didn’t expect to be on the radio. When I was a kid, I took acting lessons and actually got parts. Then I got picky about what I’d do—decided I only wanted to act in Shakespeare plays—and also, I was very interested in mechanical things.
The show started live, and it’s now recorded. My wife and I do the editing. That helps a lot–it makes me sound a lot better, and also our guests.
One of the things I’m most proud of is the show’s community activities. We started a partnership with the Salvation Army, and network members have joined in a clothing drive. Shops have collections boxes for customers to donate. We sell a car care rewards card to consumers, and for each purchase we donate $4.00 to the Salvation Army, about 13 percent of gross revenues from the card sales.
We first got interested in helping the Salvation Army because of the economic downturn, with so many people out of work and being turned out of their homes. We like the Army’s emphasis on building self-sufficiency. They do more, though, than helping people who are down on their luck financially. In addition to the Family Center, for families who are facing a crisis, they have a shelter for abuse victims, they do drug and alcohol rehabilitation, and they provide care for the elderly.
FaM: These two enterprises—the radio show and the network listings—must be an enormous amount of work.
Lockwood: It really was a lot of work at first. It’s tapering off now, partly because we’ve achieved one of our goals, which was to have coverage for the entire valley. And over time we’ve learned to work more efficiently.
The big challenge is trying to get the data perfect, before it’s published. My wife helps with getting the information accurate, and we both work at proofreading and checking.
FaM: What advice would you offer a Funny about Money reader who might be interested in doing a similar website in another city?
Lockwood: To do it at a level that offers real value to your readers, you need to be very expert in the business you’re reviewing. Not just anyone can do one of these sites on automotive service. You need many years of experience to understand how these businesses work and what makes them successful, from the owner’s and the customers’ points of view.
I’d suggest that if you want to create a really useful consumer service website, you should pick a business that you truly know something about. If you’re an expert, if you know customer service well, and you know how the businesses operate, you may be able to pull it off.
It’s a lot of work, and you have to be fully committed to accuracy, honesty, and fairness.
FaM: Were you at all nervous about selling the shop to become a full-time radio personality?
Lockwood: No, but you have to be confident and hard-working to insure success.
FaM: What steps did you take to ensure that you could make the transition financially?
Lockwood: We never lived over our heads, so that wasn’t an issue. We did things like building our own house—I helped to build it myself. We didn’t want to get tied down with a large mortgage and other debts. We look at things this way: Say we’d like to get new furniture for the living room. It’s going to cost $4,000. So we ask ourselves, “Do we need it today, or are they still going to be making couches in six months?” If the the answer is “yes, living room furniture will still be around,” we save up and pay for it in cash.
FaM: What’s your strategy for retirement?
Lockwood: Hasn’t entered my mind, because we still have more to achieve. We diversify our investments. And besides, enthusiasm keeps you young.
Tomorrow morning begins the first in what I hope will be a long-running, fairly regular series. I’m calling it Entrepreneurs.
Every now and then I meet or hear of someone who has an unusual or even unique enterprise. Many of these small businesses are interesting in their own right. Some are especially interesting to PF readers because they suggest creative ways to start a business that could support you or to build a side income large enough to get you out of debt or build a credible savings plan. So it occurred to me that Funny about Money regulars and visitors might enjoy learning about these highly original ideas now and again.
The first post in the Entrepreneurs series should go up in the wee hours of the 25th. I hope to run about one such story a month.
And I especially hope you enjoy these stories. If you know someone who’s bringing a creative business idea to life, please give me a lead: she or he could be featured on Funny about Money.
So Joel G and his palm tree charro showed up this morning. What a performance!
You know whatcharreada is? It’s Mexican rodeo on steroids, and uno charro is a cowboy on steroids. A really good charro is indistinguishable from his horse: when you watch such a rider, you understand where the idea of the centaur came from. The difference between a charro and a horse, far as I can tell, is that horses are crazy only part of the time. One of these guys’ entertainments, aptly named the paso de muerte, is to get a half-wild mustang flying around the perimeter of a ring, pursued by several men on horseback, and then jump from one barebacked mount onto the bare back of the reinless, frantic beast…at a dead run.
And now you know what machismo is: these characters define it.
So the palm tree guy has to climb to the top of these trees—my yard has five of them, thanks to some mindless former owner—and cut off last year’s dead growth, the six- or eight-foot-long flower stalks, and a lot of debris. To get at the stalks, he also has to remove most of the current year’s new palm fronds. In addition to being big and heavy enough to suffocate a man, these things are lined with razor-sharp thorns shaped like tiger claws. All this is done eighty feet or more off the ground. He is, in short, a man who knows no fear.
This photo’s not very good, but from the three trees in the background, you can see how tall the things are. The power lines are a block away, in La Maya’s neighborhood: my utilities are underground.
It’s a very messy job. Palm fronds, flower stalks, dirt, insects, and debris go right into the pool. Joel hauled the large stuff out of the water, but he couldn’t get all the fine dirt and litter off the bottom. So, as usual after the annual palm-tree enterprise, yesterday morning I spent six hours cleaning the pool: started at 6:00 a.m. and finished around noon. This is why I dread having the job done: that and the cost. Joel charged only $30 per tree to risk his man’s life, but what with the traffic fine, I didn’t happen to have $150 laying around in the budget this month. Click on this photo twice to see all the chaff that’s flying out of the tree as el charro works on it.
I did make an interesting discovery: a garden hose with a high-pressure squirter on it does a mighty fine job of cleaning tiles. The alkalinity in the pool’s water is too high, and so calcium deposits are growing on the tilework. At the same time, I’m told the pH is too low to add more acid (don’t ask! I took high-school chemistry, too, and I don’t get it either). So the tiles have to be cleaned a couple times a week, which is a job. Yesterday I really didn’t want to get into the dirty water to scrub down the debris-coated tiles, so it occurred to me to squirt them off. Lo! The white crud squirts off, too! I couldn’t believe it. Not only that, but the pressurized water rinses algae and dirt off the pool walls, especially in places I can’t easily reach with the pool brush, and bats it right out of the inlets, outlets, light frame, and gadgets for attaching a volleyball net. This is going to make my life 100 percent easier.
Transplanted a pretty little vitex tree that volunteered some years ago and has outgrown its pot. I hope this will make a nice patio tree one day, or possibly a landscape item for the downtown house. It makes a beautiful deep-blue blossom and can grow into a lovely tree. The one in my front yard is getting pretty big.
At the Safeway, they were selling chuck roasts for a glorious $1.27 a pound! I grabbed five pounds and had it ground for me and the Corgi. Cooked up a magnificent hamburger spiked with feta cheese—excellent barbecue combination! Wrap the burger around the feta, grill to your satisfaction over charcoal and, if available, hickory chips. Awesome!
After all the banging and crashing with the palm tree cutting and the pool cleaning, along about 5:30 in the evening the phone rings and voilà, there’s Gerardo! He’s lleno de disculpas for not having called: no, he hasn’t fallen out of a palm tree. He took his family to San Diego. They stayed for a week with a brother-in-law and had a great time. He was sorry not to have taken after the palm trees this week (Gerardo, being mas hombre than Joel, does not hire a guy to do this job: he climbs up in there and has at it himself, leaving one of his half-wit flunkies on the ground to do the clean-up). So, he wants to meet and talk about landscaping M’hijito’s digs this afternoon.
To top off the day, Her Deanship’s secretary called mid-afternoon, trying to summon me to the Presence. I was forced to admit that Macavity wasn’t there…now I’m supposed to show up over there this morning.
Lately, I’ve developed an attitude. I’ve come to loathe what remains of my job so much that if there were a reasonable way to cover my health insurance between now and the December 31 canning day, I would go out the door today. Such resentment feels irrational to me: shouldn’t I be grateful that the university is keeping us on through December instead of closing our office, as expected, on June 30? Shouldn’t I be delighted that we all come and go at will, unmolested, and that we’re all being paid for many more hours than we really put in? What, I keep wondering, is the cause of the stress I feel about the job? Have I slipped my trolley? Is there any real reason to hate this job so much I don’t even want to think about it, much less go and do it?
The stress spinning off this resentment keeps me awake at night, causes me to grind my teeth, and drives me to drink. (Okay, not much drink…but for me, two glasses of wine or beer every single day is about 1.5 glasses too many.)
Last night I sat down with a pad of paper and started listing every reason I could think of, sane or not, that might explain my loathing for GDU in general and for my job in specific. Didn’t expect much to come of it: at the outset, I figured my problem is simply unhappiness at being laid off and worry about how I’m going to get by in retirement that will start about six years sooner than planned.
The result surprised me. At the outset, the list consisted of petty, stupid things that really don’t matter much: being rusticated to a decrepit building that was called out of condemnation for no discernible reason; the enduring stench of chemicals used to remove asbestos nine months ago, fumes that have never fully dissipated; some SOB from FacMan turning the thermostat as high as it would go (!) and then bolting the cover to the wall. I mean, really: get over it!
But as I was scribbling these things on paper, more serious issues arose:
• It makes me uncomfortable and unhappy to accept a full-time salary for doing practically nothing. Profoundly uncomfortable and unhappy.
• I’m bored stupid on the campus. Reading academic copy is not one whit more fascinating than reading freshman comp papers; it’s just a variant on boredom.
• I dislike the fraudulence of many degree programs offered not just by GDU but by universities in general. We’ll refrain from naming these, for obvious reasons, but let us observe that too many undergraduate and graduate programs take students’ money and give them precious little in return. Some courses of study turn out graduates with neither the learning and critical thinking skills a traditional liberal arts degree should cultivate nor a salable vocational skill. We have professional programs that turn out not professionals but dunderheads. Although GDU, like most large public universities, does have many highly worthwhile programs, it no longer is easy for a student to distinguish between a worthy program and an academic scam. I don’t like working for an institution that generates much of its income from questionable products.
• And speaking of fraudulence, I’m unhappy with the discovery, made in the course of doing my job, that about 95 percent of academic “research” and publication is unmitigated bullshit, and I resent being made an accomplice to that variety of institutional fraud.
Finally, as the hour grew later and I was nodding off to sleep over the notebook, the real cause of my nausée about the job surfaced. Several years ago an incident occurred whose details I can’t describe here. Suffice it to say that as a result of my doing something my dean had approved, I pissed off an über-dean, who, in a highly actionable way, shafted a woman I had hired. So actionable, in fact, that I gave her the name of a barracuda lawyer and advised her to sue the university. Had she done so, she would be corresponding with us from the Riviera, where she would be enjoying the life of Riley.
What this guy did was so crushing and so demoralizing that at the time I made a considered decision never again do anything even remotely entrepreneurial for the university. Bear in mind: I was hired because of my proven entrepreneurial track record and led to believe my job was not only to establish an office unique in the Western hemisphere but to grow it into a significant enterprise. I decided that I would allow the office to perform the work it had claimed for itself—nothing more—and that I would keep as low a profile as possible. Indeed, I would do as little work as possible, given the kind of appreciation my work had elicited.
There it was: I’ve hated my job ever since that happened. And there’s nothing even faintly irrational about it.
Over the past three or four years, I’ve pushed the incident out of my consciousness. But it hasn’t gone away. The guy pulled a nasty stunt on me and on an innocent bystander, and he should have been canned. In fact, a year or so later he was evicted from that particular über-deanship and shoved laterally into a less influential (but still highly paid) position. A day late, we might say, and a dollar short.
What can I do about this?
Probably nothing. I can’t undo what happened four years ago, and I can’t change the disaffection the incident created. There’s not a thing anyone can do to repair the damage that was done to me and to our operation, and even if there were, it’s too late now.
Still, when I awoke this morning I felt a lot better. Identifying the causes of distress and recognizing that at least one of them is in no way unreasonable helps to create perspective. At least I know I’m not crazy: I really do have good cause to feel some anger and resentment.
Should you put things like this behind you? Well, obviously. If you don’t, sooner or later you’ll drive yourself nuts. But you can’t put an issue behind you until you know what it is. I knew what this one was a long time ago but deliberately neglected it. That probably was a mistake: given that there was no recourse within the institution, I should have left the job as soon as possible. “Putting it behind me” without taking action on it was like burying radioactive waste in a vegetable garden.
Putting a problem behind you probably needs to include doing something, no matter how minimal, to resolve the issue: physically getting away from it, confronting its cause, asking for redress, or finding a way to undo harm that has been done. It may be that you must do something about an issue before putting it to bed; otherwise, you risk chronic angst whose real cause grows more and more undefinable as the years pass.
What about you? Have you encountered an issue that came to affect your thinking, your attitude toward life, or your well-being? How have you dealt with it?
Gerardo the Yard Dude Extraordinaire has disappeared from the scene. He’s not answering phone calls, and that’s not like him. So La Maya (another of his clients) and I are worried something’s happened to him.
Of late, he’s had a hard time getting good workers, partly because many migrants are staying in Mexico for lack of work here, and partly because the rabid Sheriff Joe’s publicityracist anti-undocumented worker campaign has resulted in so much harassment for Latinos that people who jump through all the immigration hoops to enter the country go to friendlier locales. Gerardo himself is very smart and very good at what he does. But some of the characters he’s hired lately have been annoying. He does a lot of the work himself, and so he’s not riding herd on these guys—and they’re guys who need to be watched every minute. The result is not always ideal.
Meanwhile, speaking of rabid, the dratted palm trees around the pool have gone into a reproductive frenzy. Why people plant palms around swimming pools (or anywhere, for that matter) beats me. They’re one of the messiest trees around. They grow out of the top, sprouting a new topknot of fronds each spring. The previous year’s growth then dies, creating an ideal nest for cockroaches. At the same time, the plant springs a crop of long flowering wands, which drop millions of tiny, crisply sharp blossoms all over the ground and into the pool. The things are too small to be caught by most pump pot and skimmer baskets, and so they get sucked into your pump. Not good. Worse: the fertilized flowers produce BB-sized seeds. These rock-hard little fellows also drop into the pool, where the pool cleaner picks them up and chokes on them, resulting in a nice repair bill.
So, once a year you have to get a guy to come round and trim the palm trees, at rates ranging from $25 to $45 apiece. Some people have them taken out, but in a yard like mine, where the pool is built within a couple feet of the wall, removing the stumps would pose quite a challenge. Besides, in such a confined area there’s not much else you can plant that will cast even a modicum of shade.
Gerardo was doing the job for $25, very cheap. So I cringed at the thought of having to track down someone else to do the palms and, BTW, the monthly yard work.
At this time of year, dozens of itinerant workers roam the neighborhoods looking for palm tree work. They litter your front door with cards. So I picked one whose name I vaguely remembered from last year: Joel G.
I’m impressed:
1. He’s Mexican. Several amazing experiences have left me strongly preferring Mexican over Anglo landscape workers.
2. He showed up promptly to provide an estimate. He must live nearby, because he was here 15 minutes after I called.
3. He looks substantial and honest. OK, I know you can’t tell a book by its (etc.), but gut instinct goes a long way toward assessing character. He’s clean-cut, neatly dressed, and has a frank, straightforward manner. At first inspection, I’m guessing this is probably a decent man.
4. His English is excellent. That helps a lot, because my Spanish leaves a lot to be desired. Like…oh, say, Spanish.
5. He charges a reasonable price, only $5 a tree more than Gerardo.
6. He also advertises a number of other skills, the very skills M’hijito and I have need of: he can install watering systems and lay gravel. If his price is right there, too, we may hire him to do the landscaping at the downtown house.
And he’s hired. We’ll see how good a job he does on the palms. If that works out, maybe we can get him going on the two houses, and that would be a great help in our lives.
I hope Gerardo is OK. Palm tree work is very dangerous—every year men are injured or killed wrestling with these nasty plants. Worse even than falling off an 80-foot-high stem is getting trapped under one of the heavy fronds: if you can’t get out quickly, you suffocate. It’s such a gruesome way to die that just about every incident hits the newspapers, and so if anything like that had happened to him, La Maya would have picked up on it, since she still gets the Arizona Republic. But other injuries and car wrecks are so commonplace no one even notices. We’re both assuming he’s met with some accident…but who knows? Maybe he took a salaried job.
