Ben Cook describes how brilliantly trained NASCAR Pit Crews inspired an amazing business consulting division. Be open to new opportunities and nimble enough to adapt.

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Stephen Semple:
Hey everyone, we gave Dave Young another little break, and I’m on this podcast with Ben Cook from Pit Training School. And their website is visitpit.com. And I’ve got to tell you a little bit about this organization. This is one that you guys all want to be aware of. Gary Bernier and I, and you’ve heard Gary in some past podcasts, Gary Bernier and I one time were driving down to Florida and we pulled off in the Charlotte area off the highway. Gary’s grandfather used to be heavily involved in racing in the day, and there was a NASCAR museum and all this other stuff in this area that we wanted to visit. And we drove by this one building and here was this, I don’t know, I guess it’s a four-story or five-story building that had this little race track around it. And we saw a car going around this race track.

We thought, “What the heck is going on there?” So we had to wander in. And we wandered in and we got really lucky, because Ben Cook, who’s with us, happened to step in at the same time and gave us a tour of their facility. And here’s the cool thing. What these guys do is train pit crews for NASCAR. Now, you might be asking, why is that important for business? Lots of this is applicable to business, and they have a training facility that not only trains pit crews but also has great corporate retreats. And we also recently did a corporate retreat with a client. And you’ve often heard me saying on this podcast, you’ve got to get out and visit different places. Like Seth Gordon once said, no innovative ideas come from a room with four white walls and a drop ceiling. You’ve got to do something different.

And what we found when we took our client down, why it works is that they came out with so many amazing, great ideas and it was so innovative and it was a great place to do planning for the year. So one of the things that has always surprised me, Ben, is when you share the whole idea of how pit crews work and how important time is in NASCAR. And I forget how you break it down, but I think you break things down into an eighth of a second. Is that what it is, something like that?

Ben Cook:
Millisecond sometimes, because for every millisecond loss, we’re potentially losing laps or positions on the race track. And so we try to do everything we can to be as efficient as we can in order to gain that speed of performance.

Stephen Semple:
The thing I found really interesting when we were down there because you get a chance to do a little bit of pit crew stuff, like just bolting the tires on, which was really fun. But when you showed the video of how a pit crew works, I actually think it’s one of those things that is really applicable to business. Because a lot of sports things are not. Because if we’re a hockey team, what I do directly affects what I do. If we’re a bowling team, we’ve each got to do the same thing no matter what. But with the pit crew, there is this pass-off. What one person does, how he does his task or finishes his task directly affects the next person, right?

Ben Cook:
We always say that if one guy or gal is off by a tenth of a second, they’re all being diminished by that same loss of performance, that tenth-of-a-second loss. So we talk about inside the box. When our cars come down pit road and they come to a screeching stop inside of the pit box where we do our pit crew activity, we have to be on our game at that moment in time, stepping into that space and taking care of it as a whole. But it’s all of the individual tasks that culminate to create that whole pit crew performance. And so not only are we thinking about what we do inside of our team box, but we’re also thinking about what we do inside of our individual boxes. And those overlaps are critical. And it happens in every business where you’re having certain handoffs, where maybe you have one group that’s directly influencing another group. And if they don’t coordinate together, you’re losing time and you’re losing revenue and you’re losing position in the market.

Stephen Semple:
It’s like I think about with a lot of businesses, the way the phone call is answered and how it’s passed off, all have those impacts. And we really saw that as we participated in the little pit crew exercises that you guys were giving us to do.

Ben Cook:
Yeah, we do a program here, it’s called Lean Performance U. And years ago back in 2001, we started as a pit crew training facility. And we still do that to this day, we’ve had over 1,000 kids come through the program, young men and women who are in their teens and early 20s trying to find a place on NASCAR pit crews. And we’ve placed about 70% of that number in the money, which we count as being NASCAR Camping World Truck Series that races on Friday nights, and the Xfinity Series race on Saturdays. And then of course everyone’s trying to get to that pinnacle point of NASCAR racing, which is the NASCAR Cup series. They race on Sundays. And those are the big names You may have heard, Jeff Gordon’s, Jimmy Johnson’s, Dale Earnhardt’s, Richard Petty’s, all of that was in cup racing.

We share that same coaching philosophy on how to get those guys and gals ready to be at peak performance with our companies, our corporate visitors that come in, and talk to them about tool organization, talk to them about workplace ergonomics, talk to them about how we communicate with one another, how we work on our processes all during the week to build efficiencies, where we don’t leave anything out that could come out of nowhere and hurt us at 200 miles an hour. Because 3/10 of a second, which is the time it takes to hit one of those lug nuts you guys hit out on pit road when you were visiting us if you miss one of those and have to go back in and hit that last thread to get it to come off that you missed, that normally loses us about five car lengths at 200 miles an hour.

Stephen Semple:
I’ve got to tell you, I think I lost us like 50 car lengths.

Ben Cook:
Well, and that’s to be expected. We have our companies come out and we do a morning introduction, take them on a race shop tour down at JR Motorsports, which is Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s son, Dale Earnhardt Jr. And then we bring them back here in the afternoon and we have six organized pit stops with learning scenarios, but it’s all intended to create a best standard practice. So by the end of the day they’ve had continuous improvement with some monkey wrenches thrown in, pardon the pun, but with some wrenches thrown in there to try to get them stronger along the way. At the end of the day, everyone’s competitive. And you see because of those six stops they got better and better and better. Every time you guys went out there and came up to the car for another try, you’d figured something out. You’ve gotten a little bit better.

And so we try to show that all business is like that. But we really stress education. How do you teach your people what you need them to do? And then you give them the best training possible, just like we do with our guys out here on pit road.

Stephen Semple:
And it’s cool, ’cause when we talk about on pit road, you guys have actually recreated that feeling. The car comes around, comes in, it’s really cool. But it’s funny, we think about training athletes. We think about training football players. We think about, I’m Canadian, so of course we think about hockey players. But when I first encountered your facility, there were two things that caught me as being really innovative. One is, that you sort of didn’t think about training pit crews. What made you guys decide initially to get into the pit crew training business?

Ben Cook:
Back in the mid-1990s, Ray Everham, who was down with Rick Hendrick at Hendrick Motorsports, Ray was the crew chief for Jeff Gordon. They called that car the DuPont rainbow car, and those pit crew guys were the rainbow warriors because DuPont’s logo was a rainbow. And he started going out looking for designated pit crew folks. We used to have shop mechanics, fabricators, electricians, and folks who worked on the car come out of their 10-hour day and come out to pit practice in the afternoon for about two hours, and they were exhausted. And Ray started looking for more designated pit crews who had athletic experience.

And he didn’t gain a lot from the four to 40-yard dashes and the 39-inch vertical jumps and the 500-pound bench presses. But what he did get was a really coachable product that was fresh at the end of the day and ready to increase their performance ability. And so when they did that, they started looking for athletic trainers, they started looking for strength coaches, and the shops actually took on an athletic aspect when it came to those pit crews. And so we started in 2001 being an adjunct to that. We started training those pit crew members, lifting weights with them, teaching them how to move more quickly and more efficiently in the space, and giving them some dance moves. Because so much of it, what we do, is a coordinated, choreographed process. And so we imported all that, yeah.

Stephen Semple:
I was going to say, it’s much more choreographed than I would have ever understood before seeing you guys.

Ben Cook:
Absolutely. Step for step, every single move, everyone is symbiotic. We’re all moving in space to try to complement one another.

Stephen Semple:
One of the things I’m constantly talking about in this podcast is the whole idea of being innovative and looking outside. And what’s interesting is, these folks who started this started with the whole idea of, “Okay, the traditional way that pit crews are done is, I have somebody who’s a mechanic so they understand the car, I get it. And then they come and they pit crew for me.” But the reality is, every 1/8 of a second matters, and really what I need is something different. I need somebody who’s fresh and I need somebody who’s athletic and I need somebody who’s coachable. Which made you go, “Okay, I want to reach out to athletes and teach them this thing called pit crewing.”

Ben Cook:
Originally when you had mechanics and fabricators, they were so exhausted by the end of the day you weren’t getting that great performance out of them. But when we started using the athletes, we got a whole lot better outcomes from them.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah, which made the difference in winning races, right?

Ben Cook:
Well, absolutely. You’re talking about gaining those tenths of a second back that you were formally losing due to fatigue or due to a lack of concentration at the end of the day.

Stephen Semple:
Now, were you one of the first to do this sort of pit crew training approach?

Ben Cook:
Well, pit instruction training, definitely every shop had their own pit crew. Every race team had their own pit crew, and they were training. But as far as being an outside source that was going out and trying to procure talent and then funnel that back into the race teams, yes, we’re definitely the first. We gained a little bit of an advantage because first impressions are everything. And I tell all the kids who come in here, I say, “Look, first impressions are everything. You show up at a team and you start working out with the teams, then their first impression of you is junk. Because you’re going to be junk, you’re not going to be really good.”

And so what we do, we provide an opportunity for them to come and train over on the side, out of sight of the teams. But it takes about a two-year process to get them ready to show up at the race track and then eventually go for a tryout with one of the teams. But when they show up, they are fully groomed, fully developed, and ready to show up in front of a team, and the first impression that they make is impressive because we are all about attention to detail in everything we do.

Stephen Semple:
I can certainly see that. And it strikes me that you guys have also managed to turn pit crews into really … And it’s like any athletic career, it’s not long, but into a career. ‘Cause I was surprised when you told me what a member of a pit crew gets paid these days.

Ben Cook:
It’s not NBA money, it’s not NFL money, it’s not Major League Baseball money, but it’s pretty nice money. Right now some of the top jack people, and they’re all making six figures plus, and some of the top jack people are making close to $400,000 a year.

Stephen Semple:
Wow.

Ben Cook:
And when I tell people that in our corporate presentations, they’re like, “What?” And I’m like, “Hey, we’re always recruiting. If you guys want to go out there and put on a really good show today, we’ll tap you on the shoulder and invite you into school.”

Stephen Semple:
I noticed you didn’t tap me on the shoulder, Ben.

Ben Cook:
You can come back and keep working. We may tap you on the shoulder yet, Stephen.

Stephen Semple:
But before you started doing that, how professional was a pit crew before this evolution happened? I’ve got to assume that it was not a highly-paid job.

Ben Cook:
Yeah, definitely not. In the beginning, it was guys who were mechanics, who were fabricators, who were already possibly working for a race team, but they weren’t getting paid that much but they really enjoyed the sport. They were great enthusiasts of the sport. They loved being a part of a team with the driver that they wanted to be associated with. And a lot of them went out there every weekend just to be there, to experience it. But as it came down the line and performance became so critical, where every tenth of a second on pit road could possibly change positions on the track, then it got to be more and more important that you had highly organized and prepared people out there. Everyone’s trying to figure out how to gain that small advantage, and sometimes it’s just about how good a shape you’re in. So if your guys are not as good a shape as our guys, we’re going to beat you.

Stephen Semple:
And when you think about things being 1/8 of a second and how much of an impact 1/8 of a second is, that’s the difference between carrying home the cup and not carrying home the cup. It’s crazy.

Ben Cook:
That’s exactly right. We tell our corporate clients, “Hey, you may not be down to 1/8s of a second, but you may be down to minutes or you may be down to an hour.” If that’s your standard of measurement and you’re somehow losing your standard of measurement to your competitor, they’re going to end up getting market share and you’re going to be behind. So what we do, is we just share our efficiencies and our coaching philosophy. As I said, it’s called Think Inside the Box, which is inside that Lean Performance U program. And it’s basically talking about how we develop our team, how we put them together, how we develop a culture around them that they can believe that they’re in the best place possible. And then the third corner of the box is process. How do you make sure you’ve got all the processes in place? And we talk about that. And then lastly we talk about leadership and how everyone needs to bring leadership qualities to their work.

Stephen Semple:
It’s really interesting, because even in business, if something’s a regular activity and even if it’s one of those things that’s just something you spend 10 minutes a day doing, that’s one of those things that it adds up in a big hurry. That quickly becomes 33 hours a year. That’s almost a week’s worth of work. Every 10 or 15 minutes a day adds up to a week at the end of the year. So it does add up even in the corporate world.

Ben Cook:
Yeah, absolutely. And you said it at the outside of the program, how do you get your people enthusiastic? How do you get them motivated? And we found that people are more motivated when, one, they feel like they’re winning. So what you do, is you build wins into your system with your assessments, with your quarterly reviews and all of that. And if people feel like they’re getting great instruction, they feel like they’re getting a win. If they’re making advancements and they’re getting an opportunity to improve their status in the company, they’re getting a win. And so you have to set people up for success. But a huge part of that is, how do you motivate them? And you can motivate people if they feel like they’re getting something a little special. So when you bring them over here to Pit Crew U and experience Lean Performance U with corporations, as you said, it’s kind of exciting. There’s something different about it. It’s niche-y and weird. At the same time, it gets you thinking, “We’re a pit crew member too.” Because we’re all trying to save time.

Stephen Semple:
So here’s the interesting thing I find, is you guys transformed the pit crew industry. So I always find it interesting that a business looks out there and says, “Boy, we need this thing.” And you go down this path that didn’t exist before and you’re innovative and you really transform the business. You transformed the business of pit crew. But the part that’s also really cool is you didn’t stop there. The next thing you went is, “Oh, this is applicable to the corporate world. We should do corporate training.” How did that come about?

Ben Cook:
We’d like to take credit for that. But actually, Coca-Cola came over, they were in the Charlotte area, and they were like, “Hey, we’re interested in this whole pit crew model ’cause we want to have a more efficient bottling line and we’d like to know how to turn this bottling line over just like pit crew members turn those cars over. We’d like to share the pit crew concept and lean initiatives with our standards and our terminology, but we want to make them feel like pit crews.” And they said, “Can you help us?” And we said, “Well, do you have any money?” And Coca-Cola said, “Yeah, we’ve got money.” So we figured it out, and that’s where the initial push came from, was corporate America reaching out to us. But then we reached back out to corporate America because we needed to take notes and see what everyone out there was doing. And we started realizing, “Hey, everybody’s a pit crew.” And it’s true.

Stephen Semple:
That is so interesting, because here was Coca-Cola recognizing that if inside the industry, inside the bottling industry, if this had been figured out, it would have already been figured out. So Coca-Cola was innovative enough to go, “We need to look outside of our industry. Wow, there’s a lot of parallels between bottling and pit crew.” So that was innovative thinking number one for Coca-Cola. Hats off to them for doing it. But the other is, when the call happened, you guys took the call. I’ve worked with customers before where people call them on something and their initial reaction is, “Well, we don’t do that. We train pit crews.” You guys were open and you went, “Sure, let’s figure this out. If there’s money on the table, there’s money to be made, let’s do it.” But you didn’t stop there. What you learned from that, you went, “Well, wait a minute, wait a minute. This is also applicable to Southwest Airlines and United Airlines and a whole bunch of other companies.”

Ben Cook:
Yeah, we do a lot of work with airlines. And they get it immediately because they’ve got a vehicle that comes into a space and needs to be turned around pretty quickly and they all have to converge on that vehicle. And they have these overlapping groups like fuel coming in and housekeeping coming in and food services coming in. And it’s just like us at the race track when we’ve got a crew chief talking to us about what we’re supposed to do, and the driver’s another entity that comes into the space, and then we’re going over the wall. And then we have behind-the-wall guys that are part of a team that goes out early, mechanics and engineers that help us behind the wall.

But we’ve all got these overlapping responsibilities that we have to coordinate to create almost an 11-second pit stop. And United got it immediately, they’re like, “Hey, we need to get first in line out on the tarmac so that we can be the first to take off.” They ended up getting six flights a day after they started thinking a little bit more like a pit crew that was extra, and they made up huge cost savings as a result of that.

Stephen Semple:
That’s big money for an airline. So I just wanted to wrap this up. It was an amazing day. It was fun, it was interesting. But what I’m going to say that’s even more important, when I went out with our customers and had dinner with them, it was amazing when myself and the rest of the team, Gary and Jeff and Joe, were sitting with them, how different the conversation was, how they were thinking about their office. It stimulated so much thought. And as I said at the beginning, no great ideas ever come from a place with four white walls and a drop ceiling. It’s always about getting out in a different environment. So if somebody is interested in reaching out and having a corporate event at your place, a planning retreat, some sort of training, or something along those lines, how do they get ahold of you, Ben?

Ben Cook:
Oh, they can reach out to us online at visitpit.com or they can give us a call at 704-799-3869 and just ask for me, and we’ll chat a little bit. We’ll get you guys a opportunity to come in and pit race cars and have some fun. And when it’s fun, everybody gets motivated.

Stephen Semple:
Absolutely. And I just want to stress it’s visitpit.com. The other part is, that you are super approachable. It is amazing when I think how many years ago was it Gary and I wandered in there and we were just standing in the lobby, and you came wandering in and you said, “Hey, what are you guys doing?” And we were just like, “We’re just curious about what’s going on here.” And you said, “Hey, I’ve got a couple minutes. I’ll give you guys a tour.” And he gave us a tour that resulted years later in an event. And I can guarantee you I’m having more customers down there because it was worth every penny.

Ben Cook:
We had a great time with you guys and hopefully, we’ll see a lot more of you in the future.

Stephen Semple:
Absolutely. I’m looking forward to it. Hey, and thanks for your time today, Ben.

Ben Cook:
Thanks, Stephen.

Dave Young:
Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us, subscribe on your favorite podcast app, and leave us a big fat juicy five-star rating and review. And if you have any questions about this or any other podcast episode, email to questions@theempirebuilderspodcast.com

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