Search Interviews:

Unknown Speaker
leaving you there. Yeah, I think they wanted me I was I was a good kid. No, no, no,

Juan Chavez
but regardless if I was a bad kid, I’m pretty sure.

Jeremy Weisz
But what was it like what was the transition? Like once you got there was it easy was a hard?

Juan Chavez
It was hard because of the English there. You know, I didn’t I didn’t know how to speak English at the time. So it took well being that I was 11 and that I went to a school you know that basically everybody spoke English. I learned pretty much in six months how to speak English. So that’s amazing.

Unknown Speaker
You

Juan Chavez
And then afterwards basically, you know, I was able to communicate, but it was those first six months were pretty hard. You know, like I couldn’t couldn’t speak to anybody you know, it didn’t there wasn’t any any Latinos in my school at the time. Really? No. Yeah, in that particular school there weren’t I think it was one but I didn’t really get along with them. So I kind of was forced to hang out with that with the with the English speaking kids, which was good for me. You know, so

Jeremy Weisz
well, that talk about a driving force Juan, like your dad comes, he’s like, I gotta make sales because I need to bring my family over here. Yep. Yeah,

Juan Chavez
so that was a pretty cool story when like, he didn’t sound I didn’t know this back then. You know, but he told me this when I was when I was a little older. That everybody when he first got there, they were like on the hook you up for the job as a dishwasher. I’m I mean, I’m gonna get you a job as a cook in a restaurant. He was like, No, no, that’s not gonna make me any money. Like, you know, I he knew basically he knew his self worth. You know, he like I said he was a he had graduated college. English speaking person, very disciplined and hardworking. So he knew what he can accomplish. So you went to, to a job where they can pay him any salary, but he was able to get, you know, earn high commissions. So, so what

Jeremy Weisz
are you talking about how you got started in the automotive ROM.

Juan Chavez
So at first once I graduated college, he actually got me a job in his company that he was working with doing sets, you know, but as a 21 year old kid, you visiting repair shops where there’s nothing but 40 to 50 year old you’re

Jeremy Weisz
going door to door you’re going to shop the shop.

Juan Chavez
Yeah, I’m going door to door I hated it. I literally hated that job. And within like, I think I didn’t make now one sale when I was 2122. And I actually left I was like, you know, I told I told my father that I was like, This is not for me, I’m sorry. Like, you know, and he’s like, if you want to quit, you know, do what you got to do. So after that, did real estate for a couple years in New York in Wall Street that I actually enjoyed, you know, in in 2008, when the whole, the whole recession hit. I was like, you know, the real estate market was going down. So I, I didn’t I couldn’t continue doing that. So I was like, You know what, let me do, let me go into law school so I can at least go back to school and have a degree in law, you know, which is something that I thought I thought would be would help me out in my in my career. So then, what as I was studying for the, for the outsets, I met a lot of lawyers. And a lot of these lawyers told me that they were, they were, they weren’t happy, they’re sad. They were depressed or working 80 hours a week, never able to enjoy their life. So I was like, You know what, that’s not the life for me either. You know, I was actually very good at the L SATs classes, but I would like I didn’t want to have that lifestyle. And right around that same time is the opportunity was presented to me to come to to travel to Medellin to start a call center. This is in 2009 Right. So my business my, my business partner at the time was able to find like, Yeah, he was able to find an investor. So he can, they can bring us down here. And they did. And the reason how medellin comes into play is gonna I had a friend that was living in Medellin since 2006. He started a call center. So we’re like, Hey, we could do the same thing. Right? So we started the call center that lasted for a year. And that basically, after a year, it kind of just crashed completely. First business as a 2627 year old kid, they didn’t know what I was doing. So you know, it went down the drain. Right after that,

Jeremy Weisz
what was it about it?

Juan Chavez
It was it was a call center is selling, selling a service in the financial industry. So we were doing good at first, we’re doing good we were selling you know, but of course, you know, when you come to a different country, especially something like Medellin, whereas, you know, it’s a very fun place, to say the least, you know, you get distracted and it didn’t didn’t work out for About a year and a half later, I started talking to my father about his business, right. And he was he still kept on doing selling automotive equipment. Now now by this point, he’s very well known in the New York City area as the go to guy when it comes to automotive equipment for any auto repair shops, right? So I told them, like just having a conversation with him, he tells me that he’s only able to visit maybe five, six, maybe 10 people a day, you know, but still, he’s doing well, right. So obviously, an idea starts. Come on, start coming up with an idea of how to create a website where people can just come to our site, like an e commerce site where people can come and, and see and see the products and buy not just in New York, but across the country. Right. So my father calls a digital marketing company at the time, and they they tell him that it’s gonna cost $10,000 to create a website. I was like, Listen, I can literally do it for like, 30 days. All I need is the domain and the hosting. And I’ll figure out what to do. So I

Jeremy Weisz
put up a website this is pre Shopify or Shopify round reason pre Shopify. Yeah.

Juan Chavez
Yep. So like I put up a website I forgot what the name of the company that I put the website which was called and I put up some products on my father hat right like one a couple of brands. And I guess said I didn’t I didn’t know anything about digital marketing. I didn’t know anything about e commerce. I kind of just started doing research as I went along. And the third month of having the website I we had our first sale for it was a remote I to this day. I remember what the sale was. It was a four post lift. That was around 4000 $5,000

Unknown Speaker
Wow, I got really big.

Juan Chavez
Yeah, it is a big for sale. So I got really excited. I was like this is working. This is amazing. And of course I stopped doing the running the call center because I want to tell We still wish we kept the call center, but we’re looking at different campaigns, you know, that that would pay us and of course, none of them work. And once I got that first sale, I was like, let me start doing the call center. Let me focus my time in this because not only is it working, but it could be like, it’s my family, my family’s business, right. So started paying more and more attention to that. And that’s how basically I came back to the automotive industry from you know, from from the beginning of time, like, you know, from basically when my father started this, so your question

Jeremy Weisz
So what was the next step in you growing JMC Automotive Equipment? So, you know, I could see, listen that going to 10 shops a day, let’s open up to the, you know, the US and you don’t have to go there you have the relationships, just send them to the site. What was the next step to grow JMC, automotive?

Juan Chavez
Um, well, first I had to learn about e commerce, learn about digital marketing and learn about the equipment that We’re selling, right? So obviously, little by little, I started learning more and more and just calling random, random companies in the automotive industry to so we can become distributors for them. And at first of course, they were like, No, we don’t know who you are, you know, we don’t we’re not going to give you a distribution. But little by little, you know, after, after our name became well known, he started like giving us a distribution and now, people are just coming, like, we get like, we get manufacturers coming up to us every month, wanting to us to represent a product. But the next step basically was just learning, you know, learning about e commerce learning about digital marketing, and learning how to get people into our, into our website, which at the time, we weren’t doing any paid advertising, but we were doing a lot of SEO, you know, and blackhat SEO to say the least.

Jeremy Weisz
So the fight Yo, tell me what do you mean by blackhat?

Juan Chavez
Okay, so this so I don’t do SEO as much anymore like me personally. I mean, I hired company got as a CEO, but at the time, there was two major types of SEO. You know, for those of you who don’t know what SEO is, it’s search engine optimization. It’s how you rank your website organically so people can can find it in Google, right? So there’s

Jeremy Weisz
blood on searches best tires, you that you come up, and they buy tires from you, or whatever the case is.

Juan Chavez
Exactly. So um, so yeah, so it’s black hat and white hat SEO white hat is though the the good way to do SEO where, you know, you have a lasting impression, and obviously takes a long time to to rank for certain keywords through white hat. And black hat is basically the shady way. Some would say like, you know, the illegal way of ranking very, very fast. So we actually were able to rank for a lot of keywords doing blackhat SEO and then like our websites started just getting traffic started getting a lot of sales, and those

Jeremy Weisz
things still worked. Today, but they’re not there. You’re not supposed to do them at this point. But early on when people are doing SEO, I think it was just all gray. Right? Like, you know, those things that are considered, you know, whatever, blackhat. Now, back when people were doing them, were just ways that you rank,

Juan Chavez
you know what I mean? Exactly. So once Google started changing the way their algorithm, that’s when they started calling it black hat and white hat, and of course, the things that we were doing were illegal in Google’s eyes. But at that time, it wasn’t it was just like you said it was a free for all. So of course, Google changes algorithm they did, I forgot which one it was, I forgot. But we all of the keywords that we were ranking on the first page got sent to sent to the last page. So of course, that brought down our traffic completely. So we had to come up with different ways. But this whole journey is all about learning and basically and learning different ways to get people to our website. Whether it’s Seo social media paid advertising or whatever it is, you know, and bring in new manufacturers to the website.

Jeremy Weisz
Yeah. So SEO is one way and you still do, you know, kind of more proper SEO now. Yeah. Um, what are some other ways that you were able to get traffic to the site?

Juan Chavez
paid advertising, Google Shopping. So I have a mike my, the person that actually handles my Google Shopping, he is a was my business partner when I when I opened up the call center, right? He so I took the e commerce direction and he took the pain like after we close on the call center, he took the paid advertising, digital marketing direction. So he really focused on that and he became very, very good at what he does. And actually he he still does that for me and he have great, great results for paid advertising with him. Apart from that, a lot of blogging, a lot of blogging, so You know, I was I was putting out articles for repair shop owners you know, like I would call them basically like you know how to market your repair shop so you get more and more more people through the door. So of course who’s gonna read that auto repair shop owners, you know and so I was giving a lot of value to these auto repair shop owners through websites like LinkedIn, Facebook, you know, in the Facebook groups and LinkedIn groups. So we will get people coming into our into our website like that and getting to know us, you know, so now that they bought the first time so they will look at the article learn a little bit and then remember our name when they had to buy something

Jeremy Weisz
who are ideal customers for you. It sounds like it’s not so much the end consumer but a lot of repair shop owners are the best customers.

Juan Chavez
Yep, so it’s a lot of auto repair shop owners, the decision makers of WebAdvisor in the repair shop, you know, just an hour,

Jeremy Weisz
you Because it’s like you have me I order one tire, but the repair shop owners probably ordered lots of tires every week because all the repairs are doing. Yep.

Juan Chavez
Well, we don’t sell tires we sell for example, like the bigger equipment like car lifts, tide changes, wheel balancers or regular consumers not gonna buy it. Unless you’re at you’re, you’re a big car enthusiast like, right. So like we do, but we do get bigger. Yeah, yeah, like, you know, like, for example, we do sell to the consumers by it’ll be like a car lift, like a for post car lift, right a parking lift type of thing, you know, but everything else is basically need to be.

Jeremy Weisz
Got it. Yeah, I guess I was reading the tire changers because you have tire changers car lifts, you know, auto body tool. So it’s really for that someone who owns the auto body shop?

Juan Chavez
Yeah, yeah, auto body and auto repair shops. Mm hmm.

Jeremy Weisz
That’s really cool. So what’s what’s a popular product?

Juan Chavez
The most the most product The most popular product that we have is a tuples. Right? Because every shop will need that. So it’s basically Do you know what to pose with this?

Jeremy Weisz
No, I’m ignorant when it comes to car repairs.

Juan Chavez
Gotcha. So, I mean, you’ve seen them every time you pass by a repair shop they have, it’s basically like, it has two posts. And these two posts for example, the car will go in here and it will lift up the car up and down. That way the mechanic doesn’t have to get on the ground and fix the car, you know, from from the back. Yeah, like basically the car will lift up and then the mechanic will just fix fix the car underneath.

Jeremy Weisz
So where’s the one where’s the call center come into place? Because now you do have a call center. Right

Juan Chavez
So now I have a call center but basically this call center was developed through my own team of people that that work for me, right? Because I do have several businesses and I have created or I have developed different leaders in my in my in my business. So I can focus more on expansion of the business and opening up different types of businesses as well. Because I’m, I mean, I don’t know, I don’t know what it is about me, but I’m always I’m always looking for more. Right. So like, obviously, when I saw the opportunity to start a call center, where I can help other businesses, you know, maybe in the sales, customer service or marketing, I wanted to do that, right. Right now it’s just taking off so like, it’s not like I’m really focusing on that because I still focus on the e commerce site. But we do have a couple of potential clients that have digital marketing agencies, for example, and they use us to develop their websites to come up with some designs for them. You know, right now I like one digital, my friends, a agencies asking us about SEO packages for his clients. So it’s basically white labeling stuff, you know,

Jeremy Weisz
you’re doing the same stuff that you do for your own business for other people. And at what point did you find a need for a call center for JMC automotive? Because were people then just wanting to call like they need help navigating the website or what? What was the need there that you like? Yeah, we better get some people answering the phones.

Juan Chavez
Well, when I first started, I was doing everything myself and I was answering the calls, doing the accounting, doing the marketing, doing the customer service, sending out the orders, sending out the tracking information. So little by little I started hiring people to help me out. Right, so first, I, you know, I wanted to handle sales. So I hired a customer service rep that would help me fulfill the orders send that out to the to the manufacturers, send the tracking to the clients, you know, and once more, more and more calls started coming in, I started hiring sales guys, you know, so on and so on, you know, like so now, for example, we have four salespeople, we have two customer service reps, to marketing people. One bookkeeper that helps me with My business. So, you know, and obviously taken me a long time to develop them to develop your team to the way to the point it is. And like I said, to develop leaders because I think that’s the most important part, you know, not to just teach them the basics of the business, but also the developer’s leaders so they can come up with their own decisions. And even if they make mistakes, it’s okay, right? So it could lead me the owner of the company to, to to create or to help I would expansion or to expand the company a little bit more, and to seek other opportunities in the same industry or different industries.

Jeremy Weisz
So what do you look for in a good salesperson? What are the salespeople doing?

Juan Chavez
enthusiasm? Yeah, positivity. Right. Because if obviously, like, you know, selling automotive equipment, you’re not going to find like a random person that knows about automotive equipment, right? So obviously notice for you to be good at sales. I think you need to have enthusiasm, be positive and a no quit out. Because you’re gonna hear a lot of notes, right? Luckily, everything in our e-commerce site is inbound. Right? So I tell them be enthusiastic, you know, ask these people, how are you What’s going on? Especially with everything going on right now? Because right now we have, we can ask me, Hey, how you doing? How’s your family doing as everybody healthy, you know, like and reach out to them go that extra mile. Because when I call mine, the manufacturers that I work with, mean, you know, they the customer service business as usual. Yeah, it’s no it’s not they’re not that enthusiastic. They’re like, Hey, what are you doing? You know, they’re like, Hey, what’s going on has a family, you know, like, some of them do, and some of them don’t. So I learned, I like holding, for example, the manufacturers that asked, hey, how’s your family? Hey, how you doing? How are you guys health, you know, how’s business where the other manufacturers are like kind of customer services, just Yes, we have this in stock. This much, you know, so if you so I kind of learned from that. And basically I’m kind of like teaching my mic guys, Hey, be enthusiastic, Be positive, be energetic because that’s what I like. That’s what I like to hear when I call all the other places. And that’s what, you know, a regular person wants to hear as well,

Jeremy Weisz
that comes through, it totally comes through exactly what was the most important position that you were so excited to get off your plate?

Juan Chavez
Definitely customer service. Because I like sending out sending the order to the manufacturer, you know, it kind of just, I wanted to focus on sales and marketing. So that kind of like in my eyes, not a waste of time, obviously. But you know, definitely, something that’s extremely important, but I rather focus my strengths on sales and marketing and also sending out tracking information. That’s something that I was glad to take off.

Jeremy Weisz
Yeah, totally. Um, I want to point people towards the site and if there’s any other places we should point them towards. I have two last questions Juan, they can Go to jmcautomotiveequipment.com if you know repair shops, that’d be perfect. Actually, I do know a bunch. So it’s funny, or someone who knows a lot of repair shops, so we’ll talk about that. But um, where else should we point people towards Juan to checkout about you about the companies?

Juan Chavez
So, I have a couple of companies, right? The call center is called JMC Enterprises. Okay, so the name of the website is JMCenterprises.co, right. We just launched it when we launched the website a couple of months ago. So we just started working on Instagram, Facebook, all the social media venues. And of course, I also have the VIP and concierge services in Colombia, both in Medellin and Categena. So basically like for people that are looking to vacation, you know, they’re looking to travel and that need a company to take care of everything from A to Z from transportation, housing tours, English speaking, translators, everything That’s the company to go to, and that would be medellinvip.net and Categenavip.net. Those are also my companies as well. And of course, if you want to follow me on my personal social media accounts is J Chavez 1898? Instagram, Instagram, Twitter, everywhere.

Jeremy Weisz
Got it. Thank you, everyone, check those out. We’ll link them up. Juan, I always asked him since it’s Inspired Insider, what’s been a low moment, a challenging point that you had to push through. And then on the flip side, what’s been a proud moment? What’s been a challenging low moment.

Juan Chavez
So that’s easy. Last year, last year, around the same time, was a very, very low moment because I my second born was just you know, he was born and I was more fulfilling family, you know, at the end of the bookkeeper I had at the time wasn’t doing the correct job at double bookkeeping. So I know it After a couple months, we were we were losing a lot of money. You know, we were obviously we’re expense spending more money that was coming in. So I got very scared at one point, you know, because it wasn’t, it’s not just me anymore, that that that I’m taking care of now I’m taking care of my wife, my two kids, you know, I have responsibility behind me. So I was very, very afraid to fail. And it was a very low point up to like, you know, that I basically speak to my father every day. And like, you know, just tell him what was going on very nervous, very scared of what was happening, did not know how to climb out of that, that hole, that debt that I was in. So I was basically telling my mother like, Hey, I’m just gonna go for bankruptcy. You know, because I don’t think I can handle this like mentally, you know, and of course, talking to my father. You know, he’s been in business since he was 20 years old. So he was like, how much money you losing, he’s like this much. He’s like, I lost about 10 times more. No, throughout the time that I’ve been in business, obviously that didn’t make me feel any better.

Jeremy Weisz
Makes me feel better. But at

Juan Chavez
the same time, like I’m actually

Jeremy Weisz
more scared now after that talk,

Juan Chavez
but the thing was like, you know, when you going through these things with through these hardships, you think you’re the only person that’s going through, you know, you’re like, wow, I suck as an entrepreneur, I suck as a business owner. I’m really the only person that’s going through this, you you don’t, you’re not even opening up your eyes to what’s going on. So obviously speaking to my father and telling me that story was like, okay, like, you know, it’s not making me feel any better. But people go through this stuff. People go through the lows in business, you know, and of course, I gone through the lows, but not as bad as the one that I did last year. And of course, just talking to different entrepreneurs, you know, was how I was able to climb out of that hole. They were like, yeah, we’re kind of going through the same thing. Sometimes it’s good sometimes it’s bad, but you have to have something that I kind of like started, you know, mental resilience, where you have to Be positive during those hard times. And that’s when mental resilience is going to come about, you know, and I, like now that I look back I, those months that I was sad and scared and nervous, I learned a lot because like, even though I wanted to quit, I was like, You know what, I’m gonna push through my push through, I’m gonna push through all my push through, and definitely develop different tactics on what I could do in order for the business to survive, because at the time, but at that time, my mentality wasn’t surviving. Not thriving, you know, like, now it’s something that I that I kind of, like, tell myself like, you know, you have to thrive not just survive, right? And, and, of course, at that point, all I could think about was just like, survive, survive, survive. I was in survival mode, in my mind. And I even I even started doing cold calling to every client I had, and just, you know, trying to sell them that try to sell them the equipment that we had in that world. That was it was You’re able to do a lot of a lot of big, sell a lot of big, big equipment, doing that. And of course, implementing different marketing strategies like motivating my team a little bit more, so they can start selling a lot more. That’s how I was able to climb out of that hole. And by that, that has been the hardest the hardest time as an entrepreneur.

Jeremy Weisz
Is that how you turn it around when you basically just rolled up your sleeves and just started calling?

Juan Chavez
Yep, yep. So so I know I looked at the different opportunities that I had, right? So I told myself okay, what can I do in order to diversify what I’m doing right now? So I started writing more like you know, because once you get successful you kind of like, like, you know, you got you get you get a little comfortable, you know, which is what happened to me and of course, the distraction of my, my kids being bored and everything like that, you know, it was it was a little bit of a distraction. So I kind of just went back and did what I had to do started cold, calling started. writing blog articles again started you know, pushing my team you know, started basically doing a lot of what I used to do in the beginning of the business in order to to become successful again and then little by little sales just started climbing back up, which kind of made me relax but not relax. What I was doing would work but just relax mentally. And once I was able to relax and not be nervous and not be scared and not be, you know, pretty much like you know, think of myself like you know, as a failure. I was able to look for different opportunities and just diversify more and more and more and more.

Jeremy Weisz
No, thanks for sharing that. Because anyone who’s been in business they’ve gone through that you know, there’s there’s ups and downs. What about On the flip side, a proud moment,

Juan Chavez
A proud moment in the probably the past couple of months Well, there’s been a couple of them right obviously me joining the bank because Being a part of the Inc 5000 two years in a row was a really proud moment. But I think I’m an even prouder moment was when this whole pandemic hit. Of course, like I started feeling those same feelings of anxiety that I felt last year, right? So I was like, Okay, I’m kind of used to this, I was able to control those feelings a little bit more. And I was able to what I wanted to do is I can’t so let me try to see how I can help the most business owners as much as possible my own clients, right. So I started sending out personal emails or emails to my whole email marketing lists, like hey, just positive, positive, honest, hey, if you guys need anything, I’m here, right? You know, something that will make them feel good, both mentally sending out business advice, you know, and just tell them like, Hey, here’s my personal number. If you need to speak to anybody, please call me even if you need to just listen to somebody or just you know, if you want to Cry, because I know people are going through a rough time, you know? So I sent several emails out and I got a lot of good responses, a lot of positive like, Hey, thank you very much, you know, you making me feel better? Like, you know, just reading your email? Definitely, um, you know, it’s helping me climb out of this this this whole mentally you know, and then I’m about a month after I sent those emails out, right. I got a call from one of my Actually no, I called one of one of my clients. Because we had to do a count, like, you know, we didn’t we didn’t have his product that he put, because it was on backorder. And because of this whole pandemic, you know, like, it wasn’t, we couldn’t ship it out. So I call them personally, which sometimes I do, I still do sales calls, and I you know, so the guy was like, Hey, he’s this one. He’s and you know, he’s like, yeah, this is why he’s like, Brian, thank you so much for calling me. Like I really appreciate those emails you sent out in the beginning of this whole thing, because it really helped me. You know, Get get to that positive mindset, because everybody at the time was they didn’t know what was what was going on. You know, so just him telling me that I was like, wow, like, I impacted people with those emails that I sent out, you know, so that was really cool that I was able to help out. business owners, you know, kind of be more positive. Even though there’s we had this whole excuse my language shitstorm going on, you know which of uncertainty we didn’t know what could happen. So that was a really like, a really proud moment for me. They are very emotional when that client or that client call me up. And he’s from the bottom of his heart. He told me thank you like 50 times on the phone. So it was really, really cool to hear that.

Jeremy Weisz
That’s rewarding. You’re making an impact to some of those people Juan I’m gonna be the first one to thank you. Everyone should check out JMCenterprises.co co, and jmcautomotiveequipment.com Juan thanks for being with me,

Juan Chavez
Jeremy. No, thank you very much for having me on the show.