TIME TO SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT - Why I Left The Repair Association (aka, Repair.org) & What Really Happened

This is a story I HAD put behind me, but it appears some little birdies have been chirping away and trying to trash my reputation as well as get me blacklisted in their circles of influence. So, allow me to set the record straight on what really happened when/why I left The Repair Association (TRA) after giving them a year of my life.

 

Let me preface this piece by saying I've tried to take the higher ground even though I got royally screwed TWICE (Screw me once, shame on you...). The TRA holds a lot of industry power and influence, especially the guy on top, who by all accounts is one of the most powerful people in the industry. I'm not going to mention any names in this piece just on the off chance that that I might be misreading them. But I did try to contact a few people to clear this up, including the top guy, and no one would return my calls or email.

LET ME BE CLEAR

I did NOT steal the TRA member list or misappropriate any of their resources. A truly honest mistake happened -- which I will explain -- in emailing their list but in no way did I steal their mailing list, members, or anything else from the TRA. Quite the opposite is true, which I will also explain in detail later. Let me also state that I keep really good notes and in some cases recordings and/or solid documentation of many things to back up what I say when I am forced to say it. This is one of those times.

THE MAIN INCIDENT IN QUESTION

In February of this year (2021) an email was mistakenly sent out to the TRA email list from a member platform that I built for them while I was working for the TRA. It was an innocent mistake that really should have had zero impact on either of our organizations. In the end it caused zero damage to the TRA and, at the time, destroyed all of my work with the newly formed TECH CARE ASSOCIATION. I’ll explain some of the incident below.

The email sent was very vanilla and was meant to be the first email sent from the newly launched TECH CARE ASSOCIATION that I had started with my own resources a few months before this incident (more details why I started the TCA are below as well). I know what happened, but I can't give too many details of that publicly because the TRA has threatened to sue me over the incident. Again, it was a simple honest mistake that did not cause any damage to the TRA. 

Yes, the email was to promote the new association, but we went out of our way to tell recipients that the TRA was a quality organization that they should support. The email was designed to simply let people know about the new association while making sure they didn’t confuse the two. In essence another option to help the industry. Even after this incident I went out of my way to ask people to support the mission of the TRA - which is documented in this blog. 

If I had had a better relationship with the TRA during this time, I would have asked them to support this new association and perhaps even write a positive piece about what we are trying to do to help the industry. You would think that wouldn't be a problem considering the fact that I gave them more than a year of my life to help further their cause. But that didn’t happen because of...

PETTINESS AND SMALL-MINDED PEOPLE

Honestly, I should have seen it coming. Which is why I just wanted to put everything behind me and move on. I made a huge mistake working for them and making the deal I made. It cost me a year of my life and a lot of money, only to get slandered and have my credibility questioned because of rumors and innuendo that no one ever even tried to verify with me. Assumptions were made and judgment was cast without even a phone call.

What could have been two distinctly different organizations, with minor overlap in membership, working together to further the industry had now turned into the larger more established organization building insecure walls of division. Unity had been my stated goal from the beginning but something the TRA ignored completely when I informed them on my plans.

But let’s start in the beginning…

HOW/WHY I GOT INVOLVED WITH REPAIR.ORG (TRA)

I was invited to join the TRA board of directors shortly after meeting them at the Nixing the Fix hearing at the FTC in July 2019 concerning right to repair. We hit it off immediately and I really enjoyed getting involved. I developed what I thought was a trusted relationship with all of the board members and I thought too that we had developed some friendships along the way. I was wrong.

Having gotten to know the organization well I offered to join the TRA FULLTIME to help them as the director of member development later that same year. My desire to help them was coupled with what I saw as a tremendous business opportunity based on my skillset. I offered to take the position with this cash poor organization at 100% commission knowing all of the organizational work that would be required would pay off later when I was able to bring in large numbers of new members. Since they had no one doing this work they seemed excited and I was eager to open a new chapter in my long career – building things and making them grow is what I do best.

That excitement soon turned to a low level of anxiety over things I would learn.

PROBLEMS FROM THE START

From the start I was given access to whatever tools the organization was using. What was strange from the beginning is that nobody had a complete list of them or in some cases even knew about them. I discovered lots of things that different people had built over the years. I was shocked that an organization that had been in existence for seven years was so disorganized. To start they had no accounting system in place and the member management platform they were using was designed for neighborhood groups or local PTA’s. It immediately zapped every donation with some high fees. The biggest positive was that email list that was big but very mismanaged. Lots of potential!

I spent the better part of a month researching solutions for the TRA, narrowed the search down, got three proposals and presented them to the BOD. All three would be a major upgrade to the existing piecemeal system and wouldn’t cost a dime more. Once one was fully implemented the association could grow at light speed. The board approved moving forward but efforts to commit to a new system were delayed by a funds request to start. I only needed $800 but the TRA just didn’t have it.

After a few weeks delay I finally started work on this major platform upgrade for the TRA and I was promised any and all help that would be required to complete the job. I got none. Zero. Zip. Nada! Lots of critique but no help.

In the meantime, I was working on trying to save existing members from leaving while making connections with new companies as well. I put in 10-hour days while paying for all of my own expenses, including a business trip to Atlanta to represent the association at a live event, visit existing members, host a meetup, and visit with two major prospects for the association. Sadly, during the trip an existing board member couldn’t even find the time to meet with me.

My work on the new platform/database progressed slowly without any of the promised help from the TRA board and “volunteers”. The company we contracted with were shocked that I was flying solo on this endeavor and told me that they had never encountered one person doing all of this work (normally 3-6 people would contribute). I felt confident that the business opportunity would payoff for me and so I kept my head down and moved forward with the project.

THIS MIGHT COME AS A SURPRISE TO MANY

As I dug into the associations member base, I was really surprised that the self-described “largest trade association ever to represent the repair industry” only had a little over 200 members and of that only a few dozen member companies. It turned out that the vast majority of members were individual members (most only paying $25-50 a year to join). It surprised me and many board members too, but I saw this as an incredible opportunity for the TRA to get more business members and raise more money for the cause. To this day I’m not sure why they make misleading statements like their current claim of more than “400+ member companies and counting” on their home page??? It’s just nowhere near true!

NOTE: This is not confidential information about a non-profit trade association. They should be making this information available at the very least to their membership and to the public as a whole in an annual report! But that’s another mystery.

PROBLEMS ARISE AS MY WORK IS PUT ON HOLD

After six months of building out the new member database and membership platform for the TRA we did a soft launch in June of 2020. Unfortunately, there were problems from the start. Keep in mind, I kept trying to get all of the board members to learn the new system and help with its development. I also negotiated free access for the host companies major training sessions that only one or two people attended. Most were happy to complain but reluctant to help.

Small hiccups started happening and a handful of members started to complain. The reality was that the system was working overall, and we were adding new members at an historic pace at a much higher membership fee -- raising twice as much revenue for the important work of the TRA. 

Then on day one of the official launch of the new system it failed in some major ways to process new members. It was working, but it caused more complaints and frustration with the E.D. I was told to put everything on hold until we could figure it all out. Since I was being paid commission, this put my planned income source on hold as well, which had already been delayed because the project took twice as long as I expected (with none of the promised help). When I mentioned that fact to the E.D. she laughed and said, “join the club”. She made that choice, I did not!

The next few board meetings were nothing short of a disrespectful collection of blame pointed directly at me. Despite the fact that NO ONE had gotten involved with the project when the work was being done everyone pointed the finger at me and wanted to “just go back to the old system” or suggest other systems they hadn’t even looked at or evaluated.

After an evaluation of our vendors system, we found that they did in fact have a major flaw in the platform that might not be fixed anytime soon. A flaw that could be overcome but would take some extra work on our part. I was furious that they had not disclosed this to me, and I had numerous calls with their leadership team to vent (more on that later).

In the meantime, the head guy at the TRA wanted to reevaluate the system change and officially suspended my work until we could find another solution. Keep in mind, that I had committed the last six months of my life to this project, and I was not interested in starting over - especially with the knowledge that no one was going to help. I had lost a lot of time and money in this venture, my family was struggling, and I didn’t have as much optimism about working with them going forward.

THINGS GO FROM BAD TO WORSE THEN MY LIFE WAS TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

After a month of putting the project on hold and losing hope that I would ever be able to make a living for myself here (I had been paid for some of the business I brought in, but it wasn’t very much). Things went south even faster when I had to fight for a missing commission payment that was being illegally withheld from me – the E.D. wanted to force me into signing a contract first. A contract that was very one-sided.

I was almost ready to cut my losses and leave when my wife and I got really bad news. Out of the blue, like so many others, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Which was tough enough without the major stress of what I was dealing with at the TRA. When I told them what had happened, they did send flowers and a couple of emails, which was nice, but that was about it. I immediately took leave to care for my wife and help her with treatment. They immediately sprung into action to dismantle my work.

In the middle of it all, I started to have a health scare myself with my heart. The stress of a toxic workplace coupled with my wife’s diagnosis was too much for this old body. I had asked for some time to deal with matters but then the requests started rolling in, “so and so needs this”, “can you get that”, “we need…”. I tried to help but when I would talk to the person they said needed something they would tell me that they were all good. The disfunction and disorganization was literally killing me. So, I officially quit.

I held no malice and chalked it up to bad discussion on my part. It was time to…

MOVE ON AND TRY TO HELP IN OTHER WAYS

After the dust settled a bit and I could think again I decided that I didn’t want to throw away all of the hard work I had done over the past year. It’s then that the TECH CARE ASSCIATION was born. And my inspiration came from an unlikely source.

You see in the middle of all of the issues I was having at the TRA in July & August, the head guy had told me that if I wanted to buildout the vision that I had to help all of the small business people in the industry that I would have to build it from scratch with brand new resources. He expressly told me that they couldn’t divert any people or money to my project, but that I was welcome to build it for… THEM.

I had even asked myself at the time (actually wrote it down in my notes during the call), “WHY???” Why build something that they clearly don’t want and are not willing to support? Why give them all of the revenue from a project like this that they would only squander? Why??!!

But even with that question in mind and having dealt with all of the hassles I dealt with I put together a plan to build a separate division of the TRA that was focused on helping small business people within the industry. I never submitted it to them, but instead used for a blueprint for the TECH CARE ASSOCIATION (TCA).

NOTE: The TCA is not designed to “compete” with the TRA in any way, sort, or fashion. It’s apples and oranges really. The TRA is an advocacy group that has the “primary intent is to lobby for repair-friendly legislation, standards, and regulations” It is mainly made up of individual members not companies – they do good work, but they might want to change their IRS designation! The TCA has a much broader mission to help the industry grow as a true trade association for companies with a focus on small businesses.

I sent emails to some of the board after I formed the new organization to let them know my plans and let them know I hoped to work with them in the near future.

Except for a curt "Good luck" I got ZERO responses from those messages.

THE FINAL CHAPTER

Here’s some information that I am reluctant to share because it wasn’t the best choice on my part and might sound questionable to some. But in an effort of full disclosure, I will share what happened leading up to the email incident mentioned above.

During my phone calls with the member platform company that caused so many issues I was trying to work out compensation for the problems. They agreed to provide the subscription for free until they could fix the issue that caused so many problems. But I wanted more from them. They offered to give me an additional subscription for free that I could work on perfecting and then possibly move over the TRA database at a later date (long story that gets complicated, but it was a good offer).

I said yes and they set it up totally separate from the existing TRA database with NONE OF THE MEMBERS loaded into it. The idea was something to work on with major tweaks to it but keeping the member data clean until when and if we decided to move them over, which is very complicated and was NEVER done. In the back of my mind this might become the separate division that the head guy had suggested I start.

Fast forward months later after starting the TECH CARE ASSOCIATION I was searching for an affordable member platform, but I wasn’t excited about learning something new (it's very complicated and a lot of work). So, I called my contact at the company that we had used, told him exactly what I wanted to do, and he gave me the green light to use it since it was already setup and not being used. They had already accounted for it on their side and the TRA didn’t want it in fact they had abandoned the entire system. I honestly didn’t realize that this was an under the table deal he gave me and figured I would be billed later.

Doing this made sense at the time but in hindsight was not such a great idea.

NOTE: It did not and never has had a list of TRA members loaded into it. Nor did we ever try to upload TRA members or target them in any way! Honestly TRA members are worthless to us because more than 90% of them are individuals and we are focused on business members only.

Once we started working on it (and it’s a lot of work) I was trying to remember how I had setup things in the TRA database. Nothing proprietary just the framework I had used for certain parts of it. I knew the TRA database had been abandoned and I assumed my access had been removed. We had a small team at the time that was in charge of replicating the database framework that I had created (all my IP) and they were able to do so in short order.

On the day of the email incident someone made a mistake plain and simple. Once I was alerted to the issue, I tried to call the main guy at the TRA a few times, but he chose to ignore me and didn’t bother returning my calls. Shortly after the incident our database and website were taken offline without any recourse available to our organization. Crippling our efforts to exist and setting back our organization for months.

I kept going because I had made promises that I wanted to keep.

RUMORS, BACK BITING AND JEALOUSY

Listen friends, this was all an unfortunate incident that I had moved on from up until some people at the TRA decided to interject themselves into my current world and tell people not to work with me. In essence trying to blacklist me from the industry. Yea, they have gone out of their way to contact people they know to try and undermine my efforts to help the industry through our organization. All because of a misunderstanding about one innocuous email.

Why? They have all of the power and influence. They have big money resources and key allies in the industry. Why distract yourself from you mission -- which is making progress now -- and come after me on a personal basis?

To the TRA I say, haven’t you exacted enough revenge. You made me pay for working with you, you destroyed much of my early work of trying to help small businesspeople succeed, and now you want to limit me even further. Move on! This isn’t a Star Wars movie where everyone is your enemy, and you are the only true savior of the world!

It took 7 years for a coalition of industry associations and partners to win right to repair for the auto industry. Maybe if the TRA, had better leadership, worked with others and focused more time on their mission, we would have the right to repair by now!

FINAL NOTE

I know writing this piece will alienate me from a few people because they will think that I’m trashing the TRA (repair.org). That’s not my intention at all. I'm trying to shine a light on a secretive organization that may have lost there way. I would love to see them succeed and move the ball forward in the right to repair movement. If you really love the TRA and support right to repair, then I hope that instead of hating me you will take this opportunity to get involved and help them. They need more good people to get involved.