MOVING UP - Congratulations to our Nissan SCOPE & Infiniti KEI Masters

Bryant Wilson knew he wanted to work on cars right out of high school. Beyond that, he honestly does not remember where the interest came from. He came from a military family. “We didn’t really work on our cars or anything like that,” Bryant says. “I just kind of fell into it and figured I could do it. I don’t know!”

Well, one mercurial circumstance followed another. Eventually, Wilson found himself at Nissan’s Aurora Training Center, outside Chicago. Chicago is a three-hour drive from West Burlington, just far enough to require overnights away from home—right when his wife was having their second child, a little girl.

Bryant took it in stride, but concedes it was not easy. “It was a lot of time to be away from my family and my new little girl,” Bryant says. “It was challenging, yeah. It was tricky for us both, you know, but we lived, we got through it and it’s better now,” he chuckles. “Other than that, you get to meet people and learn new things. It’s not too horrible!”

What makes a successful technician? Master Technician Joey Himuro’s answer is quick and unequivocal. “Certification is everything,” he says. “You can know everything, be able to fix everything. But if you’re not certified, some places won’t even let you touch a particular job. Diesels. LEAF.” Certification lets Joey work on any job he wants.

“I’ve always been ‘the lazy one’ in my family,” Himuro laughs. “I have one sister becoming a nurse, the other’s studying to be a psychiatrist. So, I had to decide what I was gonna do.” Himuro’s father always encouraged his interest in cars. “He said: ‘This is what you love. This is what you’re good at. You need to go for it.’”

So, he did. Career path chosen, Joey went straight to school and got a dealership job straightaway. Now, just a short while later, Joey has achieved his Master Technician certification at a point in his career when most guys are still lube-techin’. Hardly ‘lazy.’ “Well, I saw other people making money,” he says. “And the mentality I have, I had to kick it into gear!”

Neil Stewart is a hard man to get on the phone, but there is a good reason for that. He was certified in April, and then, for months—all summer—he was the only technician on duty at Ron Sayer Nissan. Neil singlehandedly fielded every job that came through the bay doors until another technician was hired to support him. So, until recently, if you called Neil, he was usually too busy to talk.

“It was a hair-pulling experience,” Stewart says. “But it’s one of those things where we’re training people the way we want so we can make the dealership the way we’d like it.”

Patience is key to building a great dealership team, and it is a big part of becoming a Master Technician too. “To start at the bottom and work your way up… It’s a long road,” Neil says. “It’s a fun road, because you get to go out of town—we went to Seattle [and] California. It’s a minivacation. For me, anyway. For my wife, maybe not so much! But it definitely takes some time.”

Garrett Marlow came from a wrenching family. His grandpa built tractors for John Deere and his dad owned a farm. Somebody was always under a hood. During high school, he and his friends worked non-stop to keep their rides running or to make them go faster.

Upon graduation, Garrett made a decision. “I figured I’d work on cars,” he says. He got a part-time job and took classes at night. But he did not take it seriously until a service manager took him aside. “He’s a good dude. He said: ‘You’re good at this. Why don’t you grow up a little bit, get your head into your job?’”

Those words hit home. Marlow pursued the Master Technician certification almost immediately. “I realized it’s a good profession,” he says. “Ever-changing but always needed.” And that is all it is—a profession. No project cars for Marlow! “When I get out of here, the last thing I want to do is work on a car!”

“I plan to be with Nissan until I retire,” says Master Technician Chris Roberts. “I’ve just always been a fan, first of the earlier Datsuns and then Nissans later on.” It all started with a buddy’s 280Z. Chris fell in love with that car. Since then, he has had several 240SXs, with engines he swapped for rare Skyline pulls. When he entered the job market, Chris says he applied with every manufacturer he could think of—even though Nissan was far and away his preference. He was pleased as punch when Nissan stepped forward to hire him.

Roberts found a mentor pretty quickly. “There was a Master Technician there,” he says. “He’d been with ‘em since the Datsun days. I looked up to him. So, when I first became a tech with Nissan, I made a promise to myself that I was going to become a Master.” Roberts advises anyone with similar ambitions to: “Just be patient. Keep on going and don’t give up.”

Chris Dinan’s love of technician work comes down to one thing. “The challenge,” he says. “I’ve always been intrigued by the way things work.” That probably comes from his father, a military pilot/engineer who always had something disassembled.

Training itself was a challenge. “We’re up in Maine,” Chris says. “The closest training facility is Jersey. A six-hour drive. It was a hassle.” Still, it has made an appreciable difference for Chris, especially in advanced electrical, which offers plenty of challenging puzzles.

“It is exciting—the rare times it happens—to get a phone call, maybe it’s a no-start, some weird fault code other shops have played with,” Dinan says. “And you’ve got to figure it out.” For example, take a recent Check Engine light and switch problem. “With the help of TECH LINE and patient diagnostic checks, we found an intermittent fault in the accelerator pedal position and the IPDM wasn’t communicating properly. We replaced the pedal sensor and IPM and haven’t seen it back since!” The only thing better than a good challenge is conquering it.

“I never pictured myself in the dealership world,” says Master Technician Nigel Jarrett. “But I got thrown into it, and it turned out I was good at it.” Of course, Nigel was no stranger to West Palm Beach Nissan. Prior to his employment there, Nigel was a vendor, specializing in accessories and body styling components.

The dealerships noted Jarrett’s knowledge and overall work ethic and offered him a gig. He bounced from Mazda to Nissan, where he quickly became Team Leader. “I already had some knowledge and I understood the tools,” he says. “I just needed to learn a little bit more about diagnosis.” Master Technician training helped with that.

Nigel welcomed the switch from vendor to technician—after some initial reticence. “I never thought I’d work for somebody else again,” he says. “Not after owning my own business.” But Nigel kept an open mind, and the change has been lucrative. Better yet, he now leaves work at work and does not obsess about it in his offhours. “I’m doing pretty well,” he says. “I can’t complain.”

Jose Campos cut his teeth on go-karts. Then, at the ripe old age of 14, he got a ’95 Nissan pickup. “I put some wheels on it and added a header and intake,” he says. “That was pretty much it for me.” After that, he was hooked.

Jose’s dealership employs 27 technicians, and 20 of those are certified Master Technician. So, peer pressure definitely played some motivating role in Jose’s training. “I just wanted to be certified like everyone else!” he laughs. He recommends the certification to anybody. “There are quite a few benefits,” he says, citing the bonus he received, as well as being paid for OBD-II and diagnosis.

Campos still enjoys wrenching. The Nissan pickup is still in the driveway, and he recently snagged a Silverado SS. “I’ve been working on the twin turbo every weekend,” he says. “That’s been my project for the last few months.” He, his brother and some friends run a performance shop on the weekends. “It’s not just a career. It’s like a hobby, you know?” He laughs. “An expensive hobby!”

It was a given. Jesse Stone always knew he would be a Master Technician. “I never really thought about it,” Jesse says. “It was subconscious, I guess.” He just took the classes, no goal in mind. But a path, as they say, is set one stone at a time.

Classes found Stone in Fort Lauderdale, Florida… just as Minnesota got pummeled by one of its infamous winter storms. “It was nice for me,” he says. “But my wife had the kids, snowed in, all by herself. I just got a picture text, a photo of our driveway under a foot and a half of snow. So, it wasn’t fun for her!”

Maybe it all evens out. After putting in his hours, and with three children in the house, Jesse usually does not have time for recreation. He does plan to have a project car one of these days. “I don’t have any specific car in mind,” he says. “But I don’t know…An old Z would be kind of nice!”

It takes one thing to become a Master Technician. “It’s the want,” says Jonathan Stelly. “You gotta want it.” If that is in place, it is just a matter of taking the appropriate steps. “Take your training online. That’s the first step. You gotta do it. And meanwhile, always be learning on the job.”

Jonathan has been in the business since he was 15 years old. He left school at the start of that summer and simply went to work. Since then he has moved around between manufacturers and even bounced in and out of the field. But Jonathan started at Nissan when he was 18, and he always comes back to the brand.

Stelly has been doing Master Technician level work since he picked up for a departed Master Technician back in ‘05. Master Technician status has not changed his work life much, but he appreciates the pay increase. Outside work, Stelly likes to relax and spend time with his three children, ages 3, 8 and 9. They enjoy camping at the state parks in and around Louisiana.

That Pontiac dealership picked an awful time to close. James Wilson had worked there since high school and things seemed stable. He had just signed papers on his first house when word came: the dealership would close, and corporate would block any franchise sale. “I said: ‘Well, I better get out of here!’” says James.

Luckily, a friend had just moved to Nissan. They offered him a job, and Wilson leapt to safety. More recently, a new manager signed on with the intent to certify everyone in the shop.

And even James—who thought he knew everything about cars—learned some new things in Master Technician training. “Like, with certain Infiniti’s, you can adjust the temperature internally, plus or minus 8°,” James says. “So if a customer has an older car, you can compensate for degradation in the HVAC system. You can even change the air flow direction, percentage-wise.” James strongly recommends the training to anyone—especially novice Nissan technicians. “You learn a whole lot. A guy fresh out of school might not know half that stuff!”

Dung Huyn first became a Master Technician in his home country of Vietnam. “Of course,” he says. “A car here is, like, way different than a car over there.” Once he landed stateside, those differences stunned Dung. “It threw me. We don’t have emissions set up over there. The symbols were different, everything.”

Then, there was the language barrier. Huyn—pronounced “Yung”—had to translate everything while learning new concepts at the same time. This entailed a layer of difficulty native speakers might never consider. “You have to translate names of parts, translate the procedures,” he says. “I couldn’t just read a book. It took me a while.”

Dung thinks the essential quality for a technician is not one you can learn. “You have to have the talent, the ability. Without that, time and practice mean nothing.” Still, the longer Dung works on cars, the more he likes it. Each completed repair brings a greater sense of mastery and familiarity and this, in turn, makes the work more and more rewarding. “I get better and I keep going,” Dung says.

Robert Stephens has seen it all. His father was in construction, so Robert drove bulldozers—along with dune buggies, mini-bikes and gokarts—before he even had a license. He built a ’67 Firebird from the ground up at the age of 17 and never looked back.

Well, maybe he looks back a little. “I like the old stuff better than the new stuff,” Stephens says. “Everything on our cars now comes down to saving the cat. And that’s great, but more horsepower is more horsepower. You know what I’m saying? And saving the cat takes away the horses. The new stuff can get a little tricky. Then again, who doesn’t like a good puzzle?”

Years of technician work fused Robert’s spine. “For a while, I wasn’t able to walk at night when I got home from here.” The discomfort forced him into hobbies other than wrenching. One of those hobbies was remote control cars. Even though he is feeling better now, Robert has kept up on the R.C. scene. “I really enjoy it,” he says.

When Infiniti of Mechanicsburg lost its chief Master Technician to Tech Line, Brett Gutshall—by virtue of talent and experience—was the most logical choice to replace him.

Brett was eager to train. “I always need to feel like I’m progressing and moving forward,” he says. He enjoyed plenty of dealership support, too. “If it’s slow, and we get stuff wrapped up by 2 or 3 in the afternoon, they’ll let us hang out another hour and a half to study,” he says. “And they’ll compensate us. It’s a pretty good deal, I think.”

Away from work, Gutshall plays drums with various bands. One musical project splintered off the band he plays in at church. After getting together every Sunday, they decided to take it on the road. They do bars, clubs, parties—and Gutshall himself is able to step up to the drums when needed. “I’ve always played guitar, too,” he says. “One day our drummer quit and they were like: ‘What are we going to do?’” And, once again, Brett Gutshall was the most logical choice.

One day, when he was very young, Benjamin Stafford’s mother found him sitting on the floor with two bags in front of him. One was filled with tiny screws. The other was full of parts. Benjamin had taken a screwdriver to his entire Transformers collection. “I don’t remember this, but apparently, I had wanted to make one big one,” Benjamin laughs. “My mom wasn’t too happy. I guess I always wanted to know how things worked.”

As soon as he was a teenager, this curiosity naturally pointed itself at Stafford’s cars. “When you’re young, that’s your freedom, you know?” he says. “You’ve got to keep moving around.”

Once he went professional, though, the opposite impulse kicked in. “I decided I really wanted to focus on one brand. My Nissan service manager said: ‘We’re going to make you a Master.’ It’s all about time efficiency. You don’t have to know how everything works. You just have to know how to find out how it works, and then diagnose it. And that’s the benefit of school.”

Congratulations to our Nissan SCOPE & Infiniti KEI Senior Specialists

Karl Hoffman

Nissan SCOPE Senior Specialist

Northwoods Nissan

Hummels Wharf, PA

Jose Valdivia

Nissan SCOPE Senior Specialist

Puente Hills Nissan

City of Industry, CA

Brian Conde

Nissan SCOPE Senior Specialist

Bill Kay’s Downers Grove

Downers Grove, IL

John Price

Nissan SCOPE Senior Specialist

Five Star Nissan Florence

Florence, SC

Gregory Stiller

Nissan SCOPE Senior Specialist

Brenner Nissan

Mechanicsburg, PA

Adam Fricks

Nissan SCOPE Senior Specialist

Heritage Nissan

Rome, GA

Chris Huie

Nissan SCOPE Senior Specialist

Pence Nissan

Midlothian, VA

Samuel Hitchborn

Nissan SCOPE Senior Specialist

Nissan of Reno

Reno, NV

Tyler Williams

Nissan SCOPE Senior Specialist

Formula Nissan

Barre, VT

William Moses

Nissan SCOPE Senior Specialist

Giles Nissan

Lafayette, LA

David Kruk

Nissan SCOPE Senior Specialist

Gurley-Leep Nissan

Mishawaka, IN

Chad Fulbright

Nissan SCOPE Senior Specialist

Taylor’s Automax Nissan

Great Falls, MT

Nicholas Trapani

Infiniti KEI Senior Specialist

Ray Brandt Infiniti/Metairie

Metairie, LA

Rahmel Lett

Infiniti KEI Senior Specialist

Infiniti of Gwinnett

Duluth, GA

Ryan Reynolds

Infiniti KEI Senior Specialist

Infiniti/Clarendon Hills

Clarendon Hills, IL

David Perez

Nissan SCOPE Senior Specialist

Nissan of Midland

Midland, TX

Michael Ramirez

Nissan SCOPE Senior Specialist

Scott Clark Nissan

Charlotte, NC

Brian Dicosmo

Nissan SCOPE Senior Specialist

Modern Nissan/Lake Norman

Cornelius, NC

Shaun Cotta

Nissan SCOPE Senior Specialist

Darling’s Nissan

Bangor, ME

Anthony Williams

Nissan SCOPE Senior Specialist

Conyers Nissan

Conyers, GA

Jacob Ackerman

Nissan SCOPE Senior Specialist

Destination Nissan

Albany, NY

Travis Crain

Nissan SCOPE Senior Specialist

Bob Richards Nissan

Beach Island, SC

Christopher Daugharty

Nissan SCOPE Senior Specialist

Grubbs Nissan

Bedford, TX

Luke Ewing

Nissan SCOPE Senior Specialist

Quad Cities Nissan

Moscow, ID