Your potential best recruiter already knows which technicians in your market are about to quit. He sees inside 20-30 shops every single week. He knows who's miserable. Who's underappreciated. Who's one bad Monday away from walking out. And nobody's asking him. I'm talking about your parts delivery driver. Here's what most shop owners don't realize: That guy dropping off your filters and brake pads? He's a mobile intelligence network. He hears the complaints in every bay. He sees which shops have angry techs slamming hoods. He knows who just got passed over for a raise. And right now, he's sitting on information that could solve your hiring problem—while you're posting another job ad that 75% of technicians will never see because they're not looking on job boards. The math is brutal: For every shop desperately posting on Indeed, there are dozens of wanna be techs who see the ad and very few serious technicians even scrolling. And those very few serious techs who actually see your ad? They're probably just checking what their skills are worth so they can negotiate a raise where they already work. So while your competitors fight over the same 25% of the talent pool, the delivery driver knows about the other 75%. The question isn't whether this approach works. The question is: Why haven't you bought that guy/gal a coffee yet? What's your experience with parts drivers or tool truck guys? Have you ever gotten a lead from one of them? Drop a comment below—curious if anyone's already tapped into this.

Yesterday I got a text from a number I didn't recognize. (786) 481-4680. Miami area code. The message? "Hi Christopher, right?" Three words. That's it. My first instinct was to reply. Be polite. Say "wrong number" and move on with my day. I didn't. And that split-second decision might have saved me thousands of dollars. Here's what I almost walked into. That "innocent" text is the opening line of what the FBI calls a "pig butchering" scam. Weird name. Devastating consequences. HERE'S HOW THE SCAM WORKS They send thousands of these texts. "Hi [name], right?" They're fishing. Waiting for someone polite enough to respond. If you reply—even just "wrong number"—you've confirmed two things: 1. This phone number is active. 2. There's a real person here willing to engage. Now you're a qualified lead. The scammer apologizes. Strikes up a conversation. Maybe mentions it's "fate" that you connected. Over the next few weeks—sometimes months—they build trust. They become your friend. Maybe more. Then comes the hook. A cryptocurrency opportunity. A trading platform. An "investment" that seems too good to pass up. By the time you realize what's happening, your money is gone. And I mean gone. Think I'm being dramatic? Last year, text message scams cost Americans $470 million. That's five times higher than 2020. These aren't Nigerian princes with bad grammar anymore. They're sophisticated operations using AI to manage conversations with hundreds of victims simultaneously. The Miami area code on that text I received? Spoofed. Could have come from anywhere in the world. The fact that they used my first name? Probably pulled from a data breach. Or my LinkedIn. Or anywhere else my info exists online. This isn't random. It's targeted. It's patient. And it's designed to exploit the one thing most of us were raised to be: Polite. So here's what you do when you get one of these: Do NOT respond. Not even "wrong number." Silence is your best protection.

A reporter is working on a story about private equity ownership in the auto repair industry. She's looking for shop owners (or people who know shop owners) who have direct experience with PE - whether you've been acquired, considered selling to PE, or watched competitors get bought out. If that's you or someone you know, drop a comment or DM me. I can make the introduction.

I can't tell you how many times I'm on a call with a shop owner and they say: "I'm drowning. I think I need to hire another tech." And 10 minutes later we realize: Another tech won't fix it. It'll magnify it. Here's what usually happens on those calls. Owner says: "We're booked out two weeks. Cars stacked up. I need another tech." I ask: "How often do your techs wait on approvals? Parts? Dispatch?" Long pause. "Honestly… a lot." "Cool. Then the problem isn't production. It's feeding production." Here's the hard truth nobody wants to hear: When cars are backed up, it's usually NOT because you need more production. It's because: → Work isn't approved fast enough → Parts aren't sourced fast enough → Jobs aren't dispatched fast enough → Tech questions don't get answered fast enough → Cars and keys aren't moved fast enough The real constraint is front-of-house throughput. Hiring a tech first often makes the problem worse—because you're adding horsepower to a system that can't feed it. Let me twist the knife a little more: Every minute a tech waits is a minute you paid for nothing. When techs stand around, owners blame techs… but the shop is usually choking them. Hiring another tech doesn't fix starvation. It just adds another mouth to feed. Your techs aren't the bottleneck. Your front counter is. THE 30-MINUTE BOTTLENECK AUDIT Stop guessing. Measure it for one day. Here's how: Step 1: For one full day, track every time a tech is stopped for a non-wrench reason: Waiting on parts Waiting on approvals Waiting on dispatch/next car Waiting on answers Keys/vehicle movement Step 2: Put a clipboard at the counter. Every time it happens: hash mark. Step 3: At close, answer: What stopped tech momentum most often? What one role or process change removes that stoppage? Step 4: Implement ONE change for 7 days, then re-tally. This isn't theory. This is data. Data kills drama. COPY THIS SCORECARD TECH STOPPAGE SCORECARD (1 day) Waiting on parts: ___

The mindset that gets a vehicle to 250,000 miles is the same one that builds a shop technicians never want to leave. Two Technician Find community members— @Brett Beachler and @Carm Capriotto —just dropped a conversation that every shop owner needs to hear. It's about vehicle maintenance on the surface. But underneath? It's about something bigger. Here's the pattern they exposed: Most shops treat maintenance as a series of isolated repairs. "Fix what's broken. Move on." And most shops treat hiring the same way. "Fill the seat. Move on." Both approaches fail for the same reason: They're reactive instead of strategic. The 250K Mile Mindset flips this completely: → From transactional service to advisory leadership → From fear-based selling to education-first communication → From chasing emergencies to building long-term relationships Sound familiar? It should. Because the shop that thinks in decades about customer vehicles is the same shop that thinks in decades about their team. Technicians notice this. They notice when your service advisor treats a customer like a partner—because that's how they want to be treated too. Culture isn't what you say. It's what you do, repeatedly, across every relationship in your shop. Watch Brett and Carm break this down: [LINK] Then ask yourself: Are you building 250K relationships with your technicians... or just fixing problems until the next breakdown?