"A-level would be great, but we've lost hope. I'd settle for a B or C." A shop owner sent me that. He thinks he described his market. He described himself. That sentence isn't about technicians. It's about what he thinks he can get. And he'll get it. You always do. Every shop has a ceiling. It isn't the building. It isn't the bays. It isn't the town. The ceiling is the best tech you can sit across from without shrinking. Think about the last one who intimidated you a little. The guy who knew more than you about something, and you both knew it. Who asked what you're running for scan tools, then waited. Now go look at who you hired instead. That wasn't the market. That was comfort. You made the call before he left the parking lot. We hire comfortably. Comfortable is almost always one grade down. Then we call it a shortage. An owner out west told me he used to sit in interviews with a sentence looping in his head. "This guy's not going to come to work for me." He'd think it while the man was still talking. Every interview. For years. Then he caught it. Tell yourself something long enough and you'll believe it. Believe it long enough and you'll show it. So he flipped the sentence. This guy might work for me. This guy's starting Monday. He wasn't chanting affirmations. He'd stopped rehearsing the rejection in front of the man he was trying to hire. Because the sentence in your head doesn't stay in your head. It comes out in your shoulders. In how fast you answer. In the pause before you say what your shop is worth. He isn't reading your words. He's reading your face while you say them. And when it falls through, we all reach for the same lever. Money. I hear a version of this constantly. Willing to pay more. Still can't get them to commit. That's not the market failing you. That's a confidence problem wearing a money costume. Money is what you reach for when you've run out of things to say. It's the one number you can move by yourself, so it feels like doing something.

One shop owner admitted it on the EasyBench call last week. Nobody said anything for a few seconds, because he'd described the whole room. "I'm busy all day, every day. I don't know if I'm busy on the right things." He wasn't complaining. That's what made it land. Nobody jumped in. You could feel guys running their own week against that sentence and not liking the math. It costs a man something to say that in front of other owners. Owners aren't supposed to be confused. Everybody in the building is waiting on you for the answer. Then another owner answered him in four words. "Read The One Thing." Good advice. Incomplete advice. Most owners who read that book close it fired up. They block off Tuesday morning. By Thursday he's back in the bays with a scan tool in his hand. The book is right. It's also missing a step. You cannot find your one thing without two pieces of information. Most owners have never written down either one. Both of them are in here. By the end you'll know the one thing to do tomorrow before you touch anything else. And why the other forty can wait. "WORK ON THE BUSINESS, NOT IN IT" HAS NEVER ONCE HELPED YOU AT 7:15 ON A TUESDAY You've heard that line four hundred times. From a stage. From a coach. From a guy in a Facebook group who has never had a tech call out. It's true. It's also useless as an instruction. At 7:15 AM on a Tuesday a tech calls out, eleven cars are promised by five, and the parts guy left a voicemail you already know you're going to hate. Nobody has told you which of those to drop. In most businesses, urgent and unimportant are easy to tell apart. The email chain nobody needs. The meeting about the meeting. You can spot the junk from across the room. Your shop doesn't work that way. The comeback is urgent and important. The customer standing in your lobby is urgent and important. The delayed part is holding a car that's holding a bay that's holding your week. You are not wrong to handle any of it. That's the trap. It isn't laziness. Laziness would be easy to spot and easy to fix.

Two high school kids rotate through a shop I know. Two weeks on, two weeks off. Sharp kids. Show up early. The techs like them. Both of them have told the owner they aren't staying in this industry. Nobody ever asked them to. Nobody ever showed them what this job looks like in fifteen years. I read a piece this week about young people flooding back into the trades. Six out of ten Gen Z adults surveyed said they're going blue collar this year. They watched a generation take on six figures of debt for a degree that didn't guarantee anything, and they did the math. Most owners will read that and feel some relief. Then look at the trades reporting the worst shortages this year. Electricians. Welders. HVAC. Plumbers. Heavy equipment mechanics. We're not on that list. That's not because we're fine. The kid in your town who decides to work with his hands has options now. HVAC is hiring. Electrical is hiring. Somewhere within a hundred miles of most of us there's a data center going up, and they pay apprentices while they learn. So when that kid picks, he isn't choosing between your shop and a four-year degree. He's choosing between your shop and an outfit across town with a written apprenticeship, a posted starting wage, and one person whose entire job is finding him. You've been fighting the dealer for twenty years. You know how the dealer fights. This one doesn't fight like a dealer. Here's the only number in this you need to hold onto. Between now and 2032, four skilled workers retire for every three coming in behind them. That gap doesn't close. It widens every year. Which means the technician you go looking for in 2029 will cost more and be harder to find than the one you could start building a relationship with this month. Kids aren't avoiding this trade because they hate the work. They're avoiding it because nobody in their life ever showed them the work. You can't hire your way out of that. A kid who never considered the job is never going to answer your ad.

@John Hitch is the editor in chief over there. He called about why shops are losing techs. The article's awesome and I've linked to it at the bottom of the post. This is the rest of it. THE MOMENT HE LEAVES A tech tells you the lift is acting up. Nothing happens. He tells you again. Nothing happens. The third time, he doesn't tell you. That's the moment he left. The notice shows up months later. Friday afternoon, with a reason you can't do anything with. When I talk to techs who are job shopping, the word that keeps coming up is disgust. Not with you. With themselves, for putting up with it as long as they did. Anger is loud. Disgust is quiet. That's why you never see it coming. Culture isn't a feeling. It's a response time. YOU DON'T HAVE TO FIX IT You don't answer because you can't solve it. The bay's too tight. The lift is real money. The schedule won't allow it. So you say nothing and hope it stops coming up. It does stop coming up. That's the problem. He wasn't asking to be fixed. He was asking to be answered. "I can't do that this year. Here's why. Ask me again in March" closes the loop. Costs you nothing. And he's standing in a shop that heard him. Silence is the only response that reads as contempt. ASK YOUR TOOL GUY. DON'T ASK YOUR TECHS. You want to know whether you've got a problem, so you ask your guys how things are going. Your guys are the exact people who stopped telling you things. Your tool guy hits a dozen shops a week. Nobody pays him to tell you what you want to hear. He knows what your shop sounds like when you're not standing in it. Don't ask him about your shop. He'll tell you it's fine. He sells to you. Ask him about everybody else. - Which shops around here are guys trying to get into? - Anybody been asking you about openings? - If you were 28 and turning wrenches, where would you want to be? What he praises in other shops is what you're missing. And the fact that he won't burn them to you is how you know he isn't burning you to them.

You remember where you were standing. End of the day. She caught you by the parts counter. The good one — four years in, the one you hand the customers nobody else can handle. "Can I ask you something? Where does this go for me?" And you said something true and completely useless. There's definitely room to grow here. Let's talk about it after the summer. Or the one you knew was garbage the second it left your mouth: Keep doing what you're doing. She nodded. Went back out front. Nothing changed. Except something did. Because nobody asks that question for no reason. People don't wonder where the path goes until they've already started wondering whether there is one. And by the time somebody asks you out loud, they've usually asked somebody else first. Here's what got my attention. I haven't seen a lot of real surveys on what service advisors want. The front counter seems to be the least-measured part of this industry — which tells you about how much thought it gets. So the closest thing we have comes from the tech side. In the 2026 Voice of Technician Report, 94% of technicians said a documented career path matters to them. 27% said their shop actually has one. Ninety-four and twenty-seven. Almost everybody wants it. Almost nobody has it. And that's the gap on the side of the shop somebody actually studied. You can guess what it looks like out front. So I built the thing I wish I'd had when I talk to shops about recruiting and retaining service advisors. → Service Advisor Career Path Builder: [ChatGPT LINK] It's free. You answer questions, it builds the path — front counter hire, to Service Advisor, to Senior Advisor, to Service Manager. All the way to General Manager, if that's where you're headed. Three things make it different from every career path template you've ever been handed: 1. It builds off your numbers, not somebody's national average.