This is Kevin the iguana. He's our new buddy. He hangs out in the cabana here in Cancun. He loves carne asada tacos and corn chips. We tried to catch him but he's too fast. @Brian Nerger no he doesn't drink tequila... Even on Cinco De Mayo. Smart lizzard!

In the world of automotive service, we often treat hiring like a "check engine" light. We wait for a vacancy to glow yellow on the dashboard, scramble to scan for a fix (a job posting), and hope the first part we throw at it—the first applicant—clears the code. But here’s the reality: Hiring isn't a repair job; it’s preventative maintenance. If you’re only looking for talent when you have an empty bay, you’ve already lost. Building a high-performing shop—from your C- & B-techs and General Service pros to your lead A-techs and Service Advisors—is a carefully built long-distance relationship, not a sprint. Part 1: Recruiting is Relationship Management The best technicians and advisors usually aren't looking for a job today. They’re working. But they are watching. They are observing how you treat your team, how your shop looks, and what your reputation is in the community. The "Why" Behind the Move People leave shops for reasons that are sometimes tangible and sometimes entirely "perceived." As an employer, it doesn't matter if the grass is actually greener or if they just think it is—the result is the same. They move for: - The Big Three: Money, Benefits, and Seniority. - The Emotional Drivers: Respect, feeling heard, and work-life balance. - The Future: Career advancement, training opportunities, and modern equipment. - The Reputation: They want to work for a shop that customers trust. Your Google reviews aren't just for clients; they are a recruiting brochure for top-tier talent. The Strategy: Always Be Planting Seeds You need to be building a "bench" of talent long before you need them. This means maintaining casual professional relationships with Techs and Advisors at other shops, vendors, and even students at local trade schools. - Listen to the "Secret Agents": Your parts drivers see the internal weather of every shop in the zip code. If a shop down the street is melting down, they know first. Treat your vendors well, and they’ll tell you whose "check engine light" just came on. - Have a System: Treat recruiting like a CRM. Have a central place that all managers use to reach out monthly via a short text check-in (texting is usually more effective). Keep a record of their name, phone number, specific talents, where they work, and a log of every touchpoint.

Most shops blame the market or the tech when they get ghosted. The real leak is usually the person making the first phone call. In this post: - Why ghosting is usually not a candidate problem - What the tech actually decides in the first 90 seconds - The reframe from "screening call" to "audition call" - The Monday diagnostic to find your leak in 15 minutes - The resentment layer most shops never name Read time: ~4 minutes ___________________________________________________________________________________________ The tech isn't ghosting you. He's ghosting the person who called him. And the person who called him is probably someone in your shop right now who would rather be doing anything else. Here's the pattern I see in shops that can't hire. It has nothing to do with the market. It has nothing to do with the ad. It has nothing to do with the generation. It has to do with 90 seconds of phone audio. There's a guy I'll call Bill. He's the GM. He's supposed to be running things. He's supposed to be calling the applicants. He does. Kind of. He calls them the way you'd cancel a dentist appointment. Flat voice. A couple of random questions. Checks the box that he made the call. Moves on. And then wonders why nobody shows up for the interview or why they start screening his calls. Here's what the candidate hears on that call. This guy doesn't care if I take this job. This shop is probably like the last one. I'm not rearranging my Tuesday for this. That's the decision. It takes 90 seconds. He hangs up polite. He doesn't show. You think he ghosted you. He didn't. He decided. You just weren't in the room for the decision. Most owners think the first call is a screen. It's not. It's an audition. And your shop is the one auditioning. The tech is deciding whether you're worth a Tuesday. Whether you're worth driving 30 minutes for. Whether you're worth leaving his current shop — where at least he knows where the bathroom is. You're not evaluating him.

Can $5K in pizza outwork $60K in turnover? A $5K weekly lunch habit beats a $60K bad hire — if you ask the right question and shut up after. In this post: - The question that turns "fine" into a fix. - Why monthly meetings fail where weekly ones win. - The ten-second discipline that makes or breaks the meeting (and it's not the lunch). - The math: $29,500 per bay × 50% gross profit, and why $5K starts looking cheap. - The six-step Monday version — including the week most owners quit before it works. 4 min read. Short on time? Watch or listen to the video walkthrough below while you're on the go. ___ Five thousand dollars a year. That's what a shop in the Midwest spends on Thursday lunch for the team. They've been doing it for ten years. They've fired exactly two people in that time. Most of the team has been there since the day they were hired. It's not the lunch. Same day, every week. That's the cadence. One question with a specific shape: "If we tweaked one process around here, what would you tweak?" Then the owners shut up. Three things, working together. None of them work alone. WHY WEEKLY Most shops run feedback as an event. Annual reviews. Quarterly check-ins. Maybe a monthly meeting if the owner is ambitious. Each one fails for a different reason. Annual reviews show up too late. By the time you hear about the broken process, the tech has either worked around it or left. Quarterly check-ins turn into HR theater. Everyone shows up with rehearsed answers because they've had three months to forget what was actually irritating them in March. Monthly meetings get closer. But the average tech has already swallowed three or four small complaints by the time the meeting comes around. Most won't bother resurfacing them. Weekly is different. The irritation is fresh. The tech remembers the exact thing that broke yesterday. The fix is still cheap. Frequency is what converts feedback into a culture. Without it, feedback decays into compliance — and compliance is what techs do right before they update their resume.

A shop owner told me this about a tech he'd talked to six months earlier. Good tech. Great vibe. Not quite ready to make a move. The owner meant to follow up. He just never knew what to send that wouldn't sound like "ready to come over yet?" So he sent nothing. Six months went by. The tech took a job somewhere else. That's not a recruiting failure. That's a follow-up failure. And it's the most common one I see. Here's what we dug into on last Thursday's EasyBench clinic: → Three new texts in the Stealth Script Library that you can send to any tech on your Bench Board — no job mention, no pitch, no ask. One shares a diagnostic shortcut. One surfaces a career question the tech can't stop thinking about. One asks for the tech's opinion on a tool — which flips the dynamic so the tech feels like the expert, not the target. Each one is under 60 words. Read-it-at-the-lift short. Send one every few weeks and by the time you have an opening, you've already earned the conversation. → A new swipe-and-deploy ad built from something ugly. A tech told me he got thrown under the bus by name in his shop's Google review response. Three hours of chasing an intermittent misfire two other shops gave up on — and the owner publicly blamed him for the comeback. The campaign uses that scenario to let your shop show it does the opposite. The CTA asks techs to comment "mine" if their shop has their back. The ones who can will. The ones who can't will follow your page quietly for months. That's your bench growing in the background. → A custom GPT that shows you how your shop stacks up against your 15 nearest competitors — through a technician's eyes. Not your eyes. Theirs. What they'd see when they compare your pay, your schedule, your culture, your training, your online reputation to the shop three miles away. It scores you, ranks you, and tells you exactly where you're exposed. One member pulled his report and told me offline he finally understood why he kept losing candidates to a shop he thought was worse than his.