A shop I work with pays their techs full warranty hours on comebacks. Even workmanship comebacks. On purpose. Most shop owners hear that and think it's insane. It's actually one of the smartest moves in their entire operation. And it starts with a story about a bent hood. A junior tech. Second week on the job. He goes to close the hood on a brand-new van. Doesn't realize it's a prop rod, not hydraulic. Bends the hood. He walks from the shop into the front office and says something along the lines of — "Do you want my resignation or should I just go?" The owner looked at him and said: that's the kind of employee we want. He told us immediately. He didn't hide it. He didn't make an excuse. He showed us exactly who he is. That tech just hit his two-year anniversary with the shop. Now — most of us hear that and think, "Good for them." But the real question is: what did that shop build that made a second-week tech walk in and confess instead of covering it up? Because that doesn't happen by accident. A different shop owner told me that a fleet customer pulled him aside one day and said something that made his stomach drop. "We could tell the difference between a vehicle that one tech worked on versus the other guy. We weren't sure we were going to keep bringing our stuff to you." The owner had no idea. The tech had been making sloppy mistakes. Not catastrophic ones. The kind that erode trust slowly. And the tech never said a word about it. The customer knew before the owner did. That's the real cost of a shop where techs are afraid to admit when they screw up. It's not the comeback. It's the comebacks you never hear about — until a customer walks. Your name goes out the door. Not the technician's name. So how did that first shop — the one with the junior tech — build an environment where mistakes get reported instead of buried? Two things. The first is a monthly meeting with one specific question. The owner brings in lunch for the team. Nothing fancy. Pizza, subs, whatever. They talk about what's going well, what tools need replacing, what's bugging people.

I asked a shop owner in the Midwest what he wanted to advertise for pay. Six-bay shop. Been in business for years. Good reputation. He thought about it for a second. His top tech was making $34 an hour. He figured $45 an hour for the right A-tech — about $90,000 a year — would be a strong number. Then he paused. "I don't know if that's enough. What do you think?" That question — I don't know if that's enough — is the most common thing I hear when shop owners are setting a pay range for a technician ad. And it tells me everything I need to know about how most shops approach compensation. They guess. They base the number on what they've always paid, or what they think they can afford, or what the last tech negotiated, or what feels right. None of that is market data. It's instinct. And instinct is fine for a lot of things. Pricing yourself against 20+ other shops actively competing for the same tech in your zip code is not one of them. Most owners don't realize how much information the tech has that they don't. A tech who's decided to look is not reading one ad. They're reading ten. They're on Indeed at 10 PM comparing your listing to the shop in the next town, the dealership across the highway, and the fleet company that just posted a $10,000 sign-on bonus. They have more information about your local market than you do. Because they're reading every ad. You're only reading yours. Before we write a single ad for any shop we work with, we run a salary survey. Not a government wage average from two years ago. Not a Glassdoor estimate. A snapshot of what's actually being advertised right now in the shop's market. Here's what that looks like. We pull every publicly visible, currently active automotive technician job ad within a 50-mile radius of the shop. LinkedIn, Indeed, and 5 other major boards. We only include ads that show a real number — anything that says "competitive" or "DOE" without a figure gets thrown out. For each ad, we capture the shop name, the city, the low end and high end of the posted pay range, and every benefit listed — health, dental, vision, 401k, PTO, tool allowances, sign-on bonuses, schedule perks, training, relocation packages. All of it.

A shop owner — let's call him Jim — came to me a couple of years back with a job ad his business coach wrote. He wanted me to "plug it into my system." This happens more than you'd think. I looked at the ad. It was fine. A little better than the average Indeed post. But it wasn't a scroll-stopper. It wasn't going to grab a working tech's attention and make him curious enough to click and learn more. So I asked Jim a question. "Jim, what do you tell a customer who comes into your shop and asks if you can install the parts they bought at AutoZone?" He didn't hesitate. "We don't do that." "Jim, you just walked into my office and dropped a bag of parts on my desk that you want me to install on the hiring vehicle we're building for you." He got it immediately. Here's what I didn't mention to Jim in that moment: That week alone, we were running approximately 600 automotive technician ads across 30 shops all over the United States. I'd be willing to bet the business coach who gave Jim that ad hadn't run 600 ads in his entire career. And here's the thing most shop owners don't think about — The reason I wouldn't run his ad is the exact same reason he won't install customer supplied AutoZone parts: - I can't be sure of the quality. Just like he can't be sure of the condition of those parts. - If we don't get results, it's still on us. Just like if a customer's part fails, the shop still takes the heat. - It compromises the entire system we've built. Just like installing random parts compromises the integrity of the repair. I told Jim he was welcome to run the ad on his own and compare it to our results. If it pulled a good tech, he could look like a hero. If it failed, we'd still be running a proven system with years of solid results as a backup. Here's the pattern I see: Shop owners know instantly why they don't install customer-supplied parts. They don't even have to think about it. But they'll hand their most critical business problem — finding the right technician — to someone who's never run a recruiting campaign in their market.

"I can't afford to recruit right now." I've heard this from dozens of shop owners over the years. And every single one of them would fix a broken lift the same week. But an empty bay? They'll let that sit for a year. Same lift. Same lost production. But because nobody sends you an invoice for an empty bay, it doesn't feel real. Until you see the number. Hunt Demarest — CPA, author of Beyond the Bays — ran the math across his client base. An empty bay costs roughly $175,000 a year. Not in revenue. In GROSS PROFIT DOLLARS out of your pocket. I just went back on Hunt's podcast Business by the Numbers for a second time. I'm the first returning guest he's ever had by-the-way😎 We got into: → Why one A-tech narrowed her search to six shops — and exactly what the winning shop did that the other five didn't → The reason every ChatGPT-written job ad looks identical to every other ad on Indeed (and what that's actually costing you) → What most shops get dead wrong in the two weeks between an accepted offer and a toolbox drop → Something I announced publicly for the first time If you've got an empty bay right now — or you're one Friday afternoon conversation away from one — this is the episode you need to watch.👇

He walks through the front door at 6:40 PM. Boots on the mat. Doesn't say much. Grabs a plate, sits down, picks at dinner while the kids talk about school. His wife watches him from across the table. She doesn't ask how work was. She already knows. He's been coming home like this for months. Same look. Same silence. Same heaviness he carries from the shop to the truck to the driveway to the kitchen and right into the chair where he sits like a man who's given eight hours of himself to a place that gave nothing back. She's heard it all. The broken equipment nobody fixes. The comebacks that aren't his fault but somehow land on him. The new guy who doesn't pull his weight. The owner who hasn't said "good job" since 2019. She doesn't bring it up anymore. He doesn't want to talk about it. So they don't. But she's paying attention. One night she's on her phone after the kids go to bed. Scrolling Facebook. And something stops her. It's a job ad. For a shop she's never heard of. But it doesn't read like a job ad. It talks about the team. About how techs are treated. About the schedule — and the fact that people actually go home on time. It mentions training. Growth. A culture where people want to stay. It's long but she reads it twice. Then she walks into the living room, sits down next to him, and says five words that change everything: "Hey. You need to see this." That moment — right there on the couch, phone in hand — is the most important interview your shop will ever have. And you weren't even in the room. I see this pattern constantly. The best hires, the ones who show up ready and stay long, often didn't find the ad themselves. Someone who loves them did. A spouse. A girlfriend. A buddy who was tired of hearing them complain every Friday at the bar. The tech wasn't looking. They'd made peace with being miserable. It wasn't bad enough to leave. Just bad enough to stop caring. But the person next to them? They hadn't made peace with it. They saw what the job was doing to someone they love. And when the right opportunity showed up in their feed, they didn't scroll past it.