I've shared a version of this message before. And I'm going to share it again. There's an old story about a priest who gave the same sermon every Sunday for a month straight. Same words. Same message. Week after week. Finally, one of his parishioners came up to him after church and said, "Father, are you okay? You've been preaching the same sermon for four weeks now." The priest smiled and said, "I'm fine. But I'm going to keep preaching this sermon until you start applying it in your life." That's how I feel about what I'm about to say. So here it is again. When things get hard in your hiring… do you go chase the next shiny object? Do you hire an expert or a consultant… then ignore their advice the moment the work gets boring? Do you buy a new course, ask another shop owner for advice, download a new script or ad template, try a new job platform… and then three weeks later start hunting for the NEXT new thing because results didn't show up fast enough? Be honest with yourself. Here's what that cycle actually looks like from the outside: You hit resistance. You get discouraged. You start questioning whether the tactic even works. So you start searching again. You find something new. You get excited. You start over. You hit resistance again. And the whole time, you never stayed with any single approach long enough to actually get good at it. That's not a hiring problem. That's a consistency problem. Years ago, a mentor told me something that changed the way I approach everything in business. He said: "Chris, stop searching for the perfect way to attract clients. Any tactic will work if you give it enough time and do it the right way. It will take you at least 12 months to master any tactic so be patient. And always remember, when you get impatient and try a new tactic, the clock starts over and you have another 12 months of hard work ahead of you with very little visible results." Twelve months. Not twelve days. Not twelve posts. Not twelve ad campaigns.

I got to my aunt's property this week, opened the garage door (freshly repaired after a bear tore the bottom off), and the smell of skunk nearly knocked me backward. Not a hint. Not a whiff. Full-blown, eyes-watering, gag-reflex skunk. So that was the start of my morning. Four hours of sleep. An 81-year-old woman I love very much counting on me. And a garage that smelled like something crawled in and declared war. I needed a skunk removal specialist. Sounds simple enough. It wasn't. I spent the next chunk of my morning trying to find an actual human being who removes skunks. You know what I found instead? Lead generation companies. Middlemen. Aggregators. Pages and pages of businesses that don't actually do the work — they just collect your information and sell it to someone who might. Sound familiar? I'm clicking through results, getting more frustrated by the minute, and all I can think is — this is exactly what shop owners tell me about trying to find techs. Noise everywhere. Real help buried underneath it. Somewhere in the middle of all that, my aunt bit down wrong and cracked a dental crown a couple of days ago and we still needed to take care of that too. So now I'm dealing with a skunk situation, a dental emergency, coordinating logistics for my aunt's care, and running on almost no sleep. Here's the part I want to be honest about. I love my aunt. Deeply. She's 81 years old and she matters to me more than I can put into words. And my patience still got tested. Not because she did anything wrong. Because I was tired. Because life doesn't care about your schedule or your energy level or what you had planned for the week. It just keeps coming. I felt my edges. And I didn't love that feeling. But it clarified something. In the middle of all of it — the skunk, the crown, the sleep deprivation, the logistical chaos — I also had a conversation connected to a PE firm. One of those "bigger opportunity" conversations. And honestly? The week made the answer clearer, not fuzzier.

You search your customer database. Nothing. You check your repair orders. No match. You read the review again and your stomach turns — because the language is almost identical to another 1-star review that showed up just 7 days ago. This isn't an unhappy customer. This is an attack. That's exactly what happened to @Eddie Lawrence. Eddie's a member of this community and the owner of MTR in Colorado Springs — a shop he's been building for close to 30 years. Someone was smearing MTR's name with customers, vendors, and even his own team through a variety of methods including fake Google reviews. Eddie didn't just sit there and take it. He reached out to me and we fought back, got the reviews removed, and Eddie documented the entire process step by step so you'd know exactly what to do if this happens to you. I'm going to walk you through his playbook in a minute. But first — here's the thing most shop owners don't realize: Negative reviews aren’t just a sales problem. They’re a recruiting filter. If a tech sees you don’t respond, they don’t assume “busy.” They assume “drama.” And they move on. When a tech is thinking about applying to your shop — or when they've already applied and they're doing their homework on you — one of the first things they do is check your Google reviews. And when they see unresponded-to negative reviews? They ghost. I've seen it happen over and over again across hundreds of shops. A great candidate goes silent and the shop owner can't figure out why. Then I look at their Google profile and there are 3 negative reviews with zero responses sitting right there on page one. Silence is never neutral. It's always interpreted negatively. So here's the playbook. Whether you're dealing with an unhappy customer or an outright fraud, here's exactly how to handle negative reviews — ranked from best-case to worst-case scenario. THE REVIEW RESPONSE HIERARCHY 🥇 Best outcome: Get them to take the review down.

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: ___

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.