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81 contributions to Technician Find Community
2d •
You're Not Too Busy to Focus. You're Busy Because You Haven't Decided.
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.
2 likes • 2d
where to start... three things from the mentioned book club discussion...attend to all things, everything gets shortchanged and nothing gets it's due. Mark Twain quote incomplete but fitting...The Secret to getting ahead it getting started. Last though I will repeat is... Sometimes the questions are more important than the answers. (for context they get you going in the right direction)
2 likes • 2d
BTW I am loving this book worth the time like you mentioned
5d •
Nobody ever asked her to stay.
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.
1 like • 4d
I needed to use Claude to work through my dilemma two interns and no permanent position to fill. Six bay shop with six techs and rotating interns one junior and one senior last school year from the Votech. here was the first go : This is a real crunch — two different kids, two different calculations, and the clock's moving faster than it feels like it should. The junior one is easy: no decision needed yet, just keep developing him and let next summer sort itself out naturally. The senior one is the actual dilemma, and I think it's worth being honest with yourself about what's really being asked. "I want to stay as long as possible to keep learning" is a genuine and admirable reason — but it's his reason, not a business reason. It doesn't answer the question of what role he'd actually be filling, at what pay, doing what work, for how long. Right now that's undefined, and undefined arrangements have a way of drifting until someone gets hurt by the drift — usually the intern, when it ends abruptly, or you, when you've built dependence on labor you never budgeted for. A few things worth pinning down before the end of summer forces the decision on you: - Is there real, billable work for him — not just "shadowing and learning" — that justifies paying him something? If yes, this isn't really a "keep the intern" question anymore, it's a "hire part-time or per-diem help" question, and you should treat it like any other staffing decision. - What's the actual ceiling? If there's genuinely no full-time seat coming (not this year, not next), continuing to string it along on enthusiasm alone risks him staying too long out of loyalty to you rather than what's good for his career — vo-tech kids need to be building toward journeyman hours and a real position somewhere. - Talk to him plainly, not vaguely. Something like: "Here's what I can offer you concretely for the next X months, here's what I can't promise beyond that, and here's what I think you should be watching for in terms of your own career." That's more respectful than either a mushy "sure, stick around" or a sudden cutoff in September.
1 like • 2d
in the end he will move on, not correct timing we are fully staffed and he doesn't justify someone else getting replaced. Cold hard facts, make it easier.
19d •
You Don't Need to Hire an A-Tech. You Need to Invite One.
You're writing another job ad for an A-tech. The guy who could be that A-tech is twenty feet away, elbow-deep in a brake job. He does clean work. He does everything you ask. He has never once walked into your office and said he wants more. So you filed it away. He's comfortable. He's fine where he is. If you want an A-tech, you'll go find one. He is not unambitious. He's uninvited. What if, what he does for you now is all he's been invited to do. But It's not all he can do. You can see a skill gap. It shows up in a comeback, a misdiagnosis, a job that runs long. A permission gap never shows up anywhere. That is what makes it expensive. You never see the thing costing you the most. So you go outside. You post the ad. You pay the job board. You interview strangers. You hand market rate to someone new for a seat you could have grown yourself. And the tech you grow comes with the one thing the outside hire never will. Loyalty you didn't have to buy. Both of you are waiting. You're waiting for him to raise his hand. He's waiting for you to open a door. He doesn't raise his hand because in most shops, asking for more gets you nothing. Or it paints a target on your back. Staying quiet is the safe play for him. So the standoff never breaks on its own. You hold the door. He can't open it from his side. You move first, or nobody moves. The fix is a two-minute conversation. You start it. Not a pep talk. Four moves. Name the specific thing you watch him do well. Specific. Not "you're a good worker." Name the seat out loud, with a real timeline. Ask him if he wants it. Then stop talking and let him answer. Then tell him you'll build the path. That conversation opens the door. It doesn't walk him through it. A promise with no roadmap is a wish. It feels good on Tuesday and it's gone by Friday. A real roadmap is four things. The skills he needs to close, in order. The milestones that mark real progress. A timeline, so it doesn't drift forever. And what each one unlocks. More pay. A real title. More responsibility.
2 likes • 17d
This is my reakity at the moment. working on correcting
Jul 6 •
Stop meeting technicians the day you need one.
"I don't want to be in desperation." A shop owner told me that. Seven words. That's the whole game. Because most of us recruit the same way. We wait until someone quits. Then we panic. We rush an ad live. We settle on the next guy because the position can't sit empty. Or we go the other direction. We run "We're Hiring" all year long. Always be recruiting, right? Except technicians read that ad differently than you do. A good tech sees a shop that's always hiring and thinks one of two things. "That place must have brutal turnover." Or "They're only collecting resumes." Neither one builds trust. Both quietly cost you the people you want. So you're stuck picking between two bad options. Panic later, or look desperate now. The best techs are already working. They're not on job boards. One shop I know had a master tech in mind for a year. By the time a bay opened and they reached out, he'd already taken a job somewhere else. Another shop had been talking to him the whole time. They didn't lose that tech to a better ad. They lost him to a relationship someone else already had. The biggest recruiting mistake is waiting until you need a technician before you start meeting technicians. So what if we stopped recruiting? What if we started building relationships instead? That's the whole idea behind a Future Team Campaign. It isn't a hiring campaign. It's a relationship campaign. You're not filling a bay this week. You're becoming the shop a great tech already respects, long before he needs a new job. Same shop. Same budget. Opposite message. Opposite result. A hiring ad says "we need someone." A Future Team Campaign says "this is what it's like to work here, whenever you're ready." One smells like desperation. The other builds a bench. The best time to meet your next great technician isn't after someone quits. It's months before you need them. You can run one of these yourself. Starting this week. Pick three things that make your shop worth leaving another job for. Better bays. Real training. A boss who backs his people. Whatever is true.
1 like • 22d
Looking forward to my first meeting. This is my biggest weak point.
29d •
You Don't Have an Applicant Quality Problem
There, I said it! The applicants aren't usually the problem. I know that isn't what you want to hear. But nearly every time an owner tells me the candidates are garbage, we find out nobody ever opened them or at least never reviewed and processed them correctly. I've written about this before. I'm writing about it again because I watched it happen twice in the last two weeks. Two shops, both ready to blow up a campaign that was working fine. This one keeps costing people hires. So we're going to cover it again. Here's how it sounds when it starts. "Nobody qualified is applying." "No one wants to do this kind of work anymore." "I've exhausted all other options and I don't know what else to do." So the ad gets changed. Then changed again. Then the pay goes up. Then the town takes the blame. Sit with this one for a second. "Nobody good is applying" is a check engine light. It is not a diagnosis. You would never quote a customer a repair based on how he described the noise over the phone. You'd get hands on the vehicle. You'd pull codes. You'd watch live data. You'd verify before you replaced a part. Hiring is the one system in your building where you accept the phone call description and start throwing parts at it. WHERE IT ACTUALLY BREAKS Most owners are judging applicant quality from email notifications. The automatic ones. A name. Maybe a resume snippet. Often nothing you could make a decision from. The notification is a window. The account is the shop floor. You are standing in the parking lot deciding whether the bay is clean. Last month an owner told me his campaign was dead. Nothing coming in. Ready to pull it. @Christi Warren on my team got on a screen share and opened the account with him on the phone. Twenty-two applications he had never opened. Three he would have hired. Now here is the part that stings, and it's the reason I keep writing about this. The owner usually isn't the one reviewing. He handed it to a manager. A service advisor. His wife. Somebody who has forty other things on the list.
1 like • 22d
Eye opening, I could be guilty of half of these issues
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