24d • 📣General discussion📣
WHERE’S THE OWNER? SHOULDN’T HE BE HERE?
"He's always gone. Must be nice."
If you own a shop, somebody in your building has said that about you. Probably this month.
Buck Monson wrote the best answer to it I've read. He owns a diesel repair and HD towing shop in Davenport, Iowa, and posted this in his TruckShop411.com community. He gave me permission to bring it over here.
Read all the way to the Army stretcher.
If you've built a shop that runs without you standing in the middle of it, this one is a victory lap. If you're still climbing, it's a roadmap.
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WHERE’S THE OWNER? SHOULDN’T HE BE HERE?
“He’s always gone. Must be nice.”
I was a young lad once, and I’m sure at some point I looked at a business owner and thought the same damn thing.
Where is he? Why isn’t he here working with everybody else?
What a young technician usually doesn’t understand is that he’s looking at Chapter 20 of a book and judging it without reading Chapters 1 through 19.
Most successful truck shop owners I know didn’t start out with managers, supervisors, service writers, established customers, nice equipment and money in the bank.
A lot of us went through hell getting there.
BEFORE “MUST BE NICE”
Starting a truck repair business can mean taking damn near everything you’ve got and putting it on the line.
Maybe you sell equipment. Maybe you drain your savings. Maybe you borrow money. Maybe your spouse helps keep everything together while you’re trying to get the doors open.
Then the bills start.
The building.
The equipment.
Diagnostic computers and software.
Insurance.
Payroll.
Workers’ compensation.
Utilities.
Trash.
Parts.
Service trucks.
Taxes.
And about 500 other expenses you never knew existed until you owned a business.
Then come all those customers who told you:
“If you ever open your own shop, we’ll bring everything to you.”
You open the doors and suddenly half of them can’t remember your phone number.
Funny how that works.
But after you’ve struggled for a few years, built a reputation, hired good people and proven you’re going to make it, some of those same people show up.
“I always knew you were going to make it.”
And you’re thinking:
Where the hell were you when I was trying to climb the ladder?
THEY DIDN’T SEE THOSE NIGHTS
There were times in my early years when there were only a handful of us.
When somebody didn’t show up, there wasn’t another department to call.
You were the department.
I remember working ridiculous hours. Thirty-plus hours straight wasn’t unheard of.
I remember being so sick somebody practically had to pull me out of the truck and lay me on a bench. They were talking about taking me to the emergency room.
Did I go?
Hell no.
Probably because I was a dumbass, but also because when you’re building something and every dollar matters, you convince yourself you don’t have time to be sick.
I remember driving an hour toward home after an exhausting day, finally pulling into the driveway and putting my hand on the door—
BEEP.
Yes, youngsters, we had pagers.
Another road call.
Turn around and drive all the way back.
Sometimes that happened two or three times in one night.
Eventually it wasn’t worth driving home anymore.
So I slept at the shop.
I slept in an F-250.
For the record, Ford did not design the F-250 as a luxury hotel.
I bought an Army stretcher because I could fold it up and stand it against the wall during the day. At night I’d unfold it and sleep on it with my arms hanging off the sides.
I slept across two desks.
That was the owner’s suite.
THERE WASN’T ALWAYS SOMEBODY TO CALL
Today we have networks, groups, training programs, online communities and people across the country we can reach when we have a problem.
Back then, a lot of that didn’t exist.
If you didn’t know how to do something, you figured the damn thing out.
Repair problems.
Employee problems.
Customer problems.
Pricing problems.
Insurance problems.
Accounting problems.
Management problems.
Nobody hands you an owner’s manual when you open a truck shop.
Then a technician doesn’t show up.
You’ve already promised the customer the truck.
So now you’re the technician.
You stay late and finish his work—only to discover the job wasn’t planned correctly and you don’t have all the parts.
Now you’re the parts department too.
Tomorrow morning you’ll get to be the owner again.
THEN SOMETHING STARTS TO HAPPEN
You hire one good employee.
Then another.
You learn to read people a little better.
You make mistakes hiring people.
You make mistakes firing people.
You make mistakes pricing jobs.
You buy equipment you probably shouldn’t have bought and don’t buy equipment you should have.
But every year, you get a little better.
Every employee who becomes great at his position moves the company another step forward.
The frustrating part is that sometimes you’ll plateau.
You’ll go through an entire year thinking:
We didn’t accomplish a damn thing.
Here’s something I’ve learned.
Take out a piece of paper and write down everything that improved during that year.
The employee you trained.
The piece of equipment you added.
The customer you gained.
The procedure you finally put in place.
The debt you paid down.
The mistake you stopped making.
The manager who can now handle something that used to require you.
Suddenly you realize:
We actually moved a long way.
It just never feels fast enough when you’re standing in the middle of it.
“THE OWNER IS NEVER HERE.”
Eventually, if you’ve done your job correctly, something strange happens.
The company doesn’t need you standing in the middle of the shop every minute.
And that’s not failure.
That’s success.
An owner’s job should eventually change.
His job isn’t to stand over a technician asking why that brake job isn’t done yet.
His job is to build the company that keeps that technician working.
His job is to think about next year.
And five years from now.
His job is making sure there’s enough work.
Enough cash.
Enough equipment.
Enough training.
Enough leadership.
Enough opportunity.
And enough stability to survive the next downturn, lawsuit, lost customer, broken piece of equipment, bad hire or whatever else gets thrown through the front door.
If I have 30 employees and many of them have spouses and children, I’m not thinking about 30 people anymore.
I’m thinking about dozens of families depending, at least partly, on this company continuing to succeed.
That’s a different responsibility.
THE BEST EMPLOYEES ACTUALLY DON’T NEED THE OWNER AROUND
I’ve got great people today.
They don’t care if I’m there every minute.
In fact, they probably prefer that I’m not sticking my nose into everything.
They don’t mind seeing me.
They just want me to stay the hell out of their job description.
And they’re right.
If I hire somebody to manage something, train him, give him authority, establish policies and procedures—and then stand over his shoulder telling him how to do everything—
why did I hire him?
That’s micromanagement, not leadership.
A successful owner should be building people who can make decisions without asking him 50 questions every day.
THE VIEW FROM THE BOTTOM OF THE LADDER
I don’t blame a young technician for not understanding this.
When you’re 22, 25 or 30 years old, retirement seems about 400 years away.
A 401(k)?
Who gives a shit? That’s old-people stuff.
Then you blink.
And somehow you’re the old guy.
Every successful owner was young once.
We remember wanting more money.
We remember thinking somebody else had it easier.
We remember looking up the ladder and wondering why the guy at the top wasn’t climbing as hard as we were.
What we couldn’t see was that he had already climbed those rungs.
Maybe the reason the owner can leave at 2:00 today is because there were years when he couldn’t leave at all.
Maybe he’s taking the afternoon off because there were hundreds of nights when he didn’t get an afternoon, evening or weekend.
Maybe he’s traveling because there were years when every extra dollar went into payroll, equipment and keeping the doors open.
And maybe—just maybe—after spending most of his life building a company, creating jobs and trying to improve the lives of the people who helped him build it…
he’s earned the right to enjoy some of the fruits of that labor.
So the next time somebody says:
“Where’s the owner? He’s never here.”
Maybe that’s not the insult they think it is.
Maybe the better question is:
“What did he have to build so he didn’t have to be here?”
Because when a truck shop can operate successfully without the owner standing in the middle of it every day, that owner hasn’t abandoned his business.
He finally built a business instead of building himself a job.
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WHERE’S THE OWNER? SHOULDN’T HE BE HERE?
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