1d • 📜Shop Culture📜
You don't have a turnover problem.
You don't have a turnover problem.
You have one seat that eats people.
Maybe two. Maybe three.
Ten minutes and one sheet of paper will tell you which ones.
"I can't keep anybody."
I hear it every week. Then I ask how long the lead tech has been there.
"Oh, forever."
So which is it?
Same ad. Same spot. Running again. And somewhere along the way, you quietly decided you're just bad at picking people.
You're probably not.
One shop owner in this group has an office manager going on 40 years. His lead tech is at 21. Average tenure is about seven years.
Then he named the real pattern in one sentence:
"It's that short little window of that last three or four seats that just seem to be rotating."
Three or four seats. Out of the whole shop.
He doesn't have a turnover problem either.
Average tenure is a number that hides the only thing you need to see.
A dozen people who never leave and three chairs that have had nine people in them can average out just fine. The average says healthy. The chairs say bleeding.
Turnover isn't a number.
It's a map.
Here's where it gets expensive.
When it feels like everybody's leaving, you reach for the shop-wide fix. New pay plan. Team meeting about attitude. Better benefits.
So you raise pay for twelve people to fix one chair.
Your lifers sit through a meeting about why people quit.
And the seat keeps eating people. Because nobody ever looked at the seat.
You know what you call a tech who replaces the same part three times without finding out why it keeps failing?
A parts changer.
That's what we do with people. Three hires. Same chair. And three times, you told yourself you picked wrong.
They weren't three separate failures.
They were all telling you the same thing. You just heard it one at a time.
Every shop has two kinds of seats.
The Launchpad. People leave it going up. Lube tech becomes B-tech. That's not turnover. That's you doing your job.
The Trapdoor. People leave it going out, usually inside the first year. That seat is broken.
Here's the filter. If the seats around it aren't burning, the problem is the seat. Not the people you keep putting in it.
Diagnose the seat like you'd diagnose a vehicle. Four questions:
Does the pay match the job as it is today, or the job it was when you set the rate?
Who does this seat answer to, and has that stayed the same through every exit?
What lands here that nobody else will touch? The comebacks. The dog jobs. The 4:45 Friday drop-off.
Does your job ad describe the seat that actually exists?
Monday morning, grab one sheet.
Every seat in the shop. Years the current person has been in it. Every name that's held it in the last three years.
Ten minutes.
It will tell you where your money is going.
If the chair that keeps emptying is the one that answers to you, the fix might not be a hire. It may be coaching.
If the seat's fixed and you just need the right person in it, I take 4 Hiring Strategy Calls a week: [Talk to Chris]
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1 comment
You don't have a turnover problem.
skool.com/technicianfind
Proven templates, strategies, training and top-level networking to help independent auto repair shops hire quality staff faster.
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