8d • 📣General discussion📣
You're doing everything you can see
One owner on a peer group call put it better than I ever have.
It's easy to get stuck in a rut and think you're crushing it. That you're doing everything you can.
Then you sit in a room with owners further down the road.
And you find out what's actually possible.
Here's the version I see over and over.
An owner with 20, 30 years in the business goes to a training event. Or starts working with a new coach.
And he comes home lit up like a first-year apprentice.
Talking fast. Notebook full. Monday's meeting already planned in his head.
This isn't a rookie. This is a guy who's made it through recessions, parts shortages, and more comebacks than he'd care to count.
A month later, the notebook's in a drawer.
It's not that he isn't serious. He's one of the most serious operators you'll meet.
It's something almost nobody figures out on their own. I'll come back to it.
EVERYTHING YOU CAN SEE
If you're reading this thinking, "I'm already doing everything I can," I believe you.
You're doing everything you can see.
And what you can see depends on the room you've been standing in.
Every owner has a gauge in his head. It got calibrated by the shops you know, the numbers you've hit, the stories you hear at the parts counter.
When you say "we're crushing it," you're reading that gauge. And you're reading it right.
The rut isn't laziness.
You're reading the gauge right. It's just calibrated to the wrong spec.
WHY THE ROOM WORKS
Here's what I think that owner was pointing at.
The room doesn't give you ideas alone. You can get ideas from a podcast on the drive in.
The room gives you evidence.
The thing you filed under "not possible for a shop like mine" is sitting across the table from you. Eating the same bad conference lunch.
Ideas are cheap. Evidence changes what you believe.
Wanna bet?
There's a book I keep coming back to. Thinking in Bets, by Annie Duke. She was a professional poker player, and the book is about making decisions when you can't see all the cards.
Which is every day in a shop.
Most of what we believe, we picked up casually. We heard it, it sounded right, and we never went back to check.
Her fix is simple. The moment you state something as true, imagine someone across the table saying, "Wanna bet?"
Try it on this one:
"No one wants to do this kind of work anymore."
Would you bet $10,000 on that?
How sure are you? 100%? 80%? 60%?
Notice what happens when you put a number on it. It stops feeling like a fact.
Here's the filter. If a belief is about the future, or about what thousands of people you've never met are going to do, it isn't a fact.
It's a forecast.
"No one wants to do this work" is a forecast about every tech in North America.
And forecasts have a nasty habit.
If you believe there are no good techs in your town, you stop looking. When you stop looking, you don't find any.
Then you're right.
Beliefs don't just describe your shop. They staff it.
WHY THE FIRE GOES OUT
Back to the owner who came home lit up.
He didn't lose the fire. He carried it back into a building where nobody else saw what he saw.
He brought home the notebook. He didn't bring home the room.
Your guys will argue with you about flat rate all day long.
Nobody's going to argue that your whole picture is too small.
That quiet feels like being right. It's really just nobody checking.
Duke writes about the small group of players who made her better. They didn't cheer her on. They made her explain her thinking, whether she won the hand or lost it.
That's what the owner on that call felt. A room that made his old beliefs answer for themselves.
Most owners get that a few times a year. If they're lucky.
THE ROOM IN YOUR POCKET
You can't be in that room every day. But you can run the same questions it asks.
Four moves. I call it the Wanna Bet Audit.
1️⃣ Name it. Write the belief the way you'd say it at the counter.
2️⃣ Price it. How sure are you, 0 to 100?
3️⃣ Find the counterexample. Who's already doing the thing you think can't be done?
4️⃣ Shrink the bet. What's the smallest test you could run in the next 30 days that would move your number 10 points, either way?
Here's a prompt that walks you through it. Paste it into your Technician Find Copilot Bot, pick one belief, and give it 10 minutes.
Any AI tool works: ChatGPT, Claude, whatever you already use. But Copilot is already trained on your shop, so it skips the small talk and gets to the hard questions faster.
Copilot asks the questions. You do the thinking.
👉"I want you to be my thought partner, the way a sharp owner in a good peer group would be. Not a cheerleader. Not a lecturer. Someone who respects what I've built and still won't let me get away with lazy thinking.
Here's a belief about my shop I want to pressure-test:
[WRITE IT THE WAY YOU'D SAY IT AT THE COUNTER]
Walk me through it one question at a time. Wait for my answer before you ask the next one.
1. Ask me how sure I am that this belief is true, from 0 to 100, and whether I'd bet $10,000 on it.
2. Help me figure out if it's a fact or a forecast. If it's about the future, or about what people I've never met will do, call it a forecast.
3. Ask me where this belief came from. Something I saw? Something I heard? One bad experience that stuck?
4. Ask me who might already be doing the thing I think can't be done. If I say nobody, push me to think wider: another shop, another town, another industry.
5. Show me how this belief might be shaping what I do and don't try, and how that could be keeping it true.
6. Help me design one small test I could run in the next 30 days that would move my number at least 10 points, either direction.
When we're done, give me:
- My starting number and where I'd put it now
- The one test I'm running, with a start date
- One plain sentence I could say to my team or my spouse about what I'm testing
Keep it plain. Short questions. Talk like a shop owner, not a consultant. If I dodge a question or say "it's different here," call it out kindly and ask again."👈
Not sure where to start? Pick one of these:
"No one wants to do this kind of work anymore."
"There just aren't good techs in my town."
"My customers won't pay more than they do now."
"If I'm not here, the place falls apart."
"I'm already doing everything I can."
Run it tonight. Then drop your before and after numbers in the comments. You don't have to say what the belief was.
P.S. Run the prompt on "I'm already doing everything I can." If your number barely moves, it's worth knowing one thing: is the ceiling out there, or in here?
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You're doing everything you can see
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