TL;DR — Average pay is a fence, not a starting line. You can want the top 10% of talent, or you can pay the market average. You can't post both. In this post: - Why "competitive pay" is quietly the reason your best applicants never apply - The number that actually pulls an A-tech (it isn't the average) - How a careful salary survey still hands you the wrong number - The back-of-the-table mistake that loses techs even when the money is right - The one question that exposes your real number in ten seconds 4 min read. Short on time? Catch the video on the go. ___________________________________________________ An owner described the tech he wanted in one line. The guy who chases the fault nobody else can find. The hardest seat in any shop to fill. Then I asked what he'd pay. He didn't have a number. That's not a knock on him. Almost nobody has the number ready. But the gap between I want the best diagnostic tech in my market and I'm not sure what I'd pay is where most hiring falls apart. The owner finds the market average. A salary survey, what his buddy down the road pays, a gut number. He lands on something "competitive." He posts it. Then he goes fishing for a tech who is, by definition, nowhere near average. You wrote a number built from the middle and went hunting for someone who lives at the top. The best diagnostic tech in your area already knows what he's worth. He's not guessing. He's getting pinged. Your "competitive average" sits below his number — far enough below that he doesn't even reach out. The ad doesn't offend him. It doesn't register. He scrolls past it the way you'd scroll past a job paying half what you make now. Average pay isn't a floor you negotiate up from. It's a fence that keeps the good ones on the other side. A REAL SURVEY, READ BACKWARDS I ran a full salary survey for a shop in the Charlotte market not long ago. Thirty-one usable comps — dealerships, European specialists, recon operations, independents. Real ads, real ranges.

A shop owner just got a $125/day sponsorship recommendation from Indeed. That's $3,750 a month. Here's what that money is actually doing — and why the conversation Indeed wants you having is the wrong one. Three things to take away: - The number isn't a fee. It's a bid in an auction against your panicked neighbors. - You're paying premium prices to fish in a puddle while the ocean is ten feet away. - Indeed is the world's best applicant tracking system. It's not a recruiter. Most owners are paying for the wrong job. The right question isn't "how much should I bid?" It's "where do my techs actually live?" Read time 4 minutes. Short on time? Listen to or watch the video explainer below. ________________________________________________________________________________ A shop owner forwarded me an email from Indeed. Subject line: Increase your sponsorship to stay competitive. The recommendation? $125 a day. That's $3,750 a month. To do what, exactly? If you read that and your stomach tightened, you're not alone. More of these quotes are landing in shop owners' inboxes every week. The numbers are climbing. The applications aren't. THAT $125 ISN'T A FEE. IT'S A BID. You're not paying Indeed to find you a tech. You're paying to outbid every other shop in your zip code. All of you fighting over the same small group of techs who are on the platform actively looking for work. It's an auction. The price goes up because more shops are bidding, not because more techs are arriving. When Indeed quotes you $125, that number is a thermometer for how panicked the other shops in your market are. That number going up isn't good news about the platform. It's bad news about your market. YOU'RE FISHING IN A PUDDLE A small slice of working technicians are on Indeed. Some are out of work. Some are job-hopping. Some are actively looking. That slice is who Indeed shows your ad to. Everyone else — the employed techs, the satisfied techs, the ones who haven't updated a resume in six years — they're never going to see your ad. They're not on Indeed. They're on their phones scrolling Facebook between brake jobs.

What happened in the industry. What it means for your shop. What to do about it. Read time: ~4 minutes. ___________________________________________________________________ The $500,000 Sentence Most Independent Owners Will Never Hear. "We've been here for 31 years. The shop down the street just got bought but the sign didn't change. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with that." A shop owner said that to me last Tuesday. Here's the number that should have been in his head: $500,000. By the end of this post you'll know what built that number, why most shop owners will miss it, and what to do about it before June. WHAT HAPPENED LAST WEEK Sun Auto, May 4 + May 11. Cypress, Texas (Service Street → Sun Auto Tire & Service, their 127th Texas location). Then Murfreesboro, Tennessee (Quality Tire & Auto, third Tennessee location). Network now sits at 575+ locations with 40+ added this year. Their own language: "key transportation arteries in Middle Tennessee." GreatWater 360, this week. Crosstown Auto Repair in south metro Minneapolis becomes location #155. Local name preserved. Local team preserved. Recruiting platform, procurement engine, benefits administrator, analytics stack — all new behind the wall. Kinderhook backed them in 2021 when they had seven locations in Grand Rapids. Today: 155 in ten states. Five years. Driven Brands, public-market pressure. ADW Capital made a non-binding $18/share proposal on April 30. On April 21, Driven's Audit Committee said previously issued financials for fiscal 2023, 2024, and the first three quarters of 2025 contain material errors and should not be relied on. The 10-K is delayed. Expected by June 15. The 10-Q is also late. Three different stories. Same week. One pattern most owners are reading wrong. THE MATH THAT SHOULD BE IN YOUR HEAD Your shop generates a number every year after you pay yourself a normal wage and pay your taxes. Call it $180,000 for a healthy mid-sized shop. A buyer pays a multiple of that number.

🎉 We Hit 500 Members! 🎉 A huge thank-you to every shop owner and gm in the Technician Find Skool Community. This group keeps growing because of you — your questions, wins, hiring tips, shop stories, and support for other owners. We built this community to help auto repair shop owners find better techs, make smarter hiring moves, and grow stronger teams. Now we’re 500 members strong. That’s a big deal. 🙌 Here’s to more wins, more hires, and more shops getting the help they need. Thank you for being here! — The Technician Find Team

Most "rejected" candidates aren't unqualified. They were filtered out by the wrong person on the wrong day. Your next hire is probably one of them. In this post: - Why "rejected" almost never means "unqualified" - The hard-screening mistake that filters out hands you need in bays - The 72-Hour Recovery Sprint — a 45-minute audit you can run Tuesday - The text script that re-opens the conversation - Why running this sprint is the wrong long-term answer Read time: ~4 minutes ___ A shop had 25 candidates in the rejected pile. 2 in the active pile. One of the 25 had 35 years turning wrenches. Former shop owner. Nobody called him. How many candidates are in your rejected pile right now? Here's the 90 seconds that decides who gets called. Someone in the office opens the application. They look at three things — ASE certs, years of experience, and whether the applicant filled the form / resume out correctly. Miss any one of those? Rejected. The applicant might have 35 years working in professional auto repair shops. He might have run his own shop for 15. He might have the exact skills and values that would take your shop to the next level. Doesn't matter. He didn't check the ASE box. Application closed. Rejected. Rejected doesn't mean unqualified. It means filtered out by someone running a checklist. Most owners treat the rejected pile like a graveyard. It's not. It's a holding pen. Some of those candidates really aren't a fit. They don't have the experience. They don't want the work. They're applying to everything that moves. But some of them? Some of them are the hire you've been looking for. They got filtered by the wrong person, on the wrong day, against the wrong criteria. The only way to know which is which is to look. When you screen on ASE certs, what are you actually screening for? If you're trying to find a tech who can produce — ASE is a proxy. Sometimes it's accurate. Sometimes it isn't. There are excellent techs who never bothered with the test. There are mediocre techs with a wall full of patches.