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Life Calibration Community
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Technician Find Community
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83 contributions to Technician Find Community
23d •
Ask five people in your shop the same question. Count the answers.
I ask every shop owner the same question. A tech is sitting across your desk. He tells you he has offers from two other shops. Why should he pick you? The best answer I ever got wasn't an answer. The owner told me to go ask his guys. Don't interview me. Walk the shop. Talk to anybody you want, by yourself. Then decide. An owner in a different state said nearly the same thing. He'd hand the tech to his lead technician and get out of the way. Neither one answered the question. Both of them passed the test. Other owners go quiet. I ask, and the line goes silent. Not because the shop is bad. Some of these are good shops. Clean bays, guys who've been there ten years. The owner has never had to say it out loud, so it isn't there when he reaches for it. That owner doesn't run the interview. He sits through it. The tech is running it, and he already has two other offers. Most owners land in the middle. They have a good answer. Clear, specific, true. That's the dangerous one. The quiet owner knows he has a problem. The one with the good answer doesn't. The answer never leaves his head. So it never reaches his team. So it never reaches the tech. The test is already running on your shop. You're not the one giving it. A tech who's considering you asks the tool truck driver. He asks the parts guy who runs your route. He asks the buddy he plays ball with who quit on you two years ago. He reads your ad one time. He hears their version ten times. A tech told me how he sizes up a shop. He pulls the Google reviews and sorts by one star. He wants to see how you answer when somebody comes at you. That tells him more than any five-star ever will. You don't get to skip this test. You only get to decide whether you ever hear the results. Your ad is a copy. The original lives in what your team says about you when you're not standing there. Which is why rewriting the ad doesn't fix six months of nothing. That's painting over rust. The ad gets better. The tech still doesn't come.
2 likes • 22d
i will be working on this elevator pitch. I will definitely mention the longevity of my staff. I will also emphasize this is a career not a job, if you are looking for different opportunity immediately I am not interested. There is this weird sense that the interviewer should be selling me on why I should invest in them. I know not the reality but in my mind I am thinking if they are worth the effort we will put into them. As I type this it feels arrogant, but I am not interested in wasting our resources. So I better refine these thought for when they are needed. Thanks for the extra homework 👀
Aug 13 •
The best tech in ten weeks is sitting in a folder
I am watching a campaign right now where the strongest applicant in ten weeks has been sitting untouched for six days. One voicemail. No callback. Nobody has tried again. Euro dealer tech. About 25 minutes out. Two dealers in four years, short runs at both. The shop called once, left a message, marked him under review, and moved on to the next thing. That was six days ago. He is still there. Go open your own applicant folder tonight. There is a version of him in it. Most owners see two short runs and stop reading. Job hopper. Look again. A tech who moves when something better shows up is the only kind of tech you can recruit. The one who has been in the same bay for fifteen years is probably not available to you. He is not reading your ad. He is not answering your text. There are always exceptions but most likely, he is somebody else's guy and he is staying. Your best candidate might read like your biggest risk on paper. That could be exactly why he is still available. Other shops read the same hastily prepared resume and passed. He is flat rate. He is under a car. His hands are filthy and his phone is in a toolbox drawer two bays over. And the guy standing eight feet away reports to the same service manager he does. Call a dealer tech at 11 on a Tuesday and you are calling him during the only eight hours of his day when picking up is a risk. He finds the voicemail at 5:15 in the parking lot. Unknown number. A week after he applied. No context. Now calling you back is a cold call. Techs do not make cold calls. And one voicemail told him something else. It told him you were not that interested either. His silence told you about your timing. It told you nothing about whether he wants the job. One voicemail is not one attempt. It is zero. Contact is not counted in dials. It is counted in responses. And nothing in your system has ever picked up a phone. Under review is not a step in your process. It is a parking spot. Every hiring conversation I have goes straight to volume. More ads. More boards. More budget. A bigger net. More applications.
3 likes • Aug 17
I have one of those short hop employees on staff for five years now. Sometimes it is personality styles (or lack of) in this case he had poor skills communicating his frustrations with previous employers. It is worth digging past the very first impressions and see if you have a diamond in the rough. Sometimes it is our side that adds to the short hopping employee. take a few minutes and investigate what is happening. "Not all who wonder are lost" J.R.R.Tolkien
Aug 4 •
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 • Aug 4
where to start... three things from the mentioned book club discussion...attend to all things, everything gets shortchanged and nothing gets it's done. 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 • Aug 4
BTW I am loving this book worth the time like you mentioned
Aug 1 •
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 • Aug 3
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 • Aug 4
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.
Jul 18 •
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 • Jul 20
This is my reakity at the moment. working on correcting
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