"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. _________________________________ 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.

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.

Not a little stumble. A full send. Went down hard enough that my phone left my hand, cleared two steps, and kept going. I watched it bounce away like even it didn't want to be associated with me. Hand torn up. Leg torn up. And the first clear thought in my head, before any of the pain registered, was not "am I hurt." It was "how many people just saw that." The answer was a lot. The beach was packed. And the stretch right in front of me happened to be a row of very attractive women in bikinis, because of course it was. That's just how the math works when you're bleeding and trying to locate your phone. I'm not gonna lie to you. The version of me from a few years ago grabs the phone, does the fake "I'm fine, totally meant to do that" wave, and speed-limps straight to the car. Workout canceled. We don't talk about this again. But I'm standing there doing the math on the slink-away, and it just hit me that walking off bleeding would somehow be more embarrassing than what already happened. Like the fall was an accident. Quitting would've been a decision. So I got up. Wiped the blood on my shorts. And finished the run. In front of everybody. Looking exactly as graceful as you'd imagine. Anyway. We've all got a moment like this. Fell flat, whole world watching. What's yours? Tell me I'm not the only one. P.S. Phone lived. My dignity did not. Pics below after I got home and swabbed the wounds with iodine, you're welcome.

Every shop owner I talk to tells me what’s broken. The bay that’s empty. The tech who ghosted. The ad that flopped. The Monday morning when nothing went right and everything felt like it was falling apart. Almost nobody tells me what’s working. Not because nothing is. But because you’ve trained yourself to scan for problems. You wake up looking for what needs fixing. You go to bed running tomorrow’s fires through your head. And somewhere in that cycle, you stopped noticing what you actually built. So I’m going to do something different today. I’m going to hold up a mirror. And I want you to look. ——— I talked to a shop owner who told me his best technician once said to him: “You are the best owner, the best boss, the best shop I’ve ever worked at.” And this owner’s response? “It doesn’t get better yet. That’s kind of what I strive to be.” That sentence right there is everything. Not “I’ve arrived.” Not “I’m the best.” But “it doesn’t get better yet” — which means he’s still reaching. Still pushing. Still trying to earn it every single day. If that’s you, you’ve built something real. ——— I talked to another owner who described his operating philosophy in one sentence: Customer first. Employee second. Me last. No mission statement committee produced that. No consultant handed it to him on a slide deck. That’s just how he runs. Every day. And his 82% repeat customer rate — the highest in a 65-store network — proves it works. If that’s how you operate, even when nobody’s watching? You’ve built something most people never will. ——— One owner told me he started his shop because he was tired of going to family reunions and feeling looked down on. He was the only guy with dirt under his fingernails. Even though he was making more money and carrying less debt than anyone else at the table. So he built a business with a single mission: bring honor back to the trade. Today, his technicians don’t apologize for what they do. They lead with it. That’s not just a shop. That’s a movement.

Here's what I've learned working with 200+ independent shops: Every owner I talk to is in one of three situations. And each one requires a completely different fix. Trying to solve the wrong one is why most owners stay frustrated. Here's how to figure out which one you're in — and what to do about it. 👉 SITUATION 1: “I need a tech. Yesterday.” Your bays are sitting empty. Your backlog is growing. Your best techs are burning out covering the gap. You’ve tried Indeed, ZipRecruiter, word of mouth. Nothing’s working. You need a hire, and you needed one three months ago. → This is what Technician Find solves. I only take 4 hiring clarity calls per week. Not a sales pitch. A diagnostic. We'll look at your market, your ads, and your pipeline and I'll tell you exactly what I'd change. Apply here: [HIRING CLARITY CALL] → Want the details on how Technician Find works? [HERE'S HOW WE FILL YOUR BAY] 👉 SITUATION 2: “We’re okay right now. But I never want to start from zero again.” You’ve been through the panic of losing a tech with nobody waiting in the wings. You swore you’d never let it happen again. But life got busy, and now your bench is empty. → EasyBench exists for exactly this moment. It’s the done-with-you bench-building system that keeps your pipeline warm when you’re not desperate. Details here: [EasyBench] 👉 SITUATION 3: “The problem is bigger than hiring.” You’re doing the revenue. But you’re exhausted. Your team is disengaged. You’re making reactive decisions because you’re running on fumes. The hiring problem might actually be a leadership-energy problem. → Life Calibration helps shop owners recalibrate before the wheels come off. Start with the diagnostic: [LIFE CALIBRATION DIAGNOSTIC TEST]