Quick recap + what's coming from inside EasyBench this week. This won't apply to everyone — but for the ones thinking long-term about staffing, it'll make sense. What happened last week: - No live implementation call last week — members used the week to get into the Command Center and start setting up their Bench Boards from their onboarding calls - A few members started identifying passive techs in their market and logging them for the first time - Some guys are realizing how many names they actually have scattered across their phone, old texts, and random sticky notes — and none of it was organized until now Nothing complicated. Just small moves that keep you from starting over when something breaks. The pattern that's starting to show: Most shop owners have more contacts than they think. A tech they talked to six months ago. A guy the parts rep mentioned. A name from a reference check that didn't get hired but was solid. A handful of applications from the last time they posted on Indeed. The difference is whether those names live in your head — or in a system you can actually use when it matters. What we're working on this week: - Walking through the Bench Board live — how to read it, how to use the color coding, and what your first 20 minutes should look like each week - Unboxing new bench building campaigns from the Campaign Vault — ready to copy, paste, and run - Unboxing new Stealth Scripts — outreach messages you can use immediately without sounding like a recruiter - Q&A on what members are seeing in their local markets We'll build it live and keep it simple. Thursday, March 19th — 9:30 - 10:30 AM Pacific. If you're in EasyBench: Show up live if you can (the live call link and recording will be available in the command center if you miss it live). This is the kind of week where things start to click. If you're not in it: No pitch — just giving you a look at what some shop owners are doing behind the scenes. This is the stuff that doesn't happen on Indeed.

I want you to try something. The next time you catch yourself saying "we're just not getting qualified applicants," stop. Don't finish the sentence. Instead, answer this one: Qualified how? Because I will bet you money that if I asked you right now — on the spot, no prep — to tell me exactly what "qualified" means for the open role in your shop, you'd hesitate. Not because you don't know your business. You know your business cold. But because the definition in your head is a feeling, not a filter. And that's where the wheels come off. I was on a call with a shop owner a while back. Good operator. Solid shop. Frustrated out of his mind. "Chris, we're not getting qualified applicants." So I said: tell me what qualified looks like. Be specific. Long pause. "Well… more experience." More than what? "More than what we're seeing." Okay. What kind of experience? "Electrical. Drivability." How many years? "Probably five-plus." What kind of shop environment? "Professional. Not a backyard operation." Right there. That conversation took about ninety seconds. And in those ninety seconds, we went from a frustration statement to something I could actually use. "More qualified" is not ad copy. It's not a screening filter. It's not something your service advisor or GM can use to sort applications. It's not something any recruiter on earth can act on. But "five-plus years working in a professional auto repair business, strong in electrical and drivability"? Now we're working. Here's what I've learned from working with shops for years: The phrase "they're not qualified" is almost never one problem. It's usually three or four problems smashed together under one label. Sometimes it means the candidate doesn't have the technical chops. Fair. Sometimes it means the candidate has the skills but showed up fifteen minutes late and gave one-word answers. That's not a qualification issue. That's a reliability issue. Sometimes it means the candidate could do the job today — but the owner had a picture in his head of a master tech with twenty years and ASEs wall-to-wall, and this person didn't match the picture. That's not a qualification issue either. That's a fantasy issue.

I've shared a version of this message before. And I'm going to share it again. There's an old story about a priest who gave the same sermon every Sunday for a month straight. Same words. Same message. Week after week. Finally, one of his parishioners came up to him after church and said, "Father, are you okay? You've been preaching the same sermon for four weeks now." The priest smiled and said, "I'm fine. But I'm going to keep preaching this sermon until you start applying it in your life." That's how I feel about what I'm about to say. So here it is again. When things get hard in your hiring… do you go chase the next shiny object? Do you hire an expert or a consultant… then ignore their advice the moment the work gets boring? Do you buy a new course, ask another shop owner for advice, download a new script or ad template, try a new job platform… and then three weeks later start hunting for the NEXT new thing because results didn't show up fast enough? Be honest with yourself. Here's what that cycle actually looks like from the outside: You hit resistance. You get discouraged. You start questioning whether the tactic even works. So you start searching again. You find something new. You get excited. You start over. You hit resistance again. And the whole time, you never stayed with any single approach long enough to actually get good at it. That's not a hiring problem. That's a consistency problem. Years ago, a mentor told me something that changed the way I approach everything in business. He said: "Chris, stop searching for the perfect way to attract clients. Any tactic will work if you give it enough time and do it the right way. It will take you at least 12 months to master any tactic so be patient. And always remember, when you get impatient and try a new tactic, the clock starts over and you have another 12 months of hard work ahead of you with very little visible results." Twelve months. Not twelve days. Not twelve posts. Not twelve ad campaigns.

I got to my aunt's property this week, opened the garage door (freshly repaired after a bear tore the bottom off), and the smell of skunk nearly knocked me backward. Not a hint. Not a whiff. Full-blown, eyes-watering, gag-reflex skunk. So that was the start of my morning. Four hours of sleep. An 81-year-old woman I love very much counting on me. And a garage that smelled like something crawled in and declared war. I needed a skunk removal specialist. Sounds simple enough. It wasn't. I spent the next chunk of my morning trying to find an actual human being who removes skunks. You know what I found instead? Lead generation companies. Middlemen. Aggregators. Pages and pages of businesses that don't actually do the work — they just collect your information and sell it to someone who might. Sound familiar? I'm clicking through results, getting more frustrated by the minute, and all I can think is — this is exactly what shop owners tell me about trying to find techs. Noise everywhere. Real help buried underneath it. Somewhere in the middle of all that, my aunt bit down wrong and cracked a dental crown a couple of days ago and we still needed to take care of that too. So now I'm dealing with a skunk situation, a dental emergency, coordinating logistics for my aunt's care, and running on almost no sleep. Here's the part I want to be honest about. I love my aunt. Deeply. She's 81 years old and she matters to me more than I can put into words. And my patience still got tested. Not because she did anything wrong. Because I was tired. Because life doesn't care about your schedule or your energy level or what you had planned for the week. It just keeps coming. I felt my edges. And I didn't love that feeling. But it clarified something. In the middle of all of it — the skunk, the crown, the sleep deprivation, the logistical chaos — I also had a conversation connected to a PE firm. One of those "bigger opportunity" conversations. And honestly? The week made the answer clearer, not fuzzier.