Don't Lose Sight of What Matters · Technician Find Community

Don't Lose Sight of What Matters

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.

Bigger isn't always better. Aligned is better.

Not every opportunity that looks like growth actually is growth. Some of it just adds weight. Some of it pulls you further from the things you said mattered most.

I held my ground. Not because I'm impressive. Because the week reminded me what lane I actually want to be in.

And that's really what I've been thinking about while I'm away this week.

How easy it is to get pulled. How the chaos and the noise and the urgency of running a business can slowly drift you away from the things you built it for in the first place.

You started your shop for a reason.

Maybe it was freedom. Maybe it was building something your family could be proud of. Maybe it was doing things the right way in an industry full of shortcuts.

Whatever it was — are you still protecting it?

Or has the daily grind quietly moved you away from it without you noticing?

Are you building a business that gives you more life? Or just more weight?

Are you staying true to the kind of shop owner, spouse, parent, or human you actually want to be?

I don't have a neat answer. I'm asking myself the same questions.

Just something that's been on my mind this week. Hope you don't lose sight of what matters either.

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