8d • 📣General discussion📣
One Question. Every Month.
There's one question I wish more shop owners asked themselves.
Not every quarter.
Not every year.
Every month.
"What decision am I avoiding because I don't feel confident?"
Sometimes it's hiring. You need a tech but you don't know where to find one worth hiring or what to offer. So you keep pushing your team and hoping someone walks in.
Sometimes it's pricing. You haven't touched your labor rate in two years. You're not sure how customers will react. So you absorb the hit and tell yourself next quarter.
Sometimes it's a conversation you've been putting off. With a tech who's been coasting for months. With a client who drains your team every time they roll in. With yourself, about what this business actually needs from you.
Every shop owner I talk to has at least one decision sitting on a shelf somewhere.
It's rarely because they lack courage.
It's because they lack certainty.
Those are two completely different problems with two completely different solutions.
Courage can't be manufactured. You either white-knuckle it or you don't.
But certainty?
Certainty can be built.
You can pull your numbers before adjusting your rate. You can find out what shops in your market are actually paying. You can call an owner who already made the decision you're weighing. You can run a 30-day test instead of a permanent commitment.
Every one of those steps turns guessing into knowing.
The owners who build the healthiest shops don't wait until they feel 100% certain.
They pull the data. Ask the questions. Do the homework. Close every gap they can.
And then they move.
Not at 100%.
At 80%.
That's not recklessness. That's a system.
100% never arrives.
One more thing about that shelf.
Shelved decisions don't sit there quietly. They compound.
A bad decision has a cost. You can measure it and move on.
A non-decision has a running cost. Every month it sits on the shelf, the price goes up. And the confidence to make it goes down.
That empty bay isn't on pause. It's running a tab.
That pricing adjustment you've been putting off isn't free. It's leaving money on the table every week.
That conversation you keep avoiding? Your team already knows you're avoiding it. And they're drawing their own conclusions about what kind of shop this is.
The shelf has a weight.
And you're carrying it whether you've done the math or not.
So here's my challenge for this month.
Ask yourself: what's on my shelf right now?
Then ask: what would I need to know or see to feel 80% ready?
Not 100% ready. 80%.
I built a prompt you can paste into any AI to walk yourself through this. Takes about 10 minutes. It helps you sort what's actually missing from what you're using as a reason to wait, and land on one step you can take this week.
I'll drop the full prompt in the first comment.
It works in ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever you use. If you're a Copilot user, the answers will be sharper because it's already trained on your shop.
If the decision on your shelf is hiring, I take 4 strategy calls a week. I'll look at your specific market and tell you exactly what I'd change. Apply here: [Talk to Chris]
If it's building a pipeline so you're never starting from zero again, that's what EasyBench is for: [Never scramble to hire]
1
3 comments
One Question. Every Month.
skool.com/technicianfind
Proven templates, strategies, training and top-level networking to help independent auto repair shops hire quality staff faster.
Leaderboard (30-day)
1
+10
Powered by