Most shop owners pick the wrong one. They chase the loudest pain — not the real constraint. In this post: - The one question I ask owners stuck between two hires - Five answers I hear — and what each one tells you to hire next - Why hiring two at once burns out your manager (not you) - Eight things that double the minute you stack two hires - The Monday sequence that ends the cycle 3 min read. Short on time? Watch the walkthrough video below. _________________________________________________________________________________________________ The position you think you need to hire isn't the position you need to hire. When a shop owner comes to me not sure which one to hire first — tech or advisor, advisor or CSR, second tech or first apprentice — I don't look at the org chart. I ask one question: "If your car count went up 20% tomorrow, what would break first?" Long pause. Then they tell me what they actually see when they picture Tuesday morning with 20% more cars on the lot. And that answer — not the title they walked in wanting to post — tells us which position to hire. Here's how the answers sort themselves: "Quality. Write-ups would get rushed. ARO would drop." → Front-counter constraint. The problem isn't in the bays. It's at the desk. Hire the advisor or CSR first. "We couldn't write them up fast enough." → Same lane. Desk first. "We physically can't touch that many cars." → Bay constraint. Hire the tech. "Cars would sit in the lot for days before we could pull them in." → Bay constraint. Hire the tech. "My manager would burn out." → That's not a hiring problem. That's a systems problem wearing a hiring costume. Different conversation. A good chunk of owners I ask this question give me an answer that doesn't match the position they walked in wanting to hire. Here's where the wheels come off for a lot of owners. They run the question, see both constraints, and say: "Fine. I'll hire both at once." I get it. Both roles are open. Both are bleeding you. Stacking them feels efficient.

“Sorry, I’m not very good at this stuff.” A shop owner said this to me last week. I’d asked him one question: “If the perfect tech told you he was talking to two other shops — why should he pick yours?” Five seconds of silence. Then those eight words. He talked about his lobby. Clean bathrooms. Monday through Friday, no weekends. All true. All forgettable. A technician weighing three offers isn’t choosing based on your bathroom. HERE'S WHAT HE DIDN'T SAY AT THE TIME THAT CAME OUT LATER IN OUR CONVERSATION He was a broke kid with a $500 car that kept dying on him. Enrolled in a vocational program his senior year just to learn how to keep it running. He entered a mandatory skills competition. Won at the school level. Won at state. Won state again the next year. Went to nationals. Scholarships followed. He got into one of the most rigorous OEM training programs in the country. Interned at a luxury dealership two days a week, worked Saturdays, got hired before he graduated. Spent a decade there. Worked his way up to diagnostic specialist and team leader. Left the dealer world. Worked at an independent for six years. Got recruited by the previous owner of the shop he runs now — hired with the understanding that he’d eventually buy the business. He bought it. Grew it from $1.3 million to $2 million. Invested in top-shelf equipment. When a tech gets stuck on a tough diagnostic, he pulls two or three guys into a huddle and they work through it together — because he’s done the work himself. There’s a pathway to ownership in his shop for the right person. Marvel can barely tell a superhero story like that. And his story is all true. And none of that came up until I pressed him. HE LED WITH CLEAN BATHROOMS He’s not unusual. He’s the norm. Almost every time I sit down with a shop owner and ask that question, the same thing happens. A pause. A fumble. Then the safe answer — the lobby, the schedule, the scan tools. They’ve spent years describing their shop to customers. Nobody has ever asked them to describe it through a technician’s eyes.

Steger Service in Brentwood, MO just brought on an experienced Auto Technician. And they’ve got more techs on the bench. That’s the kind of position every shop wants to be in: a great hire made, and options lined up behind it. Strong momentum, smart planning, and a whole lot less “hire panic.” Nice work, Steger team.