What happened in the industry. What it means for your shop. What to do about it. They're not buying your competitors. They're surrounding your customers. Three different PE-backed platforms made moves in the Midwest in the last two weeks. Sun Auto pushed into Southern Indiana. GreatWater 360 crossed 151 locations in the heartland. And CenterOak's brand-new Grismer platform is now positioned to start buying up 1–3 location shops across Ohio. But here's the part most owners miss: the shops getting acquired don't look acquired. The sign doesn't change. The owner stays. The team stays. And the customers never know. Until it's too late. Here's what happened, what it means for your shop, and what to do about it this week. SUN AUTO MOVES INTO LOUISVILLE'S BACKYARD Sun Auto Tire & Service acquired Carmerica in Sellersburg, Indiana on April 6th. That makes it Sun Auto's third store in Southern Indiana. Read that again. Not Southern Indiana's third Sun Auto store. Sun Auto's third store serving Southern Indiana — specifically targeting the Greater Louisville market from across the state line. This is a geographic encirclement play. Sun Auto didn't try to plant a flag in downtown Louisville. They bought a trusted local shop 15 minutes north of the river, in a different state, serving the same customers. Lower overhead. Same market. Smarter play. Sun Auto is now backed by Leonard Green & Partners and operates more than 575 locations across 26 states. For context — they added 23 Colorado locations and 5 North Las Vegas locations just last month. Here's what this means if you're in the Louisville corridor or anywhere along the I-65 stretch through Southern Indiana: Sun Auto uses a "keep the name on the building" model. Your customers won't see a corporate rebrand. They'll see the same shop, same sign — with 24/7 online scheduling, digital vehicle inspections, and a national warranty network quietly bolted on behind the scenes. That's the competitive pressure you need to match. Not by becoming corporate. By being so visibly, unmistakably local that no one confuses you with a shop that just got a new owner they've never met.

“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.

In order to get acquainted and and help fellow community members, please share: 1. The name and location of your shop. 2. Your biggest frustration with finding techs. 3. How you found your last tech.

He showed up for his interview with no tools, no English, and no apartment. His wife translated every word. He'd been in the country a few weeks. He was living in a hotel. And the owner across the table had a stack of reasons to pass. Here's what happened instead. The owner's wife was handling recruiting. She found his application on Indeed. On paper, he was an easy pass. She called him in anyway. They gave him shop tools to work with. Not a full-time offer — a 30-day trial. Prove what you can do. He showed up every day. Didn't complain. Didn't cut corners. And when you watched him work — even without understanding a word he said — you could tell this guy knew what he was doing. So they offered him a full-time position. That's when things got hard. The next six months tested everybody. Google Translate became a daily tool — not for diagnostics, but for conversations. Write-ups didn't meet the shop's standards. The front-of-house team started losing patience. Too many questions. Paperwork that slowed everything down. If you were standing in that shop at month three, you'd be thinking the same thing every owner thinks: this isn't working. Most owners would have let him go. And nobody would have blamed them. The owner didn't do that. He leaned in. He helped the tech find an apartment when the hotel was draining his savings. Kept working through the language barrier one Google Translate conversation at a time. Stayed patient when his own team was ready to give up. Six months of this. Today? He speaks full sentences. The service advisors who were ready to quit on him? They work with him seamlessly now. He flags 60 to 70 hours a week. He's buying a house. Not renting. Not in a hotel. Buying a house — eighteen months after he couldn't order lunch in English. The owner told me something I almost never hear. He said: "I have three rock stars right now. If I could clone all three of them, we wouldn't be having this conversation." My rock star team member on the call @Jenni Archer said what I was thinking: "We never hear that."

He read every 1-star review the shop had. Not the 5-stars. The 1-stars. This was before he applied. Before he walked through the door. Before he ever met the team. He went to Google. Pulled up the shop’s reviews. And started reading. But he wasn’t reading the complaints. He was reading the responses. He wanted to know one thing. What happens at this shop when a customer gets angry? Does the owner throw the tech under the bus? Or does the owner have the team’s back? He read every response. Then he applied. She asked him why. He could’ve gone to the dealerships up the road. They were hiring. Some paid more. His answer: “I only came to work for you because I can see that you protect your technicians against the outside world.” He didn’t pick the shop for the pay. Not the benefits. Not the sign-on bonus. He picked it because of how the owner responded to a 1-star review. Most shop owners think of Google reviews as a customer thing. They’re also a recruiting tool. The best technicians — the ones you actually want — are doing homework on you before they ever apply. They’re Googling your shop name. Scrolling your reviews. Reading how you handle conflict in public. These aren’t desperate candidates who blast their resume everywhere. These are employed techs with options. They’re choosy. And they’re looking for signals. Your 1-star reviews are one of those signals. Not the review itself. Your response to it. Here’s what a good tech sees when they read your review responses: Response #1: You throw your tech under the bus. “We sincerely apologize. The technician responsible has been spoken to and this will not happen again.” What a tech thinks reading that: If I make a mistake here, I’m getting publicly blamed. If a customer exaggerates, the owner sides with them automatically. Next. Response #2: You get combative. “Actually, you’re wrong. We did exactly what you asked for. Maybe if you maintained your vehicle properly this wouldn’t have happened.”