I am watching a campaign right now where the strongest applicant in ten weeks has been sitting untouched for six days. One voicemail. No callback. Nobody has tried again. Euro dealer tech. About 25 minutes out. Two dealers in four years, short runs at both. The shop called once, left a message, marked him under review, and moved on to the next thing. That was six days ago. He is still there. Go open your own applicant folder tonight. There is a version of him in it. Most owners see two short runs and stop reading. Job hopper. Look again. A tech who moves when something better shows up is the only kind of tech you can recruit. The one who has been in the same bay for fifteen years is probably not available to you. He is not reading your ad. He is not answering your text. There are always exceptions but most likely, he is somebody else's guy and he is staying. Your best candidate might read like your biggest risk on paper. That could be exactly why he is still available. Other shops read the same hastily prepared resume and passed. He is flat rate. He is under a car. His hands are filthy and his phone is in a toolbox drawer two bays over. And the guy standing eight feet away reports to the same service manager he does. Call a dealer tech at 11 on a Tuesday and you are calling him during the only eight hours of his day when picking up is a risk. He finds the voicemail at 5:15 in the parking lot. Unknown number. A week after he applied. No context. Now calling you back is a cold call. Techs do not make cold calls. And one voicemail told him something else. It told him you were not that interested either. His silence told you about your timing. It told you nothing about whether he wants the job. One voicemail is not one attempt. It is zero. Contact is not counted in dials. It is counted in responses. And nothing in your system has ever picked up a phone. Under review is not a step in your process. It is a parking spot. Every hiring conversation I have goes straight to volume. More ads. More boards. More budget. A bigger net. More applications.

One shop owner admitted it on the EasyBench call last week. Nobody said anything for a few seconds, because he'd described the whole room. "I'm busy all day, every day. I don't know if I'm busy on the right things." He wasn't complaining. That's what made it land. Nobody jumped in. You could feel guys running their own week against that sentence and not liking the math. It costs a man something to say that in front of other owners. Owners aren't supposed to be confused. Everybody in the building is waiting on you for the answer. Then another owner answered him in four words. "Read The One Thing." Good advice. Incomplete advice. Most owners who read that book close it fired up. They block off Tuesday morning. By Thursday he's back in the bays with a scan tool in his hand. The book is right. It's also missing a step. You cannot find your one thing without two pieces of information. Most owners have never written down either one. Both of them are in here. By the end you'll know the one thing to do tomorrow before you touch anything else. And why the other forty can wait. "WORK ON THE BUSINESS, NOT IN IT" HAS NEVER ONCE HELPED YOU AT 7:15 ON A TUESDAY You've heard that line four hundred times. From a stage. From a coach. From a guy in a Facebook group who has never had a tech call out. It's true. It's also useless as an instruction. At 7:15 AM on a Tuesday a tech calls out, eleven cars are promised by five, and the parts guy left a voicemail you already know you're going to hate. Nobody has told you which of those to drop. In most businesses, urgent and unimportant are easy to tell apart. The email chain nobody needs. The meeting about the meeting. You can spot the junk from across the room. Your shop doesn't work that way. The comeback is urgent and important. The customer standing in your lobby is urgent and important. The delayed part is holding a car that's holding a bay that's holding your week. You are not wrong to handle any of it. That's the trap. It isn't laziness. Laziness would be easy to spot and easy to fix.

"A-level would be great, but we've lost hope. I'd settle for a B or C." A shop owner sent me that. He thinks he described his market. He described himself. That sentence isn't about technicians. It's about what he thinks he can get. And he'll get it. You always do. Every shop has a ceiling. It isn't the building. It isn't the bays. It isn't the town. The ceiling is the best tech you can sit across from without shrinking. Think about the last one who intimidated you a little. The guy who knew more than you about something, and you both knew it. Who asked what you're running for scan tools, then waited. Now go look at who you hired instead. That wasn't the market. That was comfort. You made the call before he left the parking lot. We hire comfortably. Comfortable is almost always one grade down. Then we call it a shortage. An owner out west told me he used to sit in interviews with a sentence looping in his head. "This guy's not going to come to work for me." He'd think it while the man was still talking. Every interview. For years. Then he caught it. Tell yourself something long enough and you'll believe it. Believe it long enough and you'll show it. So he flipped the sentence. This guy might work for me. This guy's starting Monday. He wasn't chanting affirmations. He'd stopped rehearsing the rejection in front of the man he was trying to hire. Because the sentence in your head doesn't stay in your head. It comes out in your shoulders. In how fast you answer. In the pause before you say what your shop is worth. He isn't reading your words. He's reading your face while you say them. And when it falls through, we all reach for the same lever. Money. I hear a version of this constantly. Willing to pay more. Still can't get them to commit. That's not the market failing you. That's a confidence problem wearing a money costume. Money is what you reach for when you've run out of things to say. It's the one number you can move by yourself, so it feels like doing something.

Two high school kids rotate through a shop I know. Two weeks on, two weeks off. Sharp kids. Show up early. The techs like them. Both of them have told the owner they aren't staying in this industry. Nobody ever asked them to. Nobody ever showed them what this job looks like in fifteen years. I read a piece this week about young people flooding back into the trades. Six out of ten Gen Z adults surveyed said they're going blue collar this year. They watched a generation take on six figures of debt for a degree that didn't guarantee anything, and they did the math. Most owners will read that and feel some relief. Then look at the trades reporting the worst shortages this year. Electricians. Welders. HVAC. Plumbers. Heavy equipment mechanics. We're not on that list. That's not because we're fine. The kid in your town who decides to work with his hands has options now. HVAC is hiring. Electrical is hiring. Somewhere within a hundred miles of most of us there's a data center going up, and they pay apprentices while they learn. So when that kid picks, he isn't choosing between your shop and a four-year degree. He's choosing between your shop and an outfit across town with a written apprenticeship, a posted starting wage, and one person whose entire job is finding him. You've been fighting the dealer for twenty years. You know how the dealer fights. This one doesn't fight like a dealer. Here's the only number in this you need to hold onto. Between now and 2032, four skilled workers retire for every three coming in behind them. That gap doesn't close. It widens every year. Which means the technician you go looking for in 2029 will cost more and be harder to find than the one you could start building a relationship with this month. Kids aren't avoiding this trade because they hate the work. They're avoiding it because nobody in their life ever showed them the work. You can't hire your way out of that. A kid who never considered the job is never going to answer your ad.

Community member @Paul C sent this to me today. I can't stop laughing🤣