After more than 30 years in the automotive industry, I've learned that running a successful auto repair business has a lot less to do with fixing cars than most people think. It's about building trust, providing exceptional customer service, and creating an experience that makes people want to come back. Here's how hospitality completely changed the way I approach business.

Your service advisors do not need to know the answer to every question that comes in over the phone. They need a simple process for understanding the customer’s concern, asking the right questions, and moving the conversation toward an appointment. Here’s how to make phone calls easier for your team and turn more incoming calls into vehicles on the schedule.

Learn how to turn first-time auto repair customers into repeat customers with a simple service process. From welcoming new customers and building trust to invoice reviews, follow-up calls, and maintenance reminders, these strategies can help improve customer retention and keep your shop top of mind.

There are a lot of people willing to give business advice, but not everyone has the experience to teach it. Before you change the way you operate, take the time to understand who you are learning from, what they have actually done, and whether their advice has been tested in the real world.

Entrepreneurs build systems for everything in their businesses, then rely on willpower to manage their own lives. Charlie Zlatkos shares the personal operating system that helps him stay consistent through travel, long days, and unpredictable weeks, and how to build one that works when life doesn’t cooperate.

The higher Charlie Zlatkos raises his standards, the less he cares about experience. His recruiting philosophy is simple: hire for the qualities you cannot teach, teach the rest, and never wait until you have an open seat to start looking for great people.

I once had a manager whose store was floundering, so I sat him down and we went through the business model page by page. He said yes to every page. I had him sign every one. The next month the store lost $30,000. I replaced him with a guy who had been on the floor with me for a year and a half, and the month after that the store netted $30,000. Same staff, same location, same ad spend, same software. One person changed.

Most shop owners keep their numbers to themselves. What I have found is that staying quiet does not stop your team from having an opinion about what you make. Here is what we put in front of our people, why we teach them to read a P&L, and what a $1,000 mistake actually costs once you run the math.

I have been running shops for a long time, and the same three wrong ideas come up over and over from people who are about to open their own. They expect more free time, they expect to build something real from a laptop at home, and they expect revenue to mean profit. Here is what each one actually looks like from the inside, with the numbers attached.

People ask me what habits made me a better leader. They're usually expecting some productivity hack or secret strategy. The truth is much simpler. These five "boring" habits have brought more consistency and peace to my business than anything else I've ever tried.

Are you looking for your next great business book? These are the five books that have had the biggest impact on how I lead, build culture, and run my business. Here are the leadership lessons I believe every leader should read.

One of my guys found a handwritten note in the shop that said, 'Their dream has to fit inside your dream.' I had forgotten I even wrote it, but that one sentence has become the way I run everything, from the interview process to the way we talk to customers. It sounds like a line about the leader, and it turned out to be about everyone else.

Most shop owners have never listened to a recording of their own front counter answering the phone. Every caller has a problem, and they're deciding in the first thirty seconds whether your shop is the one that's going to take care of them. Here's what a bad call sounds like, what a good call sounds like, and a simple way to start reviewing your team's calls this week.

Your paycheck, the lights, the coffee in the break room: the customer pays for all of it. The day that truly lands, everything about how you work shifts. Three common beliefs, flipped.

Sometimes a sale has nothing to do with saying it better. It comes down to who is saying it, and the trust behind it. Here is the story of a single phone call that grew my shop more than any ad ever could, and what it taught me about where business actually comes from.

They asked John Maxwell to write a book on business ethics, and he turned it down with one line I've never forgotten: "There's no such thing as business ethics. There's only ethics." After 25 years of making deals, I've learned he was right. Here's what really holds a handshake together when everything else is negotiable.

Twenty-five years ago I was on the wrong side of the street, scraping for a $50 sale. Last week I sat in a private room at One International Place while private equity firms talked billions like it was candy — looking right at the building where I started. I cried for two days. Here's everything that got me from that side of the street to this one.

The smartest people in the room are often the least likely to succeed in business — not because they lack ability, but because they can't stop analyzing long enough to actually decide. Here's why speed is the most underrated competitive advantage an entrepreneur has, and how staying out of the weeds can put you three years ahead of anyone who outranks you on paper.

If you're building a business and you feel stuck, there's something it took me years to figure out: at some point, the hustler had to die in order to become a leader. Here's the mindset shift that took me from a single shop I couldn't leave for an hour to a company that's about to scale.

Most shop owners think more technology means less customer work. It's exactly backwards — and it's quietly costing them customers.