Are You Coasting? Here's How to Tell.
There was a stretch of years when my auto shop opened at 3 or 4 a.m. and didn't really close until the last car was washed, the last thank-you card was hand-written, and the last bill was paid out of my own checkbook. There were no techs, no bookkeeper, no team. The "team" was me, a clipboard, a coffee that had usually gone cold by 6 a.m., and whatever vehicle was sitting in the bay waiting to be diagnosed before the customer was even out of bed.
I used my personal car as a loaner vehicle when somebody needed a ride. I diagnosed the problem myself, sold the job myself, hunted down the parts, did the repair, road-tested it, washed every single engine for free, delivered the car back to the customer's driveway when it was finished, called to follow up two days later, and then hand-wrote a thank-you card and dropped it in the mail. That was one ticket. Multiply it by however many cars came through the door that week, and you get a sense of the rhythm.
Some people still want to call my story "lucky." But I’m setting the record straight because I want to be candid about capacity — yours, mine, and what we're all leaving on the table when we don't think anyone is watching.
More Resources Don't Always Mean Better Execution
Today, I've built a fully staffed and fully equipped operation. The auto shop has technicians, service advisors, a service manager, a bookkeeper, and dedicated marketing support. And yet, on certain days, the level of execution coming out of this team is lower than it was when one tired guy was running the entire operation alone in the dark before sunrise.
If you own or run a small business and you've ever wondered why hiring didn't actually solve the problems you thought it would, this is the conversation you need to have with yourself in the mirror.
Here's where I see this play out most often inside a service business:
A car sits an extra day in the bay because nobody picked up the phone to give the customer a real status update.
The waiting room and the shop floor aren't as clean as they used to be, because three or four people are each quietly assuming somebody else is going to handle it.
A Google review goes unanswered for a week, because the front desk thinks marketing has it and marketing thinks the front desk has it.
An invoice goes out late, a part doesn't get ordered when it should, a follow-up call never gets made — and none of those small misses ever feels like anybody's specific fault.
When I was alone, none of this was possible to drop, because the consequences landed squarely and immediately on me. With a team, responsibility gets distributed across multiple sets of hands, and somewhere in that distribution, accountability becomes non-existant if leadership isn't paying attention.
We have more tools, more people, and more systems than we've ever had at our disposal, and it’s still possible to drop balls that nobody in our position should be dropping. That's worth being honest about.
The Customer Communication Rule That Defines Every Great Service Business
Back when I was running everything myself, I called every single customer with a status update before they ever had to call me. I did it because I knew, deep in my gut, that the second a phone rang with a customer on the other end asking, "Hey, any update on my car?" I had already lost ground I might never fully get back.
If a customer is calling you for an update on their vehicle, you've already lost that customer.
That's how seriously you need to take proactive customer communication if you want to build something that lasts. In practical, day-to-day terms, here's what great communication actually looks like inside a shop:
Reaching out within 30 minutes of diagnosis with a clear update for the customer, even if the update is simply, "We're still digging into it and I'll have an answer for you by 11."
Sending a quick photo or short video of what you found under the hood, so the customer can actually visualize the issue they're being asked to pay for.
Confirming the pickup time the day before delivery, rather than waiting for the customer to chase you down on the morning of.
Making a follow-up call 48 hours after the customer drives away, just to confirm the repair is holding up and the entire experience felt the way you wanted it to feel.
And all this is the difference between a customer who comes back to you for the next ten years and a customer who drifts down the street to the shop on the corner without ever telling you why.
You Have Way More to Give Than You Think
There's a well-known principle in performance psychology — often called the 40 percent rule — and it goes something like this: at the moment when your body and mind are absolutely screaming at you that you're done, that you have nothing left in the tank, that you simply cannot push any further, you've actually only used about 40 percent of what you're truly capable of.
Forty percent. On your worst day. When you feel completely cooked!
That means there's another 60 percent sitting right there, untouched and waiting, every time you decide the job in front of you is worth reaching deeper for. The question is never whether the capacity exists; the question is always whether you're willing to go and find it when finding it is uncomfortable.
In practice, this concept looks like this:
It's 4 p.m., you're slammed, you're starving, and you still pick up the phone to make one more proactive update call before you let yourself eat.
You've finished the repair, you've signed off on it, and a quiet voice in the back of your head says, walk it one more time before it leaves the bay — and instead of brushing that voice off, you actually listen to it.
The waiting room looks "fine," but you grab the broom and the Windex anyway, because "fine" was never supposed to be the standard.
You catch yourself about to say "I can't" and you stop mid-sentence, because you know what you actually mean is, "I don't really want to right now."
Use some of that other 60 percent. That's where the real growth in your career, your team, and your business actually lives.
Every Interaction Leaves a Mark on People You'll Never Meet
People are watching everything we do, even when we don't realize they're watching. Every interaction we have, whether in person or over the phone, in the service bay or at the front counter, is leaving a mark on someone, and that mark almost always gets passed along to other people we will likely never meet.
John Maxwell, the leadership author, has said he originally started writing books specifically to reach people he would never meet face-to-face. The same principle applies to every one of us in this business, whether we acknowledge it or not. Every action we take is doing exactly that — for better or for worse.
In practice, here's what that looks like inside the four walls of any service business:
The way you greet someone walking through the front door — or fail to even look up from your screen when they walk in — quietly becomes part of the story they tell their spouse over dinner that night.
The tone you take on the phone gets repeated to a friend, who repeats it to a neighbor, who eventually mentions it to a coworker who happens to need a mechanic next month.
The eye contact you make, the firm handshake you offer, the fact that you remembered their name from their last visit — these are the seemingly small details that quietly become a referral six months later.
One bad interaction at the counter, caught on the wrong day, lives forever in a Google review that gets read by every potential customer for years to come.
That is the real responsibility you carry every time you put on the uniform. It's much, much bigger than the car sitting in the bay.
Look in the Mirror — That's Where Real Growth Starts
I'm proud of what we've built here over the years, and I'm even more proud of the people on this team who are continuing to grow, raise their own standards, and push themselves into that other 60 percent more often than not. I sincerely hope that kind of growth never slows down for any of us.
But steadfast growth doesn't happen by accident, and it doesn't happen in a staff meeting. It happens when you're willing to look honestly in the mirror and ask yourself: Am I really executing like someone who has a full team, full equipment, and every advantage I could possibly ask for? Or am I coasting because I have a lot of help?
We have more than we need. Let's act like it.
