Treating Ourselves and Each Other Like Professionals

We need to have a conversation about professionalism in our industry, and it needs to happen soon. When I’m talking about professionalism, I’m talking mostly about our portrayal in the public’s mind. It seems to me as though we’ve come a long way in the last 20 years in terms of educating our customers. We’ve been able to climb out from being just your local grease monkey to being technicians and business professionals in people’s minds, and that’s a remarkable thing.

Why is it then, we can’t seem to treat each other, and our industry, like professionals? It seems to me, as though we need to do a much better job portraying ourselves as professionals, if our growing success is to continue. Not to be too specific, but I’ve seen a number of things recently, from a number of different sources, that I find unacceptable. In my opinion, anything from advertising to promotional material that raises the cloud of doubt in the public’s eye does a disservice to the industry as a whole, and even a disservice to the company or the shop doing the advertising. When we depict our own as anything less than top quality pros, the public doesn’t make the delineations. They will paint the entire industry with the same brush. You may be trying to identify one kind of shop or maybe a mass merchant as being outdated or Neanderthal-like in their service approach. Unfortunately, when you do that, the entire industry gets painted that way. I see that as being a very negative thing, and we shouldn’t be doing it.

Take other respected professions as an example. Dentists, for instance, have a great deal of competition in local markets to deal with, and being in the tooth maintenance business can be very difficult. With that said, you would never hear one dentist bad mouth the work of another, even if a mistake was made, or a filling not perfectly installed. Why can’t we offer that same kind of professional mutual-respect?

Our business in contrast, seems far too rife with parking-lot opinion and downright slander. If a car comes into your bay with a problem, and the client says she brought her car to the guy down the street, there is absolutely no need for you to comment on the quality of their work. The damage has been done, and this potential client has her car in your bay now. Take the business, and can the badmouthing. Not only is it detrimental to another industry professional, but it can also be detrimental to you as well. Think about what your negative comments would sound like from the customer’s perspective. Not only are you reinforcing the notion that mechanics and shop owners are lazy cheats, but you have also insulted her ability to make the proper consumer decisions in taking her car to the “wrong” garage the first time. In short, if a client comes to you, and you know the prior work was misdiagnosed, just fix the car. Don’t belittle the other shop, because it’s just not worth it for the industry as a whole.

My feeling on this topic is that the public is starting to come around to the idea of a truly professional automotive technician and an honest hard-working shop. Unfortunately, we seem to be doing all the harm to ourselves, when we bad-mouth and slander our competition. I’m not saying you have to work with the guy down the street. You don’t even have to like him. You do, however, have to treat him like a professional, because if we don’t start treating ourselves and each other that way, the public won’t either, and then we all lose.