The mindset you need to have for your shop

A business owner of any kind, even auto repair shop owners, will view their business as their baby. But a shop coach wants you to let go of that feeling so you can view your shop differently and treat it with a more neutral perspective.

Emotions can sink your shop, warned Jay Huh, a business coach at Shop Fix Academy and owner of CarMedix in North Carolina. Compare that to an investor who buys a business and has no long-standing ties to the people. They will typically make decisions that are better for the success of the business because they have no emotion attached.

During the session How to Run Your Shop Stress-Free at the Midwest Auto Care Alliance’s Vision Hi-Tech Training & Expo, he referenced something he heard from another shop owner: They urged him to look at the business as an investor and to have all your thoughts and actions flow as if you’re an investor, not someone who started the business from the ground up.

How do you act like one? Do rolling 90-day reviews of every employee. You grade them on performance, culture and attendance. And if they don’t measure up, you let them go, Huh said. You hired them with certain expectations. So if they fall short, why are they still around?

“This is a contractual agreement. When you hire an employee it’s a contractual agreement to perform at an expected level. You have expectations when you hire an employee, do you not? And if [they] don’t meet those expectations, it’s a broken contract,” he explained.

But shop owners will rationalize keeping the person around. The employee may be going through a tough time in life, so they’re cut some slack. No one wants to be the bad guy either. But the bad employee is costing the shop owner money and time.

Huh wished he had that advice many years ago. He hired someone when they were 21 and watched them grow up in the shop. They got married, had kids, all of that. But the employee’s performance eventually started slipping. It started hurting the business. But Huh was attached to the guy — after all, he’d been working there for many, many years. He kept giving him another chance.

One day, he bit the bullet and let him go.

“Hardest thing I had to do,” Huh admitted. But once he did it, Huh knew it was the right choice and that it required him to take on a different mindset.