Lube Shop Confidential
(Continued)

I don’t remember exactly how she put it, but after several days of my negative attitude, she finally said to me, “Quit your complaining, you big fat crybaby! You don’t go out and find ‘good jobs,’ you just find ‘jobs.’ Whether or not it turns out to be a ‘good job’ is up to you, no one else.”

Of course, she was right.

From that day forward, I went to work with the attitude that I was going to be the best lube tech that there could possibly be in any lube shop. I started reading any material in the shop I could find that related to the business. It is amazing the amount of useful yet little known information that you can learn just by reading through all the various documents, notices and bulletins that are in every filter catalog that is in every lube shop across the country. I soon started reading all the old copies of the National Oil & Lube News that were filed in the manager’s desk, and learned a tremendous amount of great information from the pages of that industry trade magazine.

Once I started to enjoy the job, I became much better at it. Our entire shop quickly caught the “fever” and as a team we all became very good at what we did. Our shop went from being an average, middle-of-the-pack performer to either at the top or very near it in every category that counts, month after month. Speed of service, car count growth, customer satisfaction, quality of work, shop cleanliness, average ticket, employee appearance, presentation skills — you name it, we excelled at it.

Our owners and general manager loved our performance, of course. Among our fellow shops within our organization, some were impressed with our rapid improvement, some were competitive and others were downright hostile, believing that our improved performance made them look bad.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was right in the middle of a major life-changing and defining moment for myself. I really liked my job, and took great pride in what we were all able to accomplish as a team in a relatively short amount of time.

Mind you, I was not the store manager at the time. I was still just a tech. However, we all worked together to create a great experience for our customers.

And boy, did they notice! Just about every day we got compliments on how we had improved from the customer’s standpoint. And that was our unstated goal: Make the customers notice the improvements!

Soon, I became familiar with and even had the pleasure to meet some of the real movers and shakers in the industry: David Prange, who did several customer-service training meetings for our group and always impressed me with his boundless and positive energy; Scotti Lee, an encyclopedia of lube shop knowledge (everyone can learn valuable info from him); Joe Haggard, who I believe must be the godfather of our industry and who always has a new and inventive way of achieving every goal. Those guys, and several others I have met over the years, influenced me in a big way, and I’ll always remember the things I learned from them.

I like to think that I have learned something valuable from every person I have ever met in the quick lube business: every employee, every “insider” and every customer.

One thing I learned along the way is that we all make mistakes. Lots of mistakes. You’re no different — and if you say you are I don’t believe you. Our best learning comes from the mistakes we make.

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