A short YouTube coaching clip by Chris Collins advising leaders to shift from doing operational work to orchestrating teams — "be the conductor, not the musician." He criticizes managers who remain hands-on in small shops and argues that misunderstanding effective labor, pricing, and recruiting prevents scalability and adequate customer amenities.
If you want to be an effective leader, you're going to have to come to this side of thinking. Otherwise, you'll always be the doer. You're not the conductor. You're always going to be the person playing the instrument, not the conductor. There are departments out there where the manager is the warranty administrator. They have one advisor, three techs, and it's a pretty small shop. Every time I've done a strategy session in the last couple of years with a store that size, the amount of potential they're booked out two weeks at least. Nowadays it's more.
You don't have the resources because you don't understand effective labor. You don't understand pricing strategies. You don't understand how to recruit technicians and build something that is scalable, that allows you to afford the amenities that customers need to keep them coming back.
