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333: Reflecting on 2025 & Looking Forward To 2026

Automotive Diagnostic Podcast Jan 04, 2026 27 min

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About this episode

Sean Tipping reflects on his approach to goal setting for 2025 and shares insights for 2026, emphasizing the importance of reviewing past achievements and failures to refine future objectives. He discusses balancing personal and business goals, focusing efforts on core strengths rather than spreading too thin, and the complexities of business finances where increased revenue doesn't always mean higher profit. Sean also highlights the value of using AI tools to organize and track goals, shares challenges faced including tough business decisions, and encourages listeners to persist through setbacks while continuously improving their skills and strategies.

Topics: goal setting business reflection personal vs business goals focus and specialization revenue vs profit remote programming used control module programming AI for goal tracking business challenges continuous improvement

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Hey, what's going on?

Automotive World, welcome to another episode of the Automotive Diagnostic Podcast.

My name is Sean Tipping.

Thank you so much for joining me.

Welcome to 2026.

I took the last week off to enjoy the holidays, but we are back in action.

And today I thought I'd spend a little bit of time talking about goal setting and not

only looking forward to the new year, but then also looking back over the previous year,

which is really a big part of building the goals for the following year, in my opinion.

Now, if you've been listening for a little while, I did an episode like this about a

year ago, where I talked about goal setting for the future for the next year and how I

was looking at that and what I was doing.

And to be honest, that was the first time that I had really put some thought into sitting

down and writing out both my personal and my business goals, like on a organized

piece of paper with bullet points with, hey, how am I going to do this?

How am I going to track it?

What is it going to look like if I actually complete this this year?

And then using those throughout the year to go back to check in, see, okay, how am I doing?

Did I do what I said I was going to?

If I'm tracking it, putting the information in there of what actually has been done in

regards to this goal, am I moving closer to it and is it getting pushed by the wayside?

That sort of stuff.

I've set goals prior to that at the beginning of the year, the whole New

Year's resolution thing, but this was the first time that I had been structured

about it and so now I have a year of data and I can look back and I can look at the

things that I set out for myself and did I hit it?

Did I accomplish what I wanted to?

Why or why not?

And then use that information going forward.

Like, do I still want the exact same things for the business?

Are we still moving in the same direction?

Did we achieve these things and now we want to hit different targets, right?

That all goes into it.

So I thought I'd spend a little bit of time just talking about my process and,

you know, looking forward to the next year reflection on the last year and

some helpful information for you if you wanted to do the same.

Now, you may not be running a business, but

that doesn't mean that you couldn't set some goals for yourself in your

professional career, right?

Now, again, I have a separate document for personal goals and then one for

business and, you know, this year I did take some time to consider that, you

know, one affects the other, right?

If I make all kinds of crazy business goals that is going to affect my

personal life and it will, you know, there can be an imbalance there.

So I do want to take into account, okay, these are the things I would like to

accomplish outside of work that don't have anything to do with work.

And then these are the things that I would like to achieve with the business,

you know, do both of these things work together?

Do they fit?

Is it possible to accomplish everything I'm shooting for?

Or do I have some, you know, imbalances here that I have to work through?

So, you know, you do want to consider there are two sides to the coin,

but, you know, having some personal goals and then having some business

goals or career style goals, those can be, you know, separate lines of thinking and

they were for me, right?

Especially when you run a business, it's good to just have, okay, these are

the goals of ST Mobile for the following year.

Here's what I want to accomplish.

Here's why I would want to accomplish this thing.

Here's how I'm going to do it and how I'm going to track it, okay?

Now, like I said, first things first, it is nice to look back on the previous

year if you did set some goals for yourself and you, you know, work through

them throughout the year to see, okay, what did I accomplish?

You know, did I hit the marks that I was hoping to?

And then looking back on yourself a year ago and say, okay, well,

why did I want to do this a year ago?

Do I still want to do that?

Is that still a goal for the business, for myself?

And what's interesting is some of them, things have definitely changed over

the years for one reason or another, right?

The target may have moved a little bit.

I may have, you know, realized or decided like pursuing this goal that I had

isn't necessarily good for the business.

You know, it's, it's extra, extracurricular stuff.

It's maybe an expansion of, of a new service, right?

Something that we're not currently doing or we're doing a very small amount of

that I wanted to pursue and wanted to grow this new area of the business where

it's either a new client, a new market, a new thing that we have to learn,

new equipment that we have to buy.

And sometimes that sort of thing can just be a distraction.

Sometimes it can spread you too thin for, you know, the stuff that you've

already got to keep track of.

The information that you've already got to learn about, about what you're already doing.

And that if you instead take the time to focus on the things that you're

already doing and make those even better, that that might be better for you,

better for your business.

What I'm getting at here is like, if you're, you know, an automotive technician

and you work primarily on light duty vehicles, it may be interesting

to get into the heavy duty diesel side of things, or it may be interesting

to get into the auto body repair side of things.

But there is a lot to learn in those different areas.

It's like starting brand new, like you have the base knowledge coming in,

but it's a whole nother world.

No, I'm not saying don't go out and learn new things, but taking the time,

the effort, the energy, the resources, the money to learn about those things

are going to take away from your capacity to improve your skill set

at what you're currently doing.

So at a point, because we all have a limited bandwidth,

whether that be a single person or a business itself,

you do have limited bandwidth.

You can only take in so much information and learn so many things,

be really good at so many things.

And some people have different capacities than others, of course,

but to be able to be or shoot for that number one position,

to be the best or recognized as the best, at least in your area even,

it's going to take a lot of effort to do that.

And so can you do that for three or four, five or six different areas?

Maybe not.

Maybe that new thing that is shiny in an attractive,

maybe isn't the way to go.

Not that you can't do a little bit of it,

but maybe it's not going to be a primary service that you offer.

Maybe it's just you're not going to be a light duty and a heavy duty shop.

Maybe you're not going to be a repair and a collision shop at the same time.

Again, not saying you can't.

I'm not saying to not expand and to look for new opportunities,

but to say my limited time could be better spent at being even better

at what I'm doing so that I can truly be the number one.

Again, that's all relative, of course, but maybe in your area,

you can be the number one shop for diagnostics.

Okay.

But does that also mean that you're going to be the number one shop for

alignments and for suspension work and for four by four and for tires?

Right.

Again, obviously different places have different capacities on what you can take

on and what you can be the top in.

But does it make sense to really focus in on one area and be really,

really, really good at that?

Now, the tough part about that is picking what that is,

but usually it is probably what you're already good at, right?

Lean into things that you're already doing well in and say,

how can I make this even better?

How can I be even more of an authority in that particular area?

So the reason I talk about that is, again, some of my goals,

I had a couple expansion of services that I was just doing a tiny amount of.

And over the course of the year, things sort of changed when I,

we did put some effort into a couple of different things here.

One of them was remote programming, which I do a little bit of,

but the market is very saturated.

There are some people out there that got their foot in the door early.

And again, have probably put a ton of effort into making it their thing.

And it is really tough to elbow your way in, not impossible.

I'm sure you can figure out lots of people have.

And I mean, I could even push harder and

probably utilize the podcast to try to get more customers on it.

But it just became a thing where it was getting pushed to the outside

of everything else that we do.

Like, I'll spend a little bit of time on it here, a little bit of time on it here.

And throughout this year, I just realized I'm not putting in enough effort

into this to compete with the people who are doing really well at remote programming.

I'm sure I have as an option.

And even a few listeners have reached out to me and

I've helped you out with a couple things here and there remotely.

And it's actually nice to have the capability even within our company to

have these remote capabilities.

Or we went on, what was that?

We went to Vegas for SEMA and Apex.

And we left some remote applications for a few of our big shops so

that we could do it from there if they needed something programmed quick.

And so again, learning about it, having the capabilities nice,

is it going to be a core service of ours?

Probably not.

It just, it does not seem like the thing that I want to invest the time and

money to do.

Now, who knows, that might be a mistake.

Maybe that's where everything's going, but we have found some pretty good

success doing the physical show up with a computer and

a laptop and do the programming for most of our shops.

And for me personally, the issues that you deal with when you're at

the car is enough for me.

I don't need more of the remote connection and not being at the car and

having somebody else actually having things plugged in and the maintainer.

And it adds a whole nother layer of complexity to it.

Anyways, that's one area that I set out at the beginning of the year that I

was going to work at.

I was going to try to build those services and things have changed for me.

I mean, if you'd look at it straight out as a goal, I'd say it was a fail.

For me right now, it's actually a good thing because I have kind of cut off

my effort and energy being put into that.

And now I'm putting that into other things that we can actually improve and

will help us increase as we go forward.

So that's just one example of looking back at things like a goal you may have

set that you're putting energy into.

And maybe you realize, okay, it's time to just not worry about this and

not dedicate that extra energy and effort to.

Let's put it towards something else that makes more sense.

Hey, have you ever been faced with the challenge of sourcing,

installing, and programming a used control module in a vehicle?

I know a lot of us have.

It seems to be happening more and more often today with the volume of

control modules on vehicles, the cost of some new ones, or

even the availability of new control modules.

In some cases used may be the only option.

So what do you do here?

I strongly recommend checking out SJ auto solutions and Tommy Oliva.

Tommy offers a cloning service for

use control modules to make these things plug and

play for the vehicle that you're working on.

In a lot of cases, he is also able to source the control modules if you're

unable to locate one for the vehicle that you're working on.

But once you get connected with Tommy,

he's gonna offer fantastic support from start to finish to make sure that

that control module is gonna work in your application.

He's also got tech support that he offers through his website,

along with some free resources there as well on information about

used control module programming.

So make sure to check out SJ auto solutions.

I can't recommend that enough.

And you may find that you had other goals that you said that you just

straight up didn't hit, but you would still like to.

And those are the ones where you can actually take the time to figure out,

well, why didn't I hit this?

Why did I think I was going to?

And what did I expect to happen?

What actually did happen?

And why or why not?

Was it a lack of effort or care on my part?

Or was it something that I didn't quite understand how it would all play out?

Are there other outside factors that played a role?

And I did put a lot of time into some of the goals that we didn't hit.

And well, so actually one of the really interesting ones and

as a business owner, you may have experienced something like this.

As an employee, maybe you don't understand that things like this can happen.

Let me give you an example of what happened with us this year.

Our goal was to raise our overall revenue by 10%.

So that's total money that comes into the business.

I wanted to be up 10%.

And that was a pretty modest goal actually.

In the back of my head, I'm like, we can definitely do a 10% increase.

No problem, we'll hit that.

This is a softball to hit this.

And we did.

We actually rose our revenue by 30% last year.

Fantastic, great, 3x the goal.

Sweet, and that's the end of the story, right?

We made 30% more money.

Let's do it again next year.

Well, here's the interesting part, is that net profit,

which means that's bottom line, that's the money that we walk away with

at the end of the year after all taxes, all expenses are paid.

What's left at the bottom?

We were actually down 10% from the previous year.

Now there's some taxes that play a role with that that kind of maybe shift

the numbers a little bit.

And that's why it's important to understand that stuff and look into it.

Because if you take the timing of the tax bills into account,

it might not actually be that.

But just looking at it straight on paper and by the dates that signify a year,

which are just kind of made up by us.

But that's how businesses run is by quarters and by years.

We were down 10% in this certain window.

And I mean, if nothing else like you should be flat, you should be the same.

You shouldn't go down, especially if you make 30% more.

But that's where looking at this stuff is actually really,

really important to understand that that happened, right?

Now it's not a huge issue for us, 10%, it's not the end of the world.

We can correct for this.

But only if we know that that is happening and that we're actually looking at this.

And you're actually going through the documents.

And I bring this up if you're a technician listening, you work at a shop.

What does that matter to me?

Well, that's where the money comes from in order to pay the technicians.

Or that's in the expense portion of it.

But when whoever is running your shop, and maybe it's you,

is looking at the P&L at the end of the year.

These are the sort of things that hopefully they're going over.

Hopefully they're just not looking at top line and say, hey, we made 30 more percent.

Everybody gets raises.

We have to look at what's left afterwards.

Okay, that's the most important one because that's why we're doing this.

And so we get paid and ask, okay, well, what happened?

And again, expenses are up just like everything else.

Payroll was up this year quite a bit.

And then there was some tax bills that came due.

Again, adjustments have been made and I think things will be just fine going forward.

But that was really an interesting one because we had set both revenue and

net profit goals for the year.

And one went up a positive direction and the other one went to a negative direction.

But as far as I'm concerned, going forward this year,

the net is going to be more of my focus, right?

The overall revenue, there's no point in bringing in more money.

And that inevitably means more stress and more problems, right?

The more jobs you take on just by volume, by default, the more problems that you're

going to have, the more stress that you're going to have.

A certain percentage of jobs that you take on are going to be a problem.

So if you take on more jobs, you're going to have more problems, right?

There's no point in just going straight for more revenue if we can't actually make

more money at the end of the day, right?

So that's a shifting viewpoint for me is I don't care so much about the revenue.

How do we protect that bottom line, okay?

So again, that's why this is important to look back on it and

say this is what I set out to do, this is what actually happened and why.

And I've done that, I've gone through this stuff and

I feel like I'm in a pretty good position to make things better going into this year.

But you can only do that if you put the time into it.

You do the tracking, you understand the metrics behind your goal.

And this doesn't have to be money, right?

It's just an example of a couple things on my goal list that I set out for

and what actually happened.

It could be any goal that you set for yourself to actually look back and

see, well, why didn't I hit that, right?

Was I actually trying?

Was I putting the effort into it?

Did I really care about it?

Or did I fully understand what it took to achieve the thing that I wanted to achieve, right?

And again, that's just an example.

You would think, hey, I make 30% more money overall.

I should also take home 30% more.

It's not necessarily true, right?

Business is a very complex thing and

money can leak out a lot of different ways.

So you have to really examine why that data didn't happen.

And that can be the case for many goals.

Now, you probably also have some goals, hopefully, that you did hit.

That you landed that mark.

You got what you accomplished, what you hope to accomplish, and that's great.

And then you can ask yourself, is this something I want to repeat going forward

and prove going forward?

Did I do it and it's done and I don't need to do it again?

Maybe you accomplished that goal and it was what you thought it was.

That's great and we'll keep doing it moving forward.

Or you hit it and you're like, this isn't what I thought it was.

Or it didn't bring me the satisfaction that I thought I would have by hitting that goal.

So maybe we move on or change it in the future.

But I think it's worth looking at the ones that were successful too.

So looking forward to 2026 and setting some goals.

Again, put some effort into it.

And I've got my personal list, got my business list.

And I feel really good going into the year that I can work towards accomplishing these things.

And there's a lot of things that are polished and refined as compared to last year.

So the stuff that I have created for myself going forward into this year

is much better in my opinion, the effort that I put into it.

But also the data and the reflection from the previous year.

So where I'm going with this is a suggestion to anyone that hasn't tried this is to do it

now.

Just get something together for this year and actually check in with yourself on a quarterly

baseless monthly basis, whatever it is to say, am I keeping track of this?

Am I actually doing it?

And then you'll have a bulk of data to look back on at the end of the year,

which makes the next one even better.

And I'll make a suggestion here to everybody.

Of course, I've talked a lot about AI and large language models.

But this is a really great use case for this that you can use your large language model

of choice.

I mean, they're all getting so good.

So I'm not going to say that you have to use chat gpt or Gemini or grok or clod.

They're all good.

Pick the one that you like that works for you.

But you can start a, they call it a project in chat gpt or a gem and Gemini, but it's

a dedicated, I'm just going to call it project for a specific purpose.

And you can, you know, explain to it like, hey, this project is to help me generate

the goals for 2026, you know, and then you can list off exactly what your goals

are.

You can say, hey, I want you to help me make a structure document that is going to lay

out my goals.

And then I'd like to talk through, okay, why do I want to hit these goals?

How am I going to hit them?

How am I going to track them?

You know, what is it going to look like if I actually achieve it?

And it will assist you in creating a really well polished document that has all of those

things on there.

And I found that incredibly helpful to get something that actually looks really good that

I can utilize going into the new year.

So just a tip and a suggestion to not only speed up the process a little bit, but to

polish it a little bit.

And I mean, it looks professional, like it looks like somebody that actually knew what

they were doing put this document together and I feel good about going into 2026.

So that's it for the goal setting.

Just a few other notes.

It's been, you know, a great year.

Big thanks to the listening audience and everybody that's reached out to me over the years

and this year as well.

I really appreciate all the feedbacks.

That is definitely the massive part of what keeps me going and doing this podcast

is the people reaching out and, you know, just sharing their passion for this industry

and their appreciation for the knowledge and the connection and the learning that they

get from this type of show and others.

That's a big one.

Big shout out to Tommy as well.

I mean, he essentially saved the podcast, if you will, because I was going to be

done this time last year.

I was like, yeah, I'm good.

I'm moving on from it, going to focus on other things, but he definitely got me back

in it and he'll continue to be on the show periodically with the interviews.

But he's been he's been a huge help.

So if you are listening to this, it is thanks to Tommy.

So you can shoot him a thank you as well.

Then a final note, you know, things don't always go as planned, obviously.

There are some bumps in the road.

It will happen one way or another.

We definitely had that towards the end of the year.

I ended up having to let somebody go within our business.

And it was by far the hardest thing that I have done in my business.

Now, I don't need any sympathy.

What was me for Sean?

Obviously, you know, it's not great for the person that I let go either.

But honestly, we've had some really tough challenges within the business.

That was definitely the biggest for me.

But it is what needed to happen in my view.

And I hope it's a better future for both our business and for the employee

that he finds a better fit that's going to work better for him.

But that sort of stuff happens like unexpected things that you don't foresee this happening.

You don't think that things are going to go this way.

You're always looking for that line to go up into the right.

And it doesn't always happen that way.

There's going to be bumps in the road.

But that's all part of the process.

So if that's you in, you know, whatever capacity, things just not going right.

Just, you know, that you got to keep pushing through and you can make it happen.

And again, doing things like sitting down and really looking at the big picture

over the course of the last 12 months and the following 12 months

can be one of the things that will help you get there.

So just wanted to share that with everybody.

But that's all I got for today.

Thank you so much for listening.

Let's get out there, start fixing the world one car at a time.

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