Simple Ways To Fix Your Business in 2026. Mistakes Most People Make.Episode #933

Welcome to the Pints and Polishing Podcast, the most influential and listened to podcast in auto detailing. Welcome to the community. What's up everybody, it's Nick. Welcome to another episode. And Marty is off today, so you're going to be getting a solo episode. I want to start today and just kind of lay out what we're going to talk about. In 2025, some things become very apparent.

You probably know this. I say this on a lot of episodes that I'm hearing that people are working harder than ever. They're posting more content than ever. They're staying busier than ever. And still feel stuck in a hole, or they want to get better. And one thing I've noticed in 2025 is that most operators don't actually know what race they're running. And when you can't define the race, you don't just lose, you lose slowly, it gets expensive.

And it gets very public. Today I want to talk about the races, shop owners, or mobile guys accidentally run why they can't win them, and how to define a race that actually leads somewhere.

And so when I say things like, this is what I've observed in 2025, what I mean is guys, I have people reaching out to me all the time every day, multiple times a day.

They're always asking me questions about their business, PPF shops, 10 shops, you know, all the above mobile guys doesn't matter. I get it a lot. And I've been getting it for the better part of five and a half, six years since the first time I appeared on this podcast.

And I'm very, very, very appreciative of that because it's taught me a lot about the issues people are having, the things they're going through and all that kind of stuff.

In 2025, probably one of the things that has become the most clear to me is that almost, I would say 90 plus percent, you know, if not more of operators can't define the race that they're running, which guarantees them that they're going to end up in a race they can't win anything.

Right, so when we think of small business, it's a very hard proposition. And so what do I mean by the race? What are you trying to win? Right, are you, what were you trying to win in 2025, but let's take this to 2026, this something useful out of this conversation that hopefully you can get you to think about what you want to accomplish in 2026, what are you trying to win?

You know, are you trying to grow your business 2x? Are you trying to grow your business 20% or are you trying to grow revenue or are you trying to go profit or are you trying to hire two mainstays, maybe you're trying to hire a salesperson and a shop manager, maybe you need to have a ppf installer, maybe you just need to grow to your second person, maybe you need to grow to your third person, your fifth, you know, your 50th person, whatever it is, what race are you trying to win.

And the next part is who are you really competing against? I've talked about competition a million times on this podcast and I can't name five shops in Las Vegas. I wouldn't even know who I'm really competing against because that's not what I was competing against. I was competing against the growth of my company.

And the most important part is how are you going to keep score? There's a lot of people that don't keep score in any way. And I've always told people one of the most dishonest things that we tell small business owners is to not concentrate on the money.

I've said that on this podcast quite a bit. So how I kept score was, is my company growing financially? Are my team members doing better? Am I serving more clientele? Those types of barometers that are black and white and not my opinion became very important and instilled to this day are very important.

If you look at hyper clean, which has had massive growth in the last five years, we still had to have a way to keep score internally that we were doing all of the right things. We were growing all the right ways, et cetera.

And then it matters how long do you have to run this race? You're trying to finish, right?

So part of the thing is, what are you trying to accomplish this month or in the next 90 days and what goals in six months and what, what are you trying to be 12 months from now is putting a timeframe on all of this.

And I think if you get the answer to those four things I just said, you're not in a race anymore. You're not in a race. You're just running around. If you don't have those answers. And that's what I meant to say.

If you can't answer those four things, you're not in a race. You're just running around, right? You're just running in circles. Sorry, I was a little confusing there.

Where do I see the biggest failure points? And when I designed this episode, I really looked back on a lot of notes that I have, right?

And a lot of different conversations I have. And I think one of the benefits I can bring to this is I just don't talk to detailing and PPF and tent shops. I talked to all the material suppliers.

Marty talks to a host of other type of people. We talked to people that need chemicals built. We talked to people that need to supply us with raw materials. We talked to people in all facets of the automotive business. If you guys have been following clutch culture.

We're now talking to massive people that want to be involved in all different parts of the automotive business. And so I get to record and write down a lot of my thoughts of a lot of these different meetings.

And you find out that there's big failure points that just keep coming up. Like a lot of people confuse effort with making a progress.

I think this is probably one I've harped on a lot is I hate the terminology of hard work because I know that doesn't equal what people think it should equal.

Putting in hours and working really hard and cleaning wheels, which is hard work does not equal your business making progress.

It's part of progress. It's part of the work you have to do. But just putting in effort doesn't mean you're making the progress to win the race you're trying to win. Now again, let's go back if you've never identified what race you're trying to win. That's why you confuse effort being progress.

I know guys working really hard, probably some of you listening to this and you look up at the end of the year and you're like, I just didn't make very much money.

You never identified what you're actually trying to do. That was the main problem I promise. And so continually telling yourself how hard you work, but not tracking black and white numbers as to the progress you're making doesn't really mean anything.

I've been a person that never had a problem putting in the hours, but I can tell you looking back at the beginning of my career probably for about the first three to five years.

I wasted a lot of time thinking working really hard meant progress, right? And it doesn't not even at all. Hard work just is not the only thing that we need to be concerned about.

It's smart work combined with hard work, making progress to that goal, that race we're trying to win. That's what really matters.

It becomes this really obvious thing once you see it and hopefully after this episode what I'm trying to get at is, you know, sitting down and understanding what you're trying to win and not just doing things for the sake of doing things.

I promise you you're going to have a better 26 and you did a 25 and you have a better 27 than you had 26 if you constantly do this stuff.

The other part of the failure point is this obsession with doing content and activity that feel productive that are not necessarily productive.

And I think this is the biggest one I see. I see a lot of people on the internet all day long.

You know, one of the biggest things that shocks me in the last five years is I think a lot of people think I know this.

A lot of people believe that everyone can't see what they're doing online. So a lot of people just make lots of content.

It's not necessarily the most professional content. Sometimes it's extremely unprofessional. It's certainly not speaking to potential customers well.

It's just activity for the sake of telling yourself you did something.

Not necessarily where you want to be. It goes back to hard work for the sake of hard work is just and not tracking progress in your business really just doesn't mean much.

But this content thing has gotten completely out of control for lots of people. I mean, Marty and I share people that we know have been making content for the better part of the last seven years.

They're in a worse spot today than they've ever been seven years later of making content every day.

They make content every day and have for seven years. There's people I can point to.

Their life is worse, their finances are worse, their business is worse, but they keep making the same content. That's a failure point in your business.

And by the way, we all fail at stuff. You guys have probably heard me say this too often. I make a ton of mistakes.

I don't run away from mistakes. I'm going to make mistakes when I try stuff or try to do new things or whatever.

I'm just there in willing to take the hits and financially fix the problems that I cause which a lot of people aren't willing to do.

And then when you take all of these failure points and you say when you have no finish line, you have no leverage to actually grow, right?

So a lot of people moving around or motion feels like they have momentum until you realize you're not getting anywhere.

And it just becomes one of these things that people do, like waking up and shooting content, not asking if the content is better than five years ago, not asking who I'm trying to talk to.

We see this a lot. It's becoming very apparent Facebook.

In some Instagram, but Facebook is this place for people to try to preach ideas about the PPF industry, the tent industry, the detailing industry.

They're using AI chatbots to write their posts. They're telling themselves and you how valuable AI is, but the only way they use it is to write these long posts that they could have never written on their own.

And they're talking to like the professional installers, professional detailers, professional tent guys on their like business page or personal and it just becomes this thing that they say, I got all of this motion and I got all this content, but they're never asking like, what are we doing? Why am I doing it?

And I think this is where you get into the biggest losing races that I watch people make and number one is social media, posting constantly.

I mean, I know people who are posting two, three, four times on Facebook a day and it's nonsensical. I feel for them because I know what's happening.

Either they're not having success and they're doing it because they're bored, which is leading to less success.

Or they're trying to sound like the smartest person in the room and everybody's like, nobody cares about this stuff.

Right? Like I always tell people, if you see a post on hyper clean of any kind, whether that's this podcast or guys, we're hoping you go try our products.

Or you order products, you know, for the 10th time or the 20th time or the 50th time. I mean, it's not rocket science, what we're doing here.

But if you're posting constantly and it's all of this stuff that makes no sense to a consumer of yours,

why are you posting it? And I can tell you, I think it's, I think it's become almost like a cancer to some people that they're posting things because they're convinced that they're supposed to be posting.

And then they want to sound smart. And unfortunately, the more that they talk, the less smart that they sound.

And now we have this never ending cycle of how I'm referencing this guy who I've watched post constantly for seven years to not only no growth, but negative growth.

And I think Marty says this best behind the scenes. And I know some of you have talked to him as well. And I'll share it here.

There's a lot of people that are just chasing likes and views.

They're not actually chasing again, running any race of any value.

Hey, man, views and likes are great. You know, this last 12 months, we've gotten millions upon millions upon millions of views on clutch culture in the first year.

We've had several videos do a million, two million, you know, three million views. And it feels great.

But if those people don't come over to hyper clean or don't get involved in the community of clutch culture in any meaningful way, those views and those likes don't really mean anything.

And so you see people posting on social media and they have no conversion strategy.

Like, how is this person actually truthfully going to come by from your company? So if I get a view and I get a like, how do I convert that person?

What is my strategy to make customers? Right.

Then there's another part of social media that a lot of people don't ever want to talk about is that there are lots of people. And I would say almost the majority of them that are just trying to be creators. And so you're competing with creators.

So there's this, there's this thing that a lot of people, especially small business owners who are trying to sell a service locally like detailing PPF or tent don't realize is that if you have no conversion strategy, you're just competing with people that are doing nothing but creating and trying to make money off their channel.

When you own a small business or a business of any kind that you sell a service or a product, you don't want to be competing with creators, you want to be competing with other people selling product or selling service.

But when you don't have a strategy to convert people to buy your stuff, now you're just a creator.

And yeah, man, Mr. Beast makes a lot of money. There's a lot of got a lot of men and women that make a lot of money creating content of all different types of things outside of our industry.

But that's not what you're doing as a business owner. You're trying to get people to buy your service, you're trying to get people to buy things from you, you're trying to find a way to do what you want to be doing, selling the service or the product that you sell.

And you got to remember platforms only reward entertainment. So it's, it's, you know, attention doesn't mean profit.

Like one of the things we've partnered with a company will be revealing, they make some American made products here for the shop.

And they've worked with creators that have 10 million subscribers, 5 million subscribers.

And he goes, you know, the funny thing is, those people that attention never made us any money. He said it right on the phone call I had with them.

And I kind of felt vindicated because I've been saying in that to our team for a very long time. And Marty's been saying that to our team for a very long time.

Just because somebody gives you a view and a like doesn't mean you can make money off of it.

And so if you're a small business owner and you're running the race of social media, you're posting constantly, you're chasing views, you have no conversion strategy, you got attention, but you got no profit.

You can't feed your team, you can't feed your family, your business isn't growing. And you're not losing because your content is bad all the time. You're losing because this isn't the race you're trying to win.

So you're posting constantly with no idea of what race you're trying to win. And this goes back to what I'm trying to get across today is you're running a race, but you don't know what race you're trying to win.

And if you're posting on social media as a business owner who sells a service or a product.

You can't go out there and just be a content creator and be like, I just want views and likes. Well, that doesn't move the needle in your business.

And this leads to the next race we see people lose.

Okay, it's the price race.

The vast majority of people that own a business today think their way to win is to undercut the price locally or undercut the price on the product online.

We have this happen all the time at hyper clean where we see people come out with cheap products and they try to undercut the price. They never stick around.

So if it's you and you go, I'm going to go undercut my competitor. Great. But usually the people who have been in the market for 10 years have stayed in the market and have a good reputation charge the price they charge because that's what it costs to do things properly.

And why people charge an undercut is because they want to stay busy. They discount their services because they go, I'll stay busy.

Okay, what is staying busy? Get me if I don't make any profit off the service. This is really big in the PPF world.

The PPF world is probably in the biggest mess of any part of our industry right now. And I think it's probably not close.

Tent has largely stabilized, but they had a decade in the wilderness where it was really hard to make money on tent.

Because you had the $99 guy on every corner and all those kinds of things they've stabilized that tent is now out of that market largely in most places.

But there is a reality that PPF is in this right now. You see people are doing 999 full fronts.

I mean, I'm on the west coast. It might be a little bit aggressive over here. It might be less aggressive or you're at, but you've seen the price fall dramatically.

And what happens is shops just keep going down, down, down. They look up at the end of the year. They made $0.

And by the way, that's happened a ton in the last 24 months, if not the last 36 months to be to be fair about it.

The thing that people never who run this race of cheap prices never understand is someone's always going to be cheaper your margins are going to die first.

And your growth is only going to make this problem worse. So if you get busier and you've undercut all the prices locally.

100% getting more work makes your problem worse because now not only are you not making any money you're not making any money faster.

So your bills are piling up all those kinds of things. And there's always a saying people say a variety of different ways if prices your advantage, you don't really have one.

You don't really have an advantage. Okay. This leads to the third race that we see people run. I'm busy, busy work, busy human being constantly talk about being busy. They got a full calendar. They got constant work, but you're stressed out. Right.

Right. There's really three simple ways and reasons that this fails. Okay. So remember, we've undercut on price. Now we're bragging how busy we are. We're running this race of being busy, busy, busy every time I pick up the phone, I tell everybody how busy I am.

But you got to realize time caps revenue. You only have so many hours in the day you can run your shop or run your mobile. So time is going to restrict how much revenue you can make.

Usually the owner is the bottleneck in these problems. Right. You become a real problem in your business because the owner is so centrally involved in everything that as you grow and as you get busier, the owner bottlenecks everything.

And finally, there's no scalability in all of this. So again, we're laying out races that I've watched people run pretty much my whole career, but especially in 2025, it became very apparent and busy is not a business model.

People think it is and they go, well, I'm busy and I'm busy. Are you profitable in that busy? And I don't mean barely profitable. For any of you in a service based business, there's nothing more profitable than service based business. Okay. That because you are charging for time.

And that should be the most expensive thing on the planet when you sell a good like car shampoo. Okay. You can't make the type of profit that you can make using the car shampoo as a service provider.

The service provider makes all the money. That's why it's always funny when people complain, well, the coding companies are making all the money. No, look at what you make on a $200 bottle of tray.

Most of you are making several thousands of dollars on a hundred mill bottle of tray. I only sold it for 200 bucks. So who made all the money? The service provider. Right. So busy is not a business model. And it's not something you should be bragging about on every phone call in my opinion.

So then people have this idea of the race because they're not thinking through the race that they're running and they go, well, if I create content, it's going to accelerate my growth.

The problem is content amplifies your strategy, which you have none. Right. If you are running the wrong race and you add in content, it usually equals faster failure.

Most people don't have a content problem. They have a clarity problem. They don't actually have content that is trying to gain customers. Again, we stated earlier, they just have content for the sake of content.

The problem is that amplifies your lack of strategy. You put the wrong race that you're running plus the content you just fail even faster. And that's what I've watched. Right.

There is zero doubt in my mind that the races I've laid out here that people are running improperly is exactly what I've watched in 2025. And the reason these have become more obvious because the economy got tougher.

When the economy gets tougher to amplify all the problems somebody may have, and I want to remind everybody I only got this idea and the things I'm talking about today from talking to so many people this year.

I talked to people at SEMA for a week straight 8 9 10 hours a day in person could look in their eyes see what they were saying sat down with them.

Plus all the DMs all the emails all the phone calls all the text messages.

So I don't want to just leave this as something of all of the bad things. I want to say what do you do in 2026 to run the right races.

Let's talk about the word that everybody dodges of a small business called profitability.

The higher your ticket, the better your margins, the more profitable you are.

Okay. But having a high ticket for the sake of a high ticket like we see in PPF now where people go well my average ticket's 1500 bucks. Yeah, but you're making 150 dollars profit happens all day every day by the way.

Or I can put tray on for 1200 bucks and have 900 to a thousand dollars in profit.

Which one would you rather install? Well most people would go I want PPF at my shop. I'd rather install tray and I install both by the way.

If I could do 10 jobs of tray or 10 full front PPF's I would take 10 jobs of tray because I'm going to get a higher ticket.

I may not get the highest ticket, but I'm going to get a high ticket and I'm going to have infinitely better margins. That's how this game works.

The next is how are you positioned in your marketplace? Are you known for something specific?

Well, yeah, I'm known for PPF. Okay. Well, you've just shown me your PPF isn't profitable. So now you may have to make a move and get back into coatings, which we're seeing at a record pace from PPF shops that we're talking to.

And you have to reposition yourself to be known for that in 2026 instead of pushing paying protection film so hard.

It doesn't mean you bail on PPF, but you bring coatings back to the forefront and now you're get a high ticket. You get better margins all of a sudden you fixed a lot of your business.

The next thing you have to think about is longevity is this sustainable and predictable? There's one reason we tell everybody to have maintenance programs.

They're sustainable, they're predictable, they're trainable to team members.

But if you can learn how to grow your coatings business, if you can learn how to build a profitable PPF business, if you can learn how to have a profitable tent business, all of those

will increase your longevity and sustainability and your predictability of your business.

The goal isn't always more customers, it's better customers. That's been what I've done for 15 years.

Matter of fact, we are probably going to serve less customers in 2025 at VR in my detailing and coating in PPF business.

Then we've ever served and we're probably going to make more money than ever.

So after 15 years of concentrating on better customers, I can serve less customers, make way more profit, provide way more services to those people.

At a more profitable number, I don't need to go out and sign thousands of new headache customers. I just need to talk to the better customer.

And there's a dividing line that's getting bigger and bigger and bigger in the economy. Talk to anybody that owns a restaurant.

They're looking for the better customers, too. They don't want their staff harassed, they don't want jerk customers yelling at their waitress staff or their wait staff and their hostess and their managers.

We all want better customers, but that starts with how you price services, how you do your content, how you talk to people, how you do things.

Right. So if I gave you some things to write down for next year to answer some of these questions, because I want to make sure I make this valuable.

We're at the end of the year. We're going into 2026. Seemingly, we'll all have some free time around the holidays.

The first question is, who am I trying to beat? Who am I trying to beat in my market? Who am I trying to beat? Maybe it's just me.

Maybe I go, I just underperformed the last couple of years, I need to beat myself over the last two years.

The question is, what does winning actually look like to you? And just so you're clear when you're in business, there's going to be a monetary thing that should be a goal. That shouldn't be the only goal.

But what does winning look like? So for me today, I have traded more money in my pocket at VR.

What I'm doing at VR today is me having to deal with the business last, my team taking the reins, my team doing more things, them getting rewarded financially for doing that.

Winning today at VR isn't me getting another thousand clients because I own part of hyper clean. And so I made a decision over five years ago that I thought I was going to have to do several different things to have the future I wanted.

So what does winning look like to you? This is probably the most important one to write down next.

What do I track weekly? And when I say track things, one of the things I want to put here is it better be black and white and not something you can have an opinion about. So it needs to be numbers based as my opinion.

That could be how many details, how many full fronts you did, how many windows you tended, whatever. More importantly, okay.

I would say when you track weekly for most people, it's revenue and profit.

What revenue do we bring in weekly and of that revenue, what did we profit? There is a simple answer to that question.

And number four, what am I willing to ignore? When you're trying to win, it requires you to ignore races you could run, but you shouldn't. And let me tell you the big one I saw in 2025.

I saw people in a tent business to go, I got to get into this PPF thing. Hey man, it could work for you. They didn't have a good plan. They weren't running the right races. They got into it. It completely derailed their business. So they didn't ignore that race they could run, but they probably shouldn't have run it.

This happens a lot to detailers now. We see a lot of people, many of whom have never scaled PPF businesses telling detailers to go into PPF.

It's very dangerous. I have talked to people who brought PPF into their detailing business. They weren't ready. They weren't financially ready for what it takes. They weren't mentally ready. They certainly weren't skill ready.

And they've delaminated headlights. They marked up paint with the knife. All mistakes that happen. I understand that.

But truth be told, they shouldn't have been running that race right at that moment.

Now you get into this really, really, really, really final part that I think is important.

Okay. When you drift away from things that can make you money and you say I'm going to go chase this thing, you 100% ramp your stress up.

Stress isn't necessarily always a bad thing, but for a lot of people, it's a really bad thing. They don't know how to handle it. They don't know how to get through it.

But that's where clarifying what the questions I just said and listening back to this episode and taking some notes that you can take from it to help your business.

When you have clarity of what race you're trying to run, therefore what things you're trying to win at at the end of the year or the end of the quarter or whatever, you don't really have tons of stress.

You might have stressful days. You might have a stressful week, but you don't have stress all the time.

Every time I have felt stuck in my business that I look back on it was never my effort. It was always I was going in a little bit of the wrong direction.

So to close this episode, one of the things

that you can take away is if you define the race before you post more content before you discount or add services, I think you're going to be in a better spot.

I think that's where I end today is if you know where you're trying to go and what race you're running, you'll post better content, you won't discount your services causing you to lose money.

And you won't add services just because somebody on the internet said you should add a service.

Happens every day though. And I don't judge anybody for these things. These are things that I've noticed in 2025.

Some of these things, if not all of them, I've struggled with that points in my business.

And so the point of this episode was to provide something to go into 2026 to find what races you're trying to win.

Mainly one race, which should for me, simplify your race.

How to get more revenue and be more profitable is an easy race to start at.

Plane simple, go through your numbers, do your numbers, and then devise a plan based on your numbers far too many of us. And I've been guilty at times too.

Give all of this gray area type of well, if I we do this, no, get black and white when you're doing this to begin 2026.

And I think it'll be helpful.

Guys, I wanted to share this with all of you. I hope you found it helpful.

I hope this is one of those things you can refer back to and at times make your life a little bit easier maybe when you're having a tough time or you can't figure something out in your business.

And I want to thank everybody for constantly listening, go over to the hyper clean specialist group on Facebook and we'll talk to you guys next time.

Simple Ways To Fix Your Business in 2026. Mistakes Most People Make.Episode #933

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