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Skinny Spending: The Leadership Discipline That Saves Your Shop [E257]

Skinny Spending: The Leadership Discipline That Saves Your Shop [E257]

Chris Cotton Weekly Blitz May 11, 2026 15 min
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About this episode

A painful growth mismatch at Firestone of Durango—expanding and hiring ahead of demand—left the shop carrying expensive payroll through a volume drop, forcing layoffs. The takeaway reframes “skinny spending” as disciplined, demand-aligned capacity: audit payroll versus demand, track car count weekly, and tighten scheduling so no-shows don’t quietly drain utilization. Instead of panic cuts, the leadership focus is flexibility, proactive marketing, and hiring only when need is proven.

Topics: skinny spending capacity planning payroll control utilization tracking appointment no-shows scheduling discipline hiring ahead of demand demand alignment
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This is the Automotive Repair Podcast Network.
It's your weekly Blitz with Chris keeping you in the game.
There's a moment every shop owner hits where the numbers don't lie,
but you wish they did. You look at your payroll,
you look at your car count and you realize you got ahead of yourself.
That's exactly where I found myself recently at Firestone of Durango.
I made the call late 2025, expand, hire ahead,
get ready for the spring and summer rush, train, train, train. On paper,
it was a smart move. In reality, I carry too much weight for too long.
We have to make hard decisions as owners. Heavy is the head that wears the crown,
I guess. March looked great.
I felt validated and then April hit and I got punched right in the mouth.
Car count dropped, revenue softened, payroll didn't,
because we pay our people hourly, not flat rate.
And here's the truth. Most owners don't want to say out loud.
Sometimes the problem isn't the market.
Sometimes the problem is the decisions you made trying to outsmart it.
And that's what happened to me today.
I'm talking about being skinny with your spending, not cheap, not reactive.
I'm talking disciplined, intentional leadership driven. All right.
Because if your business can't breathe,
it's usually because you suffocated it with your own dumb ass decisions,
which I did.
This episode is about the discipline of spending in your shop,
how over hiring, misreading demand and reacting emotionally instead of
operationally can create unnecessary pressure.
I'm going to break down how to stay lean,
how to make better hiring decisions and respond like a leader when the numbers
turn against you.
I fell into the expansion trap, I guess.
I wanted to be ready for more demand.
I set a B-hag, a big, hairy, audacious goal for this year.
We did 1.6 million last year.
I wanted to get to 2.6 million this year through the first quarter.
We were within $30,000 where we needed to be for that first quarter.
But man, April just punched me in the gut, right?
If we're thinking about what to call this, let's call it what it is.
I tried to get ahead of the curve.
I hired through the winter, so we'd be ready for late spring and summer.
I trained them, I invested them.
I watched payroll climb, I watched savings drop.
And here's the part most people don't admit.
I wasn't wrong with intention, but I think I was wrong in timing.
And that's a critical distinction because in this industry,
capacity doesn't create demand.
Demand earns the right for capacity.
And so I built capacity hoping demand would follow.
It's backwards thinking about it now.
I think we should just got punched in our teeth a little bit and then work through it.
The reality check of this is payroll is my biggest controllable expense.
Idle capacity is expensive capacity and hope is not a hiring strategy.
Or, as my friend Rich said, hope is not a strategy at all.
Okay.
You know, when the numbers turn, this was my April reality.
March gave me confidence.
March was the second best month we'd ever had in the history of us owning this shop.
And it was within a couple thousand dollars of the best month we'd ever had,
which I think was August or September of last year.
And I'm like, ah, this worked out.
We did great.
I think I was onto something here.
Car count dropped last month.
I have no idea why we were 50 cars less last month than we were April of 2025.
And we were open more this year because we've been open seven days a week.
And we just started that in June of last year.
So I'm like, ah, car count will be good, but we dropped 50 cars.
And so our average repair order went up, but the car count died.
There were just people standing around like a lot of standing around time.
And I look at productivity numbers and I'm like, my gosh, what's going on?
And I don't know, I don't believe and I don't buy into excuses on what happened.
Right.
It, it happened.
We kicked some dirt over that stuff and moved on.
Could have been weather shifts, could have been gas prices, could have been
consumer hesitation.
I don't know.
Seasonal lag, but here's the truth.
It doesn't matter why at first it matters how you respond.
And so I think too many owners waste time trying to explain the dip instead of
adjusting to it.
Okay.
So here's a couple of things that didn't change.
Payroll stayed high, expenses stayed high, pressure increased.
And that's when my leadership got tested.
And I had enough thought in this that Kimberly was like, dude, what's wrong with
you?
Like there's something going on.
And it was me processing all of this and finding out what I needed to do or
figuring out what I needed to do and then make hard decisions.
Right.
When it talks about making the hard decisions, this is the part nobody
enjoys talking about.
I had to let some people go, people that I had hired, people that I trained, people
I carried through the winter, all of that's on me, people that I liked.
It's not that I didn't like them.
It's just in order to make sure that the bills get paid, make sure that everything's
done and make sure the rest of the crew survives and the business carries on.
I had to make tough decisions, right?
The buck stops here always.
And if you're leading a shop, you better get comfortable with that reality.
Hopefully I left these people better off than they were when they found us.
We spent training.
We sent technicians to technician training.
We hired service advisor coaches to coach the service advisor and programs and
training, keeping people you don't have work for is not kindness.
It's avoidance.
And it puts the entire business at risk.
And this wasn't about performance.
It didn't have a thing to do with performance.
This was about alignment with reality.
Was it a rookie mistake?
Yeah, I'll own it, but here's the bigger lesson.
You don't learn leadership when things go right.
You learn it when you have to fix what you created.
And I created this whole mess.
The title, you know, we're talking about skinny spending.
So when we're looking at skinny spending versus starving the business, let's
define this correctly.
Being skinny is not cutting everything.
It's not running understaffed.
It's not saying no to growth.
Being skinny is spending aligned with demand, hiring based on proven
need and maintaining flexibility.
All right.
Some of the key metrics that I watch to do this or the KPIs, labor hour sold per
tech, productivity percentage, car count trends, weekly, not monthly, sometimes
daily, and then average repair order.
Although here's the interesting part.
We started in May or, you know, we're recording this or at the end of the
first full week of May, like our average pair orders, $800.
It's $400 a ticket higher than it was last year.
What does that tell me?
That tells me that the cars are valuable.
It tells me that customers are approving work.
And it also tells me that declined work is coming back.
So what's the issue?
Really, the issue is volume inconsistency.
And that's a different problem than we don't have good customers, right?
We're talking about that.
I want to stop and talk about my sponsor.
And this is exactly where most shop owners get it wrong, right?
When car count drops, they panic, they cut spending.
And the first thing they do shut off is marketing.
That's backward thinking.
If your volume is inconsistent, you don't need less marketing.
You need better marketing.
That's why I trust shop marketing pros.
They understand the industry.
They're not guessing their building strategy around your shop's goals, your
market and your capacity, just like they do around mine.
SEO, Google ads, website optimization, it's all built to drive real return on
investment, not vanity metrics.
And more importantly, they help you stay proactive instead of reactive.
Because if your car counts controlling your decisions, you're already behind.
Let's think about what's actually happening right now.
If we start connecting the dots, average repair order strong.
Customers are saying, yes, declined work is returning.
I'm going to stop for just a second and talk about declined work.
Declined work is returning because we're giving them something that they declined
in the past.
We got a one star review yesterday.
Lady wasn't happy because we, you know, did the DVI and looked at her vehicle.
She said, I'm not interested in that.
You're just trying to upsell me.
And I was trying to explain to her, I just want her to be informed about her vehicle.
Like in a perfect world, would they always say yes to everything we recommend?
Yes, but I'm not dependent on that.
And I don't need that.
We just want you to be able to make smart decisions about your vehicle.
Is it time to sell it?
Is it time to keep it?
What do you do?
Do you like this car?
Do you not like this car?
But based on everything we know, this is what your cars needs are.
And so we're presenting it to you.
One of the things is if you look at our average repair order, a lot of these things
are just maintenance items that nobody ever talked about.
That's one of the things she said, I've been coming here for 15 years and nobody
ever said any of these things to me.
Well, I think they failed you.
The previous owner did by keeping you in the dark about your vehicle.
I'm sorry for that.
I'm sorry.
This is a shock, but that's what it is.
And that's where we're at.
Okay.
If we look at our average written estimate a year ago, our average
estimate was basically just what we were keeping.
And then my guys were declining it and then deleting it.
We're just not presenting it at all.
That's why I have a whole new shop staff compared to this time last year when it
comes to the front service advisors, because we had to retrain them the correct
way how to write a ticket.
You know, our average written estimate went from $700 and we were getting like an
80% approval rate to now or like $2,500 in our average repair orders, $800.
When we think about this, I'm not sure we're still getting a good mix of new
steady customer or new customers.
Maybe the pipeline isn't steady.
I do know that my follow up systems matter more now than ever.
And I also know that our schedule needs to be actively managed daily.
It's really, really hard to teach this.
I say yes to everybody and figure it out.
I've coached it this way for years and people are like, what does that look
like on paper?
That looks like on paper.
When somebody calls in, you say yes and figure it out.
You always have vehicles to work on.
You'll always stay busy.
I think some of our people are overly cautious.
And then I think people are like, oh, business is slow.
Like people, when they pull up to a shop, they want to see cars there.
They want to see it busy.
You can't be overly cautious.
And I'm probably going to do another episode on this, but I'm sure dentists and
doctors, this is why sometimes they're just super slammed is because they
overbook because they know 20% of the people aren't going to show.
And that's the other thing, you know, we might have 10, 12 appointments in a day
and then have five of them not show up.
That seems to be like that's been a real issue currently as well.
People not showing up for appointments, right?
If I'm thinking about some implementation steps, how do we fix this?
What do we do?
Number one, I think you need to audit your payroll versus demand.
How many hours are you selling versus paying?
If you're under a hundred percent productivity, you have a utilization
problem and a heavy general repair entire shop like us.
If it gets below 80, I freak out, but we should still be 80% productive.
And we're not like we were 50%, 60% on a good week.
I had a ton of people standing around.
The other thing I looked at is tracking car count weekly, not monthly averages.
Trying to spot trends early, not after the damage is done.
I had Piper go through and do a weekend audit for me to see which day was better.
Because I actually thinking about closing one of those days or both of those days
and figuring out how to adjust the shift.
But really Saturdays and Sundays are really big for us.
So that was one of the things that I spotted in this car count.
You got to double down on follow ups.
Every decline job is a future revenue.
Build a system around it.
Don't build a system of hope.
OK, you got a Titan scheduling discipline.
You have to fill holes proactively.
Let's let the advisors hope the day fills up.
Also, somebody needs to be in control of the schedule.
If it's 15 minutes past somebody show up time, you need to text them or call
and be like, hey, are you still coming in?
What happened?
Like we were holding a spot for you and you didn't show up.
You need to make it seem like it's an issue because it is an issue.
I think the biggest lesson for me is delay hiring until pain is consistent.
Not one good week, not one strong month.
You know, consistent strain earns expansion, I think.
And I think that's worth repeating.
Consistent strain earns expansion.
I really think this is bigger than one shop.
I think this is kind of across the industry right now.
I think shops are overstaffed from fear of technician shortages.
I think owners are reacting emotionally instead of operationally.
I feel like marketing is inconsistent still.
Productivity is under leveraged and here's the hard truth.
Most shops don't have a hiring problem.
They have a productivity problem.
You don't fix that with more people.
You fix that with better leadership.
Here's what I want you thinking about this week.
Where are you carrying weight your business hasn't earned?
Not where you hope it's going, not where it used to be, where it is right now.
Because leadership isn't about being right all the time.
It's about owning your decisions, adjusting quickly, protecting the business
and moving forward stronger.
At Firestone and Durango, we took the hit.
We made the adjustments and now we're rebuilding from a stronger leaner
position and I know you can do the same.
Kind of put a bow on this.
Leadership is earned in moments like this.
Not when things are easy, not when the numbers are up, but when you have to look
at your business, own the decisions you made and make the hard calls to protect it.
At the shop, we took the hit.
We made the adjustments and we're moving forward leaner, sharper and more disciplined.
That's the standard.
The standard is the standard.
And so now it's your turn.
Go implement something from this episode.
Don't sit on it.
Don't overthink it.
I want you to act.
Also, thanks for being part of the Automotive Repair Podcast Network and for
pushing this industry forward.
If this episode challenged your thinking, share it with another shop owner who needs
it, make sure you're subscribed, leave a review, keep showing up because this
industry doesn't need more shop owners.
It needs stronger leaders.
Remember, rise and grind everybody.
Have a great day.
You've been listening to the weekly blitz with Chris Cotton on the Automotive
Repair Podcast Network.
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