What 5,500 Technicians Really Think About the Industry

What we're trying to do is bring more people into the industry and we all know that's a bit of a

tough poll today and this is a key part of it. Beyond the Wrench with Jay Ganinen from Wrenchway.

Good afternoon everyone and welcome. Thank you for taking the time to join us as we go inside the

findings of the 2026 Voice of Technician Survey. This session is presented in partnership with

ASC and Wrenchway and today we'll be walking through some of the key insights emerging from

this year's data. Over the next hour we're going to examine what the numbers are telling us about

technician sentiment across automotive and diesel, where we're seeing consistency, where we're seeing

some movement, where there are some meaningful differences based on experience levels, shop type

or segment. We'll take a closer look around themes about pay and benefits, job satisfaction,

leadership, career outlook, and overall perception of the industry. There are some really,

really good things to pull out of this. There's a lot to get to, but the focus today is understanding

the data and the trends shaping 2026. Our goal is to provide a clear, thoughtful analysis of what

technicians are saying and what that means for the broader industry landscape. We're going to get

things kicked off right away. We've got a lot of things to get through here. A little housekeeping

before we get started. This session is being recorded and will be emailed out to all registrants

after the event. I do get the feeling there might be some things you want to watch back.

There's a lot of good information out of this. If you want to talk with other attendees, use the chat

as we do in all of our webinars. If you can go ahead and tell us where you're joining us from

today, that would be wonderful. Lastly, if you have any questions, use the Q&A button below.

That helps us as presenters be able to see those questions and address them. Hopefully,

we'll have some time for some questions, but again, we've got a lot to get through here today.

Who's joining me here today? Mark Wilson, my co-founder and CEO of Wrenchway. How are you doing,

Mark? I'm good. A little under the weather, so maybe I'll talk a little less than normal, but

I have a hard time keeping my mouth quiet. Probably not, but overall, pretty good other

than not feeling the best. That's all right. We'll get through it. Dave Johnson from

ASC, President and CEO. Dave, how are you, my friend? I am good. It is so good to be here with

you and Mark and the crew that's here to watch this today. I think there's going to be some really

good stuff shared. Thanks for letting me join in. Yeah, absolutely. We've got a bunch of

registrants for this, so I'm really looking forward to the chat and seeing what everybody's

got to say about the report, a lot of fun stuff. Reminder, if you haven't looked into the ASC

Connects program or if you haven't signed up yet, go check it out at wrenchway.com. It's a really

cool new program that was developed by us and ASC. I think there's a lot of good that's coming

out of it, a lot of really, really good feedback so far from all aspects of industry.

Quick walkthrough of our agenda for today. We'll talk briefly about the survey. There's

a lot of information there again throughout this entire report that you'll be able to see

the full report here soon, but in that report, we're going to dive into what technicians want,

technician satisfaction, some of the school stuff. This was kind of a different element to this

year's survey that I thought was really, really interesting. A lot of good information out of that.

Key takeaways that we really have gone through the report and combed through it and tried to find

things that can be beneficial to everybody. We'll talk about those key takeaways,

and hopefully we have some time for the Q&A. I talked about this already. There is so much to

cover. There's zero chance we're going to cover it all today in this webinar, but that's why we

did this report. We want you to dive into it. We want you to really dissect it and try to figure

out opportunities for your shop or your part of the industry to get better. There's a lot of

things in the data. You can see here the report includes additional data points, breakdowns by

industry role and shop type. That part is very fascinating to me. It was really, really interesting

to see the breakdowns between independents and dealers and fleets and automotive and diesel,

really getting a little bit more granular there. Very helpful. Year over year trends and what

we're seeing there, there were some surprising things to me. Hopefully we'll be able to touch

on some of those as we go through this webinar and so, so much more. Fun part about this is that

if you registered for this webinar, check your email after we're finished up. You'll get the

first look at this year's voice of technician survey report, and then it will be readily

available to the general public come tomorrow. At least you'll get a little bit of a head start

in diving into it. I want to say thank you to our friends at Milwaukee Tool, Jacob Bond,

the entire team. They've been such a great, great supporter of everything we're doing here,

and in this case, they were able to provide a $3,000 Milwaukee Tool prize package.

That helps us get more visibility to the survey, helps us get it distributed out to

more people and get more people to take it. Chad Wiggins, who is a technician from Indiana,

won the big prize, won the $3,000 prize. Congratulations to Chad.

Let's talk about the survey. Sorry, I'm motoring through this initial part.

Trying to get through everything so we get you the most value, but the purpose of the survey

is truly to understand what technicians are looking for. We want to gather that feedback

to better understand those technicians and what it's like to be in their shoes and do it in a way

where they don't get in trouble. They're anonymous. It's really giving us really good feedback

and gives us the ability to put together a report like this. The participants

was a combination of technicians, shop owners and managers, instructors, students, and others

working in the automotive diesel or collision industries. You can get a look here at this

profile. We'll breeze past this, but the important pieces are we had 5,500 completed responses.

About 60% of those were working technicians. I was surprised and I think why the focus on the

school side. 20% were instructors, which provided some incredible feedback. 85% were automotive,

13% were diesel. Again, just really, really good feedback overall, a good split between

dealerships and independents, and almost three-quarters of respondents held at least one

active ASC certification. Hey, Jay, real quick on that last one. When you all look at the final

report, a lot of it, even though there's some technician, some instructor, some students,

it'll note in the report a lot of times when we pull out charts and things like that, it's only

the technician responses or in some cases only the student responses to give a clear picture

of what's going on and sometimes to compare the two. That's less on our presentation today, but

note that when you're reviewing the report. That should be noted in the fine print too,

but I think we do a good job of splitting that out to not skew or blend things together too much.

Good call. Good point, Mark. All right. What technicians want? This is the first big bullet

that we're going to dive into. The important factors when evaluating potential employers and

pay structures. Let's dive into this, Mark. Is there anything here that sticks out to you

that you'd like to dive into to kick things off? I'll start with a general comment. Again,

a reminder, we're not going to be able to go through every single one of these. The report is

very thorough, but one comment I want to point out for this. I debated changing some of the labels,

especially the nice to have, because we asked them to rate when you're looking for an employer

what's a must have, what's a nice to have, and what's not important. Don't look at nice to

have as I don't really need to do that. All I have to care about is the must-haves. Again,

this is asking technicians what they look for when they're looking for an employer. The must-haves

are like the bare minimum. They're the ones to, I filter down right away. I get rid of all the

ones that don't offer those, but there's still a lot of employers left that offer all the must-haves.

That's where I think the key piece of this part of our report is the nice to have. Those are the

differentiators, the ones that are truly going to set you apart. Again, when talking to people for

prior year reports, I think there was a little confusion of if a technician just rated tool

allowance as nice to have owners and managers read that as well. I don't need to invest in that,

and I would argue it's the complete opposite of the must-haves. Yeah, that's a given. Those are

important. We have to talk about that, but I'll start with the bottom one of adequate tool allowance

or reimbursement. 74% say that's a nice to have. 14 or excuse me, 12% say it's a must-have. I think

part of that is a lot of shops don't offer it, and that's why they put it as a must-have, but in

talking to students and technicians when they're looking for jobs, those are those so-called

nice to have. We might as well call them the differentiators, the things that actually make

them make a decision. I guess I started with that one, Jay, but more of a general comment.

It's interesting, and I think the fun part for me is looking at this year over year as well,

and seeing the direction that some of this stuff goes. The one that is random that I would point

to that I was surprised that changed was the temperature-controlled buildings. Last year,

there wasn't really much thought given to that, and it actually bumped up quite a bit. I was very,

very surprised by that piece, but then you do look at all of the other things, and proper equipment

in the shop has always been there. That's always been towards the top. I think good technicians

want good tools, and they want to have what they need to have to fix something. That's always

important. You are starting to see an increase in, I think, a desire for paid vacation. A lot of

the scheduling type stuff, right? Paid vacation, no weekends. Maybe you will talk a little bit about

the schedule differences and what they're looking for in the schedule differences.

But it is interesting to see year over year how maybe some of this stuff is shifting,

and some of it kind of stays the same like the proper equipment in the shop.

There are some really, really interesting things here that stick out to me.

Maybe since we talked about year over year, just go to the next slide because that has

the same stuff, but adds the year over year. This is kind of busy, but we got ahead of ourselves

a little on the year over year. I think it's important as we talk, people can kind of digest

this information a little bit. Yeah. Is there anything that sticks out to you, Mark?

I think some of what you said. I'm interested in the change year over year, but I think it's

worth noting the overall consistency from year to year. The few that did change quite a bit

are interesting to talk about like you mentioned, but I'm more struck by the consistency of

what things matter and what things don't. And I wish we could say things are improving more

than they are. We see some improvements in the industry for sure, but there's just not enough of it.

So yeah, I guess that'd be one general comment. I'm curious if Dave has any

comments either on this or the last one. Sorry, we kind of got out of order on you a little,

Dave. I might throw a curveball at you there. Well, that's okay. And if I go into the weeds,

you can pull me back. But as I look at this data, I see a few things where there's some dramatic

shifts. Others where it hasn't shifted much and it's fairly stable year over year, which is to be

expected. But like you said, there's that jump with temperature control building. And I've seen

a theme there. But I want to step back a little bit. Going back to that previous slide, what you

pointed out, Mark, just double down and doubling down on that a little bit. These are all things

that you have to look at individually, as I see it. Some of it depends on your geography, where

you're at. Some of it gets down to the individual employee and what's important to them. Now,

you can't have, I'll say, variable benefits all the way through. There's kind of those standard

things. But I think as you start getting down to those, we'll call it nice to have zone. Some of

those are more need to have than nice to have for some. And so I think for me, where I've seen

success is shop owners or managers understanding what clicks with those individuals and being able

to tailor things to them. Can't do that in all cases. Totally get that. But to me, it's interesting

that you see some variety there. I wouldn't become overwhelmed by it if it were me. I could, but

you can't deliver everything to everybody. But it's identifying what are those little things.

Sometimes there are little things that can make a big difference to an individual employee.

Yeah, one other change I saw that was interesting was the well-documented career pass. If you combine

the nice to have and must to have, it's the vast majority for that. In the past, we saw that for

students, as you would expect. But now there was a big jump in experience text that

rated or changed that from a nice to have to must have to. That's a good trend in my opinion.

I mean, that is a must have in my opinion for sure on that one. And sorry for all the bouncing

around, Jay. It might be good as we talk. I apologize to the audience for this, but flip it

back a screen. It's a little easier to read those. I just got excited because you were talking about

comparing year to year. But if you go back one, I think that might be good.

Right there? Yeah. I think this one visually kind of shows you the, one, there's very little that

are not important, which shouldn't be a surprise to anybody. But yeah, I think this kind of puts

it in perspective a little more. And you don't get the comparison from year to year on this one,

but it does kind of show visually how important a lot of these things are.

Yeah. Well, a blinding flash of the obvious, I'm sure, to throw in there looking at that

bottom one, right? Adequate tool allowance or reimbursement. For the journeymen out there,

that may not be as big of a deal. For those that are earlier in their career, that may be

a bigger deal. So back to thinking about those things as you look at the decisions you have to

make as a shop owner or a manager. Yeah. And I do think that's a really important piece, Dave,

right? Kind of meeting them where they're at with the technician. And a lot of it does come

down to communication and understanding what your team wants and knowing that they're in different

stages of their career. We were able to kind of break that down a little bit. And I think

I love the fact that we split out students here because it is important for us that we need to

know what they're looking for. And a lot of it was similar to what experienced technicians were

looking for. But there were some key things that stuck out to me where they wanted something

different. And I think being able to kind of identify those things and make sure that you're

catering to those young people coming into our industry is very, very important. Anything else

on this slide, or are we good to go to pay structure here? I think we're good to go because

one thing I should say is later on, so this is what we're asking people when they're evaluating

employees, what they look for, we also ask them to rate their current employer. So we're going to

come back to some of these same categories. And I think it's pretty telling to say, to compare the

two of if I were to look for another job, what would be most important, and then compare that to

where the current employers are. So we will revisit some of these categories here in a few minutes.

Yeah, great point there, Mark. All right, pay structure is always a hot topic. This is one

that I think we're getting even stronger feedback on this year in terms of what types of salary

and what type of pay that our technicians are getting. When I looked at this initially,

you saw more pressure on flat rate. And this graph is pretty easy to decipher. And that if you look

at the bottom and traditional flat rate, it went down yet again. So when we're asking what is your

preferred method of payment or what are you getting paid, what pay plan would you like,

you're seeing that traditional flat rate kind of have more pressure and something I think is kind

of a theme throughout the survey and something that you'll see. You look at the hourly or salary

with production bonus. And last year, when I looked at this, I thought it was kind of odd

that hourly had ranked higher than hourly with a production bonus. And the only thing I could think

of last year was that maybe people thought because you were getting a production bonus, your hourly

rate would be lower. And maybe that's why they judged it that way. But this year, it kind of came

across in a way that made a little bit more sense to me where the 41% would prefer the hourly or

salary with a production bonus. The 23% was hourly or salary, 22% flat rate with guarantee,

and then 14% of traditional flat rate. So, Mark, I'll start with you on this one. Does that make

sense what I'm saying? Like last year, I thought that was a little bit off. This year makes a

little bit more sense to me. Yeah, I had the same thoughts. I agree with you. I kind of lump

the middle two together. So, I look at it as kind of top one is fix them out. You're going to get

what you get as long as you don't get fired or anything like that. And then the very bottom

flat rate is kind of like if you're in sales, it's commission only. The only difference in my

opinion is when you're in sales, you have control over it and you can go out and hunt and find those

customers. I personally think just straight flat rate, you have no control usually as a technician

on the customers coming through the door. So, that one is basically 100% variable. So, then in the

middle is what I personally like, the two that combine. It has a guaranteed amount or a baseline

amount, but a variable component tied to performance, whether you do that, you know, team or individual

or some mix of the two. So, it's tough. I've thought about, sorry, I'm saying that wrong too.

Hourly or salary is the fixed one. I think you all get what I'm saying. I said I was feeling

under the weather today. Maybe I should have laid off the cold medicine. But my point is,

I think the version of having a guaranteed amount, you're an adult, you're professionals,

you're showing up to work. There should be some guaranteed pay in my opinion. But then adding

a variable component on top of it, I think that's the right mix. Whether you call that

hourly with production bonus or flat rate with guarantee, I know there are differences there.

But in my mind, I kind of combine those a little bit. And I think that mix is always going to be

the preferred for most people. I don't know. Dave, what do you think?

Well, here's what I've observed. I've seen a lot over the years. And some of you may know,

I was at Ford for 32 years and interfaced with dealers a lot. So, I got to see on the dealer

side. And it's not totally the same on the aftermarket shop side. But it's not that much different,

guys. You saw the SOPs that leaned into flat rate. And they could see some good production

numbers. But what I observed was, it came and went in waves. And they frankly struggled with

turnover more than those that, at least my observation, was looking at basically an hourly

or salary base with the production bonus, kind of smooth things out. And what I thought I saw was

better attrition numbers, better overall morale in the shop, if you will. And so,

you may not have had those. We all want that curve going straight up on our revenue and profits.

So, it may not have been as steep as some others, but it was more consistent. And I think over the

long term, it looked better. Now, let me throw in there as well. I think what we're all, we all

struggle with a little bit is, for those of us who haven't been in the business for a while,

sometimes it's hard for us to see how things have evolved over time. On one hand, it's happened

quickly, but it still takes years for all these things to evolve in terms of the technology

we're dealing with, of the vehicles, the technology you have to have in the shop,

just to work on those vehicles. What is being expected of your technicians to know

and the skills they have to have, frankly, I didn't have to have 30 years ago. So,

when you start stacking that up, and I'm connecting some dots here, I don't know how we deal with this,

but there's a very fundamental reality that we are moving into the age of robots. And I've said

this for a while now that folks for the most part, it is progressing this way rapidly. We are

working on rolling robots. And it changes your perspective a little bit when you're thinking

about whether it's automotive, truck, whatever the case may be. And so, if that's what's happening,

what do we expect of those that are doing the work? And I think there's a real disconnect

between the perception of who they are or what they do and the reality of what they have to do

to be successful in the shop and for as a business to be successful. So, how do we deal with that?

And I'm coming full circle on this, it comes back to how do we compensate them? It's not just

about how fast that you can change shocks and struts or suspension components or do a break job.

You know, I thought of those as the gravy jobs that everybody wanted for flat rate,

so I could beat the time and get on with it. Yes, that works still there,

and it's going to be there. But the expectation of US tech is so much higher now and what you

have to do. And so, I think of it as we're professional. The industry is professionalizing

on us, whether we realize it or not. And the question is, are we keeping up with that and

thinking about how we pay and how we frame what we do as work and what our what our businesses do

as work? And I think just stepping back from thinking about that for a moment starts to lead

you to think a little differently about, well, how do I compensate people? What is important?

And if it's about professional and recognizing that we always want to choose to be professional,

but I'm just telling you the technology itself is driving that, that your skill level of your

profession, your abilities have to be higher than they ever were before, leads you to look at,

well, how do I compensate? And how do I make something that's more stable for them?

And it works for me if I'm the business owner, and that results in they feel valued, they recognize

that they're a professional, and everyone's getting compensated appropriately.

The one thing I'll add there, Dave, is that it is similar to the slide before when we talked about

having to maybe meet a technician where they're at. I hear kind of both sides of this, maybe don't

hear as much about the pro traditional flat rate folks. But I have talked to so many technicians

over the years that are absolutely love flat rate. And they said, if you take my flat rate away,

I'm going to quit. Now, the, I think, far majority, we see this in our survey data here is that a lot

of them don't like flat rate, and they're fighting against that. And so I believe that I've seen a

lot more shops that are giving options for pay rates and trying to make sure that whatever

pay rate you're putting somebody on that they're that it fits them. Now, you could, there's just

so many arguments that go all over the place on this. And I don't know that we'll ever have the

perfect answer for this. But I do think it's valuable to have the conversation with your teams

and try to get an understanding if there's frustrations with flat rate. What are those

frustrations? And Mark, you and I have talked about this a lot. There's so many different

variations of flat rate pay systems that not a lot of them are exactly alike, right? There's

different intricacies of all of them. And so if there's something that you're doing as a shop

that's creating tension with your team, just keep in mind that that's the thing that could

be driving that deflection that could be driving people away from your shop and it could be driving

some of your best people away from the shop. I know a lot of times it's that A level technician

in a shop where they're getting put on a bunch of warranty work and call the dealers out here

just a little bit, they get put on warranty work and they'll see that B level technician that's

doing a lot of undercar stuff and can turn work really, really fast. And they're able to really

make a lot of flat rate hours in a way where when you have some of the more advanced level

diagnostic jobs, frankly, you can get killed on those. So it's just kind of meeting where people

where they're at, listening to them, having open conversations, open and transparent conversations

around it. So you actually do have an understanding and oh, by the way, that actually shows that you

care about them as well. I'm glad you said that, Jay, because I did observe that as well

that even within the shop, they could do different pay structures. That could be

complicated, but they made it work. And even at that, you can look at individualizing

that hourly or salary base. Maybe your guys that lean more towards I want flat rate, well,

that may be lower on the base and higher on the productivity bonus. So there's ways to adjust that

and you could have some straight up flat rate. I saw the comment out there, I thought that was

great. Flat rate or I'm going to another shop. I get it. I saw that too. Totally get it.

I would add to that though, just because you add a guarantee or something like that doesn't mean

flat rate goes away. That's my point with the middle ground is I think you can get the best of

both worlds, but it's just crazy to me that somebody can make nothing if no customers come

through the door. That's not the technician's job to do that. And so I've never bought into that

argument at all. And then the other argument I sometimes hear is, oh, it won't be motivating

for them. And that's why I like to blend, where it's still motivating. But even if you were a

straight hourly or straight salary, that's a management issue. If you can't motivate your

people to get work done and not be in the back screwing around or being outside or whatever,

one, you got to get rid of them or you're not good at managing them. I think it's disrespectful to

say if you take away that variable component that people in our profession are just going to do

nothing. I mean, why is that the case? We are professionals and other industries make it work.

And the people that are just skating by and trying to not pull their weight, again, that's a

management issue. You got to correct that or move on from them. It works in other industries.

I've just never really bought into that argument either. But again, I like the middle ground of

having a fixed component and I don't mean minimum wage fixed component, something you can live on

if customers aren't coming through the door consistently, but then still have that upside.

It kind of shocks me that that's not the norm. And I think a lot more shops and dealers are

getting to that route. JAU touched on this earlier. Very rarely when we talk to them is it straight

traditional flat rate without some sort of guarantee or some people don't like to use that word,

but that's kind of what they're offering. At least have a floor, right? I think that's the

big thing. Make sure that they can pay their bills. I saw a Facebook post a couple of weeks ago

where a technician posted his pay stub and it was sad. I mean, it was like $300 or $200 for

the week or something like that. And you just look at that and you think to leadership in shops and

say, you can't feel good about that, right? And I know the shop's slow, but when you look at

how many variables go into a technician producing hours, it's one, are they marketing to get the

cars there in the first place? Do they have a good retention strategy to keep the customers there?

Is the service writer or service advisor doing their job properly? Even if it's the parts getting

there on time, there's so many variables outside of that individual's control that you have to at

least look at that maybe a little bit differently. And I understand why. I understand from a business

perspective where that's attractive, but if you're in that state where you're constantly chasing your

tail looking for technicians, think about the other side of that. How much are you costing yourself

in retention and having to start over every six months and trying to find another technician?

You know, the ROI goes far beyond just that billable hour. It really does

go into all of it. If you retain your crew and you've got a good crew, so you retain that crew

for a few years together, you can make so much progress there. And I think it's so undervalued

that piece of it. So just for those of you that are listening, I'll get off my soapbox,

but I do think that's an important factor. We don't have all the answers. Don't know that we

ever will have all the answers, but if you're a business and you're struggling with retention,

I think you could circle that and have some good conversations around it.

If I can just add, Jay, I think what we're saying here is we're not pretending to have the answers.

What I love about what we're attempting to do, I'm not saying we're perfect at it between ASC

and Wrenchway, and there are others as well trying to do this. It's to bring transparency

to the discussion so that you can look at these concepts. You can see how people are reacting

to it. You also have this generational aspect to it where you look at the younger generation

and it's a stereotype. It doesn't apply 100%, but there's a trend there where you see

they're looking for the security of steady pay to some degree versus, I'll say, the thrill of

full flat rate, where you can create a lot more revenue for yourself, but there's higher risk.

And so you see there's all these factors, but I think the thing for us to take away from this is

there may be no one size fits all, but what we're trying to do collectively is

bring the transparency to it so you can make decisions for yourself, if you're an individual

tech, how you want to play it for yourself as a shop, and how you want to move forward because

at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is bring more people into the industry.

We all know that that's a bit of a tough poll today, and this is a key part of it, right? So

how do we also wake up collectively, say, what are we going to do? Let's not be afraid to try

some things and get better at it. I'm watching through all the comments here, and we could have

an entire webinar just based on all of the attendees' comments. You guys are just killing

it out there. Keep the comments coming. It's a great discussion, and I wish we could talk

through every single one of those just because there's so much good going on out there.

Appreciate all your feedback.

Every shop, dealership, and business in our industry depends on great technicians.

Between the technician shortage, disconnected school relationships, and lack of trustworthy

workforce data, it makes it difficult for shops to plan higher and grow. That's where ASC Connects

comes in. Created in partnership with Wrenchway, ASC Connects is a membership design specifically

for shops like yours to help you build a stronger technician pipeline by connecting with schools,

empowering you with tools and data to improve your recruiting, retention, and performance.

With ASC Connects, you can connect with local schools through School Assist,

start building relationships, and support the programs that educate our future technicians.

You can also access verified data on technician pay, benefits, and labor rates through the industry

data exchange so you know how your shop compares locally and nationally. Lastly, you can get proven

strategies for leadership, employee development, and shop management through members-only guides,

templates, and events. Join ASC Connects to strengthen your workforce and build a stronger,

smarter shop. Learn more at wrenchway.com slash solutions slash shops or follow the link in the

show notes. The next section that we're going to tackle is technician satisfaction. This one

kind of bummed me out a little bit. I'm not going to lie. This is something that we put our hearts

and souls into trying to improve as an industry. We still see some negative with this and not

some. We see a lot of negative with this. We'll dive into this a little bit. This section to me is

maybe the most important section of everything just because there are challenges that we're

facing. Mark, we're going to start off with a relatively busy chart here. I don't know if you

can walk us through what we're looking at here, but there's a lot going on here.

Yeah, so we asked for each of these, and because it's small, maybe we'll read through each of

them so everyone understands, but we asked the respondents to rank one through five

their own employer. Previously, we were talking about mostly the industry or looking at new employers.

This one was asking anonymously about your specific employer, whether you strongly disagree

all the way up to strongly agree. I'll read them in a second, but I kind of like to look at these

as the ones and twos, as the ones I like to talk about the most, the ones that are alarming.

I would want all strongly agrees for everything if I'm an employer, but obviously that's not

going to happen. But in this case, kind of three, four, and five, I put that as like, okay, I could

improve, but it's not, you know, fire alarms going off, whereas the ones and twos, I think,

should be pretty alarming. And because it's small, I'll give a quick read from top to bottom.

So the first one, the shop provides adequate paid training, and then the shop provides

the equipment I need to get my job done. The shop provides fair compensation. I feel valued and

respected by management. I would recommend the shop to a friend. The shop provides good benefits.

Shop management communicates well. The shop has a well laid out career plan that I can follow.

The shop provides thorough and consistent performance reviews. The shop does a good job

teaching new techs and compensating mentors. I think that part's pretty important. The shop

helps local schools. And then finally, the shops provide an adequate tool allowance or reimbursement.

So I don't know where we want to start, Jay. I can start with the bottom one of

hardly any shops. The employer employees, we asked, said that there's an adequate or good

tool reimbursement. And if you go back to the nice to haves and must haves, that's one I like

comparing of, I think that can be something that separates you when you're recruiting and retaining.

It doesn't cost a ton of money. There were comments that were posted in the chat.

Maybe we'll do a future webinar on pulling together shops and dealers that have done a good

job and are willing to share the plans they have. But if you're offering pretty much anything,

you're above most of the competition. I've seen, you know, 100 bucks a month. I've seen 50 bucks

a month. I've seen once a year, you get $600. Like it's all over the board.

So I think that's just a really big opportunity if you want to step up your recruiting game to

offer something that way. We've seen other shops tie it to monthly performance. So if the team hits

their numbers, they did, everyone gets, I think it was $250 or $300 and have to look back on that one.

But anyway, that's one I think sticks out when you compare it to the slide from a few minutes

ago we were talking about. But again, Jay, I like to focus on the alarm bells ringing of the ones

and twos there, the blacks and the grays. I think I'm going to go the opposite of you here and say,

with the fours and fives, the one that concerns me the most is that only 44% said they would

recommend their shop to a friend. So less than half of technicians that are out there would

recommend their shop to a friend. And you'll see that kind of as a theme with a lot of,

you know, recommending this industry, recommending this career. It bothers me a little bit

because if that number goes up, I think you might start to see some of the other stuff go up,

or maybe that would be a reflection of the other things being higher.

But the fact that like less than half of people that work in a job would recommend that job to

somebody else is alarming to me. And I'll go back to my own experience going through industry

and that I had worked for an employer at one point and had an individual, one of my friends that

wanted to come work for me. And I told him no. And he said, well, why wouldn't you want me to

come work for you? And I said, I can't, in my right conscience, ask you to come work here

because I don't like working here. And I didn't tell him that, but in the back of my head,

that's what I was thinking. And so, you know, when, when I look at that piece right there,

I think that is a really, really important piece. And then the other one that I would point out

that seems to always be an issue is shop management communicates well, like it seems like

that's a recurring theme. Every time we talk to technicians that they don't feel like they're

communicated to, they don't feel like they're respected. There's so much as you dive into the

report, when you start looking at that kind of theme, it's almost like that they're constantly

trying to tell us this. And, you know, I've had this in my own experience in talking with shops

where I almost have to tell the leadership at a shop, it's your job to drive that communication.

If you're going to sit in your chair and wait for technicians to come communicate with you,

you're doing it wrong. Your job is to drive that conversation. Your job is the communication and

to make sure that communication is good. And so that one continues to frustrate me. I know it's

really easy to talk about communication. It's really hard to communicate. So I understand why

it's so difficult. The fact that it shows up year after year as a frustration with technicians is

something that drives me absolutely insane. Dave, do you have anything to add?

I don't think I can top that, guys. But I was just thinking about

some of those numbers. And you look at, you know, at the top where things are kind of okay,

I think of as fundamental hygiene things, right, that you got to have in place, frankly,

if you're going to be in business. But then strategically, if you want to be in business,

and if I as a technician want to work for somebody at that business,

those ones down at the bottom become quickly the most important. And to me, that, you know,

it's one example, right? But there's some cheap wins in there, if I can put it that way. I don't

mean to undervalue it, but we already talked about tool allowances, right? Big dissatisfyer.

And yet, frankly, not that hard to fix or address. And many of you I saw you commenting out there,

already have tool allowance programs, and that's great. But I think that all of these things add

up to these are the things that sometimes they take a little more effort. They're harder to fix.

You start getting into the culture of your shop is what I see. When you're looking at,

you know, shop management can communicate well, you know, laid out career path,

you know, good job of teaching new texts and compensating mentors. And this is where

or a good friend, George Aaron, you know, he would say, that's what you see there. That's

terrible news. That's evidence of us eating our own young. And what he means by that is,

you're bringing in these young kids, you're trying to get them a start.

And so that they want to stay in the industry, let alone in your shop. And if you don't handle

them correctly, they're gone. And as part of that is, who are you connecting them with to help

mentor them? And look, this takes some effort. And you could say, well, as a shop, I'm spending

some money to do that. Well, yes, you are. But it is a small amount of money compared to what it

takes, as Jay alluded to earlier, to replace that person, right? Turn over kills. And so,

yeah, what I love about this, I hate it, but I love it. And that it's pretty stark what you see

here. And I'm sure many of you are probably out there nodding as like, Yep, this is this is not

rocket science. This is it. And so, good, we see it. Now it's back to what do we do about it?

It's not rocket science yet. We still seem to struggle with a lot of the same stuff every single

year. Amen. And just to point out a few of those, I know, again, going through some of these slides,

it's a lot easier when you have the report in your hands as I'm kind of looking at the report

and holding it in my hands. But a couple things here, Mark, I don't know if you want to talk

through this one a little bit, but what's important to a technician versus what employers actually

provide? Anything here that kind of sticks out to you? I mean, I think I covered some of it. And

again, everyone attending this will get a copy of the report. I think we did a nice job comparing

this section. This is a snippet of that. But I think you're right, you get kind of got to dive

into the report for this one. One thing I'll add on the communication side that frankly bothers me

is, Jay, when you pulled me into this industry, I was impressed with how numbers focused things

were. For those that don't know, I started my career as a CPA. I'm a very numbers focused guy.

But I went from being impressed at how much numbers are focused to maybe that pendulum went

a little too far. And we might be a little too numbers focused in here. And we're chasing that

monthly number a little too much and forgetting about the people part of it. And I think when you

factor that into some of the slides on poor communication, I'm not feeling valued. It's

not intentional. It's not that managers are owners or bad people. In fact, it's usually the opposite.

We're just too busy. And I think we're prioritizing the wrong thing sometimes.

Yes, numbers are important. So don't walk away as oh, this wrenchway guy doesn't know he's talking

about he's saying, don't worry about the numbers. I'm obviously not saying that. But you got to

make time to talk to your people and that communication one just bothers me every single year

that I forget what it was when I go through it again. But half of employees feel like their shop

doesn't communicate well. That's crazy to me. Yeah, same. This next slide is another one that

drives us crazy, which is net promoter score. Mark, you want to talk us through how we come

up with this net promoter score? Yeah, let's try to keep this one brief and then we'll go to the

schools. Most people probably know net promoter score. Would you recommend it to a friend or not?

Anything lower than zero isn't great. We're at minus 60. It's been worse each of the three years

we've done this. I don't know the reason for that. When I talk to people anecdotally, I know the

industry's making progress. I don't know if we're reaching a bigger audience now is maybe part of

it. But I know individual shops and dealers we talk to are getting a lot better. Frankly,

I think everyone attending this webinar is a lot of them, like Dave said, in the comments they have

to allow and say they're doing the right things. If you're taking the time to attend this webinar,

you're probably on the right track. How we get to the vast number of shops and dealers that don't

attend things like this, that's a bigger problem. I don't know if we have to go into the theory of

net promoter score. There's a lot in the report about it. It's not a good trend. That's the summary.

We have to do better. I'm kind of confused by some of this because I do see a lot of progress

that's been made in the last three or four years for sure. I think that's the frustrating thing for

me. One point that I'll make on this is as you read through the report, what I really, really

liked. First, I forgot to mention, shout out to Sarah and Val on our team who have done just a

phenomenal job on the report itself. This is a section where they really, really dove in in

terms of the differences between automotive and diesel, the differences between dealers and

independents. There's so much there. For you dealers that are out there listening, take a look.

There are some things that there's clear frustrations with the technician community about.

When you read through the report, it becomes pretty evident what those frustrations are.

All I would ask is that when you take a look at that report and you're reading through it and you

kind of see those things that clearly stand out, take a look in the mirror. Are we doing these

things correctly? Are we doing something to improve these? Are we moving in the right direction?

I think one step that I pulled out of this and then we'll move on to schools,

that really frustrates me is that 77% of technicians said that they don't think we're

moving in the right direction, that we're not making progress. On top of the current frustrations

they have, they don't see that vision for the light at the end of the tunnel. We need to work on

that. We need to take it seriously because if we don't, we're just digging ourselves a deeper

hole. I don't think that's good for anybody. Hey, Jake, I want to add something. Sorry,

Dave, I think I'll be quick here. When you say take a look at the mirror, I would use this report

and say, share it with your team and say, hey, I think we do, if I'm a manager or owner, I think

we do a good job in this. My blind is my head in the sand. Are we part of the problem? I think

having a report like this where you can share it with your team to say, are we one of the good ones

or am I wrong on that? Because I think there's often a disconnect between the employees and

management where management truly does believe they're doing a good job, go back to communication.

They think they are listening. They think they are communicating well. I'm guilty of that myself

at Wrenchway. I found out this weekend, manager called that something I thought was very clear

a couple of weeks ago. I wasn't clear at all on and it took people calling me out on that.

So, Jay, you're thought of looking in the mirror, made me think of that of use this report and point

to each category and just ask your employees for brutally honest feedback. I think that's the best

thing you could do. And you nailed it. And all of us as managers on that side of it, you hate doing

that. You're just like, you've exposed yourself, right? Because you're going to get the feedback

and yet you don't get better without it. And I view this as a tool to help with that.

One other quick thing, thinking about what you said, Mark, we all feel like

progress is being made. Not to say there's evidence of progress being made,

maybe not consistently throughout the country, but there's progress being made.

But I think the thing we have to remember is the expectations are not stagnant. Expectations,

this goes back to my earlier comment, our whole industry is pushing us all towards these higher

levels of professionalism, if you will. Well, guess what? With that comes some expectations

and rightfully so. And so, on one hand, we could be depressed about this, but I think we just need

to understand, yeah, you may be making progress and actually getting worse because the expectations

are getting higher. And you could say, well, we've got a bunch of whiny technicians taking this

survey. If you look at it that way, you're r-sticking your head in the sand. I think we

just have to acknowledge that and say, yeah, we can be making progress, but guess what?

We've got a long way to go, but we can do it. We just got to keep plugging away at it.

We can do it. I think conversations like this help, and it is to drive action, right? We want

you to go, like Mark said, use the survey, use the report to help you in your own operation,

take it seriously, understand the graphs that are in there. And I can't help but think that it's

going to help you improve your shop. So, last section here, partnership between industry and

schools. This is a new section for this year that I thought was phenomenal. I think what we

realized in past surveys were that there were a lot of educators that wanted to give us feedback

as well, and we gave them a really, really nice opportunity to do just that here. So,

in looking here, where instructors need the most support, I really liked the simplicity in this

graph. You look at the left-hand side, the donations in general, job shadows, shop tours,

just the things you would expect. The only thing that I'd point out that surprised me here

was that the high level of I receive enough support for their advisory committee. So,

it's still only at 40%. We need that to go up a little bit more. You can see the 52% that need

more support, but to be honest, I thought that would have been a little bit lower in terms of

I receive enough support. Anything stand out to the two of you guys?

I'd say just overall. It's over 50% for I need more support in every category.

I mean, everyone's busy. The next slide gets into that, but whether you want to be in an advisory

committee or you don't think you have time, but you can donate something, I mean, just start,

just do something. We can help you connect with schools. Every form of support helps. I mean,

there's no category where it's like, well, easy guys, we're overflowing with too much help here.

That's not the case anywhere. Yeah. And for me, it reminds me of, I'll just say,

my own ignorance in this space. I'm going to tie this into ASE Connects and what

Wrenchway had been doing with school assist. And now we've combined forces on this.

You can see the needs where they're looking for support. And I just assumed that, hey,

shops, dealers, the schools are right there in your backyard. You can connect. You don't need help

with that. But as I've had a chance to reflect on that more and see this reality that we're

talking about right now, I came to realize, here's the issue. Nobody's bad in this,

per se, or not intentionally bad. We're doing a bad job. That's the reality of it.

And you could probably blame someone on the school side. What are the instructors doing to

reach out? On the other hand, technicians or instructors don't necessarily get paid to go

out there and do community outreach. So that's a struggle for them. And I think you just have

to acknowledge that. On the business side, you're so busy trying to run a shop, trying to

turn vehicles, manage your capacity, gain efficiency, increase your productivity,

all of those things, that it's easy to just let this slide. Even though I think we would all

recognize my pipeline for the future and future technicians is through this.

We've all had this conversation. Everybody wants experienced Atex,

ASC Master Certified, or whatever. And we keep acting like they grow on trees.

As you all know, they don't. And there's only one way. There's no shortcut to this at the end of

the day. It's engaging at the school level to do these things. And yes, it's a good thing to do,

right? It should warm your heart. We're doing good. But it's also your lifeline to your future.

And so this is what really convinced me that, wow, this really is important, because I used to just

think, they should be able to do this. But what we're doing with ASC Connects is going to help

facilitate it. We can't force them together exactly, but we're going to make it almost impossible for

them to say that, well, it's hard to get a hold of somebody. And that's where all this starts.

Great point. Now, some of the barriers, I think not enough time is not surprisingly the hardest

factor in working together between education and industry. I did think the second line on both

charts was very interesting. And that past attempts weren't productive. And Mark, how many times have

we had to kind of piece that together on our end? There is a lot of times where those messages go

when I answered. And I just look back, we had a time once where I think a dealership bought

a school, a laptop computer, a bunch of laptop computers, and then the school wouldn't answer

their emails back. Well, not only that, the school, the dealer didn't just do it out of the blue that

school had posted as a request. And then the dealer couldn't get ahold of them. So we've seen this a

lot on the second one there. And we have changed on at Wrenchway. And now ASC connects to we get

involved more. So when we see dealers and shops willing to help and are ready to go, if those

messages go unanswered, we step up and get involved a lot more than we used to. I never dreamt that

would be a problem of a school asked for something. Dealer says, here, I have it. Where do I drop it

off? And then the school never replies. So we've stepped that up. Not enough time, in my opinion.

It's because it doesn't get measured. Everyone's busy. I get that. But what measured is what gets

done. And if on the industry side, the owners, the managers make this a priority, you'll find the

time, stay with the instructors. If you measure how much you're working with industry, if you make

yourself accountable to having an advisory board, you find time for that stuff. But it's easy to say

I don't have enough time because there's no consequences to not doing it. So I think it

starts at the top of you have to make this a priority and find a way to measure it. And then

there magically becomes time. That's not to say we're not busy. Everybody's busy. But I think

that's the root cause. I 100% agree. Now, we talked about how much we had going into this. And I think

we could spend an entire day just talking about this report. There's a lot in that report. And

so we'll point out a few key takeaways. What I'll mention again is dive into the report yourself.

It'll take you a little bit of time. But my goodness, is there's so much value in there and

things that you can pull out that will affect and hopefully impact your operation in a positive way.

So as you dive into the report, again, the what technicians want, work schedules, commute, technician

satisfaction with their current employers, really so many obvious things that get pointed out in

the report. But then a bunch of little nuggets in there that I think if you, again, are just being

honest with yourself, are there ways that our operation can improve? Can we get better and

really try to take that growth mindset into reading through the report? Sorry, Mark.

Well, I was going to say this slide just so everyone's clear. These are things we didn't

even attempt to put on previous slides. It's in the report, but we knew we wouldn't get to.

So there's a lot we had on previous slides that we didn't dive into as deep as we could have.

But these are things like commute and work schedule that we didn't even talk about at all,

but there are sections in the report. Just want to make sure everyone understood what the words

on the slide were. Yeah, there's so much that goes in there. And thanks for clarifying there.

If you get a chance, read it. Sarah and I have a debate with Mark. I like to print it out and

actually take notes and underline stuff. Mark's smart enough to where he can just kind of get it

in his head and he understands it right off the bat. So I'm a print off guy and I have to go

through the paper. You probably saw me shuffling through some of the papers as we're going here,

but a lot of really, really good information there. I don't know. Do we have time for some

questions here? I know there's been a lot going on in chat. I think we could knock a couple off,

Jay. Sorry, I can jump in. Yeah. For the what is a good tool? Allow it to mount. I don't think

there's a magic amount for that, but there's been enough chatter for our team listening.

One of the things we want to do with ASC going forward is to have dedicated white papers,

webinars, where instead of like this is kind of a broad thing where we go wide to have more,

have something, have an hour, two hours workshop on just tool allowances and put a white paper out

for that. So our team can take a note to come out with some good examples there. Health benefits.

If you join ASC connects, that's one of the things where we created something called industry data

exchange where we're gathering data on technician pay, but also benefits, including health benefits

and where we can share that we keep all the data anonymous, but that's something we want to be a

resource for. So if you are a shop or a dealership, please join that and help us submit data. We'll

keep it all anonymous, but then we'll give you great local market analysis there. There is some of

that in the report, but we're going to dive a lot deeper going forward. I don't know. I'm scanning

through any other questions. Sorry, I hogged this question or stole the limelight. I can maybe take

Oh, sorry, Dave, go ahead. Well, real quick. I mean, I saw something that of course caught my

eyes selfishly as I saw some of the discussion on ASC certifications. And I just want to say thank

you for that. There seems to be this ongoing, well, there's always been this

debate about ASC certifications. They do any good. What I teased out of what I've seen in the

comments is what I take away from it, which is it's not about that blue seal. That is just

it's a reflection of who you are and your effort in ongoing learning, which makes you better.

And this is where I always say we have data. This is one example, right? It doesn't mean everyone's

the same, but 40% higher productivity, ASC certified versus non certified, 60% fewer comebacks,

30% lower attrition. And we see 20% higher compensation. And this is a nationwide study

that was done a few years ago with a big aftermarket chain. Now, what I take away from that is not,

oh, isn't ASC awesome? Because you came to the tower, if you will, and you took a test and you

passed, no, it's just that thing that identifies you as an individual that is going the extra mile,

that is making the effort to continue learning and to growing. And so, as I often say, if I was

going to go bet on some horses on a horse race, and I knew if one of them had that blue brand on

its rear end, and I know what I got a 40% higher chance of that horse winning, would you not bet on

it? I'm not saying that the brand caused that horse to be faster. I'm just saying it reflects

what that horse is. And so, in that sense, I appreciate what you've all said. And that's what

we, and we have work to do to make it more recognized, more recognizable to the consumers.

We're trying to blow the dust off the brand, as I'm saying, very too frequently, probably.

We all love it.

Also, there was a period of time for ASC where I was just kind of sitting there and like,

well, come take your test. Well, it is meant to be so much more than that. And that's what

we're trying to do. And I just want to say thank you all for those of you who are supporting that

and see the value in it, and also see the need for us to get better, because I agree.

Alan, I'm sorry about that.

We're over, but I'll take one minute on the ASC side of things. I get a little frustrated when

people let the exception become the rule. Yes, we all know technicians. There are some that

can't take tests well, but are amazing at fixing vehicles. And the opposite is true, too. Some

people breeze through the tests and aren't the best at actually fixing. Nobody's saying there

aren't some of those, but it's not the majority that that's the case. And I think, as Dave was

saying, it's one way to measure it. And it's an independent third party. It doesn't mean you don't

do individual performance reviews with your own employees. I just get frustrated with that of

everyone knows someone that is not a great test taker or the opposite. But as a whole, when you

gather data on hundreds of thousands of people, the direction matters. And those stats are

reflective, not in the absolute, but definitely in the majority on reflection of can you fix vehicles

or not? But again, we all know one or two exceptions. And there's just too much of that

where people extrapolate that and think that's representative of everything.

Amen. So I'll answer one last question. And then I think we have a few others that could

have their entire webinars just based on those questions. So I don't know that we'll be able

to answer them now. The one that I would like to call it is Wendy Harwood asking about a seven-day

work week. Their union shop hires typically work nights and the weekend. So really, one of those

struggles that you're going to have is what the technicians are telling us off the survey, right?

Is that you're going to have challenges hiring for a weekend or night shifts. And

I think it's okay to acknowledge that. But what I would encourage you to do is look at other

industries that are already doing that. So if you look at nurses and doctors, if you look at

other different types of hotels, what did they do for scheduling and try to find something that

might be a little bit unique and get them to actually listen to you so then you can tell them

about your benefits package and pay. I think that's the important piece. I'm always a fan

of just looking to other industries and kind of finding different things that we can implement

into ours that make it better. As far as all of the other ones, Kathy Drake, will the recording

be sent out soon? I believe relatively soon after this is finished up. Mark, am I wrong there?

You are correct. Recording will be sent out this afternoon. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Well,

other than that, we apologize for going over. We kind of had a feeling that this one was going to

it's a lot of stuff crammed into an hour. I felt like I was talking like an auctioneer to start

things off here today. So I apologize for that. But I did want to get as much value out to all

of you as we could and just appreciate all the support as we've launched ASC Connects and continue

to kind of put out different things that we're hoping are helping the industry out. It doesn't

happen without all of your support. So truly, truly appreciate all of you. Love talking shop

with all of you. So feel free to reach out and chat with us whenever you'd like. And we're always

all years and trying to help however we can. So thank you so much for attending and hope to see you soon.

That wraps up another episode of Beyond the Wrench. If you like this episode, please show

your support by rating and following the podcast. You can also watch the video interviews on Wrenchway's

YouTube channel. Speaking of Wrenchway, Beyond the Wrench is managed and produced by the Wrenchway

team. Wrenchway is dedicated to promoting and improving careers in the automotive, diesel,

and collision industries. In partnership with ASC, we run the ASC Connects community which

empowers shops and dealerships with reliable data, school connections, and industry insights

while helping grow the future technician workforce. You can learn more by visiting

wrenchway.com. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next week.

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