There is a conversation most shop owners already know they’ve been avoiding. We recognize it because it shows up late at night, when the shop is quiet, the phones have stopped ringing, and the adrenaline from the day finally wears off. On paper, business looks fine. Revenue is steady. Cars are getting out, the team showed up. From the outside, there’s no obvious crisis.
But the weight of the business feels heavier than it should. For me, that tension lingered long after the numbers stopped making sense. I kept telling myself it was the industry. The labor market was a mess and margins were tightening. Customers were different than they used to be. Technology kept adding complexity and private equity was warping expectations. All of that was true, but it also became a convenient explanation, because it allowed me to avoid looking at something closer to home. The truth I didn’t want to admit was simpler and more uncomfortable. The problem wasn’t the industry. It was my authority.
Not authority in the ego sense. Authority in the sense of what actually gets governed when things get uncomfortable. The conversations I delayed. The standards I softened, the decisions I postponed because they would create friction. I was still solving problems all day long, but I wasn’t always leading the business in the ways that mattered most.
Cause And Effect
Independent shop owners are some of the most capable people I know. We fix broken things for a living. When a vehicle fails, we diagnose it. When a system underperforms, we find the fault. Most of us didn’t get into this business to get rich. Most of us got into it because we love the work and we like helping people. That story is real, but it’s incomplete. Passion gets you started. It doesn’t carry you through the years when leadership matters more than technical skill.
I realized I wasn’t alone in this when I started going through a series of interviews conducted by my colleague, Doris Barnes. One conversation in particular stopped me cold, because it sounded uncomfortably familiar.
Shane Daly, owner of Retro Auto Works in Pennsylvania, described himself as a people-first, growth-minded shop owner. He talked about running a clean, organized, professional operation with modern capability. He believed technicians perform best when they’re respected and given autonomy. He was willing to sacrifice his own income if it meant long-term stability and loyalty for his team. Those are not soft values, they’re honorable ones, and they’re values many of us share.
As I read Shane’s words, I didn’t hear a struggling owner. I heard someone doing a lot of things right. That’s what made the next part harder to ignore. Shane shared that despite generating over a million dollars in revenue, cash flow was still tight. When a coach forced him to slow down and really look at the numbers, they uncovered roughly $4,000 a month in unnoticed overtime, loose payroll structures, and compensation misalignment in the front office. Nothing dramatic or fraudulent. Just a series of small concessions that had quietly become structural.
What stood out to me wasn’t the math. It was Shane’s clarity when he identified the conclusion. Owner pay is optional; payroll and bills are not. His value wasn’t in turning wrenches anymore. It was in building a business that could actually sustain the people he cared about. I could relate more than I wanted to admit.
For a long time, I confused responsibility with leadership. I believed that staying involved in everything proved commitment. I told myself that carrying the burden personally made me a better owner. In reality, it protected me from something scarier: trusting systems and people fully and holding firm standards even when it felt uncomfortable. A shop can survive that way for a long time, but it rarely scales that way.
The trap is subtle, because it hides behind virtue. We tell ourselves we’re being generous, loyal, or supportive, while quietly eroding the structure that keeps the business healthy. We work longer hours, solve more problems personally, and feel increasingly tired and isolated, even as the business appears successful from the outside.
As Doris shared more of the interviews with me, I started to notice the same pattern showing up in different forms. Owners weren’t failing because they lacked effort or intelligence. They were stalling because they were negotiating with themselves. One more exception, one more delayed conversation, one more month of tolerating misalignment. Those decisions compound quietly until the owner becomes the bottleneck—all while believing they’re being responsible.
What made Shane’s story powerful wasn’t that he was “fixed” by someone else. It was that he stopped lying to himself. He accepted that being a good person and being a disciplined leader are not opposites. He recognized that generosity without structure eventually costs everyone.
That realization forced me to ask myself a question I had been avoiding. If the business could only grow to the level I was willing to govern myself, what standards was I quietly negotiating away?
A Tale of Two Shop Owners
The industry gives us plenty of legitimate challenges to focus on—labor, margins, technology, customer expectations. But those challenges don’t explain why two shops facing the same conditions end up in very different places. One stabilizes and builds, the other stays busy, stressed, and dependent on the owner’s constant presence. The difference isn’t hustle, it’s authority.
Authority shows up in the moments no one sees. It shows up in whether the hard conversation happens this week or next quarter. It shows up in whether standards hold when pressure rises. It shows up in whether the owner is willing to be uncomfortable now to avoid being trapped later.
By the time I finished reading Shane’s interview, I wasn’t thinking about Pennsylvania or his shop. I was thinking about my own shops and about the conversations I’d postponed. About the standards I’d softened in the name of being reasonable. About how often I blamed the industry when the real friction was internal.
Ownership is isolating by nature. We spend a lot of time in our own heads, telling ourselves stories that make the weight easier to carry. What struck me most in these interviews was how costly that isolation can be. Clarity rarely shows up when you’re the only one listening to your own explanations.
This series isn’t about tactics. When I say authority, I’m not just talking about decisions on paper or who has the title. I’m talking about the voices that quietly run the business long before anything ever shows up in a report. Every owner has them. They live in your head, your gut, and your nervous system, and they speak up most clearly when pressure hits.
For some of us, that authority sounds like fear. Fear of conflict or of being disliked. Fear of losing good people if we push too hard. For others, it sounds like insecurity dressed up as responsibility, the voice that says, “If I don’t stay involved in everything, this thing will fall apart.” Sometimes it’s well-meaning friends or family who have never run a business but still shape how we think about risk, money, and growth. Sometimes it’s old mentors, past failures, or industry narratives we absorbed early on and never questioned again.
The uncomfortable truth is that the business almost always follows the loudest authority in the owner’s mind, not the smartest one. You can have great advisors, good data, and solid instincts, but if the voice you’re obeying is rooted in fear, guilt, or the need to be needed, those influences will quietly override everything else. What we believe about ourselves, about leadership, and about what’s “acceptable” behavior for an owner matters more than any strategy we could implement.
That’s why two owners can hear the same advice, attend the same conference, and read the same articles, yet walk away and do completely different things. They aren’t responding to information. They’re responding to belief, and belief always wins.
The first shift isn’t tactical. It’s internal. It starts with noticing which voices you’ve been giving authority to and asking whether they’ve actually earned it. Not all authority is bad, but unexamined authority is expensive. In the next article, I want to explore how this shows up operationally, how chaos often becomes the loudest authority in the room, and what changes when owners start reclaiming control intentionally instead of reactively. Once you see who’s really in charge inside your head, changing the business becomes a very different conversation.
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