Posts by Carm Capriotto, AAP

Curiosity is a powerful tool. It helps us to stay open-minded and creative.

Intuition is a way of knowing without the use of reason or thinking. It is about trusting your gut feelings and following them. Intuition can give you insights that you might not have thought about before, which can lead to better decision-making.

Being curious is something that we should all have as a default. It helps us to be more creative and to learn new things. Asking questions and being inquisitive is the first step to curiosity. The second step is being open-minded about what you find, even if it doesn’t match your expectations.

Intuition is a powerful thing that we all have, but it can be hard to listen to. We often ignore our intuition because we think it’s irrational or not logical enough, but this just means we need more information before making our decision.

That is why we need to be curious to be able to explore and discover new things and to use our knowledge to support our intuition. The podcast has proven time and again that you can feed your curiosity by listening to learn just one thing. And the more you learn and gain insights the sharper your intuition can be if you let it.

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Recently on a podcast with Coach Dave Schedin, (HERE) he mentioned ‘Tangible Mechanism.’ I quickly put those two words together and thought about shaping ideas into real actions.

I thought that a tangible mechanism can be something you create from your ideas. Yes, an idea is intangible, but it need not be.

Stick with me on this. I thought of bricks, lumber, steel, and concrete. You can build a house or building with these products, so why not consider ideas as building blocks of bricks, lumber etc.

When I look at just the past week of podcasts we produce and the hundreds of ideas that are generated for you, I would fill up a yellow pad of ideas to be implemented to take my life and my business to the next level.

Where will you find the discipline to be an implementor of the ideas or changes you need to make in your company so you can grow customer relationships and experience, hire, pay, and retain your people, improve your processes and systems and build stronger profits? That discipline can be found in humility and your leadership capabilities.

Author Jim Collins wrote about tangible mechanisms in his book “Built To Last”. Here is a short passage:

To be sure, a highly visionary company does have these, but it also has concrete, tangible mechanisms to preserve the core ideology and to stimulate progress. Tangible. Concrete. Specific. Solid. Look inside a visionary company, and you’ll see a ticking, bonging, humming, buzzing, whirring, clicking, clattering clock. You’ll see tangible manifestations of its core ideology and drive for progress everywhere. Intentions are all fine and good, but it is the translation of those intentions into concrete items—mechanisms with teeth—that can make the difference between becoming a visionary company or forever remaining a wannabe. 

Look at the metaphors in the above quote from Jim Collins. Did any of them engage you? Make your ideas into tangible mechanisms and build a better business.

I listened to Hunt Demarest’s episode on Shady Service Advisor, where he discussed how things could go wrong managing money, margin and sales. You can listen HERE.

He made strong pointers on what to look for and that paying attention to every aspect of your business is a strong deterrent. Trust but verify.

My thoughts went to the episode we did on Repair Shop Audits. The openness that reviewing Repair Orders daily or weekly with your leadership team goes a long way in finding problems and bringing accountability to your processes and systems. The data you review is determined by what you review from your Shop Management System daily or weekly. You will see the value by looking at sales, margin and at least 15 more specific data points.

Consider the potential for review and audit when you can see year, make, model, mileage, inspection, maintenance, type of repair, diagnosis, notes, unsold, unsold dollars, total ticket, labor sales, sold hours, parts sales and parts gross profit.  You can get a very powerful handle on your entire operation.

I recommend you listen again or listen for the first time to the episode on Repair Order Audits HERE. It was released on July 28th and can be watched on YouTube HERE.

Happy auditing.