Business has seasons too. Anyone who has been in the collision industry for a while has watched them come and go. Work shifts from insurance-pay to customer-pay and back again. One minute we’re buried in work and wondering how we’re going to get it all done, and the next we’re wondering where the work went. The economy is strong, then it isn’t. Total losses go up. Insurance strategies change. Technology seems to change almost daily.

We are dealing with the same things in our shop that many of you are. There are plenty of things we can’t control, and I can get just as frustrated about them as anyone else. The challenge for all of us is making sure we’re doing something about the things we can control.

Years ago, author Ross Bernstein spoke at an AASPMN conference and talked about the (plus/minus) statistic in hockey. Simply put, were you on the ice when your team scored, or when the other team scored? Then he turned it back on all of us in the room and asked:

Are you a plus or a minus for your business?

That question stuck with me. I’ve actually taken it from the business world back to hockey. I coach youth hockey, and I use it with my players every season now. I ask them: Are you a plus or a minus in the locker room? On the bench? At home? At school? In your community? I then took this back into business. Is our business a plus or minus to our community? What about the collision repair industry? Or the entire auto service industry?

Being a plus isn’t always about being the star or scoring the goal. Sometimes it’s winning the battle in the corner, digging out a puck or doing something that gives somebody else a chance to succeed. I think the same thing applies to us as shop owners. We don’t have to figuratively score a goal every day or completely reinvent our businesses every time the market changes. We just need to find ways to keep moving forward.

When we’re busy, it’s easy to focus entirely on getting the work out the door. Marketing gets put on the back burner, training gets harder to schedule and that process we know needs attention can wait until “things settle down.” But busy times give us opportunities too. They expose bottlenecks, test our processes and give us a chance to invest while business is strong. Maybe that’s exactly when we should be building our name, developing our people and fixing the things that are keeping us from being even better.

Slow times give us a different opportunity. There’s a line from the movie Van Wilder that I’ve always liked: “Worrying is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you anywhere.” I know we have all sat in that rocking chair. When we have some breathing room, maybe that’s the time to tackle something we’ve been putting off – SOPs, training, KPIs, the website, OEM procedures, blueprinting or simply asking our employees, “What are we doing every day that makes your job harder than it needs to be?”

Neither situation means we have to completely change course. Investing in our businesses doesn’t always mean spending money, either. It can be time, training, relationships, equipment maintenance, processes or finally making a change we’ve talked about forever. It could be something as simple as painting a wall. The opportunity may look different depending on the season, but the idea is the same: find something that makes us a little better and keep moving the puck forward.

Because doing nothing is NOT doing something.

We can’t control the economy, every decision an insurance company makes or when the next customer walks through the door. We can control what we do with the shift we’re given.

So maybe the question Ross Bernstein asked all those years ago is still the right one: Are we a plus or a minus for our business?



I’m asking myself the same question. If the answer isn’t what we want it to be today, tomorrow gives us another shift.