Have you ever read something or heard a speaker say something that made you question everything you thought you knew about a subject? It happened to me when I read “The E-Myth Revisited” by Michael Gerber, over 20 years ago. It was the beginning of a love-hate relationship with the ideas presented in the book and with a gnawing disgust of an increasing percentage of auto repair businesses that have adopted many of his concepts.
If you haven’t read the book, especially if you are a technician turned shop owner, I can’t recommend this book highly enough. While that may seem like a contradiction to the previous paragraph, bear with me and I’ll explain. Mr. Gerber is better able to describe the sense of frustration and despair that often comes with shop ownership in those cases where a technician decides to go out on his own and start his own business. He attributes this to a few core reasons, the main reason being what he calls “The Fatal Assumption”, which is: “if you understand the technical work of a business, you understand a business that does technical work.” He proves this assumption as false and highlights the conflicts within the parts of the shop owner that he labels as an entrepreneur, manager, and technician. He continues: “The real tragedy is when the technician falls prey to the fatal assumption, the business that was supposed to free him from the limitations of working for someone else actually enslaves him.” This was indeed a revelation. When I read the chapter discussing these difficulties it felt as if he wrote that chapter just for me. I was very comfortable in my role as technician, but dealing with the public and keeping up with paperwork made me miserable. To say that I was ready for a change would be an understatement. I was eager to learn his solutions.
The first step was defining what an “Entrepreneurial Business Model” actually is. This model has less to do with what’s done in a business and more to do with how it’s done. The commodity isn’t what’s important—the way it’s delivered is what matters. This idea troubles me. Auto repair isn’t a commodity in my view, it’s a service. The product that is delivered can differ wildly in quality. Gerber sums it up this way, “to the entrepreneur, the business is the product.” This emphasizes not on the quality of the core products or services provided, but the business itself, and runs against everything that I had ever heard or read. An adage frequently attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson is: “If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mouse-trap than his neighbor, tho he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.” Quality is everything.
The mechanism to deliver this superior business is the franchise business model, which Gerber refers to as the “Turnkey Business”. He cites the absolute need for standardization of policies and procedures to account for nearly all situations. The role of each employee is to be clearly defined in writing and the manner in which they dress is to be standardized for each of these roles. The business has to be perfectly predictable in all of its composing parts, and if it were to be easily duplicated, it had to have scalability. Taking advantage of this concept of leveraging the efforts of many to produce a product or service is hardly new but the acceptance of not producing a good product but one that is—just good enough—galls me. Never is this more evident than in the examples that Gerber cites of business “successes”. One of his favorites is McDonalds. There are over 41,000 McDonalds locations worldwide. By many barometers this is an extremely successful business, but let’s be honest; when you think of a good hamburger; thick, flavorful, juicy and satisfying, you’re probably not thinking of McDonalds. The experience is what is being truly sold, not superior taste or quality of the food.
This attitude of “just good enough” transfers to the quality of employees as well. He states: “The model will be operated by people with the lowest possible level of skill”. He continues “because if your model depends on highly skilled people, it’s going to be impossible to replicate”. In short, you don’t want or need superstars, you just want to make those who are just barely competent *feel* like they are superstars.
Let me be blunt here … We don’t test for proficiency in our field, nor do we don’t require any form of meaningful standardized testing. There’s very little aside from observation to differentiate between those that are good from those that are barely competent. Consequently, many of the technicians currently employed by franchises are underqualified and not given the proper training. But their work is profitable and now “THAT’S” all that matters.
While producing a lower quality product packaged with ribbons and bows for the unsuspecting consumer, our trade is diminished with each new auto repair franchise business model that opens.
