From the Magazine: Are you actually coachable?
Confidence shuts down curiosity, and that limits your growth as a shop owner
Two years ago, alongside my automotive consulting work, I opened a wellness business.
It wasn’t a pivot away from automotive; it was an expansion of perspective. After 34 years in this industry, stepping into wellness put me in a strange environment, one where people arrive expecting to be coached. They don’t come in assuming they have all the answers, saying things like, “Everything is great except…”
They come in open: Open to challenge, to guidance, and to changing how they think and act in order to improve their outcomes.
That experience forced me to reflect on automotive aftermarket leadership in a different way.
Because automotive is not short on capable people. Independent shop owners are resilient problem-solvers. They’ve weathered recessions, technician shortages, margin pressure, increasing complexity, electrification, and now AI. This is a tough, intelligent industry.
Which makes the question worth asking: Are we actually coachable?
In automotive, experience is rightly valued. Years in business matter. But experience can quietly harden into stubborn certainty.
In wellness, being coachable isn’t associated with inexperience. It’s associated with seriousness. There’s an understanding that what worked before may not be enough going forward. Progress assumes adaptation.
In automotive, experience is rightly valued. Years in business matter. But experience can quietly harden into stubborn certainty. Over time, certainty becomes comfort, and comfort, left unchallenged, becomes a constraint.
You hear it in familiar phrases: “We’ve always done it this way” or “That won’t work in our market” or “My customers are different.” None of these come from ignorance. They come from confidence. And confidence, when it shuts down curiosity, limits growth.
Wellness operates on systems thinking. You don’t train hard without recovery. You don’t chase performance while ignoring fatigue, stress, or long-term sustainability. One part of the system cannot be optimized at the expense of the rest.
Independent automotive businesses operate the same way, whether we acknowledge it or not. Decisions made at the owner level ripple outward — into customer trust, technician engagement, advisor confidence, safety, comebacks, and retention. Eventually, they land back on the owner in the form of stress, firefighting or stagnation.
Being coachable means being willing to examine the whole system, not just the parts that feel familiar or comfortable.
That’s where coaching is often misunderstood. Coaching isn’t about being told what to do. It’s about allowing someone to challenge the questions you may have stopped asking yourself.
Coaching isn’t about being told what to do. It’s about allowing someone to challenge the questions you may have stopped asking yourself.
In wellness, that challenge might sound like asking why someone keeps pushing when the signals clearly say stop.
In an independent shop, it sounds more like asking whether you truly understand your customer retention rate, whether you know why certain clients don’t come back, whether resistance to process is a people issue or a leadership one, whether you’re leading the business or compensating for gaps you haven’t had the space to address and whether your operation is genuinely built for today’s vehicles, not yesterday’s.
These questions can feel uncomfortable. That’s usually a sign they matter.
In wellness, ignoring coaching often leads to injury or burnout. In automotive, the consequences show up differently but are just as real. Persistent staff turnover. Flat or declining ARO. Hidden customer churn. Safety gaps, particularly as vehicle technology evolves. Owners who are busy all the time yet feel stuck.
The pace of change in this industry is unforgiving. Electrification alone has exposed how dangerous “we’ve always done it this way” can be. Businesses that adapt faster tend to share one trait: Leaders who are coachable.
After three decades in automotive, one pattern is hard to ignore. The hardest person to coach is often the owner.
Not because they don’t care. Not because they aren’t capable. But because identity is tied to the business. Letting go of being the smartest person in the room can feel like letting go of control. In reality, it’s often the opposite.
After three decades in automotive, one pattern is hard to ignore. The hardest person to coach is often the owner.
If there’s a simple way to assess where you stand, it starts with reflection. Do you genuinely know why customers leave or are you guessing? When was the last time you changed your mind because of outside input? Do you invite challenge or unintentionally shut it down? If your team mirrored your behaviour exactly, would you be proud of what that creates?
Coachable leaders don’t have fewer answers. They have better questions.
And for independent shop owners navigating an increasingly complex automotive landscape, that may be the most valuable skill of all.
Greg Aguilera is a director of IAC Canada, an organization dedicated to the management development of repair shops in Canada. He can be reached at greg@intautoconsulting.com.
This article originally appeared in the February issue of CARS magazine
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