Ask a shop owner how their month is going and you’ll usually hear one of two answers: “pretty good” or “not great.” Then ask the follow-up question — compared to what? — and watch what happens. Most of the time there’s a pause.
Compared to last month, maybe. Compared to how busy the bays felt. Compared to the shop down the street that just put up a new sign. Compared to a number they heard at a meeting six weeks ago.
Here’s the thing I’ve come to believe after more than 30 years in this business: every shop is good or bad by comparison. There’s no such thing as a good average repair order or a good labor rate in a vacuum. There’s only good compared to something. And if you never decide what that something is, you’re grading yourself on a feeling.
Where I come from
I didn’t come to this as a software guy. I started behind the counter after college, in 1993, at a store at 32nd and Market in Philadelphia. From there I came up through Bridgestone/Firestone — running stores, then districts, then regions. When you run a district, you don’t have the luxury of grading on a feeling. You have a set of stores, the same products, the same prices, the same programs, and a ranking that tells you who’s doing the job and who isn’t.
What I learned from that ranking had almost nothing to do with the numbers themselves. It was what the comparison did to people. A store manager who’s told “your alignment attach rate is 41%” nods and moves on. A store manager who’s told “you’re 41% and the store twenty miles away is 72% — same cars, same customers, same equipment” picks up the phone and calls that manager. That second conversation is where improvement actually starts.
Most independent owners never get that second conversation. They don’t have a district. They don’t have nine sister stores running the same playbook. They have their own numbers, if they have numbers at all, and nothing to hold them up against.
The heavy lifting is managing behavior
I’ve said it in a lot of rooms: most people want to do a good job — they just need to know what a good job is. That’s the whole game. The reports, the dashboards, the software — none of it changes anything by itself. What changes a shop is people doing something differently at the counter tomorrow than they did today.
That’s the heavy lifting. Not finding the number. Managing the behavior behind it. Getting an advisor to bring up maintenance on every ticket instead of the ones where they feel like it. Getting a team to sell the alignment on a set of tires every time, not most of the time. Getting a manager to stop discounting labor to close a job they would have closed anyway.
And the fastest way I know to change behavior isn’t a lecture. It’s a scoreboard. Show people where they stand next to someone they respect, and most of them will do the rest themselves.
Why peer groups work
The best operators I know already figured this out. They join 20 Groups. They hire coaches. They sit in rooms with other owners and put their numbers on the table, because they know the comparison is where the learning is. When one owner’s effective labor rate is $30 an hour higher than everyone else’s, the room wants to know why — and that owner usually has a very specific answer.
That model works. I’m not here to replace it. But it has two problems I lived with for years.
Problem one: the numbers don’t match
Every owner pulls their numbers by hand from a different shop management system. One counts car count by invoice, another by vehicle. One includes shop supplies in parts sales, another doesn’t. One owner’s “average RO” excludes warranty work; the next one’s includes it. You end up spending half the meeting arguing about whose number is calculated right instead of talking about what to do.
Problem two: once a month is too late
If you find out on the 20th of next month that your advisors stopped offering cabin air filters in the second week of this month, you’ve lost five weeks. The habit has already set. The customers have already driven off. A monthly or quarterly review is great for strategy. It’s terrible for behavior, because behavior happens every day, on every ticket, at the counter.
What’s coming October 30
This is why we built Peer Groups into the SideKick360 Connector, launching October 30, 2026. The Connector puts your shop’s data inside Claude or ChatGPT — the AI chat you may already be using.
If your shop is already on SideKick360, you’re already benchmarking. Every report holds you up against your own prior periods — yesterday against the same day last year, month to date against last month and last year. That’s the most honest comparison there is, and it’s where every improvement starts. But it only tells you whether you’re better than you were. It doesn’t tell you how good you could be. Peer Groups add the other half: how you stack up against shops like yours.
SideKick360 already pulls every repair order from your shop management system and standardizes it into one format, whatever system you run. That means effective labor rate, average RO, car count, gross profit and Maintenance Hunter results are calculated exactly the same way for every shop. No more comparing numbers built three different ways. The comparison is finally fair.
Starting October 30, you choose who you compare against:
- Your Peer Group — your 20 Group, your coach’s clients, or a handful of shops you trust. Each shop opts in and decides what it shares, and with whom. Shop-level results only — never your customers.
- Your program network — the other shops in a dealer or franchise program. You see the network’s numbers, never another shop’s name or customers.
And because the data refreshes every 15 minutes, you won’t be waiting for a meeting. You’ll be able to ask any day, any time:
- “Rank our peer group on average RO and car count this month.”
- “How does our effective labor rate compare with our program network?”
- “Who in our group has the highest alignment attach on tire tickets — and how far behind are we?”
- “Where did we slip against the group this week?”
You won’t even have to ask. The scoreboard comes to you two more ways:
- A live group leaderboard, right inside SideKick360. Gross profit, average RO, ELR and car count side by side for every shop in your group — plus Maintenance Hunter activity, services due, services sold and MH revenue, so you can see exactly who’s capturing the maintenance work and who’s letting it drive away.
- Your group rankings in your nightly Report Hub. You start every morning knowing where you stand against the group, before the first car is written up.
Compete every day, not once a quarter
Picture a Tuesday morning. Your Report Hub landed overnight with yesterday’s group rankings. You’re third of eight on average RO, but last on Maintenance Hunter. That’s not a quarterly problem anymore — it’s a conversation at today’s huddle. By Friday you can see whether it moved.
That’s the rhythm that changes behavior. Short feedback loops. A clear target set by real shops, not a number somebody read in a trade magazine. And a little friendly competition with people who run the same kind of business you do.
It works the other way too. When your shop is the one leading the group on something, you get to show your team that. Recognition with a real number behind it lands a lot harder than “nice job this month.”
The bottom line
You’re already being compared. Your customers compare you to every other shop they’ve been to. Your techs compare you to every other place they could work. The only question is whether you’re doing the comparing yourself — on fair numbers, against people you choose, often enough to do something about it.
That’s what I had as a district manager, and it’s what I want every independent shop to have. Nothing happens till something’s sold — and nothing changes till somebody knows where they stand.
The SideKick360 Connector launches October 30, 2026. If you want your shop, your 20 Group or your coaching clients in early, register your group.
