Does Your Standard Survive Friday Afternoon?

by Matthew Ciaschini, MABA President

Picture Friday afternoon. A customer is waiting. The rental is due back. The car looks great. Then someone asks whether a required calibration was completed, and the answer starts with two words that should make every owner uncomfortable:

“I think…”

What happens next says more about your shop than anything hanging in the lobby.

In my last two articles, I talked about knowing better and doing better, and about why the estimate isn’t the repair. We have to understand what the vehicle requires, perform the work and capture it accurately.

Now comes the uncomfortable part: making that happen consistently when the day goes sideways.

Because a standard that only works when the owner is standing there is not much of a standard.

The owner cannot be the entire quality-control department.

Consider a shop where one person catches the missing operation, remembers the photograph, questions the procedure and notices that the documentation never made it into the file. Everybody appreciates that person. The business depends on that person.

But what happens when that person is on vacation? Or sick? Or simply busy dealing with three other problems?

If the answer is “We hope somebody catches it,” that should bother us. Hope belongs in a lottery ticket, not a repair process.

This is not an argument against good people. It is an argument for giving good people something better than a daily scavenger hunt for missing information.

We can preach “do it right” every morning. But have we defined what “right” looks like at each handoff? Who researches the procedures? Who confirms they apply to this vehicle?

Who communicates a change to the technician? Who verifies completion before the vehicle moves forward?

When the answer to every question is “everybody,” we need to get more specific.

Write the process. Don’t just repeat the speech.

Start with one recurring breakdown. Not a complete reinvention of the business. One thing that keeps causing trouble.

Maybe necessary photographs are missing. Maybe technicians discover additional work, but the information never reaches the repair planner. Maybe a required calibration gets scheduled only after somebody has promised delivery.

Identify where the process failed. Assign responsibility. Decide what evidence confirms completion and when it must be reviewed. Then make that step part of the actual workflow – not another binder collecting dust above the coffee maker.

A checklist should support professional judgment, not replace it. “Research completed” needs to mean the applicable information was reviewed and communicated, not that someone downloaded a document and gave the checkbox a little tap.

And a repair plan copied from the last similar vehicle still needs to be checked against the vehicle in front of you. Familiarity is not verification.

Make it safe to stop.

Here is a question worth asking your team: “When something doesn’t look right, do you feel comfortable stopping the job?”

Then listen without defending yourself.

If we tell employees that safety comes first, but make them feel like raising a concern is a problem, which message should we expect them to believe?

The technician who says, “I need to verify this before I continue,” should get support, not an eye roll and a reminder that the customer is waiting. We can address scheduling and communication problems without making the person who caught a repair concern regret speaking up.

I would rather explain a delay than explain why we ignored a question we knew needed an answer.

That doesn’t mean every question requires a meeting. It means the shop needs a clear path from uncertainty to a verified answer, with someone responsible for getting it resolved.

The paperwork has to tell the truth, too.

The same discipline belongs in billing. Capture necessary work accurately, distinguish included operations from additional work and support what you charge. This is not permission to pad an estimate or bill twice for the same operation.

In the last article, I challenged you to review delivered repair orders for work you performed but never billed. Take that exercise further. When you find an omission, ask what needs to change so the next repair doesn’t have the same gap.

Finding the same mistake five times is not five separate victories for the person who caught it. It is a reason to fix the process.

And let’s apply that same thinking as an association. Bring a useful lesson to another member. Share how you improved a handoff or made documentation easier. Ask how somebody else solved the problem you keep tripping over. We should be helping each other build better operations, not just compare frustrations.

I’m not suggesting that any shop can become perfect. I’m suggesting that “We usually catch it” is a lousy goal.

So here is my challenge: choose one repair this week and follow it through your shop. At each handoff, ask what confirms that it is ready to move forward. Pay attention to the answers that depend on somebody’s memory, somebody’s assumption or somebody being in the building.

That is your starting point.

Knowing better established the responsibility. Documenting better made the work visible. Building a reliable process is how we make those commitments hold up under pressure.

Our standards should not depend on who is watching – or what time the customer arrives.

Friday afternoon deserves the same repair as Monday morning.

Want more? Check out the October 2026 issue of New England Automotive Report!