Where There’s a Wrench, There’s a Way

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a heavy-duty repair shop in possession of customers must be in want of a technician. 

Where do shops go to find those techs? Well, the county dance is probably out of the question. Sometimes they try Indeed or advertising on their own website. And sometimes they turn to WrenchWay, which connects diesel and automotive shops with prospective employees and schools. 

We happen to love the team at WrenchWay; we’ve been partnered with them for a while, and co-founder and president Jay Goninen has been a popular guest star on this blog and in webinars. But despite all the work we’ve done together, we realized we hadn’t actually, you know, talked much about WrenchWay itself. 

Classic mistake. Fortunately, it was one we could easily rectify: we got Jay on the phone and started peppering him with questions about WrenchWay’s origins, mission, and future. 

Here’s what we learned. 

THE ORIGIN STORY

A long time ago (well, in 2017), in a galaxy (or basement) far, far away, Jay was running Find A Wrench. “It was a recruiting service for shops solely focused on technicians,” Jay explained to us. The rest is kind of history; there was absolutely a market for it, and Find A Wrench grew quickly. 

As time went on, Jay began to feel like Find A Wrench was moving techs from one shop to another, rather than adding more techs to the industry overall. And while helping a tech find a great new job is very rewarding, he definitely wanted to help the industry grow, not just move around what already existed. 

Eventually, he teamed up with Mark Wilson, and merged Find a Wrench with Mark’s startup. The company that emerged was WrenchWay. 

ZILLOW FOR REPAIR SHOPS

The new WrenchWay team had already identified an issue on the hiring side of the industry: shops could say whatever they wanted in an ad or interview, but what they said didn’t always line up with reality. 

They built Top Shops, a Zillow-type job board where shops could post ads and potential techs could learn about them. Any shop that wanted to advertise open positions on the board had to answer a lot of questions, including:

• Is the shop heated? Air conditioned?
• What tools does the shop provide that are available for all technicians to use?
• How many repair orders do you average per month?
• What type of break room facility is provided?
• What are the shop hours and what are shift timeframes?
• What is your policy on side work?

Those are all good questions, but they often don’t come up during interviews. Side work, in particular, often becomes a sticking point after employment is accepted. By having shops answer these questions up front, techs can bypass operations that don’t align with what they want. Shops can also post photographs so would-be techs get an idea of what kind of environment they’d be working in. 

(It really is Zillow for repair shops!

Top Shops worked. It worked so well that many shops started using it as their actual career page.

BRINGING SCHOOLS AND SHOPS TOGETHER

How is the repair industry like a vampire? 

It needs young blood to continue. 

(Editor’s Note: No, you didn’t just read that joke. Keep going.) 

But for real, the diesel technician shortage continues to grapple with two very harsh realities: one, older techs are retiring, and two, younger people aren’t flocking to the industry to replace them.

Part of that lack of interest is due to decades of steering kids towards four-year universities and white-collar jobs. Part of it is the aforementioned negativity that continues to surround the industry. WrenchWay alone can’t solve either of those problems, but it can work with schools that offer (or might be willing to offer) shop classes. 

Why? Because children are the future. Seriously. More specifically, schools with solid shop programs could become excellent talent pipelines for repair operations. 

Through School Assist, WrenchWay and their partner ASE get the industry involved in educational shop programs. These educational facilities can use the School Assist platform to ask for anything they need: solvent, tools, and even shop tours so they can take their students out and introduce them to the industry. 

“We had a tech school that was starting a diesel program in South Carolina that [needed] some trucks to get things started up,” Jay told us. “[A WrenchWay client] actually ended up donating four semis to get the program up and rolling.”

School Assist isn’t just delivering stuff to schools that need it — it’s also giving shops an opportunity to partner with schools and create the kind of education they want their future techs to have. They’re creating the technician pipeline they want. Pretty neat.

LET THE TECHS SPEAK

If you’re a Fullbay reader, you’ve probably heard about the Voice of Technician survey right here on this blog. It started as WrenchWay’s effort to get technician opinions on their respective fields (whether diesel or automotive) without getting into trouble. You know, like an anonymous suggestion box at work.

They also wanted to take the information they got from that survey and distill it into something shops and the industry could use to better themselves. So their questions include a tech’s general feelings on the industry, their place of employment, and more. The 2024 edition of the survey had about 4,700 respondents. Most of them were technicians with over 20 years of experience. 

Once the data is analyzed, it’s packaged into a free report that lives on the website (read the most recent edition!). The ultimate hope is for shops to see where techs are satisfied or dissatisfied. Some may see areas where they can improve as employers, which will, hopefully, lead to them keeping more techs employed and in the industry. 

An interesting takeaway from the most recent Voice of Technician Report was that while there were a lot of areas for improvement in both the automotive and diesel sectors, the diesel side seemed to be happier in general. “[Diesel] is kind of a lifestyle,” Jay said. “They truly are passionate about working on trucks or equipment.” 

HELPING THE INDUSTRY GROW & CHANGE

WrenchWay has some big plans for the future, the most immediate of which is the 2025 Voice of Technician survey.

WrenchWay’s primary mission may be to connect shops with techs and prospective techs, but it’s also on a quest to improve the status of the industry in everyone’s eyes. “Look at a Facebook group or any type of online forum where technicians are talking,” Jay said. “There’s a largely negative narrative about our industry and specifically about technicians.”

The Voice of Technician will hopefully help change that: by shedding light on what techs don’t like, it helps the industry make the necessary shifts. It starts small, with one shop owner providing better PTO and paying for tools. Then it picks up speed, snowballing into discussions that lead to big changes. Suddenly those Facebook groups full of technicians may seem a little more lighthearted. Oh, sure, there will be grousing, and techs will marvel at the condition of some vehicles rolling into the shop. But they wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

“At the end of the day, I think that’s what it’s all about: how we just continue to try and fix the core of the issue,” Jay said as we wrapped up. “The more we evolve, the better we’re getting in that regard.”