Building a startup takes time, effort, and a lot of determination. You and your team have invested in a great idea, and everyone works diligently to bring new team members, investors, and customers on board. However, the process doesn’t end once the product or service has taken off and gained popularity.
A startup can operate on a lean team, with people wearing multiple hats and taking on extra responsibilities. But as the company grows, it will be time to hire more employees and scale the company to meet demand.
How to scale the business is an enormous question that causes hesitation for many leaders. How do you expand your business offerings and your team without losing the heart and inspiration that helped the startup succeed in the first place?
In my own business, Tekmetric, which offers shop management software for auto repair businesses, I have relied on a few tactics that enabled me—and our whole team—to scale sustainably. Here are four of the most vital.
Understand Your Company’s History
To plan for the future, it’s crucial to have a deep understanding of the past. In Tekmetric’s early days, my five-person team and I were focused on creating a reliable technology—we didn’t necessarily think about the entity we were building along with it. However, our problem solving and determination to succeed would form the foundation of Tekmetric’s identity today.
The journey wasn’t easy. We faced challenges familiar to many startups: lack of interest, the need for financial support, and an imperative to attract the best talent around. We also had a lot to learn about software and how it applied in the automotive industry. In fact, that lack of software knowledge was an enormous setback, and there were times we just wanted to give up.
However, our failures in these early days were extremely important to our later success. Instead of giving up, the team faced our challenges head-on. We developed a new prototype of our product, established procedures to promote customer success, and created a clear structure within the company. And when the time came to grow, we hired talented people who shared our same drive and desire for success.
Those early days resulted in values that still permeate the Tekmetric culture today. When considering your own company, pinpoint your team’s top qualities and trace them back to the beginning. There are several key questions to answer:
What defines your company’s essential identity?
What challenges did you face and how did you overcome them?
What culture have you built—and how can you hire talent that helps preserve that culture over time?
Set Realistic Goals for the Future
Understanding your company’s past allows you to set realistic goals for the future. When setting these goals, it’s important to consider industry standards and your team’s abilities and limitations. To be realistic, your goals must allow you to keep up with industry changes, but they must also align with your team’s capability to succeed.
For example, if you work in the technology industry, you will need to set goals on a shorter timeline so you can keep up with new innovations and quickly changing needs, but you will also need to keep in mind your team’s current skills and limitations.
When Tekmetric sets a goal for monthly sales, we look at each team’s capacity to succeed. The customer success team may have a limited number of shops it can onboard each day, or we may need to account for migration time when transferring data. After identifying the limitations, we can then explore potential solutions that bring us closer to achieving our goals, such as investing in new technology or hiring more customer success team members.
Lean on Your Employees
As the company grows, it becomes more and more difficult for leaders to have a deep knowledge of every facet of the business. As much as you might want to know about—and maybe even control—every little thing going on within the company, there is only so much time in the day and so many places you can be at once. Your growing responsibilities as a leader mean you will be interacting with customers less and focusing more on the overall business.
However, you do have one key resource you will need to rely on more than ever: your team.
Your employees are the magic behind the work your company does each day. They make it possible for your product or service to work seamlessly, and they create successful interactions with customers.
Empower your team to share ideas and shed light on the changes that will be necessary to meet the goals you have established. As your arms and legs, they have intimate knowledge of the company’s abilities and limitations.
By trusting, empowering, and relying on your team, you enable the business to grow—and give them personal investment in the business’s success.
Continue to Grow Personally as a Leader
Finally, you must continue to invest in your own professional growth as your company grows and scales. You are the face of the company, both internally and externally. Your continued growth will allow you to expand your own perspective and learn new techniques to be an effective leader within the company.
Personally, I challenge myself to read at least one leadership book each week. Many of these books have similar messages, and by continuing to read those messages over and over again, they become firmly planted in my brain and daily practices.
I also seek professional coaching through CEO peer groups and business mentors; these offer outside perspectives that help me work through challenges and questions that come up as Tekmetric grows.
Patience is a Virtue
It takes time, energy, and patience to grow a company. At Tekmetric, we recognize that while we’ve had a tremendous amount of success in what feels like a short time, even that didn’t happen overnight.
As you work toward your own company’s growth, don’t lose sight of the excitement and passion that inspired the company’s initial foundation. Set realistic goals and build a team you can trust and rely on. And continue to grow as a leader in your own right.
Scaling doesn’t happen overnight. But with the same hard work and determination that made the startup successful in the first place, you have the potential to grow your company and make even greater achievements in the future.
From what we see, there’s a lot that shop owners get right. They understand how to lead their teams, grow their shops, and bring trust and transparency to their customers. But as a former trainer and franchise performance specialist, I do notice a lot of little inefficiencies that add up.
Tekmetric touches every part of running your shop -- from managing customer information and measuring business metrics to facilitating digital vehicle inspections, repair order workflows, and even payment processing.
Almost 1,000 shop owners, service advisors, and technicians gathered in Houston for Tektonic 2026, Tekmetric's first industry conference. Over two days at the Marriott Marquis, attendees packed breakout rooms, traded hard-earned lessons, and heard from operators, coaches, and industry leaders who have built and scaled shops of their own.
The Question That Started It All
Tekmetric CEO and Founder Sunil Patel opened Tektonic 2026 with a question he has been asking since he was writing service tickets and mopping floors at his former Houston shop, Motorwerks of Houston: "Why does it have to be so hard? Why does it have to feel like we're fighting a war on 12 fronts?"
That question, he told the room, is the reason Tekmetric exists.
Standing in front of shop owners, service advisors, and technicians who understand that question on a cellular level, Patel walked through how much harder running a repair shop has become. Vehicles are packed with software, sensors, and calibration systems that require entirely new toolsets. Customer expectations have been shaped by on-demand everything. Technician shortages continue to press on shops across the country. And OEM data restrictions are making it harder for independent shops to do the work they were built to do.
But Patel didn't stop at the challenge. He laid out four pillars he believes the industry needs to move forward: stop celebrating burnout as a badge of honor, build genuine trust with customers and teams, invest in an ecosystem of great partners and vendors, and embrace technology that serves shops rather than extracts from them.
He closed with a simple ask for everyone in the room: be curious, be open, be generous with what you know, and be present.
"I want you to take something away from here," he said. "Something that will get you to be 1% better than you were."
That set the tone for everything that followed.
Top Takeaways
Process Consistency Wins on the Hard Days
Busy days don't create problems. They expose them. The best shops build their standard operating process before the chaos starts.
Call the day before. A preappointment call to review service history and flag overdue maintenance turns intake from reactive to planned and primes customers to say yes before they walk in the door.
Speed is your biggest sales tool. Every hour between drop-off and delivering an estimate costs roughly 10% in approval rates. Get findings to customers fast.
Set the next promise, not the finish line. Never promise a completion time you can't guarantee. Promise the next specific update and deliver it on time, every time.
The in-store customer is the highest-priority repair order in the building. Every other car can wait. The person sitting in your lobby cannot.
Improve one thing at a time. Pick one process to fix, measure it, and build accountability before moving to the next. Trying to fix everything at once fixes nothing.
Speed Closes More Jobs Than Salesmanship
Closing rates drop sharply with every hour that passes between drop-off and the customer call. A customer who has been waiting since 8 a.m. has had time to read every one-star review and talk themselves out of approving the work.
Get inspection results to customers within 30 minutes of dispatch. That's the speed zone. Everything else in the shop is secondary until that call is made.
In-store customers get findings in 15 minutes or less. The customer is sitting right there. Use it.
Relative priority is your daily compass. At any moment, the most important thing is moving the car that's furthest behind in the process. Not the loudest customer. Not the most expensive ticket. The earliest step.
Two daily goals. Full stop. Every technician runs at least eight billable hours. The shop hits its gross profit target. Nail both and everything else follows.
You Don't Have a Technician Shortage. You Have a Culture Problem.
The technician pipeline isn't as broken as it seems. What's broken is how many shops make it hard to stay.
Rethink flat rate. Hybrid pay models that combine a solid base with performance incentives align your team's goals with the shop's goals and they're far more attractive to the next generation coming into the trade.
Answer two questions before you do anything else. Why would a technician work here? Why would a customer come back? If you hesitate on either, start there.
Recognition is the highest-ROI leadership move you have. Research cited at the conference found that team members become disengaged because they don't feel seen. Fix that before you invest in anything else.
AI won't replace hospitality. Technology can handle administrative weight, but the trust a service advisor builds with a customer at the counter is irreplaceable. Invest in that skill set.
P.J. Leslie, Tekmetric's head of mid-market and enterprise sales, moderates a panel during Tektonic 2026 in which multishop owners break down the real strategies behind expansion: buying shops, building shops, systemizing operations, integrating teams, protecting culture, and planning for eventual exit or partnership.
Growing to Multiple Locations Takes More Than Money
Every multishop operator on the stage agreed: you're never fully ready, and that's fine. What matters is being profitable, having the right people, and expecting the unexpected.
Profitable and cash-positive before you move. When you make a mistake at location two—and you will—you need a healthy location to cover it.
You're ready when your shop doesn't need you. Build your bench before you open the next door. The manager for location two should already be in your building today.
Start your exit plan on day one. Almost no one in the room at one of Tektonic’s breakout sessions had a clear exit strategy. Don't leave money on the table because you never thought through how the story ends—whether that means selling, transitioning, or building for long-term cash flow.
Leadership Is the Ceiling on Everything Else
Your shop will never outperform your leadership. What you tolerate becomes your standard. How you show up on Monday morning sets the emotional temperature for everyone around you.
Know your triggers before they know you. Name what sets you off. Once you can spot it, you can stop it before it damages a relationship.
Pause for three seconds. Before you respond to anything that's gotten under your skin, stop. Three seconds is the difference between a reaction and a response.
Hear less. Listen more. After someone finishes speaking, let the silence sit. People almost always have more to say and the second thing is usually the real thing.
Walk into hard conversations knowing how you want them to end. Start with the outcome in mind, not the grievance.
Tekmetric Chief Product Officer Jared Haleck breaks down Tekmetric's new products at Tektonic 2026. The new products include Tekmetric digital ads, Smart DVI, and Tekmetric phones.
Product Announcements at Tektonic 2026
The closing session belonged to the Tekmetric product team. Drawing on data from more than 15,000 shops on the platform, Tekmetric President and COO Lauren Langston and Chief Product Officer Jared Haleck built the roadmap around key areas where winning shops consistently outperform the rest: car count, average repair order (ARO), driver experience, and cycle time.
Here's a look at what’s coming:
Tekmetric Digital Ads: AI-powered advertising on Google Maps and Search, built for the moment a driver has a problem and is ready to act. It connects directly to Tekmetric so you can see the gross profit behind every dollar of ad spend, not just clicks.
Smart DVI: Technicians walk the vehicle, narrate what they see, and Smart DVI builds the customer-ready inspection report automatically—findings organized, images annotated, and jobs pre-suggested for the estimate. Less time typing. More time turning wrenches.
Tekmetric Phones: Customer details, open repair orders, and communication history surface the moment an inbound call rings. No more looking it up while someone's waiting. A future capability in development will transcribe calls in real time and auto-populate appointment notes.
See You in 2027
Tektonic 2026 was Tekmetric's first industry conference, and it delivered on the promise Sunil Patel made from the stage: a room full of shop owners, service advisors, and technicians who showed up to get better.
The through-line across every session was the same. The shops that win are the ones that build systems, invest in their people, and keep getting 1% better. Not all at once. One thing at a time.
In auto repair, there are many moving parts to keep track of—both the literal parts your shop uses to repair vehicles, and the parts of your business that determine your shop’s efficiency, security, and ability to grow. If you want your shop to flourish, it’s crucial to devote part of your business to keeping track of the parts you order.
Many shops track parts in terms of cost of goods sold. The parts you need for the job are included on every repair order, so it’s easy to see what parts your customers are paying for as long as you have a solid process for building repair orders.
But what about in terms of accounts payable? How does your shop track how much you’re spending for parts from the supplier?
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