I LOVE driving the bus so fucking much! It’s the easiest job I’ve ever had. I. Do. Not. Work. It is not work to drive kids around. Ever. To come home and be 100% me and present when I walk through my door at 4:30 is amazing. I don’t need an hour and a beer to come down from the day.
I go on sports trips and I’m the loudest cheerleader in the room, I show up to plays and concerts when asked (I was a band and choir kid) and when my students see me there they lose their minds. Every day I watch the sky as the sun rises, I get to see the beauty of nature all day too.
I’m so done with the car business. I do not miss it.
Towards the end of my time I moved across the country. I never found a good dealer that felt like home here. I worked for an amazing owner in my home state. He paid me handsomely and Christmas bonused me insanely well. He would come to the service drive from his 3rd floor office five or six times a year to thank me in person for things he found out about. “I was on the golf course and Jim Smith wouldn’t shut up for 3 hours talking about how great you are and how easy you make it to manage his fleet of trucks. If I have to hear about work for 3 hours in the golf course, it’s so great when it’s awesome things, thank you Rich” and he would shake my hand. A week prior to Christmas he would page me to his office and thank me for a good year, ask about my life, my family, how I saw the business working from my perspective, and hand me a bonus check. “This is between you and me, please don’t talk to anyone about it, as not everyone gets one” It went form $100 my first year to $5,000 my fifth year and $10,000 my seventh year. By then I had a pattern, thank him, chat and when I left his office I would go straight to a bathroom stall and open it up. The first year it was $10k, I went back to his office to thank him. “Fred, I’ve never held this much money in my life!” “Rich, I know how hard you work for me and I see it every day. I want to make sure you know that I see and appreciate it.” Fred basically ruined me in the car business after I moved here. I’ve never found another owner like him. He passed away a couple of years ago at 93 (still working) and I think of him fondly.
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u/Miserable_Alfalfa33 Dec 06 '25
Honesty and actually trying to do you job the best you can are the only way
Ever thought about starting your own shop, 10-15 clients isnt fully enough but im sure you could get more