Almost every meeting I sit in, someone brings up the same problem: "We can’t find good techs, and when we do, we can’t keep them. We’ve tried signing bonuses, higher flat rate and free lunches on Fridays."

Six months later, another tech is gone to a competitor down the street or out of the industry altogether. We blame the labor market, the younger generation — anything except the real answer sitting in front of us.

In his book, “The Dream Manager,” author Matthew Kelly tells the story of a company in the cleaning business — about as thankless and high-turnover an industry as you’ll find — that flips its retention problem on its head. Instead of managing tasks better, the company starts managing dreams. They ask their people what they actually want out of life, then help them get there. The result? Turnover drops and performance climbs. It’s no longer about the costs of turnover. It’s about the gains from dreams.

Sound familiar? It should. Our industry has the same profile. Techs churn constantly and we rarely stop to ask the guy in the service bay what he’s actually working toward.

The truth is those who have had the biggest impact on our lives are almost never a stranger or a strategy. It’s a person — a coach or a boss who saw something in us before we saw it ourselves and they stuck around long enough to help us get there.

I think about my own start the same way. I got my first job at Colony Tire because I speak Spanish. Colony Tire's owner, Charlie Creighton, needed help with recruitment at some locations and that was the whole qualification. I didn’t know tires. But Charlie saw more in that job than the typical skill set and there I was, running a store, then working my way up to regional manager. Nobody handed me a five-year plan. Somebody just kept saying, “You can handle more than this,” and gave me the next thing before I felt ready for it. Now I have the best role in the industry.

I’ve watched the same pattern with two brothers in one of our groups, Stepan and Harry Boyajian. Stepan didn’t grow up wanting to be in tires. He had an economics degree and figured he’d end up in real estate or finance. It was his then-girlfriend, now wife Vana, who pushed him toward her father, Andy Kasbarian, who owned a tire store. Stepan will tell you he was clueless about running a business when he walked in. But under Kasbarian’s mentorship, he fell in love with taking care of customers and that mentorship became the foundation for everything the Boyajian brothers have since built. Today, they own seven stores. None of it happened without one person deciding to invest in another.

That’s the whole idea behind a “dream manager” — not a title, not a program, just somebody whose job is to notice people and invest in where they’re headed. Nobody at Colony Tire was managing my task list. Kasbarian wasn’t managing Stepan’s. They were managing potential — one step ahead of when we believed it ourselves.

Every tire dealership already has a version of this happening informally — the senior tech who takes the new hire under his wing and the service writer quietly mentoring the kid who wants her job someday. The problem is that we treat it as a nice thing that happens, if it happens, not as a strategy. If mentorship changes lives and keeps people in careers, it deserves the same attention and investment that we give to any other aspect of our business.

That means asking real questions in one-on-ones. It means pairing your best people with your newest ones on purpose. It means saying out loud, “I see something in you,” because most people are waiting to hear that and will leave a job that never says it.

But here’s the part I really want to land on: None of this works if we think of dreams as something people chase alone. We tell people to “own their career” and “take initiative.” But nobody reaches a real dream solo. Someone kept opening doors ahead of me.

Each of us is responsible for our own dream. Nobody else can want it for us. But we’re also capable of being responsible for somebody else’s dream. The tech shortage in this industry isn’t only a hiring problem. It’s a mentorship gap. We have plenty of people who could become somebody’s Kasbarian and we’re not asking them to.

So here’s my challenge: Figure out who in your building has already had an impact on someone else’s life, even informally, and put a name to it. Then ask who you’ve had an impact on and who’s still waiting for you to say something out loud.

We keep looking for the fix to employee turnover in all the same places, when it might actually just be in a conversation.