October Is the Trust Month - October 11, 2026

Marcus: It is the eleventh of October, and I will tell you exactly what October is in this business. October is harvest season. The leaves turn, the temperature drops, and every single person who has been putting off their maintenance all summer suddenly realizes winter is coming and their car is not ready. And this past Wednesday, the seventh, the National Institute for Automotive Service Excellence, that is A S E, the folks who certify technicians, put out their Fall Car Care Month release. It is basically the official permission slip for the whole industry to start selling the pre-winter inspection.

Zoe: And I love that you said permission slip, Marcus, because half of this business is just giving people a reason to come in that does not feel like a sales pitch. The release says it right there. Winter is coming, get the car checked, and here is the list. Battery, antifreeze, brakes, tires, oil, lights, wipers. It is the most boring list in the world and it is perfect.

Marcus: It is not boring when you are the one standing in a driveway in the rain at seven in the morning because somebody's battery died. Look, here is the thing about that checklist. Every item on it is something a mobile operator can sell in one visit. A battery test takes two minutes with a conductance tester. Antifreeze, you check the freeze point with a refractometer, that is ninety seconds. Oil, obviously. Wiper blades, that is a twenty dollar add-on that takes thirty seconds. The whole winterize visit is the single best ticket builder in this industry, and it only exists for about eight weeks a year.

David: Let us run the numbers on that, because the structure is beautiful. A standalone oil change brings a customer in for one transaction. A winterize inspection visit brings them in and gives you legitimate reasons to touch the battery, the coolant, the filters, the wipers, and the lights. Each of those is a margin line that already exists in your van. You are not buying new equipment. You are just sequencing work you already do into one appointment with a name on it. At fleet scale, this is the entire fourth quarter business plan. The contract is the product, and the winterize package is what goes into the contract renewal.

Zoe: Okay, but why is nobody talking about the other thing happening in October? Because the winterize list is the practical half, and the other half is pure marketing gold. All month long, independent shops across the country are running Brakes for Breasts. That is the campaign where shops give customers free brake pads in October and donate ten percent of every brake job to breast cancer vaccine research at the Cleveland Clinic. Since twenty eleven they have raised more than two million dollars. And this year the Pronto Network jumped in. Pronto announced last month that its service centers are doing free pads and matching the donations, with manufacturers like Bosch and Wagner backing it. This is running right now, all month.

Marcus: I have seen shops do this, and here is what I respect about it. It is not a coupon. It is not ten dollars off an oil change to trick somebody through the door. They are giving away the pads, the actual part, and they make it up on the labor and the trust. That is the right way to do a promotion. Add value, do not discount price. We have said that a hundred times on this show.

Zoe: Exactly. And from the content side, this is the kind of thing that absolutely eats on TikTok. Think about it. You are not filming an oil change. Everybody films an oil change. You are filming a running total. Week one, we donated four hundred dollars. Week two, nine hundred. You film the owner explaining why. You film the pink ribbon on the service counter. The algorithm loves this because it is local, it is emotional, and it is real. People do not share a ten dollar off coupon. They share a shop that is fighting breast cancer. And every one of those shares is free advertising with your shop's name on it.

David: There is a discipline question underneath it, though. The Brakes for Breasts model works because the economics are defined. The pads are free to the customer, but the shop knows its parts cost, knows its labor rate, and has already decided the ten percent donation is a marketing budget line. Compare that to the vague charity tie-ins where a shop just says a portion of proceeds and nobody can say what the portion is. If you cannot say the cost per acquired customer out loud, you do not have a campaign, you have a wish. The shops doing this right, like the one in San Jose that joined on October second, or the one in Franklin, Massachusetts that donated over seven thousand dollars last year, they treat it like a line item.

Zoe: The San Jose shop, G I C Car Clinic, they are doing free brake checks all month too, not just the pads. A free brake check is the top of the funnel. That is the content funnel and the sales funnel being the same thing. Free check, honest answer, some people need brakes, ten percent goes to the research fund, and everybody leaves with a story. That would absolutely eat on TikTok.

Marcus: And here is the part operators miss. A brake check is not a brake job. Most of the cars you check are fine, or they need pads in six months. But you have now touched the car, tested the brakes, and given the customer a straight answer for free. Six months later when the squeal starts, where are they going? They are coming back to the person who told them the truth for free. We have done this a hundred times. Trust is the product.

David: Which brings us to the third story this week, and it is the one that tells you where the industry is actually going. This past Friday, October ninth, a shop up in Calgary, UniglassPlus on Edmonton Trail, restated its standard on windshield replacements. Nothing about their announcement is about windshields. It is about cameras. They confirmed that a replacement is not complete until the driver assistance camera behind the glass is recalibrated, where the vehicle calls for it. They do it in house. Static calibration under controlled conditions in the shop, dynamic calibration with an O B D device driving the car on the road, per the manufacturer. Five people work in that shop. Three of them are technicians.

Marcus: Nah, that does not make sense at first, right? An auto glass shop doing camera calibration sounds like scope creep. But then you think about it for two seconds. The camera sits on the windshield. You move the windshield, you move the camera. Lane keep assist, forward collision warning, adaptive cruise, all of it reads the road through that one camera. If you hand the car back with a new windshield and a misaligned camera, you fixed the glass and broke the safety systems. That is not a completed job.

Zoe: This is also the content story nobody is filming. Do you know how many drivers have no idea their windshield has a camera behind it? Almost all of them. So you film the before and after of a calibration. You show the target boards on the wall, the laser setup, the car on the road with the diagnostic device. The algorithm loves this because it is a thing people did not know existed, and now they are a little bit scared of the shop that does not do it. Educational content that creates a standard is the most powerful content there is.

David: And the economics are the real story. We talked about this on the fifth, when C N B C reported that repair costs are up about sixty percent since twenty nineteen and a single calibration setup can run around twenty eight thousand dollars. The equipment cost is what scares shops off. But this Calgary shop is five people and they do it in house, both methods. The alternative is subletting the calibration to the dealer or a mobile calibration service, which means you lose the margin, you lose the scheduling control, and you hand your customer to somebody else's shop for the most technical part of the job. The contract is the product. If the work is moving to calibration, the capability has to live inside your building.

Marcus: Here is the thing though. You do not buy the machine before you have the demand. That is how shops die. They buy the tool and then try to sell the job. You sublet first. You watch how many calibrations you are sending out every month. When the sublet bill gets big enough that the machine pays for itself, then you buy it. We have done this a hundred times with every piece of equipment that ever showed up in my van. Demand first, machine second. Never the other way around.

David: I agree with that sequence completely. The point is that the capability is becoming table stakes. When a five person glass shop is doing static and dynamic calibration in house, it stops being a specialty and starts being the standard. And the mobile operators listening to this should be asking the question now, because mobile calibration services are already calling on fleets. If your fleet customer is getting their calibrations from somebody else after a windshield replacement, that is your relationship leaking.

Zoe: Okay, so let us put the month together, because October is actually a strategy. The A S E release gives you the reason to call every customer on the list. The winterize checklist is the ticket builder, battery, coolant, brakes, tires, oil, wipers, the whole list in one visit. Brakes for Breasts gives you the story, free pads, ten percent to research, and content that people actually share. And the calibration story gives you the future, the new capability you start tracking now so you are ready when the demand shows up. That is a whole month of marketing and operations that all points at the same thing.

Marcus: Which is trust. That is the word for October. The winterize inspection is trust, because you are catching the dead battery before the first freeze. The breast cancer campaign is trust, because you are doing something that is not about you. The calibration standard is trust, because you are finishing the job all the way. And trust is the only thing an independent shop has that a chain cannot copy.

David: At fleet scale the same word applies. The winterize package is what you sell in the October contract review. You walk in with the checklist, you price the inspections, and you lock the schedule before the weather turns. Every fleet manager knows the January breakdown costs ten times the October inspection. Your job is to make that math visible before the snow.

Marcus: So here is the takeaway. One, call your customer list this week with the winterize visit, battery to wipers, one appointment. Two, if you are doing Brakes for Breasts or anything like it, film the running total and the reason why, because that is the content that travels. Three, count how many calibrations you are subletting every month, and when the number gets real, that is your signal.

Zoe: Go make something worth watching.

David: And run your numbers.

Marcus: See you tomorrow.