An auto shop owner with five bays and $1.6M a year kept closing months that looked good on the profit and loss and felt wrong in the bank account. There was no single bad line. There were four hundred small ones. A 25 percent Section 232 tariff had pushed his real parts basket up 14 percent while his pricing file sat untouched since 2024, and his own tiered matrix was quietly demoting his markup every time a part inflated into a higher cost band. Add a labor rate that had not moved while his cost per billed hour rose ten dollars, and the quiet total was $108,000 a year.

In this teardown, JT walks the fix in three parts: price the basket, re band the matrix instead of raising it, and move the labor rate with a thirty day posted notice. Then he hands you the tool: the Creep Sheet, three columns and twenty one rows, forty five minutes on a Friday, run four times a year because the tariff inclusions list moves four times a year.

THE CREEP SHEET, FREE
The fillable tool: app.notebookofacoo.com/creep-sheet.html
The printable one pager and the free Small Business MBA: notebookofacoo.com/small-business-mba.html

CHAPTERS
0:00 The Month That Looked Fine
1:28 The Stakes in Dollars
3:22 Why Good Shops Bleed Quietly
8:08 The Teardown: Kessler Automotive
15:14 The Tool: The Creep Sheet
18:55 This Week's Install
20:49 Recap and the Free Tool

COMING THIS WEEK
The Install takes the Creep Sheet into a restaurant kitchen, where the cost column is the PLATE and not the case, and the output is a menu reprint date.
Then an HVAC company, where row twenty one is not your labor rate at all. It is your quote expiry.

SOURCES
Section 232 automotive tariffs, Congressional Research Service. Quarterly inclusions process, January, April, July and October. CPI for car parts and equipment. 2026 independent shop labor rate benchmarks, PartsTech. Parts gross profit benchmarks, PartsTech and The Institute for Automotive Business Excellence. Every figure spoken in this episode is sourced, and Kessler Automotive is a disclosed composite.

Notebook of a COO. Operating frameworks for owners doing $250K to $1M who learned a craft but were never taught to run the business.

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