How do you get your team to own projects instead of waiting for you to fix everything yourself? It’s one of the oldest headaches in the shop. In this Shop Talk, Rick Roth sits down with Ali Banholzer, who has built a system that turns “what’s broken” into completed projects, done by her team, not by her. TBT: A Shop Owner Gets Employee Buy-In, and Stops Doing Everything Herself

Start with one question: what’s broke?

Ali is a Lean Six Sigma practitioner. That’s a data-driven methodology for improving efficiency and quality, but only where customers are actually willing to pay for it. Her version is refreshingly simple. Each quarter, the whole team, eight employees across six decoration lines, sits down for round-robin brainstorming. Everyone, from the newest hire to the owner, answers one question: what’s broke? Every answer goes on the board, gets voted on, and gets prioritized.

Then each person picks a project to own for the quarter. The expectation is about an hour a week, roughly 15 to 20 hours over the quarter. And that’s 15 to 20 hours Ali isn’t spending herself.

Where the “A Shop Owner Gets Employee Buy-In” really comes from

Buy-in comes from a few places. Tackling projects is written into job descriptions from day one. There’s a Monopoly-money incentive that converts into gift cards. And in a nod to the shop’s aviation theme, finishing a project earns a little model airplane or army man that staff line up around their desks like trophies.

But the real driver, Ali says, isn’t the prizes. It’s that employees get a say in what they fix and how, and they watch their own jobs get easier as those broken processes disappear. By the second quarter, the team had seen enough small wins to stop rolling their eyes and start buying in.

Keeping projects from stalling

To keep things moving, everyone gives a quick status check at the weekly staff meeting. A scope worksheet spells out what each project does, and just as important, what it does not include. That’s the guard against the rabbit holes that swallow shop-improvement efforts whole. And when a project feels overwhelming, the team breaks it into chunks across multiple quarters, keeping it manageable instead of letting it stall.

The payoff: retention, lower training costs, and time back

The results are real. Ali credits the system with higher employee retention, lower training costs, and faster decisions on big-ticket items. With seven employees each completing roughly four projects a year, she has logged dozens of fixes she never had to touch, freeing her to work on the business and the high-end customers who want face time with the owner.

That retention gain matters more than it sounds. SHRM estimates that replacing a single employee costs between 50% and 200% of their annual salary. For a shop running on thin margins, keeping good people, and documenting their know-how in written procedures, isn’t a soft benefit. It’s money straight to the bottom line.

Watch the full Shop Talk with Ali Banholzer: youtu.be/iABW6yjz7wg