Reflecting on ASTA Expo 2026

For 362 days a year, trolls from all over North America hibernate in shop owner Facebook groups, rage baiting each other. Then ASTA season hits, and for three days they come out and descend on Raleigh, North Carolina.

And if you haven’t figured it out, we’re one of them.

It’s been a few hours since it ended and we’re still coming down off it. That’s the part nobody warns you about. You spend three days with several hundred people who get it, and then it’s Sunday, and everybody goes back behind a profile picture until next fall. Most of the people we sat with in Raleigh, we’ll see once, maybe twice, in the next twelve months.

There’s a belief in some corners of this industry that expos are a waste of time. We’re not going to argue with anybody who’s been burned by one. But if there’s a single event built to prove that wrong, it’s this one.

The troll thing is a joke, but it’s only funny because of what it’s standing in for. For most of the year, the only place a lot of us see each other is a comment thread, and comment threads go unresolved. Three days in Raleigh is a place to pick things up where they left off, with a heavy dose of classes.

Here’s the part we’ll admit. We came into auto repair in 2023 from the outside, after fourteen years in software, and this was our first ASTA. You walk into a room where people have been doing this for thirty years, where plenty of them grew up in their family’s shop, and you quietly do the math on what you’ve earned the right to say. We were not sure what kind of seat we had.

We weren’t skeptical about the event itself. We knew who puts it together, and those people do not play small. Mike Allen stores the entire hospitality suite year round, all of it, taking up space for twelve months so that it exists for a few nights in the fall. Tonnika Haynes and Benjie Burris are the same way, building community all year long through learning sessions, shop events, and everything in between. Ryan Ragan, the Executive Director, and Callie Johnson, the Membership and Events Manager, are the reason three days of it actually runs. And we are definitely leaving people out here, which isn’t intentional. An event like this takes more hands than any attendee ever sees.

So we expected it to be good. What we didn’t expect was to see exactly how it gets that way.

We went because of Aniz Lavji. We’d been talking nearly every day for months, all of it online, never once in person. Aniz is an ASTA maximalist and he would not let it go. Come to ASTA. You need to be at ASTA. Then we got there and he still didn’t stop. He walked us over to Bruce Bolen, Caleb Mac, Sunny Massera, people at completely different points in their journeys. Francis Wiebe came down from Canada and we met him the same way. Aniz and Francis host The Shop N Tread Talk Podcast together, and if you haven’t come across it yet, go listen. Ask how Aniz ended up this deep in it and you find out somebody did the same thing for him a few years back. That’s how most people get into ASTA, which means the first-timers from this year are the ones walking somebody in next year, because they remember not knowing whether they belonged. Nobody is assigned this. The room just keeps building itself.

We showed up knowing a handful of people in person and left having met more new people at one event than anywhere else we’ve been.

Every night all of it moved into the hospitality suite, which is where the day actually got processed. Somewhere in that room is a poker table. Mike Allen, Matt Lofton, a rotating cast of shop owners, and nobody’s title doing them a single favor. Apprentice tech or seasoned MSO, same seat, same buy-in. We were the first one out, and it wasn’t the cards.

That room is also where Benjie sat down with us on the last night and asked for real feedback, in depth, the kind you only get when the person asking has already earned it. We’re sure we weren’t the only one he asked. Anyone who has tried to pull honest feedback out of a room full of people knows the only method that works is the slow one. Not a survey in your inbox on Tuesday. Same room, same chairs, end of the night, everybody’s guard down.

But the thing we keep coming back to happened in a hallway, and it took about ninety seconds.

A few of us were standing around after a class making small talk. One of the shop owners looked at his phone and found a text from his tech saying he quit. Right there, mid-expo, two states from his shop.

Nobody could do a thing about it. A couple of people said the only thing there is to say, which is that it’s part of the game and he’ll find another one. Then the conversation moved on, because that’s what conversations do.

Think about where that text normally gets read. Alone in the truck, in your own parking lot, and then you walk back inside and put a face on for your staff. He read it standing next to people who have all gotten the same text. Nothing got solved. He just wasn’t by himself while it landed, and a couple hours later he was back in a class taking notes.

That isn’t on anybody’s agenda. You can’t schedule it and you can’t buy it. It exists because several hundred people got walked into a room by somebody who decided they belonged there.

Which is why Sunday feels the way it does. It isn’t that the classes ended. It’s that something real got built in three days, and now it lives behind a profile picture for another eleven months.

So here’s the only thing we’ve got for that. We walked in unsure what kind of seat we had, and somebody handed us one anyway. Whoever did that for you, somebody did it for them first.

There is someone within thirty miles of you who has never been, who is certain it’s three days they can’t afford, and who needs that room more than either of us did. You already know who it is.

Next year, walk them in.