What Tektonic 2026 Was Actually Like

If you run a shop, you’ve probably seen Tektonic on your radar and wondered what actually happens there. So here’s the inside version. We went to Tektonic 2026 in person, and this is a recap of what it was, what we spent our time on, and what we made of it.

Three days in Houston. More than a thousand shop owners, advisors, and technicians.

First, what it is. Tektonic is Tekmetric’s conference, but it isn’t a closed users-only meeting. The room is the whole industry. It’s built around role-based tracks, so an owner, an advisor, and a tech can walk in together and each leave with something different. You choose your own three days.

We do social media. That’s our lane. So we spent our three days on what’s around it, including a few things we were just plain curious about.

Start with Tekmetric Digital Ads. This one pulled us in. It’s a new tool that lets a shop manage ads across Google and Apple Maps from inside the platform. Paid maps ads aren’t what we do, but we wanted to see it up close. Our take? It depends on the shop. If your needs are simple and you’re inclined to run your own ads, it can make a lot of sense. It gets you in front of nearby drivers who are already searching. But it isn’t for every operation. The more your marketing has to do, the more you’ll want to think hard about where a built-in ads tool fits and where it doesn’t. Useful. Not universal.

We dug into the MSO sessions too. The part that stuck with us was configuration. How you set operational configs at the company level and cascade them across locations. Hours. Canned jobs. The operational guts of the business, defined once for the group and pushed out to every shop, and still customizable at each individual location. Central control, local flexibility. If you’re running more than one shop, that’s the hard part, and watching how it’s actually done beats any help doc.

But here’s the thing we’re still thinking about.

One example. We got to talking with an MSO operator who runs a core-and-satellite model. The core shops are full service. The satellites are low-cost storefronts that mostly take cars in and port them back to a core shop for the work. Simple on the surface. Clever underneath. The satellite is a canary in the coal mine. It does two things at once. It works around towns that won’t permit any more full-service garages. And it tests whether the demand in a community is real before anyone spends a dime building a full shop there.

Sit with that. That’s a whole growth strategy, learned in a hallway conversation. You don’t get that from a stage. You get it from being in the room with people who are living it.

And then there were the nights.

The food was top notch. Multiple nights of rooftop parties. Open bars for those who imbibe. Live music. And a thousand shops in a genuinely great mood. A lot of camaraderie got built at Tektonic 2026. The conversations that don’t fit inside a breakout slot happened there, over dinner and on a rooftop, and some of them were the most useful part of the whole trip.

That’s what Tektonic was for us. Three days of tracks and tools and keynotes, and a whole lot of shops in one place. If you’re thinking about going, that’s what’s waiting for you: the sessions you pick, and the room they put you in.