What Your Car Tells Me Before You Say a Word

Twenty-five years of visiting customers and partners leave a mark on you. I have walked through hundreds of warehouses, production floors, and offices, in aerospace, aviation, and logistics. After a while, you stop being surprised by what you find. Papers piled so high on desks that you wonder how anyone finds anything. Spare parts stored in ways that make no sense. And then, in other companies, the complete opposite: clean spaces, clear labels, everything in its place. You immediately understand why those companies are doing well.

The difference never stops telling the truth.

One moment, though, changed something in me personally. More than twenty years ago, when I was working in sales, a colleague got into my car. He looked around, at the receipts, the folders, the general mess, and said something I have never forgotten: "I keep my car as if I were returning it to the dealership tomorrow." He was not trying to teach me a lesson. He said it almost without thinking. But I understood immediately what he meant, and what it said about me.

From that day, my car has been clean. So has my desk.

I am not talking about being obsessed with tidiness. I am talking about something much simpler: control. When your space is in order, you know where things are. You know what is missing. You can focus on your work instead of wasting energy on the mess around you. Order is not something you are born with, it is a habit, and habits can be built.

What I have seen over the years, however, is that companies in serious trouble are almost always the most disorganized ones. No internal procedures. Or procedures that exist on paper but that nobody follows. Every person handling the same task in a different way, each one convinced their way is the right one. The result does not stay in the warehouse or the office. It shows up in the numbers. There is a direct connection between how you keep your car and how your bank account looks. I have seen it too many times to think it is just bad luck.

Some people say they work better in their own way, with their own system. That may be true for creative work. But for the daily operational tasks that keep a company running, personal interpretation is not freedom, it is risk. Procedures exist to reduce human error. They are not there to limit people. They are there to protect the process, and everyone involved in it.

In aerospace, we all know this. We work in one of the most regulated industries in the world, and for good reason. A wrong part in the wrong place, a missing document, a step skipped because someone was in a hurry, these are not small mistakes. They are the beginning of much bigger problems. Order in an MRO warehouse is not optional, it is part of doing the job correctly. A pile of unsorted papers has no place next to an aircraft maintenance record.

The book that first made me think seriously about this was The E-Myth by Michael E. Gerber. It has nothing to do with aerospace, but its message is one of the most useful I have ever read. His point is simple: most businesses struggle not because the people are bad at their jobs, but because there are no solid systems to keep things running when things get busy or complicated. Processes are not extra work. They are what separates a well-run operation from one that survives on luck.

So let me ask you a simple question. How do you keep your car? Not your office on the day before an audit. Your car, on a normal day. Is it the kind of place you would feel comfortable if someone important sat in it tomorrow, or is it full of things you have not dealt with yet?

It sounds like a small thing. In my experience, it never is.