It is a very good idea to have a clear set of roles and responsibilities for each employee at your shop. Whether you are a 1-man shop looking to hire your first employee or an established shop with 8 people, these roles and responsibilities will make sure there is no confusion about who is responsible for what. This blog post will outline several positions and help you in creating your own list. Employee Handbook The formal document containing these roles and responsibilities is called the Employee Handbook. The handbook should contain all important information pertaining to that specific employee: Roles...

Finding qualified technicians is extremely difficult. Ideally, you want somebody who has intimate knowledge about your platform, owns their own tools, has comparable work standards and ethics, is young and excited, only wants $10/hour, and has 20 years of experience. Hate to break it to you, but that person doesn’t exist. No one will ever be as driven to succeed as yourself. Many small business owners fool themselves into believing they can just hire somebody, put them to work, and expect perfect quality every time. Truth is, it takes a lot of time and effort to manage just one employee....

FIFO stands for “First In, First Out” and is usually associated with valuing cost of goods sold in inventory. For the purpose of this post, we will be using it in terms of scheduling and completing work at a machine shop. Difference between FIFO and LIFO FIFO (First In, First Out) and LIFO (Last In, First Out) are acronyms used to express when your workload enters the shop and when it leaves. In the case of many machine shops (and other service shops), they get sucked into a LIFO workflow. This means that they do not complete the older tasks...

Most aftermarket installation shops have humble beginnings in a personal garage. Then it grows to inhabit a formal location and may scale up or move a couple times. At some point, the desire to complete more work may warrant hiring the first employee. While this may seem like the logical next step, it can spell disaster for the business if the conditions aren’t right. Preface Growing your performance shop can be an extremely satisfactory experience! It allows you to take on larger builds, generate more revenue, and have more widespread notoriety within the community. But, with this grown can come...

Most shops just set their hourly rate by choosing a number out of thin air. We want you to use data to determine what it should actually be. This video demonstrates how you can calculate the effective hourly rate at your shop. Using your overhead expenses and how many hours you actually billed customers, you can determine if you are charging enough to cover your expenses. It also explains some reasons why you should increase your prices to ensure that you are making money. You can download a PDF version of this video by clicking this link.