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Finding and Hiring Your First Technician
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 vs. LIFO: Scheduling Jobs
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...
Preparing for Your First Employee
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...
Video: Determining Your Hourly Rate
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.
Tool Review Video: Vividia AbleScope USB VA-800 Borescope
A digital borescope is a great tool you can use to quickly and clearly diagnose engine problems for your customers. At $350, the Vividia AbleScope VA-800 USB Borescope is an excellent buy and a useful tool for any performance shop. It's a great idea to document any damage you encounter while working on a customer's car. My Shop Assist allows you to upload photos to a task (such as Diagnose Engine Failure") so you and the customer can reference them at anytime. This tool is great for quickly determining the origin of the engine failure. No more guessing on what...