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...

It’s all too common to have a fleet of dormant cars taking up space at the shop. They are usually comprised of personal project cars, delinquent customer cars, and long-term never-ending builds. High car count typically means excessive storage fees, long lead times, and headaches resulting from trying to remember every last detail about the cars. You are probably saying “Yes” to too many projects and also not charging enough for your services. You may be bringing in projects before they are actually ready to be worked on and accepting projects that exceed your skill set. Plus, you probably hate...

  In this video, we show you how to determine the Service Efficiency at your shop. The goal with this metric is to help you focus on profitability versus revenue. Many of the struggles shops face come from their obsession with revenue. Often times, we hear people say "There is so much work! I need to hire somebody to help me get the work complete!"  But, this often leads to more headaches and even LESS revenue. If you don't have systems in place to manage your employees and ensure they are billing plenty of hours, you will find adding more...

In this post, we will document the work flow necessary to manage a job from start to finish. Thankfully, this process is essentially the same for all of us, regardless of what kind of cars you work on or what you do to them. Below are 6 steps that should occur with every build. It is critical that each step be optimized to ensure the vehicle passes through the shop as quickly as possible. This means setting clear expectations and goals for the person responsible for each step. Think about which person is responsible for each step and make sure they...

If you read the 3-part blog post about Shop Management, you should be comfortable with the idea of creating specific tasks for your work and tracking time on those tasks. Having that information helps you make decisions on which tasks make the most money and which tasks you may not want to perform. In this blog, I am going to show how to utilize the information you collect. I want to break down how you can use time tracking to analyze employee performance and I will be showing the times from my shop as an example. To start, the tech...