This is the last part of a series, Part 1 can be found here, and Part 2 can be found here   I have been talking a lot about charging the right price for tasks. Take some time to think about how you originally determined those numbers. Was it a guess? A gut feeling? Some number you pulled out of a hat? All of these reasons are bad. If you don’t know how many of your worked hours are translating to dollars (i.e. billable hours), I would recommend beginning to measure that metric first. Tracking you and your employees’ hours will allow...

This is a continuation from Part 1 here   For years now, I have been working to improve my own shop, Evolution Dynamics, to be profitable, fun, and not require insane hours. Sadly, I learned from the school of hard knocks (i.e. made every mistake imaginable costing time and lots of money) on how to best run my business. It shouldn’t have to be this way. To get started, I want people to look at running a business as a machine that can be finely tuned. We are all car people and most of us come from a racing background....

This is a multi-part blog post designed to help shops change how they operate and improve their financial situation Hard Work Doesn’t Always Pay Off For many performance shops, flying by the seat of your pants is a way of life. Running a business is more about passion and drive then a well thought-out plan.  We (myself included) built cars, tuned them, and made a name for ourselves by racing and having fun doing what we enjoy. We worked out of our garages and never thought about doing it full-time. That passion is what drove us to start helping friends. Then...

      In our first video tool review, we look at the Qwikline Thread Chaser.  This tool was designed to slip over the end of a damaged bolt, stud, or axle, and reverse off to clean the threads.   We Show a sample of what the tool is capable of doing with a heavily damaged axle threads.   a normal die was unable to thread onto the damaged axle, and couldnt clean the threads.   The Qwikline tool can be used with an impact as well making very quick work of the heavily damaged axle.  We found that the...

Preface Anyone in the automotive performance world has to work with machine shops at some point or another. They have been around as long as people have been building engines. Interestingly, with so many performance shops doing tuning, performance upgrades, and engine building, the assumption would be that quality performance oriented machine shops would be equally as prevalent. In my experience, this has been far from reality. But the question I ask is, why? There are some excellent memes on social media related to performance shops that go like the following:   With such a demand for quality work, the...