alfredauto

I'm in the same boat. I like the Hawkeye elite with the tire clamps and fast setup times, but the $40,000 note is intimidating.

Your story is typical. I'm running an emglo compressor from 1990. I'll rebuild it when it finally wears out. Almost all the sub $5000 compressors made in the last ten years are China sourced, designed to last 3 or 4 years in commercial use.

My buddy buys the cheapest 80gal box store compressor every two or three years, it works out to $200 a year.

How do you keep the help motivated in December once they've spent their Christmas bonuses? It seems that giving out an end of year bonus early would hurt production.

I have two - jnc660 and jnc990. Blue and red jump n carry units. My blue jnc660 is going on 6 years, I keep it plugged in now when not in use. The jnc 990 is big red, its heavy but will crank multiple vehicles no matter how dead. These guys don't have flashlights or air compressors. If you don't need to jump diesel trucks the jnc660 will be a better choice, its cheaper and more importantly a lot lighter.

I sell used tires, its pretty easy to test them. A car comes in for a 4 tire change over because they are at 5/32", its the best thing from a safety standpoint. 5/32" is the minimum for snow if you ask me. Well, when a customer is at 0/32" and is on a tight budget those 5/32" tires become a lifesaver, for $100 they can pass inspection. I only sell used tires that I removed. We discard 90% of tires that come off. I do have a guy that takes anything above 1/32". To me its a waste of money to put them on anything but he has customers who drive junk, and it saves me the recycling cost.

The biggest used tire mover is 235/75r15 to fit 95-03 s10 blazers. Good luck finding them, typically the owners of these beauties run the tires down until air comes through.

000ooo - we are in the statistically poorest county in NY. Low income people can't afford to pay twice to repair their car. They benefit from quality parts because its cheaper for them in the long run. You can definitly have a successful business in a low income area, it takes a little more work. Educate your customers on the value of quality, don't keep them down.

Speaking of quality, I suggest reading "zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance" by Robert Persig. It is not an automotive business novel by any means, but provides a good insight on "quality"

You can't have too many top techs. Your much better off paying an A tech to do oil changes than to buy motors and advertising when the C tech greases up a steering wheel or double gaskets a filter.

3 bays, 2 techs will force them to work together, if both guys are on the same team it will work great.

I've found if you take the geometric mean of say 30 shops in your local area the number will show you where the shop needs to be. If it's $50/hr or $150/hr it doesn't matter. Customers like familiarity, if your shop is above their perceived average labor rate but do above average work it will be justified. Price yourself near the bottom percentile and you invite bottom feeders, towards the top percentile brings in better but more demanding clients. Price yourself above the franchised dealers and you might have empty bays.

With a target labor rate in mind that suits what the market will bear and where you want to fit in, one can reverse engineer the tech pay rates and work on production and overhead. When I first opened I simply took the total shop overhead (total of all expenses including officer salary, except depreciable assets), divided by 80 hours a week (total reasonable labor production we are capable of) and came up with a number. I added a percentage to keep the labor rate in line with my local expectations and provide the shop with labor profit.

Notice that parts are excluded from this calculation. Parts profit adds purely to the bottom line, and it works because I can't estimate or control what parts I'll sell in a future month/year/quarter/whatever. I can control labor.

So in a nutshell the labor dollars keep the lights on and provides paychecks for everyone, the parts matrix keeps the shop moving forward and adds a cushion.

I think my method is pretty good, it keeps me from cheating the techs out of labor and underselling our time because I need to keep the labor hours up near 100% productivity. It removes the idea of free diagnosis. If I'm paying a guy to work on a customers car the shop is billing for it, with few exceptions. If techs aren't keeping up they can't hide behind the parts profit, produce or get retrained at the donut shop.

We use Mitchell manager as the POS system, the estimator is fast and easy. It comes with prodemand which IMO is too slow to navigate. Identifix and iatn are invaluable as diag helpers! Because we are a true general repair shop there's no way we can be experts on every make and model, identifix gets us up to speed fast. Iatn helps when we are desperate, its tough to get past the users personalities.

My best tech cleans and puts away his tools before the car is backed out. Drives me nuts. I heap my tools on my cart and put them away at the end of the day. Everyone's different. If I caught a guy relieving himself on my floor I'd be mopping it up with his last paycheck.

Once in a while we all come across engineering screw ups that defy logic. My biggest one is light bulbs that are not accessable. We did a front turn signal on a Cadillac the other day. Remove the fog light/signal assembly, disassemble the housing, change bulb, reinstall. There was no access hole. How much education is needed to know an incandescent bulb is going to burn out in a few years? This was a solid one hour job on the lift. $90 to replace the turn signal bulb. The same sentiment goes for headlights that require bumper removal. Unacceptable. This is not a packaging issue, 2 seconds reveals where a panel could have been built in. 30 cents more plastic.

I've yet to see a torque stick under torque anything. Dfrisby - check your psi or air tool quality. A standard IR2135 will overtorque every time if gone around twice. I verified my torque sticks, the 80's come in at 100-110, the 100 does 120-130, the thick 120 will snap the stud eventually. 100lb/ft won't warp a rotor in a star pattern.

Think about the headache when cheapo's parts are wrong. He's already got rock auto up on his screen when you call, and I'm pretty sure he's not willing to pay $200 for a bearing he can get for $39.99 which in his mind is the same.

Here's the bring your own eggs to the diner checklist, see if you want to opt in.

1. Customer states he is cheap and does not care about your bottom line.

2. Customer does not see a value in your warranty.

3. Customer does not respect your expertise.

4. Customer proves he can re-negotiate your estimate.

5. Customer will prove he can renegotiate your warranty policy via litigation, bad reviews, Facebook, etc when his part didn't fix the problem or failed prematurely.

6. Customer will refer his doper friends who pull the same sh!t.

No thanks its all bad. There are some exceptions, but not many.

Totally agree with all of them! However, I hope you guys never find yourself on vacation needing a mechanic. I drove cross country once and needed a shop to fix a rear heater hose that got torn by road debris. Of course it was in the late afternoon. Do you know how hard it was to just be a civilian in someone else's shop? Granted, I could have sacrificed a good shirt and done it myself on the ground, maybe, after buying a screwdriver at Kmart. It would have been easier to buy a new screwdriver than unload all my families stuff to find the tools I packed and stored in the trunk. Long story short it worked out well, I didn't disclose my occupation until after I paid, and the shop really treated me well.

The point is some of these guys might know what they are doing.

Ask about a disclaimer sticker you can put on the dash to cya to get around it. "Caution, modified vehicle for off road use...limit speed to 35mph"

Its just a suggestion, most insurance companies shy away from people who modify vehicles. You might be labeled as a manufacturer, hold on to your wallet.

We have a good workflow management system, very efficient, but sometimes the world just doesn't want to play nice. Today I have a real problem. Six lifts, six cars taken apart in a major fashion waiting for parts. Parts that are 2-3 days out. The special order parts looked right when we started the jobs. Something as simple as a hub bearing, press the old one out, go to press the new one in and the hub is trashed. Oops. Ready. Set. Stop.

Maybe I should know better to have more than one Suzuki and 15 year old Benz in the shop at the same time. Its going to be an interesting week. I haven't had a shop completely full of immobilized oddballs in a while.

I wouldn't knock Google as a place to start. Its free and takes 2 seconds, it might give some insight on common issues and it definitely will give you a laugh. Example - I was having trouble getting a half shaft out of a newer w211 Benz. There's no sense why it didn't pop out like every other one, and I must have changed a hundred on the w210's which are basically the same. So Google resulted in diy advice to drop front subframe and use a 3 jaw puller, pictures to prove it,, we laughed so hard it hurt. 8+ hours work to do a 30 minute job, while the forum expert is bragging about his expertise. Needless to say I didn't employ the take complete car apart to remove axle on bench method. Conclusion in my case came from a 36" air chisel to give the inner joint a hard tap. The last guy put an aftermarket axle in bone dry and peened over the clip so it was just stuck.

My point being is before I start hammering I make sure I'm not just being dumb and overlooking something.

Individuals and families get fined for not having insurance too. The system needs a lot of work, my wife signs us up because I get infuriated with how horrible the web site is. Like it was designed and tested by a guy on a commodore 64 with a phone modem.

I'm in western NY state. Cars don't last 10 years between the potholes, rust, deer, and +100 to -30 temps. Figure in 150 mile round trip to the mall and average 50 mile commute and its a great place to be a mechanic. Not a good place to be a car or human but business is good.

We get Mercedes cruise control issues all the time, talk about weird. How about when the cruise works perfect below 55mph, above 55 it is inop? Huh? Not possible. Different tread designs on the tires can cause this. MB came out with a tsb on the issue. Yup, 3 michelins and one dunlop results in intermittent cruise operation. Sometimes I wish the automakers would go back to chain operated cruise control.

Lately we've been using cloned sensors from auto plus. I call, give them the FCC id#, a programmed one shows up in a few minutes. It saves me time and $.

I see dorman makes a 315mhz kit for about $300, at least the industry is heading in the right direction.

Ironically the easiest sensors to program are the brown Mercedes Benz units, they are plug and play. Try that with a scion sensor. Ha!

I've calculated the time savings, crunched the numbers, and went with standard lifts. When quoting any job be sure to put in the extra .2 labor time it takes to make the car go up/down, sweep the bay, wash hands, test drive, and generally tidy up the car and get the next one in. It takes about 10 minutes on average to do this stuff.

Efficiency isn't made by speeding up the lifts, its made at the service counter.

Lol! Don't worry when its snowing that guy will be at your door in emergency mode.

The inspection emergencies are a joke. People make appointments either the last day of the month or the 1st if they are really cheap. Squeeze an extra day out of the $21 annual fee. I did the math, if they squeeze an extra day every year they will save $21 after 12 years if they keep their car that long, but they risk getting a $300 fine 12 times. Risk $300 to save $1.75. Poor odds. Additionally if the car fails with an expired sticker it gets scraped off, now their odds of getting a ticket are around 100%. And guess who is responsible when they are going to get a ticket? The scumbag mechanics, the a-hole inspector, or the shop owner!

It appears the blacklist site is free now, but I'm hesitant to use it. I'd rather keep positive thoughts flowing. I did get burned for $21 this week, we did an inspection for a guy and while his car was here another shop owner told me that guy owes him $$$$ and keeps changing phone numbers. Yea yea whatever I'll inspect him - long story short he forgot his wallet was going to swing back in with my $21 for the inspection. I'm still waiting. What a jerk, this is the type of guy who probably skips out of restaurants.

This only applies if you have over 50 full time employees.