if you could own a small commercial garage

Say what? Where do you live??

ssswitch wrote: Admittedly, my city is a bit weird since it's illegal to wash your own car here,

I've been thinking about this pretty hard as of late, though obviously not with a fall-into-t great location. I ran a cottage business manufacturing specialty parts and providing hard to find restoration items for a very narrow field of cars. It did okay and I sold it off, and now I've been doing B2B outside sales for a NAPA for over a year to get a feel for shops that do well and shops that suffer.

Here's what I would like to do: Small shop, 3-4 bay max, in an out-of-the-way area with low overhead. I would buy, fix, and sell interesting cars, no more than 2-3 at a time, as a regular source of income. Services would be geared towards the enthusiast community and jobs book time shops won't take (roll bar installs, performance part installation, tuning, suspension setups, data logging, etc). I'd get a low-volume tire machine and balancer and do tire work on slicks, non-DOT tires, autocross tires, etc, as well as sell the popular enthusiast brands (Hoosier, American Racer, Mickey Thompson, etc). I'd get a modern wireless/rackless alignment setup and a set of cornering scales.

I'd avoid any "normal" maintenance jobs, like quick-lube oil changes, and general repair work on normal cars. You need a large crew of slave monkeys with $100K in debt to a tool truck each to churn out enough volume to make any profit on jobs like that, and there's just too much competition. I'd want to avoid real time-sink jobs with low margins. I would charge straight time for every job.

I'd also get a 3D printer, an old lathe, a drill press, a brake, a press, and possibly a tiny waterjet or laser table and do small batch manufacturing, parts prototyping, and R&D work.

Think of it as a small cross-up shop that's half race shop and half collector car lot.

Javelin wrote: I've been thinking about this pretty hard as of late, though obviously not with a fall-into-t great location. I ran a cottage business manufacturing specialty parts and providing hard to find restoration items for a very narrow field of cars. It did okay and I sold it off, and now I've been doing B2B outside sales for a NAPA for over a year to get a feel for shops that do well and shops that suffer. Here's what I would like to do: Small shop, 3-4 bay max, in an out-of-the-way area with low overhead. I would buy, fix, and sell interesting cars, no more than 2-3 at a time, as a regular source of income. Services would be geared towards the enthusiast community and jobs book time shops won't take (roll bar installs, performance part installation, tuning, suspension setups, data logging, etc). I'd get a low-volume tire machine and balancer and do tire work on slicks, non-DOT tires, autocross tires, etc, as well as sell the popular enthusiast brands (Hoosier, American Racer, Mickey Thompson, etc). I'd get a modern wireless/rackless alignment setup and a set of cornering scales. I'd avoid any "normal" maintenance jobs, like quick-lube oil changes, and general repair work on normal cars. You need a large crew of slave monkeys with $100K in debt to a tool truck each to churn out enough volume to make any profit on jobs like that, and there's just too much competition. I'd want to avoid real time-sink jobs with low margins. I would charge straight time for every job. I'd also get a 3D printer, an old lathe, a drill press, a brake, a press, and possibly a tiny waterjet or laser table and do small batch manufacturing, parts prototyping, and R&D work. Think of it as a small cross-up shop that's half race shop and half collector car lot.

This is pretty much exactly what i would do as well.

In reply to Javelin:

^^^^^^^^^^^^^You, sir.....I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter. Exactly what I've been thinking about doing.

BMW or Benz repair shop. My rural commute has two of them, and they're both always overflowing with cars.

Start out with this:

Would you do regular mechanical repair? Marque/model specific shop? Restorations? Fix and flips? Race prep? Custom hot rods? Seasonal small engines? Motorcycles? Off road rigs? Something else?

And whittle it down to what you: 1) want to do 2) like to do c) works out best...

What would be your customer base ?

If have a friend who makes a very nice living repairing/restoring Citroens. He also winter stores some.

How many Citroens repair shops are there ?

I wouldn't! I would run not walk screaming in the other direction...it just seems like an awful lot of headaches for what is probably not much reward.

I'd love to open a race shop and also do some Brit car repair. The problem (at least around here) is the small customer base (drag racing and dirt track were big but have almost disappeared) and pretty much everyone I know does their own stuff. I'd have to have another income source to be able to make it work.

There's always the guys who are really specialized; I know two guys doing well with rotaries and another who does Spec Miatas, for instance. But it takes a long time to build a customer base, it needs to be nationwide (or at least have a strong regional customer base) for that to be really viable.

So to me I'd do fix and flip on commuter cars with the odd specialty or sports car to keep things interesting. Do it as a 1 or at most 3 man shop, keep your overhead low. Nobody on salary or the clock; straight commission. That way they have an incentive to keep stuff rolling through. Hit the auctions; buy dead cars cheap and bring them back to life via parts cars. Like this: assume 1999 Camry, 152k miles, runs good but bad transmission. Buy for $500 at auction. Buy another wrecked Camry through Copart for $500. Rob transmission from wreck, fix first car, maybe put tires timing belt and brakes on it, another $600 or so. Including wrecker fees you have maybe $1900 in the car. Sell it quick for, say, $2800.00. That's below market and would move pretty quick: http://www.kbb.com/toyota/camry/1999-toyota-camry/le-sedan-4d/?&r=254748139643046270

Sell the wrecked shell for scrap, $150. Sell the bad trans to a trans shop as a core, $75. $1275.00 profit. From that you have to save to pay shop rent etc but if you can do 8 or so a month that's not bad.

In reply to Javelin:

That's what I'd like to do as well, more or less... hard to say if I could make a living at it, though.

Ditto on the LBC-service idea as well. There's enough of market to do it, but it seems like it's more of a "retirement job" rather than something you could pay a mortgage and put your kids through college doing.

I'd put lifts in each of the bays and rent them to DIYers without garages by the hour. Maybe employ one or two techs to help by the hour.

A small machine shop like Javelin said would be a bonus. Not sure what the liability would be on that though.

Time for some parade rain here, I'm afraid. Every idea in this thread so far is either something you do on Saturday and in the evening when you are not at your paying job, something you do after the lottery hits, or something you do 60-70 hours a week while paying yourself less money than you could earn working a 9-5 for somebody else.

Trust me. I survived in a 2 bay shop for 9 years, moved to a 5 bay, and after 20 years finally learned the lessons everybody learns. The first, and most important one involves letting cheap people find somebody else to whine at about how much it costs to fix their junk.

I fixed a E36 M3load of junk for a E36 M3load of tightwads before I finally got rid of them by pricing myself out of their market.

There seems to be a good market building bro dozers. I see 10:1 bro dozers to sports cars on the road.

In reply to oldtin:

Good point. And most of that stuff is fairly simple/easy suspension and exhaust swaps.

As long as that credit card goes through, I don't care if the owner can afford the payments...

Ian F wrote: In reply to oldtin: Good point. And most of that stuff is fairly simple/easy suspension and exhaust swaps. As long as that credit card goes through, I don't care if the owner can afford the payments...

... Until they claim that something wasn't done right and call Visa and charge back the money. Probably happens one in twenty clients. You repair a timing belt, the customer refuses to do the seals because "money." Then they see a drop of oil on their driveway and instead of calling you, they just call Capital One and complain. Next thing you know, money gone.

Transmission repair is actually a pretty easy model to make money. Transmissions are voodoo to the general public which means expensive, but its actually somewhat cheap for a properly-equipped shop.

I grossed $20k/wk for a shop with one tech and one builder. I sold, the tech diagnosed and R&R'd, the builder diagnosed and built. A good hot tank washer, a good solvent parts washer, three lifts, clean build room, lots of compressed air. Thousands of genuine opportunities for legitimate upsells (rear main seals, axles, oil pan gaskets) and lots of opportunities for general repairs to fill in the slow times.

Ran 13 transmission shops in my tenure, 7 of them I helped franchise. Get a good builder, pay him or her well. Get a good tech. Pay him/her hourly, not book time, and let them get overtime if the work is there.

Most general repair shops pay book time, so the easiest way to structure your pricing is margin. 50% profit will keep the doors open. With transmission shops when you pay hourly, just shoot for parts cost of no more than 15% of the total sale.

Transmission rebuild kits are cheap. Full kit with a converter on something like a 4L60E can be had for $180. Some of the japanese kits can be close to $300. The way I sold was SWAG. I took a look at parts cost, relative time to R&R the tranny, how much my builder grumbled about building a Jatco box, and shot from the hip. I gave a price that made honest profit, represented market pricing, and kept customers happy and coming back. It was the simplest model I've ever seen.

The other big plus is that you are making your money by doing a lot of work on 6-10 cars a week instead of nickels and dimes on 60 cars. Your phone burden is low, your ability to provide customer service is high. You'll remember that your customer Bob has three kids in soccer instead of remembering a face that belongs to an Acura water pump job.

You also don't need to know a ton about transmissions. I didn't. You already know the basics, and in a few weeks you'll have baked-in knowledge of things like Honda solenoids go bad, Ford torque converter lockup clutches like to chatter, GM internal wiring harnesses can't take the heat, Dodge tranny cooling circuits like to clog, Mercedes transmissions are really hard to get right, and the Northstar 4T80Es are terrible to R&R.

Buy the building, rent it out to some other ambitious schmuck, keep one bay reserved for yourself to do whatever you enjoy and/or make a profit on.

Personally, I'd go fix and flip route, and if possible I'd get a dealer license to get access to the good auctions.

Partout w126 coupes

I'd open a repair shop specializing in European cars. High and low end models. A good portion of people who buy those cars really love them but don't want to work on them and God knows they're always needing something repaired.

Do some fix and flip for some extra cash and why not part out the ones that can't be saved.

Thanks for all the comments so far, quite interesting to read.

I owned my own driving school for 2 years, so yes, I fully value and affirm not working for tightasses or spending 60-70 hours go barely scrape by.

Really IF I were to do this, I think I'd be focusing on the low volume higher profit stuff, or at least NOT regular maintenance.

For example: fix and flips, but only 50 y.o. cars. Do detailing and maintenance on the side (but only for same 50 y.o. cars, therefore your customers repeat both ways a bit more).

Would certainly take longer to get going, but the small customer group might help keep out the most of the crap.

In reply to rcutclif:Start with several times more money that you think you'll ever need! Expect your high profit sales and jobs to go down the tubes with the stock market and fuel cost changes. Be prepared to hold out till things turn around again. Remember to pay yourself including health insurance and other benefits.

I know a couple of plastic surgeons who went bankrupt during the financial downturn starting in 2007. If you can make a living working on cars when plastic surgeons go broke doing breast enhancements and removing wrinkles, you're a better man than me!

Good Luck

I think I like Curtiss's advice the best so far, so I'll +1 it.

skierd wrote: I think I like Curtiss's advice the best so far, so I'll +1 it.

Does + 1 apply extra leverage by placing here, or on Curtis' post?

$2k per job on something you can do in a day?

curtis73 wrote: ... Until they claim that something wasn't done right and call Visa and charge back the money. Probably happens one in twenty clients. You repair a timing belt, the customer refuses to do the seals because "money." Then they see a drop of oil on their driveway and instead of calling you, they just call Capital One and complain. Next thing you know, money gone.

True... which is why I never took money for any of the MINI work did for friends.

Streetwiseguy wrote: Time for some parade rain here, I'm afraid. Every idea in this thread so far is either something you do on Saturday and in the evening when you are not at your paying job, something you do after the lottery hits, or something you do 60-70 hours a week while paying yourself less money than you could earn working a 9-5 for somebody else. Trust me. I survived in a 2 bay shop for 9 years, moved to a 5 bay, and after 20 years finally learned the lessons everybody learns. The first, and most important one involves letting cheap people find somebody else to whine at about how much it costs to fix their junk. I fixed a E36 M3load of junk for a E36 M3load of tightwads before I finally got rid of them by pricing myself out of their market.

So who now is your customer?

We have a miata only shop here in San Diego, it seems to always be busy, I think he is doing fix and flips as well however. He also shares the office space/storage areas with Goodwin Racing a performance parts online seller/storefront

http://rockysmiatomotive.com/

It sounds to me like none of the "good options" if any of these are good really need the high volume street location. Unless the tranmission thing benefits a lot from drive in traffic. Enthusiasts will be more likely to find an out of the way shop and as mentioned fix and flip can be off someplace cheap (unless you turn the front lot into a for sale lot)