Do It For A Living

You're doing highly skilled work, working harder than the general repair shop down the street — and making less money per hour. In this episode, Richard interviews Kevin to break down exactly why performance, restoration, and custom fabrication shops struggle financially compared to general repair, and what to do about it. We cover the "book time" billing model that lets general repair techs flag 50-60 hours in a 40-hour week, why performance shops are stuck at or below 100% efficiency, the parts markup gap, and the two metrics every shop owner needs to track: door rate and shop efficiency. Then we get into how to actually fix it. If you run a performance shop, custom fab shop, or restoration business — this might be the most important episode you watch this year. Most performance shops are running on spreadsheets, notebooks, or nothing at all — and general repair software doesn't fit because it's built around canned jobs and flat rate labor guides. My Shop Assist was built specifically for this industry.