AndersonAuto

A bit of a clickbait title, but not inaccurate. The shop is doing amazing, and I haven't been here but a few hours here and there since last June. Prior to that I had been the shuttle driver and not much else. I sold the shop to my manager, something that has been in the works for over 3 years. Spending the next couple days at the shop getting a few things settled (vendor accounts, recurring payments, etc) before the final handover on Saturday. I'm retired now at 55, and I won't have to work another day. My wife and I are moving onto our boat and we're going to sail around the world a few times. The moral of the story is that you CAN get there. You don't have to be particularly bright, I'm certainly not. You don't even have to be an amazing manager. There are thousands of shop owners who are better managers than I am. You do have to work hard. Way harder than the average guy, and a lot of guys work pretty hard. You do have to be smart about your business. Don't spend money you don't have yet. Cash in the bank fixes a world of sins, make sure you have plenty. You do have to take calculated risks. Business ownership is not for the meek. You'll have to take risks that the average guy would never dream of. Be fearless, but DO THE MATH before you jump. You do have to fully understand your financials. If you can't read a P&L and be able to see there's a problem that needs further investigation, you better learn how. Same with your KPI's. You do have to do great marketing, and lots of it. There are guys out there who claim they don't need to do any marketing and are swamped. Maybe there are, but I'm not one of them. Odds are you aren't either. Get busy marketing. And you do have to get good business coaching and listen to what they say. You could be stupid like me and wait 12 years before you finally get a business coach and start making money, but why would you want to do that? Get one now. If they don't pay for themselves many times over, odds are you didn't do the work to go with the advice. John

I've been listening to an interesting book that I think a lot of us can benefit from. "Profit First" by Mike Michalowicz. It takes the "pay yourself first" principles that a lot of personal finance gurus talk about, but few of us do, an applies it to doing business. We all need to understand that our businesses exist to produce a profit for the owner, not to fix cars. If we want to fix cars, we can fix cars working for someone else. I'm fortunate enough to have my business to a place where I'm actually getting a decent profit, although it's not quite as much as I want. Probably a result of being lucky more than being good. I have never quite reached the elusive 20% net plus my W2 pay. I intend to change that this year by removing my profit first, then figuring out how to run the business on what remains. If we think about it, we figure out how to run our businesses on less money all the time. Every lean month we have, we figure out how to get the bills paid with what we have. What if "what we have" is simply what's left after we remove the profit? I bet we could all figure out how to make it work, and would finally realize the benefit of being business owners.

180 room is actually part of Joe's KC BBQ. It's their side room for groups. I-35 and 119th Street.

I should be able to be there. This is my neck of the woods, so no real excuse not to meet some of you guys.

That makes sense, but yes, out of context it looks like you just snapped a pic at random.

I wish I had the magic answer to this question. I do have a few suggestions though. Top talent is going to be interviewing you as much as you are them, and they're going to start at your Web site. My Web site is in process of being updated, so don't go by my example. First thing that jumps out at me is the family photo. Change it. Nothing wrong with a family photo, but not that family photo. You're dirty and unshaven, and you sat the family down on a curb outside the shop and snapped a pic with a cell phone. Pay someone to take a picture that you would frame and hang in your home. Also ditch the pic of the old jeep Comanche. Those things sucked when they were new. No one with the euro experience you're advertising for wants to see that. Then I would make an employment tab at the top. On it you should include a mini application, and show pics of the shop full of the kind of vehicles you say the prospective tech needs experience on, with pics of scanners and other high tech equipment being used on them. Look at stock photos of guys using scanners etc and try to emulate the look and feel. And make sure the shop is sparkling clean and jam packed with cars to work on. The goal is to portray a clean environment where a guy can knock out some serious hours. They certainly don't want to crawl around on the floor working on 80's vintage jeep pickups.

5 of my techs make between $30 and $34 per flat rate hour. My 3 master techs are at the top of the range. My apprentice tech is making $18 on the clock.

I guarantee that I'm going to do everything in my power to keep the bays full and the work flowing. I also offer the official Department of Labor guarantee, which is that if you don't flag enough hours to equal at least minimum wage for the hours you were present in my shop, I will pay you minimum wage. I also guarantee that if I ever pay you minimum wage, you're fired.

Back when my shop was young I offered a guarantee of 30 hours. What I found was that a tech with a 30 hour guarantee will produce between 28 and 32 hours consistently. They will also blame the shop for their lack of productivity. Then they want to strut around like some sort of hero if they flag over 40 hours once every few months, feeling like that's clear evidence that the problem isn't with them. So I backed the guarantee down to 20 hours. Guess what happened? The techs (I had two at the time) became even less productive and more disgruntled.

Most fun you can have at 8mph with your clothes on. Stinkpots..... can't imagine what you were thinking. A week long trip from Florida to the Bahamas, including running the generator so we can have the AC running at night, costs about $200 in fuel. Can you even make it to the fuel dock and back for $200? It doesn't matter what you want. Your wife wants a cat.

I have other things to do, like sail around the world. The last thing I want to worry about is having to go over a P&L with my manager from some tiny island in the South Pacific with little to no internet. Or worse yet, having a key employee leave and have to fly back to fix the shop and replace those key people. I'll gladly trade the additional net I might receive from being an absentee owner for the freedom to sail away without having to worry about whether the shop is doing well enough to continue funding my adventure. This of course doesn't mean I'll let my shop go for under market value, and I do have a plan in place to make it happen.

I've had that happen a few times over the years. They probably did you a favor. It's always infuriating, but you're probably much better off without someone like that working for you.

Honestly, I'm surprised that when looking at shops in the $2M revenue range that you're finding such inconsistencies in the books. The shop owners I know with businesses at that level run pretty clean (as far as I know) operations. How much spread are you finding between annual net they claim vs what's on the books?