Larry Bloodworth

Shop labor rate should be set off your shop’s fixed costs & hours of operation, not what somebody else is charging. That’s what we do. However, I don’t tell customers what we charge per hour, I simply tell them we charge by the job, not by the hour. We are a transmission specialty shop and for most vehicles, we charge $1,750 labor only for the R&R and the build. Some are less, some are more. When calculating by the hour behind the scenes, we calculate it @ $125/hr but still tell the customer we charge by the job if they ask how much an hour, but that’s only perhaps >2% of all customers who ask. In my experience, the subject of shop hourly labor rate virtually never comes up unless we mention it. Most people only want to know the bottom line.

I can only speak of online advertising including Google, Bing, and Yahoo!. The reason so many shops like it is that it’s MEASURABLE. Pay for performance is a concept few publishers of advertising understand. Our business grew from $700K/yr. to $1.2M/yr. with online marketing. I manage everything myself. Once I learned what keywords were generating phone calls, I focused only on those keywords. There’s too much to say in a short post other than to say everything you need to learn is available online from Google and/or YouTube. Good luck!