Is there a better way to execute car projects

[Ron Sutton]

One thing I find interesting in our industry is the hourly labor rate.

Today ... 2014 ... Auto Dealerships, Copier Repairmen & most Technical Trades with repair technicians commonly charge customers a little over $100 per hour for a pretty common service. It has always seemed odd to me that ultra talented shops building trick race cars, customized show cars or some combination in between charge less per hour.

I'm not suggesting shops raise their prices to $110 an hour, as you may price yourself out of the market. But it does seem odd that common repairs of production cars, copiers, etc, are billed at $100+ while work performed by rare talented craftsmen is billed at a lower rate. It makes the business of building race/custom cars more challenging to be profitable at & harder to keep employees long term.

I owned a race car chassis building shop & starved for a couple years until a mentor taught me the "business of business" ... and I made my shop profitable & smooth running. But it is no small task. I am sure there are ProTouring shops that do a great job at both ... making money & keeping employees. But it is very challenging in any business ... and even harder if the market pays less for higher grade work.

[Boss 5.0]

Originally Posted by Ron Sutton

I owned a race car chassis building shop & starved for a couple years until a mentor taught me the "business of business" ... and I made my shop profitable & smooth running. But it is no small task. I am sure there are ProTouring shops that do a great job at both ... making money & keeping employees. But it is very challenging in any business ... and even harder if the market pays less for higher grade work.

As a technical rep for a very large jobber in the north east I have almost 200 collision/ restoration shops to deal with regularly. It is amazing to me how many are owned by guys that can fix a dent or paint a car with high quality, but have no idea how to really run a business.

Body shop owners typically fall into one of two categories. the first, and smallest group is the guys that are business minded and "get it". These are the guys that are very forward thinking. New products, great equipment etc etc....

The second and much larger group are the guys that worked in a body shop making their hourly wage. They saw the boss making money, owning a nice house. Maybe had a boat and a snow mobile etc. So they decide, well if he can do it so can I. So they rent a building and have business cards made up. Bang, they are in business. What they didn't ever consider is that their old boss had more of a business mind. These are the guys that are getting by, but barely. Maybe they last 20 years, but they are just squeaking by. Scrounging for every $$. The sad fact is most will fold up and go out of business within five years.


Glenn

[RCC]

wow what a great thread I'm only on page 5 but had to jump ahead and make a comment Greg weld- Iron works-Ron Sutton some great stuff ya'll are spewing

[Cyclone03]

A friend decided his "retirement" job was going to be building hot rods and street machines. He wanted me to be the mechanic/fabricator because he is more of a bolt on type.
He rented a shop, he needed a shop type space anyway to house his car stuff. I made sure the storage was well separated from the work areas.
Our plan was to find guys who wanted cars like ours but couldn't/didn't have the skills or time to do it themselves. Took us less than 2 weeks to find a stalled project ,not a signature car for sure. The stopping point was wiring. The owner bought into the magazine hype that it just goes in in a weekend. Over a year later he was frustrated and stuck.
The problems where many but the main one was cross breeding a harness from one supplier,engine harness from another (efi swap) AC kit not matched to wire harness. All pretty strait forward for me to figure out,because I'm wiring guy,but the customer was against the wall over it all. The customer also moved the fuse block from it's designed location and cut all the break out legs so it was just a mass of wires.

I looked the project over to build the estimate while discussing exactly what we where to do.

In the end we estimated 50 hours to correct wiring.Wire gauges.Connect EFI. Install an EFI fuel system. Connect Power steering,mount and plumb PS and Box. Connect and mount shifter (AOD swap) then test fire engine.
Time was discussed and agreed to. I work only part time as I have a real job. But it was done in less than 3 weeks . Under budget.

We also estimated everything else the car needed to be a SAFE driver. Brakes,suspension exhaust ,only another 15 hours. Thats way too much ?
2 years later the car has yet to be driven.
We then got another project,friend of the first guy, that was just a list of do this next type work ,4hours here 6 hours there he finally took the car home when he figures out we where not going to replace all the sheet metal on his Mustang for $200.

Over time we got pretty good at estimating jobs,and must came under budget to the customer.
We even got to estimate some jobs that sound like huge money but truly are not. Can You put my 70 Boss 302 back together? Yes $30,000. WHAT! still sitting..... Put my bad ass highriser in this 62 Galaxie and make it look great? Yup $2500 , you guessed it 3 years still not done.
Too be honest the Boss should have been closer to $40000 but the end result would have been a nice calling card and the Gal. easy $5000 with the complete detail on the under chassis.

OUR problem was/is I'm not in the position to be in 100% , I have a "real" job and boss needed much more $$ than I could earn 10 hours a week.

But even with me passing out flyers at every cruise in and car show in the area ,over 1000 flyers just me , we only got about 20 calls ? and 1 customer.
I have seen some of the lost customer paid for someplace else work and 2 told me they got screwed. $600 to install a 4brl on a 289? From a $300 quote. Our shop rate is $80 per hour.

Our plan at the beginning was 2 or 3 guys like me with different skill sets but we never found a 2nd or 3rd . So it's now our project work space.

[RECOVERY ROOM]

Damn good insight on here fellows