216 - Performance Shop Owners: You're Working Harder for Less Money. Here's Why.

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. It captures your actual labor time on every job, tracks every part and consumable that goes into a build, and shows you real job costing so you know if you actually made money when the car rolls out. You can quote custom work properly, see where your unbilled hours are going, and finally get visibility into the metrics that determine whether your shop thrives or just survives. It's how you stop guessing and start running your shop like a real business. Kevin Dubois has spent more than a decade working with performance shop owners through My Shop Assist and teaching his "Two Metrics for Success" class at the PRI show. In this episode, co-host Richard Fielder flips the script and interviews Kevin to unpack why the most talented builders in the industry consistently make less per hour than shops doing oil changes and brake jobs — and what it takes to fix it. This isn't theory. It's the reality of how these two business models work, laid out side by side, with a clear framework for improving your shop's profitability. - our software for managing your performance shop. - our website for the podcast! Be sure to like,

You can listen to 216 - Performance Shop Owners: You're Working Harder for Less Money. Here's Why. online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

216 - Performance Shop Owners: You're Working Harder for Less Money. Here's Why. is an episode from DO IT FOR A LIVING by Todd Earsley.

This episode is 01:11:54 long.

This episode was published on Mar 2, 2026.

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