How Much Does an Auto Repair Shop Coach Cost? The Fee in Dollars and Billed Hours

The same fees counted in billed hours

A coaching fee is paid out of gross profit, not out of sales, so the useful unit for a repair shop is billed hours of labor gross profit. Hypothetical shop: an effective labor rate of $150 an hour — labor dollars collected divided by hours billed, not the rate on the wall — and $40 of technician pay for each hour billed, which leaves $110 of gross profit on every billed hour.

On those assumptions, $1,400 a month takes about 12.7 billed hours of gross profit every month, or about 153 over a year. Shop Fix LITE at $397 takes about 3.6 hours a month. AutoCademy at $495 for five users takes 4.5. The advisor course at $3,495 takes about 32 hours once, and someone else writes repair orders for the three days that advisor is away from the counter.

Swap in the shop’s own figures before deciding anything. A shop whose effective rate sits well below its posted rate, or whose techs clock more hours than the repair orders bill, pays for the same coaching with more hours than the sticker suggests.

The owner’s calendar is the other half of the price. COACH sets two calls a month. The GEAR page sets a minimum of three in-person meetings a year, each three days long, so at least nine days away from the shop before travel. A plan from any of them that nobody in the shop owns between calls is a fee with no return.

A shop coach, a 20 group or a training library

The three sell different things. A coach sells one person’s attention to one owner, week after week. A 20 group sells a seat among owners who share their numbers in a common format and meet a few times a year; Shop Owner Coach’s page, for instance, describes a scorecard that compares average repair order, billed hours, productivity and effective labor rate. A library or an advisor course sells skills to the people at the counter, priced per shop or per seat.

• A coach fits an owner who knows what to fix and does not get to it: the coach’s job is the follow-through.
• A 20 group fits a shop whose books close on time each month in a form other owners can compare. No group can compare numbers the shop does not keep.
• A comparison shows that a number is off, not where. A shop whose effective labor rate trails the group’s learns the gap at the meeting; finding which written-down labor, warranty jobs or unbilled hours made it is work in the shop’s own repair orders.
• When the gap sits at the counter — advisors who present one option and read no script — an advisor course or a library is the narrower purchase.
• A single paid session fits one bounded question, such as how a collision shop gets supplements approved before the repair rather than after it. An hour cannot read a year of repair orders.
• Opening the books to other owners is the price of a group seat. Ask how members are kept out of each other’s markets and what leaves the room.

What makes a quote bigger for a mechanical or collision shop

Anything sold by the seat grows with the staff list. Five advisors at the advisor course’s $3,495 general-admission price come to $17,475 before travel, and five counters need cover for three days. A routine for declined work, or for clocked against billed hours, has the same steps at six bays as at sixteen, so bay count moves that kind of work much less.

The mix of work comes next. Retail repair orders paid at the counter, fleet charge accounts paid on terms and extended-warranty claims paid by an administrator are three kinds of paper. A collision shop adds insurer estimates, supplements and storage. Each kind of paper takes its own pass through the records, so a shop with all of them costs more to read than a shop that only writes retail tickets.

Then data access. Twelve months that export in an afternoon from Tekmetric, Shop-Ware, Mitchell 1, Shopmonkey or, on the collision side, CCC ONE cost less to read than paper repair orders someone has to rebuild first. On-site days and travel add to any quote.

Illustrative example: two eight-bay shops. One exports a year of repair orders and asks a single question — why techs clock more hours than the ROs bill. The other writes half its tickets by hand and wants sales, hiring and cash looked at together. The bay count matches, but the second shop is asking for three projects, on paper someone must type up first, and its quote should show that.

Warning signs specific to shop coaching

General vetting — the scope, the documents named in the agreement, how to leave, who sees the data — has its own page, Choosing an Operations Consultant: 10 Questions, in the reading below. The signs here turn up only in repair and collision shops.

• A new labor rate or parts matrix recommended before anyone has read a repair order. Both are set from the shop’s own costs and job mix, not from another shop’s menu.
• A coach paid by someone else in the room. Ask, in writing, whether the coach earns a referral fee from any shop management software, marketing firm, parts supplier or customer financing company it recommends.
• Conference tickets, workshop seats or travel described as included, with no line on the invoice and no twelve-month total anyone will sign.
• A promised car count, average repair order or gross-profit figure in place of a description of the work.
• Pay-plan advice given as settled fact. Moving techs between flat-rate and hourly pay touches wage-and-hour rules, which makes it an employment attorney’s question. Not legal advice.
• A request for customer card numbers, or for a login that can edit live repair orders, when read-only exports cover the work.

Where the Revenue Review fits beside a shop coach

The Revenue Review is not coaching: from read-only access to the shop management system and the books, it counts where money stalls between the inspection and the paid invoice — clocked against billed hours, declined work, parts costs absorbed and, for collision, supplements — and finishes after two weeks; the written report is the shop’s to keep. A shop already paying a coach can take that report to the next coaching call, so the plan starts from the shop’s own repair orders; the full scope and terms sit on the Review page in the reading below.

When a shop should spend nothing

Some shop problems need a person, not a purchase. Declined brake jobs that never get a second call because nobody owns the declined-work list are fixed by naming the advisor who makes those calls and the morning each week they get made. A shop that cannot cover this Friday’s payroll has a cash decision to make first, and a $1,400 monthly fee only adds to that week’s bills.

Other problems have their own professionals. An advisor who quotes the customer one option and works without a talk track is a job for a sales trainer or the advisor course above. Tax questions go to a CPA. A shop being readied for sale needs a business broker and an accountant who does quality-of-earnings work; Lumina does neither and buys no shops.

An owner already paying for a coaching program gets more from finishing it than from stacking a second purchase on top. Where there are one or two techs and the owner writes every ticket between jobs under the hood, there is no hand-off to lose yet; the Review is built for shops with $1 million or more in yearly sales, and a smaller shop hears that on the free 20-minute call.

One check costs nothing. The Revenue Leak Calculator on this site turns four numbers about calls and inquiries that never got a callback into a yearly and a monthly dollar figure, in the browser, without asking for an email. If that monthly figure is smaller than a month of coaching, the shop is better off keeping the money.