Staffing is probably the biggest challenge in the independent garage sector right now. Finding people, keeping them, and giving them somewhere to progress.
Most owners treat it as a recruitment problem. Put an advert out, try another agency, offer a bit more. I don’t think it’s a recruitment problem at all. It’s the bill arriving for how we’ve priced our work for the last fifty or sixty years.
I explain how we got here in under three minutes.
A high-skill job in a low-paid industry
Ours has generally been a low-paid industry, even though you need a lot of high skills to work in it. When I think about the cars I was repairing 35 years ago compared with what comes into a workshop now, it’s a very different arena.
The labour rates independent garages have historically charged have been extremely low. And because of that, we could only ever pay the people we employ a certain amount.
That was okay for twenty or thirty years. But the industries around us have moved on.
Why would a young person choose us?
Look at it from the outside. Life in a garage is hard. Our facilities generally haven’t been very good, because we haven’t earned the money to invest in them.
Garages are also very flat organisations, so there’s often no succession and no promotion. You’re asking someone to earn £35,000 to £40,000 in a very difficult working environment, with nowhere to go.
Why would you want your son or daughter going into the garage industry, working in an environment where there’s probably no succession either?
Andy Savva
When they can earn the same money or more somewhere else, in better conditions and with a real chance of promotion, it’s very difficult for us to compete.
It all comes back to the numbers
Finding, keeping and developing your people is the biggest challenge an independent garage has. And it’s based around the financials. We don’t make enough money, and the conditions we sometimes offer aren’t good enough.
Put simply, your labour rate sets the ceiling on what you can pay your team. You can’t pay people properly from a rate that was never set properly.
To be fair, it’s changing. In the last three, four, five years a lot of garages have invested in their premises and their teams. But I think we’ve missed the boat. We have to sell the proposition now, otherwise it’s going to be a huge struggle.
What to do next
- Work out what your labour rate would need to be to pay your technicians what you’d like to pay them, not what you can afford today.
- Walk round your premises as if you were a young person choosing a career. Would you want your son or daughter working there?
- Map out where a technician could progress in your garage over the next five years. If the answer is nowhere, that’s part of the proposition to fix.
- Read our State of the Independent Garage 2026 report for more on the pressures across the sector.
Build a team that runs the garage with you
My online course, Leading Effective Garage Teams, is built for independent garage owners who want a team that works with them, not just for them.