Financial Understanding Essentials

Almost every garage owner was taught to fix vehicles and nobody ever sat them down and explained the money. So the labour rate gets set by looking at the garage down the road, parts get marked up on habit, and the accounts turn up nine months after the year they describe. The result is a business that feels busy, works flat out, and somehow never has any money in it. That is not a work problem. It is a numbers problem, and it is fixable in a day.

This course takes you through the financial side of an independent garage in plain language. You will work out what an hour in your workshop genuinely costs to sell, use that to set a labour rate you can defend, and get properly clear on the difference between markup and margin and what that difference has been costing you. From there it moves on to the numbers that tell you how the business is performing week to week: efficiency, utilisation, parts contribution, and the handful of KPIs worth actually tracking. No jargon for its own sake, and no accountancy theory that does not apply to a workshop.

Andy Savva has run independent garages for over thirty years, including a 14,000 sq ft purpose-built workshop, and got this wrong himself before he got it right. Our own research found that owners who can show the workings on their cost of doing business charge substantially more per hour than those who cannot — and they are not busier, they are just charging properly. This is the day that closes that gap.