Justin Miller owned Force Fed Performance in Fayetteville, North Carolina, near Fort Bragg. In the spring of 2016 the shop was Justin, one full-time tech and a receptionist, working out of about 4,200 square feet with a dyno and three lifts. Justin was 29.
Justin pitched this interview to host Kevin Dubois himself. Most of the guests so far had run big, well-known shops. Justin wanted to show what it's like to be an owner-operator of a small shop in a smaller market, where you can't specialize in one car and you're involved in everything.
This article covers how Justin was pushed into starting his own business, how he paid his tech, what he learned about books and taxes the hard way, the hours a small shop really takes, and why he stopped relying on one platform.
A dealership tech at 17
Justin grew up around Raleigh with a father who was a Corvette and GM guy. He went to college on an athletic scholarship, but money trouble at home meant he had to leave and go to work. With no degree and no trade school, he talked his way into a job as a GM dealership tech at 17. He worked next to the head Corvette tech as his protege.
It took his coworkers a while to figure out how young he was, and then the hazing started. The bigger lesson was how different a dealership is from working on cars at home. Customers, timelines and flagged hours meant he had to know what he was doing, do it fast and avoid the one slip that could cost a job or strand a customer.
Around age 20 or 21 he moved to a different shop and took on more side work. Later he became the only mechanical tech at a large body shop near Raleigh. It had 12 to 15 body techs working in teams of three, and every team fed him work. He had to diagnose each wrecked car's mechanical damage and report back to the insurance companies. He called it the hardest job he ever had.
Forced into Force Fed
Justin had a rule of thumb for anyone doing side work.
If you're making more money on the side doing your side work than at your full-time job, you need to rethink what you're doing.
When the economy tanked, the work dried up and he was laid off. He had no degree, and his dealership certifications didn't mean much outside a dealership. So he started selling parts online through the Evo forums he was already known on, and sending install and engine work to a couple of friends who owned a shop. He'd bring in the customer and order the parts, they would pull the motor, and he would build it. Before long he was making as much as he had at his job.
He described it as being forced into starting Force Fed, but the downtime let him build relationships with manufacturers that paid off later. He had started using the Force Fed name around age 23 or 24.
The office work nobody talks about
Justin knew how a shop floor ran, how to deal with customers and how to write a repair order. He had no idea how the books, paperwork and taxes worked, and said that was the hardest part of the transition. His worst business experience was learning how closely the IRS follows the money. He was never audited, but he did get asked to explain where $10,000 went. His answer was a good accountant, and his CPA had promised to handle an audit if one came.
He never wrote a business plan. He believed you learn the right way to do something by doing it the wrong way many times first. He also ran lean. He didn't start with much money or take a business loan, so he watched overhead closely. For card payments he used a mobile card reader app to keep costs down, and the shop got hit with fraudulent charges a couple of times without much protection. He said merchant services were something he planned to revisit.
Paying a tech fairly when parts hold up the job
Justin had worked straight flat rate, where a tech paid $20 a flag hour who flags only five hours in a 40-hour week takes home $100. In summer the same tech might flag 100 to 150 hours. For anyone supporting a family, he said, one bad month can wreck their plans.
Aftermarket work makes flat rate even harder. A car can be done except for one part a manufacturer is backed up on, and the customer hasn't paid yet. Justin described waiting on a $30 part to finish a $5,000 job. So he paid a base salary plus a percentage of labor as commission. Kevin added that custom work, like a forward-facing turbo kit on an Evo, has no book time, which makes it hard to price for a tech on straight commission.
Justin kept the same core people from the start, which he put down to loyalty in both directions. His weak spot was letting go. He couldn't sit still, so he kept asking his tech and receptionist if they needed help until it drove them crazy. He was learning that his tech often did better his own way. He still believed an owner should be involved in every part of the shop, because when a customer is upset, the owner is the one who has to explain what happened.
The real hours of a small shop
In a normal week Justin worked about 60 hours. Before an event or a deadline, it could hit 100 to 105. He once organized a DSport magazine event at his local track, which he believed was the magazine's first on the East Coast, and didn't go home for three days. A feature car had a ring problem the week before, and the crew spent about 48 straight hours rebuilding it. When the photographers showed up at 6 a.m., the new motor had about an hour of run time on it.
Having been the employee forced into 70-hour weeks, he didn't want that for his people. He would send his tech home at 10 on a Friday night and finish the work himself. The shop moved from Monday through Saturday to Monday through Friday with Saturday by appointment, though out-of-state customers still meant Sunday drop-offs and late nights.
Labor was most of the shop's revenue. Parts sales took time he didn't have. Every hour on forums or blogs was an hour off the dyno, and he had no salaried staff for social media like bigger companies did.
Customers, comebacks and not betting on one platform
His biggest struggle was regulars who started to feel entitled. They expected discounts, free service or a reply at 7 in the morning or midnight after a night of racing. That kind of service helped spread the word that the shop cared, so he had to draw the line carefully. He'd rather be the bad guy himself than have a customer upset with his receptionist or tech. The shop's reputation rested on rarely having comebacks.
He also saw the Evo market slowing compared with ten years earlier. A small shop with no product line behind it has to adapt. Force Fed moved heavily into LS work, since the South had so many LS cars, and took a turbo Silverado to a half-mile event in Hot Springs, Virginia. His warning for new shop owners was about building a business on one platform.
They don't look 10, 15 years down the road, when that car doesn't exist anymore. What are you gonna do?
On marketing, he found Facebook's free reach had dropped by 60 to 80 percent from a year or two earlier. On a nearby chassis builder's advice he tried one paid ad for $30 to $50. It reached about 30,000 views and gained around 500 page likes in a week. Instagram worked well too. Over the longer term he wanted to manufacture more of his own products, building on a CNC-ported Evo head the shop had sold years before.
Key takeaways
- If side work pays more than your job, it may be time to go out on your own.
- Learn the books and hire a good accountant early, because the IRS will ask where the money went.
- A base salary plus commission protects techs when aftermarket parts hold up a job.
- Stay involved enough in every job to explain it when a customer is upset.
- Set limits with loyal regulars before they start to feel entitled.
- Plan for the day your main platform goes away, and broaden what you work on.
Running a small shop without doing it all in your head
An owner-operator like Justin has to know where every job stands, because every question comes back to him. My Shop Assist puts each job's tasks, time, parts and purchase orders in one place, so it's easy to see which cars are waiting on a part and how many hours the tech put in. Time tracked against each task shows how long custom work really takes, which makes it easier to price and to pay commission on. Customers can get updates by text message, payments can be taken through the system, and invoices export to QuickBooks.
See how My Shop Assist works for performance and racing shops, or start a free 30-day trial.
