Louis Gigliotti grew up in pro racing. His father, Lou Gigliotti, ran LG Motorsports, and Louis was his right-hand man from a young age. In 2016, when he sat down with host Kevin Dubois, Louis was running G Speed, a 12-person race and performance shop at Motorsport Ranch in Cresson, Texas, about a year after moving in.
G Speed did a bit of everything at the time. It ran the pro shop at the track, prepped and set up road race cars, did fabrication and street performance work, and engineered its own parts. Louis had two business partners who came from industrial controls, and they had taught him that knowing cars and knowing business are two different skills.
This episode is about running a shop on numbers. Louis covered how G Speed tracked technician efficiency every day, why every job got a signed work order, how a written business plan kept the partners honest, and why cash flow can sink a shop that looks profitable on paper.
From race crew chief to burned-out shop owner
Louis learned to weld at eight and built his first tube chassis car at around 14 or 15. At Purdue he was a sales major and became the chassis and fabrication lead on the Formula SAE team. He left a few credits short of a degree to work for the family business. By his early twenties he was a crew chief in World Challenge, and later he ran the shop's GT2 Corvette program.
Racing at that level took a toll. In one season he spent about 60 days on the road behind the wheel of the hauler. He left to open his own shop with a friend. It was 15,000 square feet with four lifts and 22 cars, and it lasted about six months. Louis said it taught him everything not to do, starting with getting too big too soon. He moved the 22 cars into his dad's shop, finished every one, and went back to work there.
A few years later he burned out again and parted ways with his dad. He went looking for a job and found that several shops couldn't afford him full time but could each use him for 8 to 10 hours a week. That patchwork turned into Gigliotti Racing, run out of a small shop behind a friend's house with no advertising. The work came by word of mouth and never stopped.
Track every hour, billable or not
The biggest lesson in the episode is how G Speed measured efficiency. Every technician filled out a work order for what they did. Time that couldn't be billed to a customer was logged to the company, so the shop could see billable against non-billable hours. Louis reviewed each technician's efficiency every day. A staff member then entered the hours and the area of the shop each person worked in, so the numbers could be pulled up by category later.
G Speed split its work into about 12 or 13 categories, such as street car service, race car service, fabrication and engineering. Every job landed in one of them.
The shop-wide target was a rolling 10-day average of 78 to 82 percent billable. Louis said anything under 75 percent showed up in the finances, and anything in the 60s meant the shop was losing money.
Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. Everything comes down to efficiency. If you're efficient at what you do, no matter what it is in life, it will pay dividends.
Price the work so it pays the tech
Category data changed how G Speed priced things. Louis gave tires as an example. The shop was charging a flat $7 to dismount, $7 to mount and $5 to balance. If a technician billing $115 an hour on a race car got pulled off to change tires, that flat rate didn't come close to covering his time. So tire work went hourly.
The same thinking applied to staffing. G Speed had two helpers who cleaned, ran for parts and kept the shop organized, because it made no sense to pay a billing technician to sweep. Louis also said the shop's floor sales staff covered their own paychecks from parts sales in the showroom.
At the time, the revenue split was about 20 to 30 percent parts, roughly 10 percent engineering and manufacturing, and the rest service. Louis described the 12 employees as the product. G Speed outsourced its CNC machining, laser cutting and sheet metal, then built fixtures in-house and assembled parts in runs of 10 or 20.
Signed work orders and getting paid
When Kevin asked about his worst business experience, Louis didn't hesitate. He kept letting customers take their cars without paying. It happened twice in the year before the interview, for "too many thousands of dollars," in his words.
His fix was paperwork. G Speed had a signed work order for everything, even a 45-minute fire bottle service. Technicians initialed oil filters and wrote the mileage and torque spec on them. When a customer later blamed the shop for low oil, two technicians had already checked the job, and there was proof. Louis said the real cost of a dispute is the time it eats, and sometimes paying for a customer's rebuild is cheaper than calling a lawyer.
Stand your ground. Document, document, document. Signed work orders, signed approvals. Cover yourself, because the one time that you don't, you need it.
Partners, a business plan and cash flow
G Speed had three partners. The majority partner was a former customer from Louis's LG days. He and the third partner ran an industrial electrical controls business. Neither had run a business in motorsports, and Louis saw that as a plus. They noticed right away that the terms common in contracting don't work in this industry, where customers often have to pay by card before parts get ordered.
The partners wrote a business plan about a year before opening. It took about three months of back and forth, once or twice a week. The plan set out one, two, three, five, seven and ten year targets for revenue and headcount. A year in, Louis said they were ahead on year one and on track for the longer goals. He expected year two to be harder, because the bumps from year one still had to be smoothed out.
The shop rented two garages at the track. Land nearby ran about half a million dollars an acre, so buying wasn't an option yet. Louis said they kept their business credit clean and paid the credit card off every month so a loan would be easy to get when the time came. G Speed also kept a full-time accountant and kept its books audit-ready.
Just because you have sold something doesn't mean there's money in the bank. It doesn't mean you can afford to pay payroll.
Louis told anyone starting out to learn cash flow, lines of credit and 30-day accounts before anything else. Being on the wrong side of the cash flow curve, he said, will put a company out of business.
Working on the business
Louis worked 50 to 70 hours a week, down from six or seven days before his daughter was born. Only 10 to 20 percent of that time went to hands-on work. Another 20 to 30 percent went to managing, and about half to direction, planning and strategy.
His partners warned him about building an upside-down pyramid. Louis could drive the truck, build the car, set it up and crew the race himself, but a shop built on one person doing everything stays where it is. He said a lot of owners make a living without ever building a business. He added that an owner buried in hands-on work never has time to study the numbers.
Marketing was simple. G Speed spent about $800 a month, almost all of it on car forums. Louis liked that a forum for one platform reached only owners of that car.
Key takeaways
- Log every hour as billable or non-billable and review technician efficiency daily. G Speed aimed for a rolling 10-day average of 78 to 82 percent.
- Sort jobs into categories so you can see which parts of the shop make money, then price the weak ones to pay for the technician's time.
- Get a signed work order for every job, however small, and don't release a car until it's paid for.
- Write a business plan with targets for one, two, five and ten years, and check yourself against it.
- Learn cash flow. A sale doesn't put money in the bank, and profit on paper doesn't make payroll.
- Hire help for cleaning and parts runs so billing technicians stay on billable work.
Running your shop on numbers with My Shop Assist
Louis built his efficiency tracking out of work orders, Excel and QuickBooks. My Shop Assist puts the same habits in one place. Technicians clock time against each job and task, so you can see billable and non-billable hours without retyping anything. Parts and purchase orders sit on the job, you can text customers from the job, and finished jobs export to QuickBooks as invoices. Checklists keep steps like torque specs and oil fill from getting skipped. Read more about how MSA works for performance and race shops.
If you want to see your own efficiency numbers instead of guessing at them, start a free 30-day trial.
