Guides
Guides for running a mobile repair business
The business half of the job. Written for one person with a van, a phone and no office to hand the awkward conversation to.
You can be very good at the repair and still lose money on it. The parts that decide whether a mobile repair business works are mostly not mechanical: what you charge for the drive, whether the customer agreed to the price in a form you can show them later, what happens when a job comes back, how long an invoice sits before somebody chases it, and what you do when a customer turns up with a part they bought online.
Nobody teaches those. You learn them by getting them wrong, once each, expensively. These guides are an attempt to shorten that: one question per guide, answered the way somebody who has already made the mistake would answer it in a car park, with the wording you can copy and the sentence that ends the argument.
They are opinionated on purpose. A guide that lists six approaches and recommends none of them is a guide that leaves you exactly where you started, so each one takes a position and says what it is trading away.
The guides
One question per guide, in the words somebody would actually search.
- How to import a customer list into a new CRM
- How to leave shop software without losing your data
- How to start a mobile mechanic business
- What to charge as a mobile mechanic
- How to get customers as a mobile mechanic
- How to handle customer supplied parts
- How to write a repair authorization that holds up
- How to stop repair customers paying late
- How to price a diagnostic fee
- How to ask a repair customer for a review
- How to reduce no shows for mobile repair visits
- How to switch from paper invoices to digital
- How to run a digital vehicle inspection that sells work
- How to get a business phone number for a repair business
- What a mobile mechanic invoice must include
- How to follow up on an estimate a customer ignored
- Mobile mechanic insurance explained
- What tools do you need to start mobile mechanic work
- How to handle a comeback or warranty repair
- How to quote a job you have not seen yet
- Mobile mechanic vs opening a shop
- How to charge for shop supplies and disposal fees
- How to keep mileage records for a repair van
- How to take a deposit before ordering parts
- How to raise your labor rate without losing customers
- How to decide which repair jobs to turn down
- How to keep records for taxes as a self employed mechanic
- How to hire your first helper as a mobile mechanic
28 pages
Where the advice comes from
Most of it comes from one shop, which is the honest description of the sample size. Where a guide says something worked, it means it worked there, and the guide says so rather than dressing one person's experience up as a study.
Anything with a digit in it is treated differently. A number that describes the wider trade needs a source: a link, the sentence it came from, and the date it was read, or the guide does not print the number at all. That rule is the reason some paragraphs here say "most" where a competitor's blog would say a percentage, and the percentage is the thing we could not stand behind.
Where the right answer depends on where you are, the guide says so and stops. Sales tax on labor, what counts as a repair you are allowed to advertise, and what a written estimate legally has to contain all change by state, and a guide that gives one national answer to those is a guide that is wrong in most of the country.
What these guides are not
They are not legal advice, tax advice or insurance advice. Several of them touch things that are genuinely regulated, and on those the guide will tell you what question to take to somebody licensed rather than pretend to be one.
They are not a product manual. If you are looking for how to do a specific thing inside Fixty, the help centre is the place for that and it is linked at the foot of every one of these pages. A guide here should be useful to a mechanic who never signs up for anything.
And they are not a template with the nouns swapped. Two guides that would read the same with a different noun in the title should be one guide, and where that has happened the fix is to merge them rather than to publish both and hope.
What is on the site today
Fixty is a CRM for one mobile mechanic. Estimates a customer approves by text, photo inspections, scheduling and card payments, all from a phone.