Mobile mechanic vs opening a shop

The bill that arrives whether you worked or not

Here is the arithmetic that settles most of this argument, and it uses no number that anybody has to guess.

Write two columns. In the first, list every payment your current mobile setup obliges you to make in a month even if you took the whole month off: vehicle payment, insurance, phone, software, licence fees, anything on a subscription. In the second, list the same for the version with a building: the rent the landlord actually quoted you, the deposit spread over the term, utilities from the previous tenant bills if you can get them, the extra insurance your broker quotes for premises, the equipment finance, and anything the lease makes you responsible for maintaining.

Now take one number out of your own recent work: the gross profit you keep on a typical job after parts. Not the invoice total, and not your hourly rate. What is left when the parts for that job are paid for.

Divide each column total by that figure. You now have two counts: the number of jobs the van has to do before you have earned anything, and the number the building has to do. That is the comparison, and it is in a unit you understand, because you know what a month of jobs feels like.

Two things usually fall out of this. The first is that the shop number is larger than people expect, because rent is the smallest of the obligations rather than the whole of it. The second is that the shop number has to be met in slow months as well as good ones, which is the part that decides whether a business is survivable rather than whether it is profitable.

Then ask the only remaining question honestly: where do those extra jobs come from? A building does bring some walk in work, but the demand does not appear because you signed something. If the answer is that you would need to be busier than you have ever been, you have learnt something before spending anything.

A week in each business, hour by hour

The financial comparison is the one people run. The one they skip is what the day is like, and that is the difference they actually live in.

A mobile week has driving in it. Between every job there is a trip, and there are parts runs on top of that. Some of that time is genuinely lost and some of it is thinking time you would not otherwise get, but none of it is billable unless your pricing accounts for it. The work itself is done alone, in somebody driveway, with whatever you brought. Nobody interrupts you. The office work happens at the kitchen table at night unless you deliberately do it at the vehicle.

A shop week has waiting in it. Cars arrive and sit. The phone rings while you are under something. Somebody walks in with a question that turns into forty minutes. If there is a helper, part of your day is now spent telling them what to do and checking what they did. The work you personally complete in a day can easily go down after you open a shop, while the money going through the business goes up, and that trade catches people by surprise.

Ask yourself which of those two weeks you would rather have five years from now, because the answer is not obvious and it is not the same for everybody. A lot of people go mobile precisely to get away from the second week, and then reconstruct it because growth is supposed to look like that.

It matters practically too. If you hate being interrupted, a counter with a bell on it will make you worse at your job. If you are worn out by driving and by working on the ground in the cold, no amount of freedom compensates for that at fifty.

The trade also decides who you have to become. A van is a craft business you can run for decades alone. A building with staff is a management job with a workshop attached, and being an excellent diagnostician does not make anybody a good employer.

Renting a bay by the day, and the other halfway houses

The question is almost never as binary as the search phrase makes it sound, and the middle options are cheap to test.

Rent a bay by the day or by the hour. Independent shops with a spare space and machine shops with quiet periods sometimes rent by arrangement, and one afternoon a week under a lift covers a surprising share of the jobs you decline. You find out what the work is worth to you before you owe anybody a year of rent.

Do the heavy work at somebody else premises and keep the customer. Subcontracting the two or three job types that need equipment you do not have lets you say yes to the whole car instead of losing the customer to whoever can do all of it.

Rent storage rather than a workshop. A large part of what people want a building for is a place to put parts, a spare vehicle and the tools that do not live in the van. A storage unit gives you that without a workshop lease, and without the permit questions a workshop raises.

Buy the equipment before the building. Portable lifts, better lighting, a proper power supply and a canopy remove some of the reasons a driveway is limiting, and every one of them stays useful if you do eventually open somewhere.

And run the shop as an experiment before running it as a business. If you can spend a month working out of a rented bay, you will learn more about whether you want that week than any amount of arithmetic will tell you.

One practical caution about the mobile side that people discover late: what may be done to a vehicle on a residential street, in a driveway, or in a parking lot is set locally, and it is not the same in two neighbouring cities. That is a question for your own city and for the property owner, not for a web page, and it is worth asking before you build a plan on top of an assumption.