Technician Hours: Why Your Shop Bills 4.2 of 8

A shop owner I knew had the diagnosis dead right and the cure backwards. He'd read the same kind of report you're reading now, looked at his bays, and concluded he was short-staffed. So he hired. Two more techs, real payroll, and his billed hours per man barely moved. He nailed the headline that his shop was losing time, then misread why. Hiring more bodies was the wrong move. The real leak was the half-day each tech he already had was burning at the parts counter and on customer callbacks for work he'd already diagnosed. Nobody was loafing. The bay just had nothing to turn a wrench on.

That's what came to mind reading Adam Malik's report out of the AIA Canada National Conference, where industry coach Murray Voth put a hard number on the leak. Independent shops bill an average of roughly 4.2 labour hours per technician across an eight-hour day.

Voth's line was blunt. "This is not a technician problem," he said. "This is an operational, systemic issue in our industry." He's right, and I want to spend this piece on the part owners tend to skip. Forget the headline shortfall for a second. What does it cost you to keep paying for hours you never sell, and in what order do you fix it?

One caveat up front, because the framing matters. Voth cited a benchmark of about nine billable hours per technician per day. That number is flag-time arithmetic, not stopwatch time. It assumes labour guides that pay more clock-time than a job physically takes. I'd tell a shop owner to chase the lost half-day between 4.2 and a realistic eight, and leave the nine-hour figure alone. Set the target wrong and you'll either burn out your floor or game the labour guide. The recoverable money is in the gap you can actually close.

The Shortfall Is Real Money You Can Recover

Take the report at its word. A technician you pay for a full shift is selling a little over half of it. The rest evaporates into time the shop never charges anyone for. Voth named the usual suspects: waiting for parts, delays getting the next job dispatched, long verbal back-and-forth between technicians and service advisors, time spent clarifying repair approvals, and correcting errors in labour guides and pricing before work even starts.

None of that is exotic. Every shop I've worked in or sold parts to runs some version of it. What makes it dangerous is that it's invisible on a flat-rate ticket. The invoice shows the hours you billed, never the hours you paid for and gave away. So owners chase the symptom, "we need more techs," when the floor they already have is running at roughly half capacity.

If you take one idea away, take this one. Voth's reframe of the technician shortage is the most useful thing in the whole talk: "If we build eight hours per technician per day instead of 4.2, will we need as many technicians?" If you recover even a chunk of that lost time, the hiring pressure eases on its own. You're not competing for scarce talent to do work your current floor could already absorb if the bay stayed fed.

Where the Hours Actually Leak

Voth gave a memorable contrast: "Plumbers charge for driving time and mileage. For some reason, we do not." That's the diagnostic-pricing leak, what he likes to call "testing" instead of "diagnostics." In a parts role I see the downstream version of it constantly. A shop eats an hour of skilled investigation, isolates the fault, then bills only the part swap that follows. The thinking is the product, and the shop gives it away.

Undercharging accounts for about half the bleed. The rest is dead air between jobs, and that one is structural. Voth's own example: "If I wait 15 minutes for my next job, that is lost opportunity." He's right that technician downtime costs far more than the service advisor who'd prevent it. A skilled tech standing idle is the most expensive labour in the building. Understaff the front counter to "save money" and you pay for it out the back, in unrecovered bay time, every single day.

A useful way to sort the leaks is by who has to fix them, because they don't all land on the same desk:

Here's the trade-off nobody at a conference says out loud. Closing these leaks costs money before it makes any. Adding a service advisor is real payroll on day one, and the recovered bay hours show up over weeks. If your margins are already thin, and most independents run tight, that lag is genuinely scary. The way through is to start with the leak that costs nothing to fix.

The Checklist: Run It On Your Own Floor This Week

You don't need a consultant to find this money. Walk these steps in order, cheapest fix first, and stop kidding yourself about where the hours go. The first three cost nothing but attention; the last two are decisions you'll have earned the right to make.

1. Quote diagnostic time as a line item, this week. It costs nothing but a script for your advisor and a printed menu. "Testing" is billable labour, so price it and say so. This is the fastest dollar in the building, because you're not buying anything. You're charging for work you already do. Ask yourself the test question: do you charge a stated fee for diagnostic time, separate from any repair that follows? If not, that's leak number one.
2. Stage parts before the tech needs them. Pull and kit the job at write-up, not when the technician walks to the counter mid-repair. A wrong or missing part discovered on the lift is the most expensive kind. Verifying fitment up front, correct year, make, model, engine and option, is the single discipline that kills the most counter trips. The test question: when a technician finishes a job, is the next one already written, parted, and staged, or does the work start with a walk to the counter?
3. Time one ordinary day before you buy anything. For one week, have a manager note when each tech finishes a job and when the next one actually starts. The gap between those two timestamps is your dead air. You can't justify a hire, or a software purchase, on a hunch, but a week of real numbers makes the case for you. Two things to log while you're at it: how long your average approval call takes between "here's what it needs" and "go ahead," and the gaps between jobs, not only the hours that made it onto an invoice.
4. Decide on front-end headcount only after the timing shows it. If the week proves your techs lose meaningful hours to dispatch gaps, the math for another advisor is sitting right there in your numbers. If it doesn't, you've saved a salary. Either way the evidence made the call for you, with no guessing.
5. Buy tooling last. Digital dispatch and electronic repair orders can absolutely make the dead air visible, and I'd use them. But a tool you buy before you've measured the problem is just a more expensive way to guess. Measure first. The number tells you what to buy.

Read your own answers back. If it's "no," "a walk to the counter," "no idea," "only the invoice," and "hire a tech," you're billing closer to 4.2 than to eight, and none of the real fixes start with recruiting.