Voth cites a nine-hour benchmark — should I really aim my shop at nine billable hours per technician?

Be careful with that number. Nine hours is flag-time arithmetic, where labour guides pay more clock-time than a job physically takes, so it overstates what a real eight-hour shift can sustain. Chase the recoverable gap between 4.2 and a realistic eight instead. Aim at nine and you'll either burn out your floor or start gaming the labour guide.

My margins are thin. What's the one fix I can make that costs nothing up front?

Quote diagnostic time as a stated line item. Voth's "testing" point is that you already do skilled investigation and then give it away by only billing the repair that follows. Pricing it costs you a script for your advisor and a printed menu, nothing more. It's the fastest dollar in the building because you're charging for work you're already doing.

Should I hire another technician to handle the workload my shop can't keep up with?

Probably not first. Voth's sharpest point is that the shortage is often a productivity problem in disguise — a floor billing 4.2 of eight hours has hidden capacity. Time the gaps between your technicians finishing one job and starting the next before you recruit. If those gaps are large, fix the dead air; you may not need the hire at all.

Is adding a service advisor worth the payroll when money is already tight?

Often yes, but prove it with numbers, not instinct. Voth's logic is that an idle skilled technician is far more expensive than the advisor who'd keep the bay fed. Time your dispatch gaps for a week, multiply the lost hours by your labour rate, and compare that to the fully burdened cost of one advisor. The evidence either justifies the hire or saves you a salary.

Where do most of the lost hours actually go in a typical shop?

Two places. Half is undercharging — diagnostic time billed as zero, the way plumbers charge for travel and we don't. The other half is dead air between jobs: waiting for parts, slow dispatch, long approval calls, and labour-guide errors caught after work starts. The parts-and-staging side of that is fixable before you spend anything, by confirming fitment and kitting jobs at write-up.

Technician Hours: Why Your Shop Bills 4.2 of 8

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

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Technician Hours: Why Your Shop Bills 4.2 of 8