Chris CollinsHelping Struggling Dealerships Build Profitable, High-Performing Service Departments | Automotive Coaching Expert | CEO

The Myth of the 'Fair' Split (Why 50/50 Is Killing Your Shop)

1 Jan 2026 · 1 min

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1:03

Excerpt from Chris Collins' video discussing financial trade-offs in auto shop staffing and training. The speaker illustrates how two technicians at $50/hour each in one stall can create an effective $100/hour labor cost for an oil change, describes staffing models like two-person lube teams and mentor training programs, and cautions against open-ended guarantees—citing a 30-day guarantee as an example—without an explicit training/investment plan.

Questions this video answers

$50 per hour each (implying $100/hour total)

$100 per hour cost on an oil change

30-day guarantee

Chapters

If you got two guys that are costing you 50 bucks an hour in one stall, a hundred dollars an hour cost on an oil change is a hard thing to make pencil. And so we attempt stuff like that. So I think that's an important part of this conversation. Whether it's a two man lube team, whether it's my mentor training program, you know, we're kind of joking around saying unapplied time is the devil or made by the devil or whatever. You know, if you're going to have a mentor program, if you're going to put somebody on a 30 day guarantee when you hire them, like there's different situations where maybe I'm going to do some of it as an investment, training certain things like that. But understanding this math, there's a way to do it and make really good business decisions. And if you understand this basic math, you will never ever put somebody on a guarantee with no expiration or no intentional plan of what you're accomplishing with it because it's not an investment at that point.