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I don’t usually write about the business side of things. Most of what I put on here is about cars, specific jobs, things I’ve been working on. But I’ve been at this long enough that it seems worth talking about what it actually looks like to run an independent shop right now, because it’s not as straightforward as it might seem.

Everything costs more than it used to. Parts prices have gone up. Good diagnostic equipment is expensive and you need more of it than you used to because of how much technology is in modern vehicles. Rent, utilities, insurance, all of it goes up over time. You try to price your work fairly but there’s a limit to what customers can absorb and a limit to what’s reasonable to charge, so you’re always trying to find the right balance.

Hiring is a consistent problem. I’ve had positions open for a long time before finding the right person. The technician shortage is real and it affects small independent shops more than it affects the big chains, because the chains have more resources to attract people and more name recognition. When a newly certified mechanic is looking for a job they have options, and a small shop in Virginia isn’t always going to win that competition.

When I do find someone good I try to hold onto them. Losing a solid technician is a real setback. You lose the work they were doing, you spend time and money looking for someone else, and then you spend more time getting a new person up to speed. It adds up.

The competition from larger shops and chains is something I think about. They have marketing budgets. They have systems. When someone new to the area needs a shop they might just go to the name they recognize from driving past it on the highway. I understand that. What I try to offer that a chain doesn’t is consistency. When you bring your car to me I’m the one who looked at it. You can ask me directly what I found and why I’m recommending what I’m recommending. There’s no service advisor in between who’s reading from a computer screen. Some people don’t care about that and some people care about it a lot. The ones who care about it tend to become regular customers.

Most of my business at this point comes from people who have been coming here for a while or people they sent my way. That took years to build and it’s the most valuable thing the shop has. It also means I don’t take it for granted. If someone brings me their car and I tell them they need something they don’t actually need, or I do a job wrong and don’t make it right, that damages something that took a long time to build. So I try to be straightforward with people about what their car needs and what it doesn’t. If you come in for an oil change and everything looks fine, I’ll tell you that. If something does need attention I’ll explain what it is and why.

The BMW work is the part of the job I enjoy most, which probably isn’t a surprise at this point. I’ve worked on enough of them that I know what to look for. Oil leaks, cooling system stuff, electrical issues on the older models, I’ve seen all of it enough times that it’s pretty familiar. I have a few customers who specifically come to me for their BMWs and I appreciate that. It’s nice to have work that’s a good fit.

I’m not going to pretend everything is easy. There are weeks where multiple things go wrong at once and you just have to get through it. Equipment breaks down. Jobs take longer than they should. A part comes in wrong. You deal with it and move on.

But I’ve been doing this since I was old enough to hold a wrench and I don’t have any interest in doing something else. The business side of it requires a different kind of thinking than the mechanical work does and that took some getting used to. But you figure it out over time.

The shops that are going to keep doing well are probably the ones that stay honest with their customers and do the work right. I think that’s been true for a long time and I don’t see it changing. Everything else, the costs, the staffing, the competition, you just deal with as it comes.

That’s about all I’ve got on that.

It happens pretty regularly. Someone finds an old BMW for a good price on Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist, buys it without having a mechanic look at it first, and then brings it to me a week or two later because something is off. I don’t make them feel bad about it because that’s not helpful, but I do have to be straight with them about what they’re dealing with.

A few months ago a guy brought in a late nineties 3 Series he’d picked up for what he thought was a great deal. When he pulled into the lot I could already see oil residue on the underside of the engine. That tells you right away that the car has been leaking for a while and nobody addressed it.

I got it up on the lift and went through it. Valve cover gasket was done. Oil filter housing gasket was seeping. There was some weeping around the oil pan too. None of those things individually are the end of the world, it’s pretty standard stuff on a car that age with those miles, but all three together adds up to a real repair bill when you factor in parts and labor.

I put it on the scanner and the codes pointed to cooling system issues. The thermostat wasn’t doing what it was supposed to and the water pump was on its way out. On older BMW engines that’s something you want to catch because if the cooling system fails and the engine gets too hot you can end up damaging a head gasket, and that repair costs a lot more than a water pump does.

Brakes needed work too. One of the rear calipers was sticking. The tires had uneven wear on them which usually means an alignment issue that had been going on for a while. The cabin air filter was completely clogged.

I sat down with him and went through everything. He asked what it was all going to cost and I gave him the honest number. He was quiet for a minute, which is understandable. It was more than he was expecting.

What I told him is that none of what we found was unfixable, and that a lot of it was just maintenance that should have been done over the years but wasn’t. Once you go through a car like that and take care of the deferred stuff properly you usually end up with something solid. These engines hold up well when they’re not overheated and when someone keeps up with the oil and cooling system. The car wasn’t a lost cause, it just needed attention.

The mistake people make with these older BMWs, and honestly with a lot of used cars, is treating the purchase price as the whole cost. It isn’t. If a car has been neglected the actual cost is what you paid plus whatever it takes to get it into reasonable shape. Sometimes that math still works out fine. Sometimes it doesn’t. The only way to know before you buy is to have someone look at it.

A pre-purchase inspection usually runs somewhere around a hundred to a hundred and fifty dollars depending on the shop. That’s a pretty small amount of money compared to what you might be taking on without one. I tell people this all the time. Some of them listen and some of them don’t, and the ones who don’t are usually the ones who end up in my shop looking at a bigger number than they wanted to see.

The guy decided to go ahead and do the work. By the time we were done the car was in good shape and he seemed happy with it. He’s come back a couple of times since for regular maintenance, which is always a good sign. I think once people go through something like that and come out the other side with a car that runs the way it should, they start to understand what it actually takes to keep an older vehicle going.

I enjoy those jobs, honestly. There’s something satisfying about going through a neglected car and getting it back to where it should be. Old BMWs especially. They’re good cars when someone takes care of them and that’s what I’m there for.

I had a customer come in recently who told me he’d been trying to find a shop for almost two months. Not because there was no availability anywhere but because he couldn’t find a place he felt good about. That’s not something I would have heard as often ten or fifteen years ago.

There aren’t enough qualified mechanics right now. I see it from the hiring side too. When I’ve had openings at the shop the pool of applicants has been smaller than I’d like and finding someone with real experience takes longer than it should. Fewer people are going into the trade coming out of high school and that gap is showing up now in a real way.

For customers this means longer waits and shops that are busier than they want to be. It also means that when you find a mechanic you trust it’s worth hanging onto them.

For shop owners the challenge is that the job keeps getting more technically demanding at the same time as it’s getting harder to find people who can do it. Modern cars have a lot of electronics and software in them. Diagnostics require a different set of skills than they used to. You need someone who can do the traditional mechanical work and also understand what a scan tool is telling them. That’s a harder person to find than it used to be.

I got into this because I liked working with my hands and that’s still the part of the job I like best. But the business of running a shop has gotten more complicated and keeping up with how vehicles have changed takes real effort. You have to keep learning or you fall behind.

It’s not something I spend a lot of time complaining about. It’s just the reality of where the industry is right now.

I’ll be honest, I’ve been putting off dealing with electric vehicles for a while now. I’m a guy who works on old BMWs in his spare time. I like combustion engines, I like the way mechanical things work, and EVs just weren’t something I was in any rush to get into.

But they’re starting to show up at the shop. Not a ton of them, but enough that I can’t keep ignoring it.

The problem with EVs isn’t that they’re hard to understand. It’s that they require a completely different set of knowledge than what most mechanics my age grew up learning. High voltage battery systems, regenerative braking, different cooling setups. It’s basically a separate trade. You can’t just hand the job to someone who’s been doing conventional mechanical work their whole life and expect it to go smoothly.

What I’ve been doing is taking some courses and trying to learn as I go. I’ve also been honest with customers about what I can and can’t handle right now. If something comes in that’s outside what I’m comfortable with, I say so and send it somewhere better equipped. There’s no point pretending otherwise.

The diagnostic side of it isn’t completely foreign. Reading codes, working through a problem step by step, that part carries over from what I already know. It’s the high voltage physical work where you really need proper training. That stuff is genuinely dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing.

I don’t think combustion engines are going away anytime soon. There’s going to be plenty of regular mechanical work for a long time, especially with older vehicles. But I’d be dumb to just wait and see. Things are changing and shops that don’t change with them are going to have a harder time down the road.

So I’m learning. It’s not my favorite thing but that’s how it goes sometimes.

So this happened a few weeks ago and I figured I’d write it up since it was a pretty frustrating afternoon.

I was heading to Tysons Corner Mall on a Saturday. Nothing special, just needed to pick up a few things. I don’t go to the mall that often but my wife had asked me to grab something from one of the stores out there so I figured I’d make the trip. I took the E36 M3 because it was a nice day and I hadn’t driven it much lately.

I should have known something was off before I even left the house. The temperature gauge was sitting a little higher than I like but I told myself it was probably fine. That was a mistake. About two miles from the mall the gauge started climbing and I pulled into a parking lot off Route 7 before it got any worse. Good thing I did because by the time I got the car stopped there was steam coming from under the hood. Water pump had given out.

Now here’s the embarrassing part. I’m a mechanic. I work on cars for a living and I work on BMWs specifically in my spare time. I know that the cooling system on the E36 is something you have to stay on top of. Water pumps, thermostats, hoses, all of it has a lifespan and all of it will let you down eventually if you ignore it long enough. I had been meaning to do a full cooling system refresh on that car for a while and I kept putting it off. That caught up with me on a Saturday afternoon in a parking lot near Tysons Corner.

I wasn’t going to try to drive it anywhere. Running an overheated BMW even a short distance can damage the head gasket and that turns a few hundred dollar repair into a much more expensive one. So I called a tow.

I ended up using Tysons Towing and honestly they were fine. The driver showed up in a reasonable amount of time, maybe thirty or forty minutes, which isn’t bad for a Saturday when a lot of people are out. He was straightforward, loaded the car up without any issues, and got it back to my shop without any problems. Nothing fancy, just a tow, which is all I needed.

Got the car in the shop the next morning and replaced the water pump, thermostat, and a couple of hoses that were looking worn while I was in there. It wasn’t a complicated job, just one I should have done months ago before it became an emergency on the side of the road.

The E36 is running fine now. Cooling system is fresh and the temperature gauge is sitting right where it should be.

Anyway. Don’t ignore your cooling system. I know better and I still let it go too long. Learn from that if you can.

People at the shop ask me sometimes why I spend my weekends on old BMWs when I already work on cars all week. It’s a fair question and I don’t have a complicated answer.

I just like them. The older ones, E30s and E36s especially, were built in a way that made sense to me. The engineering was straightforward enough that you could actually understand what was going on. The steering felt connected. The car communicated with you when you were driving it. A lot of newer vehicles don’t really do that. They’re comfortable and they’re reliable but there’s a layer of electronics between you and what the car is actually doing.

From a mechanical standpoint they’re satisfying to work on too. Not because they’re simple, they’re not, but because things are where you’d expect them to be. You can get your hands in there without having to remove half the car first. That’s not always the case with newer stuff.

The most common thing I deal with on older BMWs is oil leaks. Valve cover gaskets, oil pan gaskets, oil filter housing gaskets, the seals get old and start going. It’s not complicated work but it needs to get done. Cooling systems are the other thing that comes up a lot. Water pumps and thermostats on these engines need to be kept up with because if you let the cooling system go and the engine overheats you’re looking at a much bigger repair.

I’ve got a couple of them in my garage at home right now in various stages of getting sorted out. No deadlines, no customer waiting, just something to do on a Saturday. That’s really what it comes down to for me. It’s a hobby as much as it’s an extension of the job.

They’re not perfect cars. They have their problems like anything else. But I know them well enough at this point that I don’t mind dealing with it.