For many independent garage owners, business strategy is pretty simple: make sure more money comes in than goes out. It pays the bills, but it doesn’t tell you if your garage is actually healthy.
Relying on the bank balance alone is a fast track to becoming a busy fool. Your ramps might be packed and the team working flat out, but without tracking the details, a profitable diagnostic job could just be covering up the losses on underpriced parts. If cash flow is the only thing you watch, your only option to make more money is to just work longer hours.
A few years back, Barry Lawson of Lawson Autotech was stuck in that exact rut. Fast forward to today, and he’s running a multi-award-winning, eight-ramp workshop. Getting there meant completely changing how he looked at his numbers, a shift that kicked off when he switched to Garage Hive in 2020.
Looking back on how the business used to run, Barry is refreshingly honest about his lack of visibility. Despite using a previous garage management system, the granular details just weren’t there.
“We never had a meaningful metric that we understood,” Barry explains. “It was a lot of learning on my part about what it meant to run a business. Looking back now, if we were bringing in more money than we were paying out, that was pretty much as basic as it got.”
Without tracking things like Average Invoice Value (AIV), individual parts margins, or gross profit, there was no way to pinpoint exactly where the garage was making money, or where it was leaving cash on the table.
Changing a garage management system is a major decision, and Barry doesn’t pretend otherwise. When asked about the transition, his advice for other owners is straightforward.
“I’ll say the same to you as I say to everybody that asks me about Garage Hive: it will bust your balls for the first three months,” he laughs. “It is a real transition. But if you use it properly, you’ll get so much out of it. If you try and take shortcuts, you just get red flag after red flag. It’s about using the system as it’s designed to be used.”
The learning curve was steep, but Lawson Autotech dug in. Business Manager Laura Guild used the COVID-19 period to watch Garage Hive’s YouTube training videos, meaning she hit the ground running on day one. Once the processes clicked for the technicians and the front desk, the actual data started to flow.
By tracking operations daily, weekly, and monthly, Barry and Laura finally had the leverage to make better business decisions. A prime example was oil. After using Garage Hive to track fluid margins, Barry realised they were making very little. Armed with hard data, he brought his oil supplier in, reviewed the numbers, and adjusted the pricing strategy. Today, oil is one of their strongest earners at a 60% margin.
Across the wider business, the financial shift between 2020 and 2025 has been massive:
Having access to live dashboards through Garage Hive’s Power BI isn’t just about looking at past performance. It actively changes how Lawson Autotech books its daily work.
By reviewing the data, Barry noticed a high volume of single MOT bookings. Now, the front-of-house team uses the system to cross-reference customer history.
“It’s key that we speak to the customer and say, ‘You’re just in for an MOT, but it’s been 18 months since you last had your car serviced. Would you like a service as well?’,” Barry notes. “You can pick up so much extra work just from having that conversation.”
While the system handles the data, Barry is quick to point out that the Garage Hive community has been just as vital.
For day-to-day running, the Garage Hive community Facebook page has become a daily resource. It’s an active, collaborative space where workshop owners and front-of-house staff share advice, compare notes, and even troubleshoot in real time.
That collaboration goes well beyond a screen. A massive part of the Garage Hive ecosystem is The Blend, the annual independent garage conference and networking event organised by Garage Hive. Originally starting out as a user group, it’s grown into a major fixture on the industry calendar where ambitious owners get together to talk business, share strategies, and celebrate the trade.
For Barry, the Garage Hive community means rubbing shoulders with some of the most progressive garages owners and managers in the industry.
“It’s just being in the room with the people that are really pushing the industry forward,” he says. “We bounce ideas off each other, which is really good to do.”
For garage owners still on the fence about the monthly cost of upgrading their management system, Barry has a simple perspective: “It’s accelerated us over the last few years. If you look at it, the numbers you start to see become life-changing. You can enjoy your time off, go on nice holidays, buy nice cars. It is a life-changing tool if you use it correctly.”
The Penygroes Service Centre located in South Wales was founded in 2014 by Jonathan. He has extensive 17 years of experience in the industry. However, Jon found himself doing a lot of manual labour for data management to keep a finger on the pulse of the business. Therefore, joined Garage Hive's garage management software in March 2021 and has already seen a significant improvement in his garage, an increase in gross profit and has achieved a great NPS® Score.
Tom and Kayleigh runs their garage TR Autos in Yeovil, Somerset. They joined Garage Hive last year. Tom has two decades of industry experience , both practical and technician side and now business as TR Autos was founded in 2008; since then the team has grown, practices have moved away from paper diaries to garage management software, their productivity has increased and they also have moved into bigger premises.
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