My shop’s expanded recently and I’ve started taking on bigger projects. I don’t mean bigger as in long-term, I mean bigger as in massive pieces of equipment. We’ve been in the construction repair industry for thirty years but never anything too crazy. About the biggest things we worked on were scissor lifts and small steel-tracked dozers. Apparently, word has gotten out about our shop, though, and we’re getting pretty popular. In fact, we’re really popular now. Our business has grown around 30% in the past two years.
Most of our new business happens to consist of new equipment, too. People are bringing in monster aerial platform lifts and bigger dozers and trucks in for repair and we really don’t have the tools or the space to repair this stuff. Seeing that this was going to be a problem, I started putting some money back for new supplies about six months ago. I can’t expect any of our individual mechanics to buy some of the things on my list so I’m investing in a community toolbox with the larger tools that will be rarely used.
For example, I’ve decided that the manual torque wrenches we own no longer cut it. Some of these boom lifts that we’re working on go 120+ feet in the air and the turntables are installed using gigantic bolts that need torqued way tighter than anything we’ve had in the shop before. If I get some hydraulic torque wrenches like these, one of my mechanics can simply put the wrench on a bolt and hit a button, instead of almost killing himself trying to torque a bolt with a huge wrench with a giant extension on it.
Of course, like I said. There are two problems… first, we don’t have the equipment to work on the bigger pieces of equipment we’re getting in…second, we don’t have the space. That’s why I plan on putting all of our profits back for the next year or so and building a new addition. I’ll need at least two new mechanics and I need to build a huge new service bay. Of course, that day is still a long way away. In fact, I haven’t even had a meeting with the architects yet but I do know that I should have around half of the capital to do what I want as of right now. All I know is that business is booming and I don’t see an end in sight.
