I am a 27 year old college graduate with a BS in Business Admin. I work in insurance and make a pretty good living, but I don't care that much about insurance and I regularly find myself thinking about ways I could make money with automobiles during work time. What is a good career that an educated person who loves automobiles (especially sporty europeans) could pursue? I know this is a Porsche forum and I want to talk about Porsches too, but this is something on my mind and I figured this would be a good group to ask. I feel like I would get bored watching a car lot all day, and I have good mechanical skills. Does being a Porsche mecahanic pay well? Any other potential careers? Any thoughts from fellow car lovers would be greatly appreciated.

 

Speaking from experience. I am a chiropractor by trade (with a double major in business as well), but unfortuntely my hobby got blown a little out of proportion, and here I am modifying porsches. Imagine Auto was started by Stephen Kaspar, literally as a side job blown way out of control. 9 years later, here we are www.imagineauto.com (He was actually groomed for big business, and finally got burned out). One thing I can tell you in this business, there is no money in fixing cars or selling performance parts. We modify the cars because each of us has a passion for it. We work 70 hour weeks, and barely get paid for 40, but that isn't what it is all about. I practice on the side as well, so I have a little advantage over everyone else in the financial department. I could easily make 10x the money without really trying if i practiced full time and left the Porsche industry, which quite honestly in the future is where I will head. Some techs make some good money at dealerships if they can run 125-150% efficient, but a lot barely get by. High overhead makes it pretty hard to make money. Just to keep the lights on and the heat running and the rent paid, our overhead easily surpasses 10k a month. The margin in parts is very low in this business due to the competition, so you have to rack up a lot of sales to make very little profit. Would I recommend it to someone else....that is hard to say. The VP of UPS is one of our customers, and he once told me "Do what makes you money for a living, and do what makes you happy the rest of the time." A lot of days I agree, other days...not so much.

 

Much appreciated!

 

I can't resist adding that you really haven't changed professional that much, just giving cars, rather than people, a little more backbone.

 

Hehe, that's kind of how I look at it, hence my Screen Name I flew into Houston this morning at 6am and drove back a 996TT Stage 4 car we did awhile back, 600hp and the Valentine 1...it was a fun trip. Now for some more upgrades........