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Grow Every Multi-Shop Location

Kris Turner

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August 18, 2026

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Read time: 3 min

Tekmetric standardizes how every auto repair shop operates

Running multiple shops should mean more revenue, more repair orders, and more momentum. For most MSOs, it also means more complexity, inconsistency, and time spent putting out fires instead of building the business.

The problem isn't growth. It's that most shop management systems weren't built for it. Separate logins for each location. No unified view of revenue or performance. Processes that drift from shop to shop until every location is running differently and nobody can figure out why the numbers don't match. Tekmetric fixes that at the root — one platform, every location, standardized from day one.

Tekmetric shops see measurable revenue growth as they adopt platform features. Shops average $612 per repair order (ARO), but that number climbs to $741 when they use Digital Vehicle Inspections and reaches around $800 when they add MotoVisuals videos. The lift isn't about charging customers more; it's about transparency, showing them what their vehicle needs so they can make confident, informed decisions. It also builds trust.

The operators running on Tekmetric show what that looks like in practice. Main Street Auto, a nationwide network of community-rooted shops, grew from six locations to more than 115 with Tekmetric at the core of every one. Rush Automotive, in Austin, Texas, saw $9,000 in new revenue in the first month across five locations. CarTech Auto Center, operating across multiple locations in Puerto Rico, grew monthly revenue 48% in nine months. The platform didn't change their ambition. It gave them the infrastructure to act on it.

Customer Experience

Customers Don't Know Which Location Is Your Best. Tekmetric Ensures They Can't Tell the Difference.

Inconsistencies across locations cost you. Skipped DVI photos, estimate delays, and declined jobs that nobody follows up on quickly add up, decreasing your revenue, and negatively affecting customer experience.

The shops that grow their ARO, earn repeat business, and generate the kind of reviews that actually drive traffic all share the same foundation: customers trust them. And trust isn't built in a single interaction — it's built through consistent, transparent communication every single time a vehicle comes in.

Tekmetric gives you the tools to make that consistency automatic. Inspections follow the same template at every location, with photos and video built into the estimate. Customers get their quote by text, approve the work from their phone, and can pay before pickup with Tekmetric Payments built in. Text-to-Pay, card-on-file, and Buy Now, Pay Later options make checkout faster and remove friction from bigger approvals. Their vehicle history travels with them, so when a customer visits a different one of your locations, whoever's at the desk already knows their vehicle history.

With Tekmetric Marketing running in the background, customers get automated appointment reminders, follow-ups on declined services, and service reminders based on real vehicle data. Online booking lets them schedule service 24/7 without picking up the phone. Google Review requests go out automatically after every completed service, turning great work into lasting reputation.

When shops share eight or more inspection photos with customers, ARO goes up because customers can see the repairs their vehicle needs. Euro Car Doctors, in Orange County, Calif., used that approach and grew their average ARO to more than $900. Garagisti, in Houston, Texas, built a practice around transparent, DVI-driven customer communication from day one and has averaged a $1,600 ARO since opening.

What This Looks Like in Practice

  • Standardized DVIs, streamlined customer communication, and shared vehicle history across every location so every customer gets the same experience regardless of which shop they walk into
  • Text-to-Pay and Buy Now, Pay Later built into checkout to speed up payments and boost approval on bigger repairs
  • Automated follow-up on declined services and service reminders that run from real vehicle data, not generic time intervals
  • Online booking available 24/7 so customers can schedule service without waiting for business hours
  • Google Review requests sent automatically after every completed service — no manual steps required

Permissions & Access Roles

Tekmetric Puts the Right Data in Front of the Right People Across Every Location

When you add a location, you're not just adding bays, you're adding staff, risk, and the need for accountability at a distance. The right access structure makes all three manageable.

Most MSOs hit a wall when they try to manage growing teams without the right controls in place. Too much access creates risk such as errors in repair orders, incorrect discounts, and sensitive financial data visible to people who don't need it. Too little creates friction, leaving advisors waiting on approvals, technicians without job visibility, and managers unable to make calls on their own.

Tekmetric gives you granular, role-based controls across every location. Technicians see their job queue, their assignments, and their hours. Managers have what they need to run their shop without touching another location's data. Advisors can build estimates, communicate with in-store customers, and process payments. Owners see the full portfolio in real time from a single login.

Before switching to Tekmetric, Will Rivera, owner of CarTech Auto Center in Puerto Rico, had to log into each of his five stores separately just to check sales or inventory. There was no unified view of the business, no way to enforce consistency, and no clean data to make decisions from. Within nine months of switching, CarTech had grown monthly revenue by 48%. Once CarTech had the structure to run five locations cleanly, expansion became the goal instead of survival.

What This Looks Like in Practice

  • Owner, manager, service advisor, and technician roles with granular, customizable permissions that are set up once and applied consistently at every location
  • Cross-location visibility for owners and ops leaders, with shop-level access for everyone else. Accountability is built into the platform and not enforced manually.
  • Controlled access to sensitive actions like unposting ROs, giving the right people the ability to correct errors without opening the door to bigger ones

Change Management

Switching Shop Software Doesn't Have to Disrupt Your Business. Here's How MSOs Make It Work.

Adopting new software across multiple locations is a real operational challenge. Tekmetric is built for it, from contract to live in a few days.

Christian Brothers Automotive migrated about 200 stores to Tekmetric in three months. Main Street Auto onboards 20 to 25 new locations a year and keeps growing. These aren't small transitions executed by large IT teams — they're operational rollouts managed by auto repair shop employees, built around Tekmetric's onboarding process.

Every new Tekmetric customer gets a dedicated onboarding manager who builds a rollout plan around your schedule, not a generic timeline. Data migrates. Workflows get configured. And most teams are fully operational within a week of going live, with results measurable within 30 days. That's not a promise. It's a framework Tekmetric has built and refined across thousands of shop launches.

The platform itself is designed to be learned fast. SJ Automotive cut estimate creation time from 40 minutes to about 10 minutes after switching. That's not a team that spent weeks in training. That's a team that picked up an intuitive tool and immediately got more done. When the platform is easy to use, adoption isn't a change management project. It's what happens when the tool earns buy-in on its own.

What This Looks Like in Practice

  • A dedicated onboarding manager, data migration support, and a go-live timeline built around your shops, not a one-size-fits-all playbook
  • An intuitive platform with a training hub, knowledge base, and U.S.-based support, so your team gets productive fast and stays that way
  • Access to the Tekmetric User Group, a community sharing what works, so you grow alongside operators who have already been where you are

Inventory & Parts Sharing

Stop Paying for Parts You Already Own. Tekmetric Gives Every Location Real-Time Visibility Into Stock.

When parts data is fragmented across locations, technicians wait, repairs get delayed, and margin slips through the cracks. Tekmetric centralizes inventory across every shop so your team always knows what's in stock, what's on order, and where to find it.

Multi-location inventory has a way of quietly breaking down. Parts get ordered twice because one location didn't know another had them. Technicians start jobs they can't finish. Reconciliation eats hours at the end of every month. The fix is straightforward: one centralized view of what's in stock across every location, updated in real time.

With Tekmetric, every authorized user sees real-time parts availability across every location. Orders happen directly inside the repair order — no supplier portal, no manual entry, no switching systems. When a technician picks up a job, they can see immediately whether parts are in stock or on order, so they're never starting work they can't complete. And when inventory hits a minimum threshold, reorder alerts surface automatically.

What This Looks Like in Practice

  • Real-time parts visibility across every location, connected directly to the repair order workflow so technicians, advisors, and managers always know what’s in stock
  • Parts ordering through PartsTech and others, directly from inside the RO. No portal toggling, no duplicate entries.
  • Automatic reorder alerts, purchase order tracking, and parts usage reports that give ops leaders a clean view of inventory performance across the portfolio

Profitability & Reporting

The Gap Between Your Best Auto Repair Shop and the Rest Isn't a Mystery. It's a Data Issue.

You know which locations perform. Tekmetric shows you exactly why, in real time, so you can act before the day is done.

Most MSOs are managing with last week's numbers at best. Reports get built manually. Data gets pulled from separate systems. By the time you know there's a problem at a location, the opportunity to act quickly and solve it is gone. That lag doesn't just slow down your decisions, it costs you money in real time.

Tekmetric's portfolio dashboard puts every location's data in one live view. ARO, car count, close ratio, gross profit, and technician efficiency are all filterable by shop, advisor, and date range, giving you a complete picture of what's working and where the gaps are. Seeing your top performer and your underperformer side by side makes it clear exactly what the best shop is doing that the others aren't.

The operators who use this visibility don't just track results — they act on them. Branch Automotive used Tekmetric's real-time data to build nine straight month-over-month increases in ARO, driven by stronger inspections, clearer recommendations, and the kind of customer trust that leads to consistently higher-value work. These aren't outliers; they're what happens when operators finally have the data to make better calls.

What This Looks Like in Practice

  • A portfoliowide dashboard showing ARO, car count, close ratio, and gross profit across every location in real time with shop-level filtering so you can see the full picture or drill into one location
  • Built-in reporting on technician productivity, DVI impact on ARO, end-of-day reconciliation, and discount and fee analysis — no exports, no spreadsheets, no five-hour Friday afternoon
  • Labor and parts matrices that lock in consistent pricing across locations, protecting margins and making every shop’s numbers comparable
👉 Ready to grow your automotive business? [Book a personalized Tekmetric Demo Here]

FAQ

More articles

Summer is a busy time in the auto repair industry, and 2020 was no exception.

But as the seasons change to fall and winter, we notice that fewer people are taking their vehicles in for repairs. Of course, this varies from state to state. Auto repair shops in colder climates may still see a steady flow of customers as drivers winterize their vehicles.

In most places, a slow down in business is to be expected.

While there may be fewer walk-ins, there are several ways shop owners and service writers can stimulate business and maintain a healthy sales funnel.

How Auto Repair Shops Can Bring In Even More Business

October 3, 2023

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When it comes to auto repair, a great customer experience can make the difference between a customer returning for future repairs or not. At Tekmetric, we recognize the importance of creating an excellent experience for your shop’s customers that meets their expectations and keeps them returning again and again. To accomplish this, we strive to offer a solution that helps you meet four key pillars of the customer experience: convenience, comfort, trust and loyalty.

Convenience 

For vehicle owners, choosing the most convenient shop is not necessarily about going to the closest shop. Rather, convenience is a matter of choosing the shop that makes their life easier. 

With approximately 50% of all business shopping completed outside of regular business hours, convenience goes a long way – especially when it comes to auto repair. Customers may need to drop their vehicle off and pick it up later, rather than waiting in the lobby. They may even request to complete pick up after business hours. In all cases, convenient solutions can keep the pick-up process smooth and painless for both you and the customer. 

Tekmetric’s two-way texting opens the door of convenience for vehicle owners. Two-way texting meets the customer where they are – anytime, anywhere. The vehicle owner can access updates to their repair process through a simple text, even from their office desk. Additionally, two-way texting can integrate with Tekmetric’s text-to-pay feature, so customers can pay from work or home, then come pick up the vehicle at their own convenience. 

Comfort

Traditionally, we think of comfort in a physical sense. For example, we might say, “that chair is comfortable.” Customers choose who they do business with based on how comfortable of an experience they receive. Having the tools and resources that ease the tension inherent with getting a vehicle repaired is critical to making a customer feel comfortable. One example that is often overlooked is the payments experience.

With Tekmetric’s “Buy Now, Pay Later,” option, shop owners can offer vehicle owners the opportunity to complete necessary repairs and pay in installments over time. An experience like this can make vehicle repair affordable and comfortable, no matter what the customer’s budget is. 

Trust

Trust between an auto repair shop and vehicle owners is paramount. Not only can it make the repair process smoother for all parties during the repair, but it also contributes to building a lasting relationship for future repairs. A customer is more likely to trust you when you have demonstrated that you can create an experience that is convenient, comfortable and transparent. 

Digital vehicle inspections (DVIs) are a great opportunity to educate vehicle owners on the health of their car by providing them with recommended repairs accompanied by photos and videos. Through DVIs, technicians can offer a holistic, transparent evaluation of the customer’s vehicle by highlighting both areas in need of repair and parts that are working well. The result? Customers can gain a better understanding of the technician’s findings, making them more likely to approve work – and return for future repairs. 

Loyalty

Prioritizing customer convenience, comfort and trust contributes to an enduring sense of customer loyalty. Building loyalty drives your shop’s bottom line in the long term. A good experience for one vehicle owner can lead to a domino effect within their personal network, as they return for future repairs and make referrals to others. Therein lies the hidden gem of long-standing, thriving businesses: strong customer loyalty. 

One of the ways to strengthen customer loyalty is through education and clear communication. Our integration with MotoVisuals demonstrates Tekmetric’s commitment to education and clear communication by showing customers what is wrong with their vehicle instead of simply telling them. Informing vehicle owners about the health of their car accompanied with pictures and educational videos creates a dynamic that is forthcoming, honest and geared towards educating the customer while also ensuring the car gets repaired. 

A customer-centric approach can drive your shop’s performance and establish an excellent customer experience. Use these four pillars – convenience, comfort, trust and loyalty – to drive your shop, and you will create a seamless experience for your customers from start to finish. Whether it’s meeting them where they are financially or educating them about a repair, you can establish a consistent, excellent experience that attracts and retains loyal customers now and far into the future.

4 Ways to Create a Better Auto Shop Customer Experience

September 3, 2024

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Similarly, your automotive service advisors might enjoy talking to people but feel worn down after a long day of helping customers and building repair orders. 

We've talked before about how modern shop management systems make it easier for your team to communicate, collaborate, and get things done. 

Going a step further, there's an opportunity for shop owners or general managers to help create a culture within your repair shop that not only boosts productivity and maximizes efficiency, but rewards success and contribution as well!

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