The One-Page Marketing Plan for an Auto Repair Shop, Built on Repair Orders
Start with how many more cars you want in the bays. Everything else on the page is arithmetic.
Most marketing plans for auto repair shops start at the wrong end. They pick a budget, usually some percent of last year's revenue, then go looking for things to spend it on. That is how a shop ends up paying for a Facebook page, a newsletter nobody opens, and an ad campaign that was never sized to anything.
This plan runs the other direction. You decide how many repair orders you want next quarter, check that the bays can handle them, work out where those repair orders can realistically come from, and the budget falls out of the math. Nine steps. The calculator below does the first six for you in about thirty seconds, and it shows you whether the plan pays before you spend a dollar.
Why Percent-of-Revenue Is Backwards
A percent-of-revenue budget answers a question nobody asked. It tells you what you can afford to spend. It does not tell you what you need to spend to fill the third bay on Tuesdays, or whether spending anything is the right move this quarter.
A repair order plan starts from the unit your shop actually runs on. In PartsTech's survey of 618 general repair shops, the most commonly reported average repair order was $500 to $749, and the average annual gross revenue per bay came out to $203,000 (PartsTech, 2023 survey data). Those two numbers are the whole planning problem in miniature: you know roughly what a car is worth when it comes through the door, and you know roughly what a bay should produce in a year. The gap between what your bays produce now and what they could produce is the size of your marketing job. Not a percentage. A number of cars.
Three things follow from planning this way.
The budget becomes an output. You will know what a new repair order costs to generate before you commit a dollar, because you worked backward from the target.
Capacity becomes a ceiling. A plan that generates more cars than the techs can turn is not growth, it is a waitlist and a bad review. The plan checks capacity before it checks channels.
The cheapest repair orders get counted first. A past customer who has not been back in fourteen months costs almost nothing to bring back. A stranger costs whatever your market charges per click. The plan spends the cheap ones before the expensive ones.
The Nine Steps, and the Calculator
Nine steps, in order. Each one after the first three is arithmetic on the ones above it. The calculator runs steps 1 through 6 as you type and draws the result; steps 7 through 9 are decisions, not math, so they follow as copy.
- Where you are now: your run rate
- How many cars your bays can handle
- Where you want to be
- Where the extra repair orders come from
- What a new customer costs to find, and what it costs to run the plan
- Does the plan pay for itself
- Which channels, in what order
- The first 90 days
- Five numbers to check every Friday
The repair order plan calculator
Put in the numbers you already know. The budget comes out the other end, and you can see whether it pays.
Where you are now: your run rate
Use your monthly average over the last 12 months, not last month. A 12-month average already has the slow months and the customers who drifted away baked in, which is what makes it a fair base. Use 6 months only if the shop changed in a big way, like adding a bay or losing a lead tech.How many cars your bays can handle
Your best month ever, without turning work awayWhere you want to be
By the end of the quarterWhere the extra repair orders come from
Your run rate is what the shop averages when you change nothing, so the plan only has to add the gap on top of it and prove it did. The gap has two sources: past customers you bring back, and new customers you buy.What a new customer costs to find, and what it costs to run the plan
If you have never run ads, leave $100 per lead and let the first 30 days replace itDoes the plan pay for itself
How long a customer stays with you once you have themRepair orders a month
Where you are, where you want to be, and the ceilingWhere the 220 come from
180 run rate + 15 brought back + 25 newDoes a new customer pay for itself
What one costs to find, against what one is worthHow the calculator gets to these numbers, step by step, with yours
Nothing here is a model or a projection. It is eight lines of arithmetic on the numbers you typed, and every line updates as you change them. Lines that rest on one of your estimates say so.
The $100 cost-per-lead placeholder comes from our own published plans: $1,500 a month in ad spend against a 45-call target over 90 days is $100 a call, and $3,000 against 100 is $90. A shop starting cold should expect the top of that range and watch it fall. Everything else on this page is your number, not ours.
Want the inputs pulled from your real numbers instead of your best guess? Bring this page to the call, or bring nothing at all.
Book a shop auditEvery input in the calculator is tagged. From your records means pull it from your shop management system. Your decision is the target; you choose it. Your estimate is a guess until you measure it, and the step-by-step math says which lines rest on one. If you do not have a number the calculator asks for, put in your best guess and write it down. A guess you wrote down is a number to go measure next week, which is more useful than a blank.
One word on the first step. The calculator asks for your run rate: the monthly average over the last 12 months, not last month. A 12-month average already has the slow months and the customers who drifted away baked in, which is what makes it a fair base. The plan does not have to earn those repair orders again. It has to add the gap on top and prove it did, because measuring against the run rate is the only way to know whether a marketing dollar bought a car or took credit for one that was coming anyway. Steps 7, 8 and 9 are the three sections that follow the worked example.
A Worked Example
A six-bay independent shop with four techs and two advisors. Every number below is made up to show the math. The bay count, tech count, advisor count, ARO, and daily car count all sit inside the most common bands PartsTech's survey reported (PartsTech, 2023). The margin and close rate are the shop's own numbers in the example, as they would be in yours.
Run rate. 180 repair orders a month, averaged over the last 12 months, at a $600 ARO is $108,000 in monthly revenue. Gross margin on the average ticket is 55%. Repeat customers are 60% of the work, referrals 15%, Google 20%, paid ads 5%.
Capacity. Best month ever was 240 repair orders, and it hurt. Ceiling: 240.
Target. 220 repair orders a month by the end of the quarter. Gap: 40.
Where the extra 40 come from. The 180 is the run rate, what the shop averages when nothing changes, so the plan only has to add on top of it. The shop has about 2,100 customers in its management system who have not been in for more than a year. Bringing back 15 of them a month is 0.7% of that list, a modest ask. That leaves 25 new customers a month to find. So: 180 run rate, plus 15 brought back, plus 25 new, equals 220.
New-customer math. The advisors book about 7 of every 10 inquiries, so 25 new customers needs roughly 36 leads. The shop has never run search ads, so it plugs in $100 per lead. That placeholder is not random: our own Steady Growth plan runs $1,500 a month in ad spend against a 45-call target over 90 days, which is $100 per call, and the Aggressive Growth plan runs $3,000 against 100, which is $90. A shop starting cold should expect the top of that range and watch it fall. 36 leads at $100 is $3,600 a month in ad spend.
Sanity check. 25 new customers at a $600 ARO and 55% margin is $8,250 in first-visit gross profit against $3,600 in spend. Acquisition cost is $144 per customer. If the average customer comes back twice a year for three years, that is $3,600 in revenue per customer acquired for $144. The plan does not need the customer to return to pay for itself, and it gets very good if they do.
What it costs to run the plan. Ad spend is not the whole budget. Whatever the shop pays for ad management, website hosting, and the CRM and call-tracking software that makes the Friday numbers possible goes on top, and the calculator has a line for each. In this example the shop runs it in-house with tools it already pays for, so those lines are zero and the budget is the ad spend. A shop paying an agency would see the total climb, and the cost to acquire a customer climb with it, which is the honest number to judge the plan on.
What the budget turned out to be. $3,600 a month on $132,000 in target revenue is 2.7%. Notice that the percentage came out at the end. Nobody chose it. These are the calculator's default values, so the numbers on this page match what you see before you touch anything.
What it would have looked like the other way. Had this shop started with "spend 5% of revenue," it would have set $5,400 a month and then gone shopping for channels to fill it. It would have had no idea whether that was too much or too little, because it had never counted the cars.
Where the Repair Orders Come From, in Order
The gap from step 4 gets filled from six places, and the order matters more than the mix. This is the 6 Rs, the diagnostic we run on every shop, applied to a plan.
Reliability. The work is good and the customer knows it. No marketing plan fixes a shop that is not ready for the customers it asks for. If you are honest about a problem here, fix it first and come back to this page next quarter.
Reputation. The review count and the star rating are the first thing a new customer sees, and they are also the cheapest thing on this list to improve. Ask every customer. Route the unhappy ones to you before they route themselves to Google. A shop that adds ten reviews a month changes what every other channel converts at.
Reselling. The customer list. Every shop has hundreds of past customers who have not been back in a year, and they already trust you. A reactivation sequence, by email and text, is where the cheapest repair orders in the plan come from. This is the first line of step 4.
Readiness. What happens when the lead shows up. If calls go to voicemail at four in the afternoon and the web form lands in an inbox nobody checks, every dollar in step 5 is buying leads that leak. Call tracking tells you how many calls you get. Missed-call tracking tells you how many you lost, which is usually the more expensive number. An AI receptionist catches the overflow.
Remarketing. Most people who inquire do not book on the first contact. A follow-up sequence for the ones who went quiet is the second cheapest source of repair orders on the page.
Reach. Now the ad spend. Google Search first, because it captures drivers who are already looking for a repair this week and it tells you what a lead actually costs in your market. Then retargeting, then Meta, then video. The full order and the reason for it is on the auto repair advertising page, and Google Ads for auto repair shops covers the channel that carries most of the step 5 budget. Local SEO is the road that compounds underneath all of it, but it is measured in months, so the plan treats it as an investment line rather than a quarter's gap-filler.
One more thing that belongs under Reach. A shop cannot advertise a service its website never mentions, and most shop sites name about five. The auto repair service map lists all 143 a shop can sell. Checking your site against it usually turns up the cheapest repair orders nobody was counting.
The 90-Day Calendar
Days 1 to 14. Plug the leaks. Tracked phone number on every listing. Call handling for the hours the front desk cannot cover. Review request process live. Google Business Profile complete, categories and services filled in, photos current. Website checked against the service map and the phone number visible on every page. No ad spend yet. The engine gets fixed before the fuel goes in.
Days 15 to 30. Turn on the list. The reactivation sequence goes out to every past customer who has not been in for twelve months or more. The first repair orders from step 4 come from here, and they come fast, because those people already know where you are.
Days 31 to 90. Fill the bays. Google Search ads go live against the highest-intent repairs in your market. Retargeting follows in week two. By day 60 you have a real cost per lead and step 5 gets rerun with it. By day 90 you know whether the step 3 target was right, and the next quarter's plan starts from what actually happened instead of what you guessed.
Five Numbers to Check Every Friday
A plan you check once a quarter is a wish. These five take ten minutes.
- Repair orders from marketing this week. Not leads. Booked and completed work, split by source. This is the only number that pays the rent.
- Cost per lead, this week and trailing 30 days. Judge the trend over the trailing window, not the week. One expensive week is a reason to watch, not to act.
- Call answer rate. Calls answered divided by calls received. If it is under 90%, the leak is bigger than anything an ad can fix.
- New reviews this week and total. Velocity matters as much as the count.
- Reactivated customers this week. Past customers who booked from the sequence. The cheapest line on the whole page, so watch that it keeps moving.
Monthly, add ARO and gross margin, because a plan that fills bays with $180 oil changes is filling the wrong bays. PartsTech found ARO was the most tracked KPI among the shops it surveyed, at 54% of respondents, followed by overall gross profit margin at 49% (PartsTech, 2023). Most shops track those two. Fewer track the three above them, which is where the plan actually leaks.
If you want all of this in one place without building a spreadsheet, monthly reporting is how we do it for clients, and the ROAS calculator will check the return on a campaign that is already running.
What the Numbers Look Like When the Plan Works
The plan above is the one we run for clients, with the steps filled in from their data. Here is what the step 5 number does over time when the leaks are plugged first.
- Freedom Tire, an independent tire and auto repair shop: cost per lead fell from $25.07 to $9.58, a 62% decline, and it dropped every single year for four straight years while tracked leads grew 469%.
- An independent European auto repair shop in the Inland Empire: three times the leads on the same roughly $2,540 monthly budget, with cost per conversion down 65.3%.
- A Southern California RV service and paint operation: monthly leads grew from 10 to 147 over 16 months while cost per lead fell 79%, from $80.92 to $16.63.
The pattern is the point. A plan built on repair orders gets cheaper to run every quarter, because every quarter starts from a measured number instead of a guess.
The Marketing Section of Your Business Plan
If you are writing an auto repair shop business plan for a lender, a landlord, or a partner, the marketing section is usually the weakest page in it, because it gets written as a list of channels. Write it as a repair order plan instead. Replace the brackets with the numbers from the calculator (the "Copy my plan" button gives you all of them in one block) and it reads like someone who has counted the cars.
Marketing strategy. [Shop name] will operate [N] bays with [N] technicians and [N] service advisors, giving the shop a practical capacity of approximately [ceiling] repair orders per month. The shop currently completes [current] repair orders per month at an average repair order of $[ARO], with [X]% of work coming from repeat customers and referrals. The marketing plan targets [target] repair orders per month by [date], a gap of [gap] additional repair orders, to be filled from two sources: reactivation of the shop's existing customer base ([reactivated] per month) and new customer acquisition ([new customers] per month).
Customer acquisition. New customers will be generated primarily through Google Search advertising and Google Maps visibility, supported by retargeting and review generation. At an inquiry close rate of [X]% and an estimated cost per lead of $[X], the shop will require approximately [leads] inquiries per month at a monthly advertising cost of approximately $[ad spend], plus approximately $[running costs] per month for ad management, website hosting, and tracking software, for a total marketing budget of $[marketing budget]. Each new customer represents $[first-visit GP] in first-visit gross profit and an estimated $[lifetime revenue] in revenue over [N] years at [N] visits per year, against an acquisition cost of $[CAC].
Measurement. Marketing performance will be reviewed weekly against five indicators: repair orders attributed to marketing, cost per lead over a trailing 30-day window, inbound call answer rate, new customer reviews, and reactivated past customers. Average repair order and gross margin will be reviewed monthly. The advertising budget will be revised at day 60 and day 90 based on measured cost per lead rather than a fixed percentage of revenue.
Three paragraphs. A lender reads that and sees a shop that knows what a customer costs and what a customer is worth, which is more than most of the plans on their desk can say.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much should an auto repair shop spend on marketing?
Whatever the calculator says for your shop: the ad spend that the gap requires, plus what it costs to run the plan (management, hosting, tracking software). The honest answer is that it depends on the gap between the repair orders you have and the repair orders your bays can handle, the close rate at your front counter, and what a lead costs in your market. For reference, our own plans run $1,500 or $3,000 a month in ad spend and target 45 or 100 high-intent calls over 90 days, which works out to roughly $90 to $100 per call. A shop that starts with a percentage of revenue instead of a repair order target is guessing with extra steps.
What should a marketing plan for an auto repair shop include?
A baseline of repair orders and ARO, a capacity ceiling, a target, a split between past customers and new customers, the lead and budget math for the new ones, a channel order, a 90-day calendar, and the five numbers you will check every week. That is the nine steps above. If a plan does not have a capacity ceiling and a close rate in it, it is a channel list, not a plan.
Should I budget a percentage of revenue for marketing?
Use it as a sanity check at the end, never as the starting point. In the worked example the derived budget came out to 2.7% of target revenue. That number is useful to know. It would have been useless to start from.
What is a good customer acquisition cost for an auto repair shop?
Lower than the first-visit gross profit is comfortable. Lower than the customer's revenue over the years they stay with you is the actual test. Divide the monthly marketing budget by new customers booked and compare it to both. In the worked example, $144 to acquire a customer worth $330 in first-visit gross profit and $3,600 in revenue over three years is a plan that pays for itself on the first visit.
Where should the first marketing dollar go?
Not to ads. The first dollar goes to fixing what leaks: call handling, reviews, the customer list, a website that names the services you actually sell. Those are the cheapest repair orders on the page and they make every dollar spent after them work harder. Then Google Search, because it is the only channel that can fill a bay this week and it tells you what a lead costs in your market.
How often should I update the plan?
Rerun the calculator at day 60 with your measured cost per lead. Rerun the whole plan every quarter, starting from what actually happened. A plan that is never updated was never a plan.
Sources
Every third-party number on this page was checked at the publisher on September 13, 2026.
- PartsTech, The State of General Auto Repair Shops in the United States. Survey of 618 shop owners and managers, 2023 data. Figures used: average annual gross revenue per bay of $203,000; 44% of respondents reporting an average repair order between $500 and $749; the most common shop profile of 3 to 6 bays, 3 to 4 technicians, and 2 service advisors; ARO tracked by 54% of respondents and gross profit margin by 49%.
- Automotive Reach, published plan pricing on this site: Steady Growth at $1,500 per month in ad spend targeting 45 calls in 90 days; Aggressive Growth at $3,000 per month targeting 100. The per-call figures in the worked example are derived from those two targets.
- Client results above are from Automotive Reach account data, periods 2023 through March 2026, as documented in our case studies.
Want the Calculator Filled In From Your Shop's Real Numbers?
Bring the plan to the call, or do not bring anything at all. We will pull your current car count, your review position, your call handling, and your website's service coverage, then hand the plan back to you with the numbers in it. No pitch until we have counted the cars.