Hayes: AI in Auto Repair: The Back Office Race to $100+ Million

When most shop owners think about scaling, their minds go to bays, technicians, and car count. But the truth is the future of the industry will be won or lost in the back office. Finance and accounting must move as fast as the front of house to compete at the $100+ million level and beyond.

At the Houston Boston Partnership, our mission is simple—every new acquisition must be fully integrated front to back within 60 days. That means Tekmetric, ADP, Rilla, and NetSuite must all feed into one system for one version of the truth. The days of stitching together Excel sheets, running weekly data dumps, or burning 100 hours on reconciliations are over.

From Scattered Data to a Unified Warehouse

The current state of most auto repair groups looks like this:

• Tekmetric for repair order information, customer profiles, and individual sales metrics
• ADP for payroll and employee retention
• Rilla for sales coaching
• NetSuite, Quickbooks, or another Enterprise Resource Plan for financials

Individually, they’re powerful but scattered. Without a centralized hub, they’re collective chaos. Finance teams spend entire weeks exporting, cleaning, and manually stitching these systems together.

By consolidating all operational and financial data into a single data center powered by Generative AI, leadership can query the business in plain English. Need board level dashboards? Prepared in seconds and updated in real time. Want to know which service advisors are converting oil changes into higher margins? The answer is available instantly.

Use Cases That Matter

The value of AI isn’t theory, it’s practical for:

• Sales coaching. Overlay sales-coaching data with close rates to spot your top converters.
• Customer loyalty. Break down new vs. repeat customers by make/model and see why certain customers come back more often than others.
• Technician retention. Merge tenure data with job types to see what’s burning out your techs.
• Store comparisons. View side by side dashboards of car count, ticket averages, gross revenue, gross profit, OpEx, and net income.
• Board reporting. Instantly view financial that once took a finance team a week to produce.

The Finance Multiplier

The real multiplier isn’t just productivity, it’s valuation when it comes to:

• Efficiency. A small finance team can now deliver enterprise-grade reporting once reserved for $500k+ FP&A teams.
• Talent leverage. Instead of over-hiring back-office staff, let AI do the heavy lifting.
• An operational feedback loop. Data doesn’t stop at the board. Information extends to the shop floor to feed operators, marketers, and sales leaders for actionable insights in real time.
• A competitive advantage. Owners running AI-driven reports move faster than rivals stuck in spreadsheets.
• PE valuation. Clean, consolidated financials with drill down visibility drive higher exit multiples and investor confidence.

The Race Is On

The faster you integrate, the faster you scale. And the faster you scale with accurate financials, the higher your valuation when it’s time to make your next private equity turn.
 The back office is no longer just overhead; it’s the engine that powers generational wealth in auto repair.

Bottom line: AI in auto repair isn’t about replacing people. It’s about empowering your people with data, speed, and confidence. Shops that embrace this shift will scale past $100 million and beyond. “Gut instinct” will always serve a purpose, but the real winners will verify instinct with data-driven reporting. Those that can’t? They’ll be left in the dust.