I mentioned in a previous post on how we did extensive research before we chose a location to open up a transmission specialty repair shop. In less than 4 years of opening, we were doing $1.3M/yr. out of a small 4-bay 3K sq. ft. shop. That's what happens when you do your homework first. One of the resources we used was the U.S. economic census which is performed every 5 years by our federal government. The last one was in 2012.

You can sort by state, county, city, etc. for any industry you want. The NAICS code for the transmission industry is 811113 and general automotive is 811111. The NAICS code that gets them all is 81111. You can go to http://www.census.gov/econ/census/index.html and click on the "Finding Data" tab to create your own query for your particular location. The queries aren't standard SQL structured, but what do you expect from the government? :-)

A breakdown of all the various NAICS automotive-related codes can be found at http://autop.ro/9DJ [autop.ro] where I uploaded a screenshot.

Here's a telling spreadsheet I created out of several queries I created on the U.S. Economic Census website: https://goo.gl/X3HbXe [goo.gl]

The bottom line is that the average automotive business in the U.S. does abut $500K/yr. and averages 4 employees per shop. The average employee gets about $35K/yr. Remember these are national averages. You can drill down to your state, county, or city by going to the U.S. economic census online for yourself.

Larry Bloodworth
Technical Information Specialist/Technician
Tanner Transmissions
Draper, Utah, USA