Starting a tyre shop, in the correct order.

Location matters most

A tyre shop relies on visibility and easy access; no quality work can make up for a site that’s hard to find or reach.

• Visibility from a busy road, not tucked behind another business.
• An entrance that allows cars to enter and exit easily without awkward manoeuvres.
• Parking for waiting vehicles, which fills up quicker than expected.
• Planning permission and lease terms that allow use, confirmed not assumed.
• Neighbours who can tolerate an air line, compressor, and early vehicle arrivals.

The cheapest unit is often cheap for these reasons, and the savings rarely make up for it. This is the decision with the least room for later correction, as everything else can change but the location cannot.

Calculate the cash needed to open and to sustain

Two different figures, and most plans only include the first.

Opening costs include equipment, deposit, and rent upfront, fit-out, signage, insurance, initial stock, and unbudgeted professional fees. Ongoing costs are the months of rent, wages, and stock you’ll cover before the garage is busy enough to sustain itself, which takes longer than expected.

A plan that exhausts funds on opening is the most common failure, occurring just as the business begins to work. Retaining a reserve isn’t caution; it buys time for word to spread.

Keep stock light, and let demand guide you.

The urge is to open with a full display, as empty shelves seem unprofessional.

It’s the wrong approach. You don’t yet know what your area purchases, so initial stock is a guess funded by the cash you need most, and wrong guesses linger for a year. Start with a narrow range of genuinely common fitments and order the rest based on confirmed jobs.

Within three months, your own sales data reveals what to stock, which is better than any supplier advice or assumptions about local vehicles.

The initial customers are not walk-ins

New garages expect passing trade to start immediately. It builds slowly, while rent does not wait.

The work that arrives quickly is intentional: local businesses with vans, taxi and driving school operators, other garages without a tyre machine, and anyone who buys regularly rather than annually. Each is a conversation that generates recurring work, worth more in month two than a hundred passing cars.

A network or marketplace that connects you with customers already searching serves the same purpose, and both are more valuable early on than a signage budget.

Price based on your costs, not the garage down the road

A new garage thinks it must undercut to gain attention, and opening a tyre shop at others' prices makes the first year tough.

You don’t know their costs, supplier terms, or if they’re profitable, so matching them is mimicking a decision without understanding. Calculate your bay's hourly running cost and what the fitted price covers, then compare that instead.

If your figure exceeds the local market, that’s crucial info, not a reason to undercut. It often indicates rent, volume assumptions, or the need to compete on factors other than price, all of which should be identified before opening, not in month six.

Handle the unglamorous setup before opening.

Waste collection, appropriate insurance, a booking system, a payment method, and a system for customer and vehicle records.

None of this is thrilling, and it’s much harder to implement retroactively once customers arrive. A garage without a waste contract finds out when the pile becomes an issue, and one without records faces a first year it can’t analyse and customers it can’t reach again.

Start the habit on day one of capturing the registration and contact for every job. In three years, that list will be the business's most valuable asset, and it can’t be created later.