Guides
How to start a tire shop: where to start, in plain terms
Starting a tire shop, gated by four commitments you cannot undo: the lease, the equipment order, the first stock buy, and the first technician hired.
What to take away
- Four decisions in a tire shop opening are effectively irreversible: the lease, the equipment order, the opening stock buy, and the first technician you hire.
- Each one should be gated by questions that have real answers. If a question has no answer yet, the commitment is early.
- Supply comes before space. Who delivers to your address, and how often, decides how much rubber you have to own.
- The opening size list is written by the vehicles on your road, not by a catalog.
- Almost everything else in the opening can be corrected later, and cheaply, so spend your caution on the four.
Why gate the four commitments
Most mistakes a new shop makes are fixable. Wrong hours, phone system, sign, or coffee machine can be reversed within a month.
Four things cannot: a lease binds you for years, and equipment is bought at retail and sold at auction. Opening stock in wrong sizes turns cash into rack decoration, and a bad first hire sets the standard every later hire measures against.
So the sequence below is not a schedule. It is a set of gates.
A gate you cannot answer is not a reason to stall the project. It is a reason to go find the answer, which is usually a phone call to a distributor, a landlord, or your local licensing office.
Gate 1: supply, before space
You cannot size the opening stock order until you know how the tail gets filled.
Supply gate questions
- Which distributors deliver, how many times daily?
- Same-day cutoff time and after-cutoff handling?
- Stock order cost vs single special order?
- Second supplier to avoid lost sales?
- Return terms on unaccepted tires?
Get written answers to four questions from every distributor you might use:
Gate 1: supply
- Delivery frequency. How many days a week does a truck reach this address?
- Route days. Which days, and does the schedule hold from week to week?
- Minimum order. What is the smallest order that ships without a surcharge?
- Cut-off time. What time must an order be placed to land on the next route?
With those answers, the size list becomes arithmetic instead of a guess. A supplier running two routes a day means you can hold fewer sizes and still say yes. One route a week means you own the inventory or you own the disappointment.
Gate 2: the site, judged as bay capacity
Look at a candidate site the way a technician will use it, not the way a customer will see it.
Site bay capacity checklist
What to measure
- Bay count and depth
- Sellable minutes per day
- Door width and ceiling height
- Trucks, vans, lifted vehicles
- Floor slab and drainage
- Lift needs specified slab
- Power supply
- Compressors and lifts need service
- Parking and turning space
- Waiting cars need space
- Storage volume
- Seasonal tire storage
- Visibility and turn-in
- Wrong side divided road
Why it decides the deal
- Bay count and depth
- Real product
- Door width and ceiling height
- Customers or refusals
- Floor slab and drainage
- Wet floors injury risk
- Power supply
- Building may lack it
- Parking and turning space
- Not in drive lane
- Storage volume
- Sell only if room
- Visibility and turn-in
- Loses half passing traffic
Judge each site on five numbers a technician will feel every day:
Gate 2: bay capacity
- Door height. Measure to the lowest obstruction, then add the tallest vehicle you expect with the hood up.
- Bay dimensions. Length and width to the walls, with room to walk around the vehicle.
- Lift type. In-ground, two-post or four-post, and whether the slab will take the anchors.
- Turning radius. Can a crew cab pickup enter, turn and leave without a three-point shuffle?
- Waste tire storage. Where casings sit until the hauler collects them, and how many fit.
Before you sign, confirm the site is permitted for your intended work. Confirm waste tire storage is allowed there, and any signage you counted on is legal.
Local requirements vary, so shop rules are separate homework covered in what a tire shop must be licensed and permitted to do.
Gate 3: the opening stock order
The order is written from your own counting, not from a national bestseller list. Drive the roads that feed the site at commuting hour and write down what passes. Sedans, small crossovers, full-size pickups and work vans have different size families, and a trade area skewed toward one of them makes the other a special order.
Three rules keep the first order honest.
Opening stock order rules
- Stock depth only where you counted frequency
- Keep written miss log from first week
- Do not chase the tail sizes
A typical first order runs 60 to 90 tires across 8 to 12 size families. An example shape for a suburban shop, not a rule: 225/65R17 and 235/60R18 for crossovers, 265/70R17 and 275/60R20 for pickups, 215/60R16 and 205/55R16 for older sedans. Stock four to eight in each of those and one or two in the sizes you saw twice.
Fitment questions, ratings, aging and recall handling all sit with the vehicle manufacturer, the tire manufacturer and the federal tire safety guidance published by NHTSA. Read the current version rather than repeating a rule you half remember, because getting this wrong is a liability question and not a stocking question.
Gate 4: the first technician
The first person you hire in the bay writes the shop's standard. Whatever they do about torque, about seating a bead, about a customer's wheel finish, becomes normal.
Ask what they do when a casing looks marginal. A good answer names the manufacturer's instructions and the shop's written policy, not their own feel. Ask what they do when a wheel is already curbed before it comes off. A good answer: they show the customer before touching it.
Those two answers tell you more than a resume. The guide to hiring and training bay staff covers the rest.
What the money looks like
Three costs carry the opening: the lease, the equipment and the first stock buy. The figures below are typical ranges for a two to three bay shop in a mid-size United States market, not quotes.
- Lease. Roughly $1,500 to $6,000 a month for 2,000 to 4,000 square feet. Rent follows the local market, the door count and whether the space was built as a shop.
- Equipment. Lifts, a tire changer, a balancer and hand tools commonly land between $25,000 and $60,000 for two bays. Alignment gear pushes that higher.
- First stock buy. A 60 to 90 tire order runs about $6,000 to $15,000 at typical wholesale prices.
- Working capital. Budget payroll, insurance and utilities for the first quarter, and a reserve for the slow weeks.
What you should not settle yet
Deliberately leave these open at opening.
- The full service menu. Add alignment, seasonal storage or fleet contracts once bays are reliably full, not to fill an empty schedule.
- The pricing structure for programs like road hazard. Live with the claims for a season before you commit to terms.
- A second location. The reasoning for that decision belongs in the material on choosing where a second shop would actually pay.
- The advertising budget. Word of mouth from the first hundred jobs is more informative than any campaign, and the approach to winning local customers works better once you know which jobs you are good at.
The SBA's guide for new business owners covers entity, registration and financing paperwork, and it lays out the order most of that work happens in.
The IRS page on what a new business has to set up covers the records. You will wish you had started them on day one.
Your equipment order is a separate exercise, worked through in the guide to outfitting the first bay.
Common questions
Can I open with one bay?
Yes, and many shops do. The constraint is that a single long job stops every quick job behind it, so a one-bay shop has to schedule ruthlessly and refuse work it cannot fit. That is a discipline problem, not an impossibility.
Do I need to stock tires at all?
Some fitting-only shops work, especially near a distributor with fast routes or where customers routinely bring their own tires. You give up the walk-in sale and the same-day repair, and you keep almost all of the working capital. It is a real model, not a lesser one, but it should be a choice rather than an accident.
How long before the first month makes sense?
Longer than the plan says, in most cases, because a new shop has to be found before it can be busy. Track weekly job count rather than monthly revenue in the first quarter, since the job count tells you whether the trade area is learning you exist.
What is the most common opening mistake?
Buying inventory before confirming supply. It looks like preparation and it is usually the largest single reversible-looking decision that turns out not to be reversible at all.
