Know Your Numbers: Hunt Demarest on Shop Profit, 50 30 20, and Smarter Marketing Spend

If you do not understand your numbers, you end up running your shop on stress instead of facts. In this Expert Spotlight episode, David sits down with Hunt Demarest, partner at Paar Melis and Associates, a firm that works heavily with auto repair shops. Hunt breaks down the core financial truths that quietly control everything in a repair business, including why profit is a trailing indicator, and why the leading indicators that actually move the needle are sales and gross profit. He also explains how to assign the right scoreboard numbers to the right roles, advisors focus on sales and gross profit, techs focus on hours, owners keep the full picture tied together. You will hear a clean framework for thinking about shop health, including the common 50 30 20 model and the simple rule behind it, your gross profit percentage needs to be at least twenty points higher than your overhead if you want twenty percent net income.  Hunt also gets practical about marketing and advertising spend, including why an average benchmark can mislead you, and how to use it as a sanity check. He shares that many shops land around three percent of sales on advertising, but the better question is value and customer acquisition cost, not the cheapest option. If you want to make decisions with clarity, not guesswork, this episode will help you see your business the way a great operator should. Links: Honest Mechanic Marketing (HMM): https://honestmechanicmarketing.com/ Paar Melis & Associates: https://paarmelis.com/ Hunt Demarest podcast page: https://huntdemarest.captivate.fm/ Business by the Numbers on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/business-by-the-numbers/id1611355257