Shop Owners Are Discovering How Much Money They Lose By Not Having a Spray Booth
A growing number of auto body shop owners are running the numbers on subletting paint work — and what they're finding is changing how they think about equipment investments.
Modern spray booths are helping shop owners recapture margins they've been losing for years.
It's the end of a solid month. Cars moved through the bays. Your crew put in the hours. You personally handled three insurance adjusters, two difficult customers, and a parts supplier who couldn't deliver on time. The work got done.
And yet when you look at the account balance, something feels off. Not disaster — just less than the work deserved. Less than what a month that busy should produce.
That gap has a name. And most shop owners never figure out what it is.
The Hidden Cost of Subletting Paint Work
Consider the typical arrangement: You find the customer. You write the estimate. You manage the relationship. You take on the liability. You do everything a shop owner does — and then at the moment the actual value gets created, you hand the job to someone else.
That other shop owner has a spray booth. That's the only difference between you and him. That's the only reason the money goes his direction instead of yours.
The reality: Subletting feels like a reasonable business decision because the cash flow still works. But what you never see is the margin that should have been yours — sitting in another shop owner's account at the end of every month.
The Math Most Shop Owners Never Run
This isn't complicated. You don't need a spreadsheet. Just honest numbers from your own operation.
Not paid to a landlord or supplier — to another shop owner who has one piece of equipment you don't.
The Customers You'll Never Know You Lost
The $32,000 is the money you can calculate. There's another number underneath it that most shop owners never account for.
The jobs you turned away entirely. The customer who needed a full paint job and you had to tell them you'd have to send it out — the timeline would be longer, the process more complicated.
Some of them said fine. Some of them drove to the shop down the street that had a booth and never came back.
"The investment paid for itself in six months. Not because business boomed — because I stopped bleeding margin I'd been earning all along."
— John Leblebici, Top Gun Auto Center, North HollywoodA Booth Isn't an Expense. It's a Refund.
This is where most shop owners' thinking about equipment is backwards.
They look at a $60,000 spray booth and see a cost. What they should see is 22 months of margin recovery — money that was already theirs, already earned, that they've been handing to someone else.
After those 22 months, the booth is paid for. Every paint job from that point forward keeps what it always should have kept.
What 1,000+ Shop Owners Already Know
JMC Automotive Equipment has been installing spray booths for 18 years across all 50 states. They've seen what happens to a shop's numbers before and after.
Almost all of them say the same thing: they wish they'd done it sooner.
You don't have to decide anything today. But you should at least know your number.
How Much Are You Losing Every Month?
Use our free calculator to see exactly what subletting is costing your shop — and how fast a spray booth would pay for itself with your numbers.
Calculate My Savings →Takes 2 minutes · No commitment · See your real numbers