Blue Sky Motorsports Announcement Options

[Richard Casto]

I wanted to announce some changes at Blue Sky Motorsports. In short, I am no longer going to be rebuilding Porsche transmissions for the general public. I haven’t updated my website to reflect this, but will do so in the near future.

Why am I stopping? In short, I have been hurt by my own success. BSM is not my day job, so any work I do ultimately has to take away time from my family and other things that are important to me. My wife was asking for me to either stop or significantly cut back due to spending too many nights and weekends working on transmissions and it finally got to the point that free “garage time” was not being spent working on my own 914.

On top of this, I am a perfectionist. So while it was fun, I was putting in more hours on each transmission than I should, based upon the flat rate labor charge I was charging. Customers were getting tenderloins at ground chuck prices. While great for them it was tough on my schedule. I could either reduce what I felt was the quality of my work (unacceptable), or charge significantly more. Charging more wouldn't solve the problem of taking too much time away from my family and I think it would have priced me out of the “ship me your transmission for a low cost rebuild” niche I have been living in and push me into direct competition with local Porsche shops (not where I wanted to go.)

I am not shutting down the business, selling off my specialized tools or inventory. I will likely do the odd transmission here and there for local folks and will likely do select sub-contract work for independent shops. I plan to keep the technical documents online and in fact may expand them. For the longest time I had wanted to create a “How to rebuild your transmission” set of free instructions including corresponding YouTube video(s). Maybe I will find the time now to do something like that? I also have dreams of moving into the “product” side of the 914 world in the future, but that is a discussion for another day.

Anyhow, I plan to continue to visit 914world.com and offer up transmission advice, etc. Feel free to email or PM me questions.

Richard
Owner, Blue Sky Motorsports

[jim_hoyland]

Thanks for sharing your tranny knowledge; I've found very informative. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)