Labor rate?

[MGB Driver]

Myself and a friend that I recently met through the similar interest of vintage Japanese motorcycles, have decided to purchase, restore, sell vintage bikes. I wasn't sure how serious he was, until he drove 10 hours to purchase a early '70s Yamaha 350 enduro. He finds them, purchases them, then brings them to me to get to a re-sellable \ "good running " condition. As of yesterday, he's brought 13 bikes home, so I've got ALOT of work to do!
My question is, what is a fair way to do this? He's not too mechanically inclined, so I'll be doing all the restoring. Should we split the profits from the sale of each bike, or should he pay me by the hour, and if so, how much per hour? We have briefly discussed this, but no decision has been made. I would love to have a weekly paycheck, but not sure how much per hour / compensation I should agree on. I don't want to undersell, or over price my ability...What do y'all think?

[Michael Stoic]

There is potential in this, but the world if full of great ideas. It's all a matter of how you guys execute the plan.

In very general terms, make sure all your agreements are in writing. Equally important: each should roughly be a 50% contributor, otherwise it's not a partnership but employer-employee arrangement.

Pricing your rate will be the last thing to worry about, at first. The market for your collective product will determine the value added, and you'll have your answer soon enough.

By the time you see how well the bikes are selling you will have a pretty good idea of what it took and how to price it for the future sales.

Try to bring some product to market on 50/50 basis and see how it goes...

[Geoff Hastings]

This is an interesting puzzle, I’ve restored seven bikes over the last four years and generally try to do all aspects myself including wheel building, spraying, welding, light machining and even some chroming. I’ve sold a couple of these bikes making about £2,000 profit per bike but, I would estimate that it on an hourly basis I’ve earned about £5.00 an hour. Certainly from a monetary point of view I’d be better off doing a paper round or flipping burgers but obviously that’s not what drives us to restore bikes. A lot of time is used searching the internet and trawling auto jumbles for parts, will you charge for this time or rely on your partner to source the parts, who is going to sell the bikes and pay for the advertising? I rebuilt a bike for a friend, the deal was he’d pay for the parts and then sell the finished bike and we’d split the profit 50/50, he never sold the bike so 6 months work for no pay!

[Geoff Hastings]

Any decision on the viability of buying and selling restorations, I’d be interested in your conclusions.