A friend of mine likes to say " Self emplotment is GREAT because I can work half-days.
Any 12 hours per day I want to".
        Tom

Try to set up your business in an ongoing auto repair shop, it's more
professional that way. Work out the details with the owner. Put up signs
and prices for the service you offer.

Spend a little money advertising in the right places. Invest in yourself
and you'll do well.

Eric

Hi Mike,
 I usually charge $45\hr. The point is that I've had quite a few potential customers
choke at even $25\hr. I don't figure $45 it too high for quality work backed by 25
years of experience. I just need to find the customers who are willing to pay. I've
gotten some good input from you folks.
            Tom

You want to really be careful on Limos - on the whole they are hack
jobs from the very beginning - and conversion companies and their
suppliers go broke will allarming regularity - making it difficult to
get replacement parts - particularly electricals. In many cases they
are not engineered in the first place - they are thrown together with
whatever the company can get cheap that does the job long enough to
get off warranty.

Electro-luminescent panels are being used for "opera lights" as well
as interior panel lights, with inverters less than half the capacity
they should have. Then when they go bad you have to source a
replacement - and the company that made the limo is out of business -
and the company that made the parts was out of buisiness when the
(surplus) parts were purchaced in bulk 3 years before the conversion
was done. Then the only available replacement (that IS the right
capacity)is physically too large to fit in the spot the dead one came
out of.

Just one example.

Or custom switch panels, using switches that may have been readily
available in HongKong 2 years before the conversion was done, but were
never imported or distributed in North America. The switches are
soldered to a poor quality printed circuit panel, that when the
conversion company was still in business cost something like $500. Now
that they are gone, you are stuck sourcing a replacement switch,
repairing the undersized traces on the circuit board, then sourcing
replacement bulbs for the illumination system - which again are
non-standard and the last north american
distributor/manufacturer/supplier has not had them in stock for 5
years (the limo is 3 or 4 years old) Nothing currently available fits
so you have to modify the acrylic panel to provide clearance for the
slightly larger bulbs available - and replace them ALL because the new
ones are brighter or dimmer than the originals.

Who pays your time tracking down and sourcing the parts? And doing the
finicky replacement?  And you are going to go through that for $18 per
hour???
And even at that rate the cheap beggar that owns the limo is going to
complain because of the number of hours required "to change a lousy
light bulb"

I've done the board repairs and sourced the parts for a repair shop
that services a fair sized limo fleet - and believe me, it's no fun.

I charge $50 per hour for the repair work I do, and the shop charges a
minimum of $65 getting the parts out and putting them back in.
The limo owner has finally resolved himself to the fact that if he's
going to make money running his limos, someone has to make money
keeping them in shape.

"Get a brush cut before you start on the job or you'll be bald (or
patchy) before it's over."