Chris Pyle worked for Ford for a long time, now he is his own boss as a car mechanic and earns more than twice as much – working from home.
What does the mechanic do from home? Chris Pyle is a 45-year-old American who worked as a mechanic at Ford for years. But one day he quit his job to do the same thing he did before from his home office: repair cars. However, he now lets his customers work on their own cars themselves – via an online help platform called JustAnswer.
He helps people solve all kinds of problems with diesel and gasoline vehicles and drives really well. He now earns the equivalent of around 160,000 euros a year – more than twice as much as he previously earned at Ford. CNBC was the first to report on Chris Pyle’s new life.
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A lot of work, but self-determined
How did Chris Pyle do it? In 2006, he was still working in a Ford workshop when he needed help with a specific problem with a gearbox. He found advice on the website above and got a taste for it. He started helping out there on the side and earned 450 euros in the first month.
In the second, his additional income doubled and things continued to improve. A few years later, he gave up his main job when he was earning more with JustAnswers than he was earning from his roughly 70,000 euros at Ford. He has now long since settled into working seven days a week for ten hours a day, earning more than three times the median income in his industry in the USA – and he doesn’t miss the real contact with oil:
I like the challenge of diagnosing the problem of an engine that I can neither see, touch nor smell.
His entire work is done on a laptop, which he uses to write and talk to his clients and to exchange pictures and videos.
But he works a lot, does he want to change that? Apparently not, because even though working time takes up a good part of his life, he can still enjoy the rest of his time with his wife and son more than before, since he can decide for himself when and where he works.
In addition, he can now afford to slow down a bit – or step up his workload. His income can be easily scaled by taking on more or fewer orders – just as he wants.
A very negative opinion of home office has brought to light questions from US billionaire, SpaceX and Tesla owner Elon Musk. In an interview, he once expressed himself so grumpily about the modern form of working for many professional groups that it is almost surprising: Elon Musk considers home office not only unproductive, but also “morally reprehensible”.