Chris Pyle worked at Ford for a long time, now he is his own boss as a car mechanic and earns more than double – working from home.
What does the mechanic do from home? Chris Pyle is a 45-year-old American who worked for years as a car mechanic at Ford. But one day he quit his job to do the same thing as before from home: repairing cars. However, now he lets his customers work on their own cars – through an online support platform called JustAnswer.
He helps people solve all kinds of problems with diesel and gasoline vehicles and is doing quite well, now earning about 160,000 euros a year – more than double what he earned before at Ford. CNBC was the first to report on Chris Pyle’s new life.
A lot of work, but self-determined
How did Chris Pyle achieve this? In 2006, he was still working at Ford in a workshop when he needed help with a specific problem with a transmission. He found advice on the above website 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 month, his side income doubled and it continued to rise. A few years later, he quit his main job when he was making more with JustAnswers than his approximate 70,000 euros at Ford. By now, he has long been working a schedule of seven days a week for ten hours each 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 cannot see, touch, or smell.
His entire work operates through a laptop with which he writes, speaks, and exchanges images and videos with his customers.
But does he work a lot? Does he want to change that? Apparently not, because even though work takes up a good portion of his life, he can still enjoy the rest with his wife and son more than before, as he can decide when and where he works.
Moreover, he can now afford to scale back a bit – or ramp up. His income can simply be scaled by taking on more or fewer assignments – just as he currently desires.
A very negative opinion about remote work has surfaced from US billionaire, SpaceX and Tesla owner Elon Musk. He once expressed himself quite grumpily in an interview about the modern form of working for many professions that it’s almost surprising: Elon Musk considers remote work not only unproductive but also “morally reprehensible”.
