Questions for Professional Detailer Businesses

[smriddlert]

Hello everyone!

I've been on here for several years watching and learning. It's safe to say I'm not nearly as good as most of you, but I'm glad to be learning with the best.

I've been thinking about starting a detailing business (that is, a legit corporation). Something small and home-based. But forming a corporation is cheap (only a couple hundred) and offers protection and a professional appearance.

So a few questions, and I think this is one thing I've yet to actually completely understand in all my years trying to learn from this forum. How do you professional detailing businesses structure your pricing? I'm located in New York, so if you're in New York, I can understand how answering these questions would be conflicting, so please feel free to sit this question out of your local to the Long Island (New York) area.

Do you offer an "a la carte" kind'of setup? IE Wet Sanding is one price, compounding is another price, waxing or LSP is an additional price etc? Or do you offer packages? The more I ponder this, the more I ask myself if it's possible to make "real" money in this business, because I feel like we're going to have to charge somewhere in the neighborhood of $50-75/hr and detailing takes MANY hours.

Do you charge by the panel?
What are some of the going rates for, say a correction on an entire car, or maybe a Ceramic Pro treatment?
Anything else I need to know?

I'll probably add more questions as I come up with them.

[sudsmobile]

I will give you my thoughts, which may or may not be applicable to your situation.

You will not command the highest price at first. If you do, consider yourself extremely lucky. You will also not get the plum buffing and polishing jobs at first. Again, if you do, congrats to you. You have to pay your dues. When I opened up, I took every job from every person that called. Literally did not turn a job down. Some were great, some I got beat to hell on. For the first few months, we were averaging about $40/hour as two man team, about $30/hour when I was alone. I did it to build my name and my clientele.

Slowly I inched my pricing up every few months. We also improved our skills and started to realize that we were going to have to turn little jobs into big jobs using salesmanship. As of today, I get about $50-55/hour when I'm alone and $75-80/hour with my son as a two man team. Our average ticket has gone from the $70 range when we first started to around $150-160 per job.

I'm busy enough now where I still quote jobs I know will be ####, but I quote them high enough where it's worth my time. I don't do stupid stuff like quoting somebody $500 for an interior detail, but I quote them higher than normal.

Oddly enough we don't do many "washes" anymore. I did two basic washes last week.

Now, it sounds like you're not mobile, which is slightly different than our model, but business is business. I don't know if you've ever started a business before, but frankly go into it knowing that most small businesses fail and the ones that don't usually take a while to become profitable. You'll be grinding your ass off to pay the bills at first. Again, if you start up and day one you're successful without doing much except hanging a shingle, congrats to you.

As for pricing, really only you can set your pricing. In my area, people are "trades" rich, not investment banking rich. They're hard working people that bust their ass and own their own business and probably make a couple hundred grand a year. They're not up for $800 details or $1500 ceramic coatings. So knowing your customers is important, knowing how much is too much, knowing how much expendable income they have for car maintenance and knowing how much your competition is charging.

I will offer you one last bit of advice. As long as you're close, people don't really care about price as much as most people think. People that have a household income of $250k-300k or more don't give a #### about $10 in either direction (saving it or spending it). Here's what people like that care about. They like professionalism. They like it when you answer the phone when they call. They like it when you deliver what you promise for the agreed upon price. They like it when you're personable. They like it when you're well groomed. If you give people those things, they're not going to care about a few extra dollars. It's the reason why people will take their cars to big box stores for tires and brakes instead of the little hole in the wall auto repair shop that's probably cheaper and better.

Good luck to you.

[Sonic Pilot]

Hey sudsmobile, that was a GREAT response! A lot of very practical advice. Nicely done sir!

[Calendyr]

Welcome to the forum.

The way you structure your prices will depend on what your expenses are and profit margins you are willing to make. I will explain to you how I do it, but your need to find a way to do it that fits your situation and market.

So for me, as a mobile detailer, I have chosen not to take any job that pays less than 100 CAN$. Under that, it's a waste of my time and I would rather stay home.

I work mostly with packages because trying to build a package for the client (doing it a-la-carte) over the phone is a complicated and most people have no idea what they want or even need. If you are in a fixed location, I would do it differently. I would inspect the vehicule with the client and offer them 3 options: What is needed to get the car as perfect as you can make it, what you recommend as a great value, and a minimum that should be done. This way the person is deciding between what to do as opposed to choosing between doing it or not.

As for pricing, the way I do it is I calculate how long each task takes, and how much it costs productwise. A task could be something like cleaning windows, or shampoo of the removable mats, or even doing a detail wash of the car. You need to break down every task to both time and cost and put it all in a spreadsheet. With that data in hand, you can form packages and calculate their cost. You will need to decide an hourly rate for the work. I suggest you start with 40$ per hour, but that is up to you.

Once you have all that, you need to add fixed expenses costs. For me that is mosly gas and commute time. For you it might be rent, electricity, water, that sort of things. You need to add up all these costs and divide them in a way that makes sense to add to the prices you charge.

Finally, you need to adjust your packages based on vehicle size. I have 3 prices for each of my packages : Small vehicles (2 door sedans and smaller), medium sized vehicles (4 door sedans, small crossovers, small SUVs with 2 rows of seats) and large vehicles (Minivans, large SUVs with 3 rows of seats, pickups). I just multiply my base rate by 1.2 for medium size and 1.5 for large size.

If you decide to have a fixed location, make sure to prepare a lot of charts and graphs to show the work flow while you talk options. People are often visual and it's easier to understand if they can see what you are talking about. The standard workflow graph showing washing - Decontamination - Wetsanding - Paint correction (compounding) - Polishing - Protection would probably be your best tool. You can talk about each step with the client and explain why they should or should not do that step. Then you can build the packages and give them a price. Otherwise, you can do what I do and have packages and point them to which would be best, most logical or cheapest.

Hope this helps

Good luck, it's an exciting business, hope you find joy doing it.

[sudsmobile]

Nice post. I will disagree with one thing though. No customer is "not worth your time." Because you don't know if that $50 wash is a one off or is going to turn into something that is long term beneficial to your company. You can't possible know that. It's extremely short sighted. It's the same way mobile businesses here trade a $200 job today for a $100 job already booked with no consideration for the future.

As an example. I had a guy book a wash with me for his new Kia Stinger. I tried to upsell him wax, polishing, etc. Nope, he just wanted the wash. I went and did it and did a really nice job for him. The guy is a youngish guy that works at a local tire store. He lives with his brother. I have washed and waxed the brother's cars (new Lexus IS F Sport, new BMW 328) probably 20 times. I've also sold about $1000 worth of additional jobs on the block they live on. We were just there yesterday doing both cars and sold another job across the street. We have like 7 customers on this street of maybe 40 houses. You just don't arbitrarily turn work away because that one job is not worth your time.

[sudsmobile]

And you CERTAINLY don't do it when you're a new business just starting out.

[Dan Tran]

$100 dollars is better than $0 when starting out.

To coincide with something Suds said:

Today I had an interior scheduled for $180. And I arrived and my client wanted a wash n’ wax. So I ended walking away with $260.

Bottom line? Don’t turn jobs down right away. Plus you’ll gain experience faster.

In literally the past two weeks alone, I had four dog hair cars. Even though I didn’t want to, I made sure when taking the job to be compensated appropriately.



(Sorry it was SUPER late when I finished, so no pictures). Also these jobs are good to take because I am getting faster at these types of jobs and anxiety decreases less and less.

Anyway, when I first started I decided to start, I decided to offer single services and packages. As for add-on services, the only thing I really advertise for is to upgrade protection to ceramic coatings. I’ve never done such things as a headlight restoration to anyone’s car except of my own. I can do it but, my clientele tend to have newer cars that don’t need thing.

When people ask for a lower price, I don’t give a lower price. But rather use some add-on services as a way to build extra value.

I had a woman recently agree to a package because she was looking to sell the car. I quoted her $260. She paid me $300. So I tossed in an engine bay cosmetic detail. Took like 15 mins extra.

I used to average $50/hour living in mass, but since moving to Maine I decided to lower my average to at-least $40/hour (since two weeks ago) because I feel that as a mobile service, overhead is not high anyways. Plus like I said, I’d rather make something then nothing. I also felt like people are not fighting my prices as much as all since doing that.

I’m still on the higher side, but sales gradually increased alone.

I used to prefer Credit Card transaction, but lately I tell people cask or check. On top of that, the tips have been more consistent as well-at least in my area this works.

It’s very possible to make a great living doing this.
Don’t worry about competition. Find something that they all have in common that lacks and find a a way to blow it out of the water.

For example, I blow a lot of my competition out of the water when it comes to my google reviews. It didn’t happen over night, but it helps a lot now.

Most people who call me don’t bother looking at my website. They just trust the five star reviews—sometimes they don’t read them.

Anyway, sorry for being all over the place, but I hope this helps a bit.


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[WindyCity]

Nice post. I will disagree with one thing though. No customer is "not worth your time." Because you don't know if that $50 wash is a one off or is going to turn into something that is long term beneficial to your company. You can't possible know that.

I agree with this, I had a lot of success with my Economy wash or “express detail” consisting of a basic wash, spray wax, interior vacuum, wipe the dash and console and clean the windows. Make a quick few bucks and start building up your customer base and referrals

most people are used to seeing carwashes that offer express details or something like that so it’s nice to offer something similar to start getting a loyal customer base while being competing and offering
Customers convenience of not taking it to a big shop



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[Calendyr]

The way I see it, if you get customers with cheap services, they might become regular customers but they will still want cheap services when they call you. And the references you will get from them will want cheap services too because they will call you saying: "Hey you washed Joe's car for 50$ and he was super happy, I want the same".

Let's say I took a 50$ job. I have to drive there and back, that is a 1 hour to 1.5 hour commute for me on 90% of my jobs. Then I have to setup, takes me about 10 minutes. Do the detail, so let's say an hour for a super quick job like that. Then store my stuff and other 10 minutes. Talk to the client when I get there to have them sign the order form, get payment when I am done, about 15 minutes total. So that's 2h35 to make 50$, and I will have spent about 5-10$ in gas, and about 5$ in products. Not counting the wear on the truck, that is about 20$ in cost so 30$ gross profit of about 11.75$ per hour. As I said, not worth my time. If this was the only money I could do, ok. But I did not come into this business from being unemployed. I was working at a 25$ per hour job. So if I was gonna cut down my work time at my job it had to pay at least as much in my business.

This summer I ramped up facebook advertizing and was crazy busy for a while. Was doing 6 days weeks. Average job revenue is around 400$. If I was offering washes, I would have to turn down a lot of those jobs. I would rather do only 1 600$ job during the week than do 12 50$ ones. The rest of the time, I can either enjoy life or work somewhere else if I choose to. If you go into business, hopefully you do it because you want to make a good income, not work minimum wage. And washes are simply not lucrative even if you charge 50$ for them. The other issues is, at 50$ people are gonna expect a lot, because hand wash cars washes do it for 19$ around here. I was approached to do car washes at the local marina this spring. The guy wanted me to do it for 20$ per car including a vacuum, wipedown and window cleaning. I gave him a counter offer that was about twice that. Lowest package was 25$ with no interior work at all, and all he wanted for about 40$. His response was we will have to talk about those extreme prices when we meet. So I just told him flat out I wasn't interested.

So it's really up to you. Sure you can decide not to turn down work and do everything from basic wash to extreme detailing, but if you want to make good money, it's in the midrange to high end stuff that it's worth it. Now a days I do almost nothing but ceramic coating and full details. My average job pays about 50-60$ per hour. I am happy with that even when it slows down and I only work 2 days a week. Heck, 2 days of work usually is about 1000$ for me, I have no problem with that.

[sudsmobile]

You use really extreme examples. LOL It apparently works for you and your extreme example of being an hour away from every customer. This is Facebook versus Google all over again. You'll never convince me, or probably anybody else that it's a good idea for a new business to turn down work and just sit around waiting for the high dollar jobs to roll in.

Just to clarify something, I don't go do a $50 job and come home. If I get somebody that wants a low priced job, I find out where they're at and I schedule around jobs I have in the area. If I don't have anything on the schedule around them, I will tell them I'm booked until such and such a date, put them on the schedule when they want and then build more jobs on that day around them.

I'll give you an example, and I'm sure this more directly relates to most mobile detailers in the world. Saturday, I had five jobs. The first job was 5 minutes from my house. The second job was 7 minutes from the that. The third job was 20 minutes drive across town. The 4th job was two blocks from the 3rd. The last job of the day was back towards my house. Took me 15 minutes to get there and 10 minutes to get home after we were done. Total drive time for the day appears to be right around an hour. I would guess this is a lot more typical for the average mobile detailer.

Everybody wants to make good money. I don't think anybody goes into business with the idea of failing. I will say this to a new business. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. One high end basket. Coatings are great. One steps and polishing are great. But a good business builds itself with a large customer base. The way you build a large customer base is to offer a variety of services at different price points. After you coat or polish a car, what's left? Maintenance washes for a while? New customers for your high end services have to come from somewhere. Doesn't it make a lot more sense that those customers come from your already large base of existing customers? I recently got a coating job from an existing customer that was a once in a while wash (or wash and wax). She is the next door neighbor to another regular customer. I would schedule them together on the same day. She recently bought a new car and the first thing we talked about was coating it. She did it and now she's back to a regular wash and coating topper customer. They tried to sell her a coating at the dealership but she immediately thought of my business instead.