Trying to start a mobile detail business need opinions

[215Detailing]

Yeah I was looking at the little green machine. There was also a bissle that was dedicated to automotive that claims to get hotter that I was looking at too but wasn't sure if it worked good enough. Amazon reviews are so hit and miss I can never take them seriously so im glad you clarified that for me.

So heres how I plan to market my self. I spent a majority of yesterday creating a flyer. My parents company has one of those giant printers so I was planning on printing 200 or so flyers. Taking those flyers to the heavily populated locations around here ie. mall, golf course, casinos and such on a fri and sat and put my flyers in the windows of cars with a business card attached. Most of them will be tossed but I figure all I need is 1 or 2 people from those 200 flyers and let word of mouth be my form of marketing.

How I plan on taking a mobile detailing company is start out small working by my self. Once I start seeing money ill put it back into my company till I have everything I need to run efficiently. After I gain enough work that id need to hire some one then I personally would try expanding to things other then cars ie boats, trailers, small aircraft, rv's and everything in between.

One thing that I have over here that I think will help me is once a year we have this event called hot august nights where pretty much the entire county erupts into a car show. Its actually pretty crazy. I figured Id set up a booth there and just do a full paint correction on one of my family members cars or my own just so I can reach out to those nice cars. Which is what I ultimately want to do as my niche is do those high end cars.

Another thing we have a ton of out here are semi trucks and horse trailers and salted roads.

As I said in the beginning there are only 2 crediable guys doing this out here and its a big area. I ultimately want to dominate the area and hope that 10-15 years from now I have the residual income to have a fleet of mobile detailing rigs a few guys working for me and a fixed location where I can do the high end jobs.

Lol im just thinking out loud only time will tell I can dream cant I lol.

Not sure if this may help some places leaving flyers is prohibited, I would either speak to management at golf course, see If I could detail their vehicle or a golf cart or members car for free to draw in new clientele, and at the car event I would do a 50/50 car detail so that the detailed (corrected) side could show may capabilities

[HUMP DIESEL]

Hump any photos of your set up?
see you stated not too many DETAILS, More wash & wax any thoughts or input for this post = http://www.autogeekonline.net/forum/...explained.html

When you are out mobile, unless the customer has a really nice garage, doing paint correction can be tough. I live in the south, so in the summer months, it can get very hot. I have a contractor grade EZ-UP that I could park a Hummer under that I would carry to jobs where I have more than one vehicle to clean. Most of my work was maintenance or wash and wax (express details). I have pulled up to a school in my area and had 15 cars to wash. I had two guys that I had on payroll and we basically set up an assembly line. I also had clients that lived outside of the city in rural areas that had numerous vehicles where I would just go to their house and set up and clean everything they had. Sometimes it was 4 vehicles, sometimes that included the owners RV or boat. I would not shy away from cleaning anything. I even had one client that would come into town from Kentucky that had a full semi race car hauler that I would clean.
Reading your other post about the car show nights, you could set up there and offer express details and I bet you could do well. I always tried to limit my amount of options when mobile, and use it more as a convenience wash service to the customer. I got a lot of business toward the latter part of the week as people wanted their car clean for the weekend.

HUMP