My Auto Detailing Business Structure & How You Can Copy It!!!

hey guys in this video I really would just want to share with you my exact business model and really walk through some more deep business stuff kind of step by step that I think will be really helpful for you and in detailing this Tacoma this maintenance detail here I'm going to show you guys how simple you can really do this using one product and just a couple of tools so just to give you guys a little bit of context this Tacoma you see me detailing this is a maintenance client here super super clean already probably one of the cleaner vehicles that I have and just extremely easy to address now the only product that you're gonna see me use in this video is McGuire's all-purpose cleaner and just for you guys who are wondering McGuire's all-purpose cleaner is really the APC that I reserved I always dilute it ten to one rarely do I change that dilution it's really the all-purpose cleaner that I reserved for all my maintenance clients it's kind of like what I would consider just a very very mild cleaner that I can trust it's not gonna leave it's not caustics I'm gonna leave any like white marks or residue and it's not the most powerful all-purpose cleaner in the detailing world in my opinion when I'm dealing with really dirty trucks or something like that I'm gonna reach for the renegade citrus all-purpose cleaner but when I'm dealing with maintenance clients this is generally what I'm going to use in fact sometimes you can even dilute it heavier then tend to one something like twelve or fifteen to one especially with a vehicle that's this clean the tools that you're gonna see me using in this video is number one you're gonna see my classic non abrasive scrub pads that's that little blue pad these can be bought at like Kroger Walmart whatever you know you're like Walmart store is where you live you can also buy them off Amazon for like a dollar fifty I think like super super cheap still super cheap in the store and then the interior microfiber towels that I'm using here are just members mark brand it's actually these Sam's brand just they're their generic Sam's brand I love these microfiber towels for the interior I go through them like crazy i buy them in thirty six packs and they're just extremely useful really good cleaning towels specifically a good ratio as far as microfiber towels go with their makeup and then I'm using the detail the work stuff detailing brushes to get in all the crevices and then finally of course I've got my trusty VX 5000 steamer with me I don't go anywhere without it and I'm using that for all the hard-to-reach areas now I really want to break down here exactly how I built my detailing business and more or less kind of tell you guys a bit of a story of how I came to the conclusion that I now live in so just so you guys know I started my detailing business when I was 13 I actually asked my dad I was like hey Dad how can I make money and he said and I don't know why by the way I asked that to my dad you know it's not like my parents were money hungry people and I was thinking about it all the time but for whatever reason I think entrepreneurship is just sometimes in people's blood and so I just said dad how can I make money and he said well you can always make money doing what nobody else wants to do and I remember him telling me a story about his friend in college who made a lot of money detailing cars and I thought well who wants to clean their car and so that's where it actually all started and I started detailing cars for $20 a car not $20 an hour $20 a car I would print off flyers and business cards from the UPS store my dad would of course pay for him because he's good dad and I would go Hann about door-to-door knock on people's doors tell them what I was doing and I charge $20 and of course my detailing business was not nearly as detailed as it is today that was you know 10 years ago now but it was a detailing business nonetheless now over time somewhere around in high school I had built up my detailing business to several I mean really the best way to say it is just in the Greater Nashville area I was kind of known as the guy who details and had built up a pretty significant reputation by the time I was about 16 especially when I was 17 I'd say 17 is really like the turning point in my business and by turning-point what I mean is I just had too much business that was the point where I had to start turning people away and there's something really interesting that happened when that happened I I started to realize that I had this good problem on my hands where I actually needed to raise my prices because you have you just think about it in a basic sort of free-market economic sense because I had a large amount of people calling me I didn't need every person to say yes in fact I only needed a very small portion of those people to say yes to my prices and that way without having to hire a lot of employees I could in prease the amount of money I was making and so in the detailing business you kind of have this quandary of well how do I make more money and this probably extends to more than just the detailing business of course but number one I can get more customers or number two I can raise my prices you know those are basically the the two answers well if you're already working a fair amount there's only so many hours you can work in a day and so the answer to that problem or the solution I came to at that time when I was 17 especially when I was 18 actually and I had just started college I significantly raised my prices and that was the answer to that pricing question how do I start making more money because that was the question I was asking I was working a lot and I thought man unless I start hiring employees and getting vans and getting other people to do this and training people it's gonna be difficult to start growing so what can I do at least right now while I'm in school to start making a significant amount of more money at least significant enough to make a difference in my life to where it would it would matter and the answer that question was to raise my prices now of course to get to that point well basically what led me there was an overflow of customers and so this is the first point I want to make this is the business model that I chose or the business structure or sequence or process that I chose when I was about 17 18 I said listen if I'm gonna have a problem I want it to be too many customers not not enough it's kind of like money right you can kind of have two different bubbles of money you can have not enough or too much and you know I think you'd probably rather have the latter it's the same thing in business I would rather be saying no to people then having to be having to say yes to everyone out of some sort of desperation while of course it's not ever awesome to say no to somebody it's a lot better than having to say yes to everybody and so just take note of that as I kind of continue down this train of thought the first significant thing that happened was I had an influx of customers that was actually too much work for me to handle so I raised my prices and I continued to do that started making a much more significant amount of money especially when I was in college it was a lot of money I think for a college student especially running my own business it felt like a significant amount of money at the time plenty to live on at least and that being said I started doing some very simple things as far as like investing in my retirement and and some pretty simple you know made some pretty simple financial decisions that I thought hey this would set me up well in the future but as I kept going I still reached this plateau and what basically happened is I was like okay this is great I've got plenty of customers coming in and I've raised my prices to a significant enough amount to where hey this is making a difference in my life but I'm running into a new problem where yes I've reached a plateau that's much higher than it was before but even with that there are only so many hours in the day that I can work and so I've reached this plateau and while it's higher than before it's nonetheless still a plateau and when you're not growing you know that doesn't feel very good and so my thought process was hey this is the point where I'm gonna have to start hiring some employees and growing that way because the way I'm going to increase my income here I don't want to keep raising my prices because I think we can probably all agree depending on what area you live in you're going to reach a sort of point of diminishing return where you can raise your prices to a certain level but after that level you're gonna start experiencing like so many people saying no it's it's just outside of like the reasonable price range and so I wouldn't say that my prices are necessarily reasonable compared to other people in my area I'm certainly one of the most expensive probably but that being said there is still a price that I will not raise too because it just doesn't make sense where it's like hey nobody in their right mind is going to pay this amount of money for detailing and so I kind of reached at this point where I was saying you know I don't think it's wise to raise my price higher than what I'm at right now so that cannot be my solution the second time around so it's going to have to be employees and so I went through a process of interviewing people I had certain things that I had people do to figure out who they were gonna who I wanted to hire and how I wanted to hire them and I went through different employees I most of them were young most of them were either like college age but not in college or in college but still had a significant amount of time and so some of them were a little younger a little older same age as me and basically you know what I ran into was eight raining problem what ended up happening was the difficulty I found was trying to train guys who looked at this job as more of something as a turnaround job that was not going to be something they did for significant amount of time so it took a significant amount of time to train them and to prepare them for the job they were going to do and yet it seemed like when that training was over they were already moving on and so that didn't feel sustainable to me at least at that point in my life either it just didn't make sense for me to do and so I just really thought about this problem and thought hey I'm gonna need to get creative with this this was about the time I started the online side of my business because I love to teach and education is is probably my passion even more than detailing is so I love detailing but I love teaching and education and all that sort of stuff even more that's part of why I'm creating this online course because it's really exciting I think to see the way education is moving online and how people of all different kinds all different kinds of people have access to education that just didn't have access to education back in you know 10 20 years ago it's just a really cool trend that I want to be a part of but that being said that's kind of beside the point I started thinking about this thing with the employees hey this isn't really working out it's not something that I have a ton of time to train people on heck I'm in I'm in school I'm in school like 15 hours what is it I was taking 15 hours that semester I remember so you know I had several hours of classes every day and so the other the only other solution I really came to was I need to add more hours in the day because if I could if I could detail one or two more vehicles in the day I could make a lot more money without necessarily having to raise my prices and even so if I hired one two three employees I would only get through one or two more vehicles a day anyways you know that one or two employees they're not going to speed me up so significantly that we get through ten cars and so I thought man how do I add hours to the day well obviously I can't add hours but I can cut down on the time that any given vehicle is taking me and by the way guys I'm just kind of walking through my thought process here of this likes this this several years of what this looked like but if you like this information smash the like button below this video cuz heck this is all free information there was a time where people couldn't get education like this and it's totally free so smashing the like button is free too so if you like this video just hit the like button it'll help this video get out to more Detailers who might need this information so all of that being said I thought hey I'm gonna need to start cracking down on the amount of time I am taking in order to get these details done if I can move cars a little bit faster than I am which is difficult for me because I'm totally OCD and I'm a perfectionist and I want to make sure it looks incredible and hold my reputation I started thinking hey I've got some clients that I see on a regular basis and these clients take virtually no time it's not a logarithmic regression if you think about if you think about this mathematically when a vehicle is already clean and I see it on our on a regular basis on a weekly you know bi-weekly monthly basis let's say the average sedan takes me four hours the maintenance client doesn't take me you know half that time it takes me it reduces exponentially you know it'll take a quarter of that time it'll take less than a quarter it'll take 45 minutes of that original four hours and so it's kind of a logarithmic reduction it doesn't our I'm sorry it's like an exponential reduction it doesn't it doesn't reduce in any sort of steady pace which is actually the beauty of it it's kind of like compound interest in Reverse because you're trying to save time and so I thought man if I could structure my business in a way where I basically only targeted this type of clientele and this became one hundred percent of my business I could figure out a monthly minimum that I want my business to do in a revenue sense and make sure that I'm hitting that every single month because I can extrapolate out based on the maintenance clients that I already have scheduled what that is going to produce and then anything on top of that that I want to take in my detailing business with new customers that I'm getting like five ten twenty calls a day that's gonna be icing on the cake and that can be revenue that really exponentially increases the business I'm doing because I can reinvest all of that I mean I can do all different sorts of stuff with that virtually extra business revenue on top of really that increase that the maintenance clients would bring and so I began this like journey of making this maintenance client thing my number one priority this was like everything to me I did not compromise in this area and I got a lot of advice from a lot of people that talked about getting employees and all this sort of stuff and well that is totally a legitimate route to take that is just not the route that I wanted to take just because long term I knew where I wanted to be in businesses and and different things that I was doing and I didn't want to focus a ton of time training employees in the detailing side of things and so this is what I call the maintenance client heaven because it totally revolutionized the way I did business I could actually not only stop having to take a bunch of calls and scheduling things and taking all of the time that it takes to educate new customers communicate with them properly on the front and build the the reputation with them schedule them out I had all of these things scheduled on the front end with clients that took no time because they were regular clients the details themselves took no time and it freed me up not only was I making more money than than I was at any other point in my detailing business but it freed me up to focus my time in all other sorts of areas in my detailing business and do things my way instead of being pigeon held to these customers that were new and that wanted you know deals and all this sort of stuff because I had to say yes because once again in the detailing business most people build detailing businesses where they're just taking new clients all the time and there's nothing wrong with that but if you ever take a business class like in college one of the first things they're going to tell you is it's always better it's always less expensive to do more business with a customer that already exists than it is to go out and acquire a new customer this is particularly true in the kind of context that I'm talking about right now and what was really amazing this I started seeing this pattern and this kind of phenomenon start to like blossom in my business this power of compounding that I keep referring to in some sense I felt like I would be burdening people by sort of selling them on a maintenance program because in my head at least at the time when I was about when I really started doing this was when I was 18 and so when I was about 17 I had thought about this a lot but when I was 18 is really when I started implementing it before I started implementing this this really heightened maintenance detail strategy and business structure my thought process was something like this most people just want one detail they don't want anything regular they're just calling me to do a one-and-done thing and trying to sell them on more than what they're asking for is just gonna be kind of burdensome and I'm not exactly sure how to do it I'm not exactly sure how to even word what this is exactly and I just don't think a lot of people are going to want it I found that the exact opposite thing was true and I think this I I don't have any like empirical data to back this up so like I've not run an experiment but I can just say I've trained a lot of Auto Detailers into starting their business particularly in this area and of course I'm creating this online course right now and so I'm thinking through all of these things you know they're kind of top of mind for me but my point is most Detailers build detailing businesses around constantly getting new customers and it legitimately does not make sense like I mean I'm just putting it all on the table here like it does not make sense and you would not apply that same logic to virtually any other business one of the most powerful things in the sort of business world is getting a group of customers together that bought from you and creating a sort of ever-increasing bowl of customers and doing business with them in different creative innovative ways that's further going to add value to their lives more and more and or and in that group or that bowl of people who have already done business with you is where the real potential is well the same is true of the auto detailing world and so there's all these details that are Pigeon holding themselves to basically kind of what I would just call like this place of detailing desperation where you're completely dependent on new customers all the time and so you feel obligated to say yes I found that a ton of people are super interested in the maintenance detail client thing and when I built up a critical mass of detailing maintenance detailing clients the word got around to where literally when people call me now they are asking to get on a maintenance list they're not asking me to do a one-time detail it's like it's almost hilarious for me to think about because there is a time when I felt like man I'm gonna really be annoying people and burdening people if I go down this road of trying to sell them a maintenance detailing sort of thing and what ended up happening is I created these detailing these maintenance detail packages and sometimes I created them to very specific people because they had very specific types of vehicles but like to give you an example I had a client who had two or I have a client actually but I don't detail for him anymore just because of all the other things going on in my business right now they're taking my time but he had two different Jaguars a white Jaguar and a black one they're both just sedans and he kept the black one for the weekend and the white one for the daily driver I think I mentioned this before but I had a I had a customer call me one time who I had never detailed for before and he said hey Luke I got your number from your you know from googling you which by the way in the course I teach all of this stuff and I'm going to teach all of this stuff like how do you get people to find you without you even trying like this is what ends up happening when you build a critical mass of stuff online it's a very very powerful thing and still it's more possible now than ever especially in the detailing world because you have all these other Detailers handing out business cards and flyers like it's 1989 it's like we're on the internet now why are we handing out business cards this doesn't make sense to me but anyway that being said this guy me and said hey listen I've got a pathfinder I Drive on a daily basis I've got a BMW sedan that I keep in the garage I've got a what was the big Ford f-150 big 4x4 truck and then I've got a there was one more Oh a Jeep just a two-door Jeep Wrangler and he had all four of those cars he worked for some sort of international pharmaceutical company I can't remember exactly what it was but I remember he was out of the country a lot actually he gave me the code to his garage and he had somebody detailing for him before that guy got too busy said he couldn't take the work so this guy called me and said can you take the work I said absolutely and I detailed one of those four cars every single week so every month all four of them were done but I just chose a different one to detail every week and almost probably 80% of the time he wasn't even there and not to mention I built actually a close friendship or a close not close but a a good business relationship with him and sort of friendship with him as I did with basically all of my clients and this is the next thing I wanted to get to I don't know of any better business to start in many ways for a young guy who wants to get into entrepreneurship wants to get into stuff you know with something I found is that we kind of live in like a day and age where social media because of the nature of social media people are getting advertisements all the time that's like start an online business start this business start this business and while all of those things I think are legitimate businesses and they work the question is where do you start where do you start with all of this well I think the most logical and like reasonable answer to that question is you start where you can create cash flow today because to start a lot of these other businesses requires cash it requires income it requires steady income it requires you know credit it requires a lot of these things that you need to build up over a certain period of time and detailing just works as this like this beautiful answer to like that question of how do I start it's like you could create cash flow with detailing today but the point I'm getting at is the people that I have been introduced to through my detailing business has been absolutely invaluable maintenance clients strategy that I'm talking about that became my complete business structure the only thing I focused on because it was that powerful this maintenance client strategy attracted a very specific type of person and those specific types of people are who I became close friends with over time as I service their cars and then became friends with their friends and then friends with their friends and it became this incredible network of really incredible people because in a lot of ways people who are great business people are doing great things they care about the details of their life like their cars a lot of times they own really nice cars and they look at their vehicles as investments and so this kind of goes back to the point I was making in that this is so viable it's so real it's so possible and how do you do it you do it one by one by getting one maintenance client at a time but also by understanding fundamentally that this person exists and there's a lot of them what I mean is the maintenance client that you're looking for that person is out there he or she is out there they are looking for your services and they want to see you on a regular basis because they look at their vehicle as an investment or you know what I had several just moms who are on my maintenance detail list who they had kids and they were just like you know I just find a lot of peace in driving a clean car and just mcmanus when I get into a clean car just feel really good and while their cars were a little bit dirtier than my other maintenance clients when I saw them once a month it was extremely easy to deal with because the dirt hadn't had time to set or anything like that still super simple but a lot of women who just had different who had a lot of kids were like hey I just want my car to be clean regularly and I know if I don't get it done regularly I'll never do it and my kids are gonna destroy it I had maintenance clients of all different shapes sizes people you know in different places with different ages just everything you could possibly think of all of that being said guys I just wanted to give you a little bit of insight into the kind of what my story looked like in Auto Detailing and why I think this type of business structure is so viable and at the end of the day guys just so powerful it's so so powerful this is where you get your time back and you can begin to exponentially increase what your business is doing now for those of you who are interested in what I'm doing here yes I gave you a little bit of the product list on the front end but I wanted to talk a little bit about the upholstery that I'm cleaning here because while this is a maintenance detail the vehicle is in fantastic condition you do get to a point where certain areas of the car need to be addressed as a sort of one-time thing you're kind of hitting the reset button and then you can just maintain them from there in this case it was time to address the upholstery but you can actually see how I'm not about addressing the upholstery as I would in some sort of like intense way this is actually one of the easiest ways to clean upholstery in my opinion I'm simply using the Maguire's APC diluted ten to one using my white really soft drill brush which I believe are out of stock again on Amazon disappointing I know nonetheless plenty of options on Amazon they don't have the detail or the care put into him but these do of course there was a lot of time put into these but that being said the white soft soft stiffness drill brush is what I'm using here and then I'm very simply mopping it up with a microfiber towel I will tell you when you're dealing with this kind of upholstery that's sort of what I call the new upholstery it's not your traditional fabric or fabric upholstery that you would find in like 2000 like 5 and previous 2004 in previous and before vehicles that had car upholstery that is actually in my opinion a lot more a lot easier to clean it's a bit more traditional fabric this kind of newer upholstery that all these car manufacturers are putting into vehicles and particularly Toyota actually like Camry is Corollas Tacomas they all kind of have the same entry level of whole street fabric this is a bit harder to clean however in this particular scenario because it's not too dirty I can do it pretty simply like this but in many ways this stuff actually needs to be extra acted I will say however it is much easier to experience that kind of wicking effect on this particular type of fabric than it is on others and so I will warn you just to be careful not to introduce too much liquid especially when the seats are already fairly clean now guys I'm gonna go ahead and let you sit back relax I'm gonna stop talking we'll put a little bit of music on you can enjoy the rest of the detail but stick around till the end of course as always if you want to check out any of the tools or the products that I'm using here that you see in the video i hook up links to all of the products that i use in a really organized fashion below in the youtube description box so you can just click that show more button and you'll see links to all of this stuff as always if you are new to the wilson auto detailing community and you've not yet subscribed but you like the information you're getting then hit the subscribe button because i don't know why you wouldn't YouTube's free right it's like what do you have to lose hit the subscribe button and tap the bell icon so you get notified when I publish videos in the future guys thank you so much for watching and as always from Luke here at Wilson Auto Detailing sit back relax enjoy the rest of the detail keep working hard and I will see you guys in the next video [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Wilson Auto Detailing

Views: 290,154

Keywords: wilson auto detailing, dirty car detailing, dirty cleaning, filthy car detailing, complete dirty detail, car cleaning, car detailing, interior car cleaning, interior car detailing, car interior cleaning, auto detailing, interior cleaning, deep clean truck, deep cleaning truck, detailing truck, dirty work truck, truck interior clean, dirty truck detail, dirty truck, truck wash, dirty truck cleaning, dirty farm truck, chevy silverado, muddy farm truck, satisfying

Id: ORJht0m5acY

Length: 35min 39sec (2139 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 19 2020