Bill: “I’ve been thinking about starting a detailing business. There’s not much competition. I’ve already checked around.”
Will: “I’ve been thinking about starting a business too but don’t know what to do. We should team up together.”
And thus, a detailing business was born with two partners.
I’m sure this relates to some readers.
It’s exciting when you’re sitting in a room or at a coffee shop thinking about the possibilities, opportunities, and freedom that will come with running your own operation.
You have your pen and paper out and start running some basic numbers on your potential earnings…
“If we do at least 25 cars a week, at $100, that’s going to be $2,500 per week. If we do that all year long, we can bring in $120,000 and split it 50/50. This is going to be amazing!”
Unfortunately, the next 3 to 6 months is the cold reality with only a handful of phone calls and even fewer details performed.
Everyone’s story is going to be different. Some may workout. Some may be fantastic. A big chunk of others will not be so well.
You can take the same story with Bill and Jill and apply it to a solo detailer. “If I can detail at least 15 cars a week, which is 2.5 cars a day, and charge at least $100 on each car, I can make $1,500 a week. That’s not bad!”
Planning a business, whether it be by yourself or with a partner, is ALWAYS exciting when you’re writing numbers down and thinking of what the future can hold.
In this article, I’m going to go in-depth on whether or not you should have a partner (or at least a helper) in your detailing business.
This is going to apply to those that currently have a business or those that are thinking of starting one!
[bonus]IMPORTANT: This article is heavily focused on setting goals in your business. You can [link]download the exact methods I use to set goals[/link] in life and business.[/bonus]
Why most people stay solo
Let’s start off with why, in my opinion, most people start off as a one man show…
I think the bigger picture is you can keep more money if you’re working by yourself. If you can charge a higher hourly rate AND get more cars to work on, it’s the win-win situation.
If you work 40 hours a week and make an hourly rate of $35/hour, that’s $1,400/week. If you can raise your rates to reach $45/hour and still work 40 hours/week, then you can now make $1,800/week.
And sometimes, the workload is going to be heavier on some days and weeks. Which to us, is great. The more customers, the more cars to detail, the more money to make.
Sure, you might be pulling 10 to 16 hour shifts throughout the week, but it’s well-worth it.
Win!
The other reason you may stay solo is you simply don’t have the demand to justify bringing on a helper. Perhaps you’re only doing this on the weekend or you’re simply not busy throughout the week.
That’s okay. There’s no need to bring someone on board to help or to be a partner with you if the work is simply not there.
If that’s the case, you should have more time to learn how to market and sell your services. Use that time available to improve your efficiency and set yourself up for success.
Lastly, it maybe that you’ve been burned in the past by hiring someone to help you.
It’s HARD finding the right person to help you or to become your partner. There’s no doubt about that.
Because this is your passion and your business. You pour your blood, sweat, and tears everyday to make sure every customer gets the best detail.
You feel as if you are the one with the careful eye and no one else comes relatively close to your level of passion and skill.
And you know what, you are probably correct. No one will ever match up to your standards. And you’ll feed yourself this thought for a very long time.
You may want a helper, maybe the work is getting overbearing, but you simply can’t trust someone else to work on your behalf and you definitely don’t have the time to go through the hassle of finding someone.
We’ll cover this a bit more later down the article…
What is your end goal?
Before you begin to write down how much you’re going to make, before you think about starting a business or starting a business with your friend/partner, you first need to have a crystal clear vision on your end goal.
IMPORTANT: Whenever you’re setting any type of goal, whether it be for business or personal, you always have to start with the goal in mind and work backwards to figure out how to get there.
This can take a while. You should take some time and put serious consideration into this. Developing your crystal clear goal is what’s going to define the actions and decisions you make on a daily basis.
For instance, take these two end goals:
- I want to start a part-time detailing business to make an extra $1,000/month working on the weekends to save up for my new-born baby
- I want to leave my full-time job to have a high-volume detail shop that makes $12,000/month
Although both want to start a business, they will travel completely different paths to get to their end goal.
So what is it that you want to get out of a detailing business? Ask yourself various questions to get your mind thinking:
- How much money do I want to make?
- What do I have to do to get there?
- What obstacles am I going to face?
- How long will it take me to get to my goal?
- Who will help me when times get stuff?
- How much time do I have to get to my goal?
- Is my goal realistic? Is it achievable in X time frame?
These are important questions and it has a lot to due on whether or not you’ll want to have a helper or have partner in your business.
Let’s look at example number one that I mentioned above;
I want to start a part-time detailing business to make an extra $1,000/month working on the weekends to save up for my new-born baby
If he only wants to work on the weekends, let’s say Saturday for 8 hours, then he has to make $1,000 within 32 hours (4 Saturdays/month). Which is about $32/hour, which is very achievable!
He can offer a variety of services to get an average ticket sale of $250. And since it’s such a low number of customers per month, he can keep his expenses very low while reaching his goal.
Now let’s move on to the next example:
I want to leave my full-time job to have a high-volume detail shop that makes $12,000/month
This end goal will require much more thought process into it since he’s thinking at a much larger scale.
He’ll need to figure out how to implement systems and processes, how to hire a manager, how to handle payroll, taxes, etc….
If you would apply the first example mentality to this scenario, it most likely won’t turn out well because it requires such a different level of thinking.
There is no right or wrong answer here. No one can tell you your goal is wrong or right.
It’s just about developing the proper game plan to get you there in a timely manner.
Your goal and actions can always change throughout the process. Don’t think just because you said you wanted to a part-time business with no employees doesn’t mean you have to stick to it.
It’s okay to adapt your goals and actions as you go along.
Okay, now that we have that out of the way…
Should you start with a partner or a helper?
This is what I mean by partner and helper:
- Partner: Owns a percentage of the company and is “in it to win it” with you
- Helper: Basically an employee or someone that helps you out when you need it
Keep in mind, I’m talking high level as everyone’s scenario is going to be much different than what I can write about. So read and adapt to your circumstances.
(also keep in mind everything I said about having a clear end goal)
If you’re starting a business with a partner
I always recommend if you’re going to start a detailing business, you need to gain traction quickly. You should:
- Contact all your friends and family members and detail their cars
- Charge a highly discounted rate
- Make them leave you a review on Google and Yelp
- Tell them to tell all their friends and family members about your business
Let’s say if you’re by yourself and detail 10 cars, at an average time of 4.5 hours, and charge $100, you’ll have:
- 45 hours of detailing
- 10 online reviews
- $1,000 in revenue
- A lot of before and after photos and videos
If you start off with a partner that can also bring in those same numbers on their end, then you’ll simply double all the numbers above but in less time:
- 90 hours of detailing (45 hours each)
- 20 online reviews
- $2,000 in revenue
- Even more before and after photos
Now that’s just for early traction. There’s also a lot of benefits as you continue on with your business with a partner:
You’ll be able to finish cars MUCH faster. On a wash and wax on a sedan, it can take a single person 4 hours to complete the detail and charge $140 ($35/hour).
You can charge the same price for the same service but finish it in half the time. So the hourly rate for that service is $70/hour ($35/hour split). Which also means you can service A LOOOTTT more cars in a day and week then someone that’s by themselves.
This is by far one of the beneficial factors to having a partner with you. You can complete a lot more cars than a single detailer can, which can ultimately mean you can grow a lot faster since you can handle more work.
If you’re getting backlogged with work, get a helper, at a minimum.
Now let’s change examples and say you’re drowning in work and you’re pulling 50 to 70 hours of detailing in a week. That’s a lot of hours!
At that point, it seems very justifiable to get an extra hand. This doesn’t mean you’re going to hire someone on full time or that they’re going to work 40 hours for the week.
It simply means you’ll have an extra set of hands helping you out so you can decrease the amount of work for the week and to make sure you’re completing the details in a timely manner.
You have two options here:
- Find another local detailer to help you out
- Get a friend/hire someone to do basic work for you
There are pros and cons to both scenarios.
An advantage to a local detailer is if you’ve seen their work and you have a sense of how they work, they’ll be able to come in and start cranking cars out with you pronto.
There will be a small learning curve as far as them adjusting to your workflow and what the end result is going to be, but you’re not going to teach them how and what to do every step of the way.
You’ll have a lot more trust in them since they also have their own business, share the same passion, and understand the importance of getting the detail right the firs time.
On that same note, because they have experience and they know what they’re doing, you’re probably going to have to pay them a decent rate to keep them with you for the duration of the time.
After all, they have their business, they have customers, and if you’re going to offer a pay grade way below what they make, it’s not going to make financial sense for them to help you out for too long.
The next option is getting a friend or hiring someone to help you out with basic tasks. It’s also a good idea to hire someone that wants to get into detailing, wants to start a detailing business, or has just recently started a detailing business.
Remember, they’re there to help you out with basic tasks.
If you as the detailer are doing steps A to Z to complete a detail, it’s a fact that a lot of those steps are pretty damn basic and are time consuming that don’t really need much skill.
Yes, you’ll need knowledge and an understanding of what needs to be done, but by no means would it take more than an hour so to get it going.
That’s what the helper is for. It’s too unload the basic and simple tasks throughout the detail process to them. This is why having checklists are so important.
In this instance, you can simply give the helper a one hour run down of what they’re going to be doing, give him a checklist of what he’s going to focus on, and let him at it.
On top of that, they’ll save you a lot of time on the time-consuming parts of the detail that you normally have to stop for. If you’re doing some paint correction, instead of you stopping to clean the pads or applying to wax or wiping off the wax, you can have them do it.
This will save you A LOT of time. Unlike having a detailer help you out, you can pay the helper a lot less because they are not as skilled and are only performing basic tasks.
This doesn’t mean you take advantage of them and pay them as cheap as you can get them for, it’s just going to be dramatically less than what the professional detailers pay grade will be.
Also, as mentioned above, if the helper wants to eventually start or recently started a business, then them working for you is a GREAT benefit to them.
[bonus]If you need help setting goals, you can [link]download the exact methods I use to set goals[/link] in life and business.[/bonus]
Why you shouldn’t have a partner or helper
As great as it is to have another set of hands helping you out, you also need to be self aware of who you are and what you can and cannot handle.
Since this is your business and you call the shots, can you manage someone else working with you without becoming a dictator? Are you going to micromanage and get frustrated for every little thing that isn’t up to your standards?
This is very important because if you’re not good at working with someone, it’s going to cause way more problems and headaches for you and the other person.
What you don’t want do is have someone come help you out (or bring on a partner) and dump all the work on them. That doesn’t make any sense.
If you’re backlogged on work, don’t call in someone to help you but then have them do all the work. In my opinion and experience, you need to both work on the same car to get it done faster.
That’s operational efficiency. Instead of one person working one car and the other person working on the second car, it’s better to team up and knock one car out after the other.
The customer will get their car faster and you’ll make a higher hourly rate.
This next reason should be obvious, but still needs to be stated:
If you’re staying busy, but not bringing in that much revenue, you don’t need to bring someone to help you. There’s a deeper problem you have to fix first.
There’s plenty of ways to make money and be successful. You can go for low prices and high volume. You can do high prices with much lower volume. Or you can fall somewhere in between the middle.
That’s fine if you are fully aware of your finances and have a plan on what you’re doing.
It’s not fine when you’re busy, not really making money, and then you call someone out to help you and offer them $X/hour only not to be able to pay them on time.
You need to take sometime, sit back, get a pen and paper out, and figure out what’s going on with your business and why is it that you aren’t making the money you should be making.
Is it that you’re charging low but doing waayyy too much work for the customer? Or are you charging a fair price but you’re simply moving way too slow to finish in a timely manner?
You’ve got to figure out the real problem first before you bring someone to help you. Because if you don’t, you’re simply covering the problem without actually fixing it.
This can add a lot of headaches later down the road with your business.
Balance the strengths and weaknesses with a partner
Now, if you DO want to bring on a partner, that is, someone that’s putting skin in the game with you, then you want to make sure you balance each other out.
For instance, I always talk about focusing on marketing and sales more than detailing because to run a business, you need customers.
If you have partner A that’s passionate and dedicated to detailing, and then you have partner B that’s also passionate and dedicated to detailing, then everyone in the boat is looking the same way.
There’s no diversity. Both of them have a tunnel vision on detailing. They’re both going to spend more time detailing with each other and trying to be better detailers more so than getting customers to hand them money.
This is a no-no.
A better scenario would be to have partner A passionate and dedicated to detailing while partner B is more dedicated and focused on marketing and sales. That’s the best of both worlds.
Partner A can dive into the skill set of detailing. He can try different tools and products. He can spend his time learning how to detail faster and get better results.
Partner B can trust him to do his job right. To tell him what to do when it’s time to detail and he’ll followed partner As lead on a job site.
Partner A would be “lead tech” and partner B would be “tech” if you wanted to put some type of label to it.
On the other hand, partner A can trust partner B because since he’s mostly focused on marketing and sales. His primary job is to get people to call them up and hand over their money.
Does this mean partner A is going to spend all his time in the garage detailing and partner B is going to spend all his time on the computer? Well, it depends..
Is that what you guys agreed on? Is it congruent with the end goal that you’re going after?
There’s not going to be a right or wrong answer. It comes down to whether or not you two have discussed about it and developed a game plan to reach the set goals.
In my opinion, both partners should constantly teach the other partner everything they know. That way both are skilled at the jobs and whenever needed, can alternate or fill in as needed.
Is there trust between the partners?
I think it’s important to point out that if you’re going to start a business with a partner of some sort, you two need to be completely transparent, honest, and open minded with each other.
If there’s any type of resistance between the two, for any reason, it can really hinder your performance and spiral down to where the business doesn’t really get much traction.
You can’t go into it expecting the other person to agree to every single last word you say and run with the plan. There are two inputs that need to agree.
Sometimes there’s going to be disagreements and you’ll have to talk about it. Someone might not ultimately like the decision that was made, but that’s where the transparency and open-mindedness comes into play.
It’s not about saying, “Hey, this seems like it’s going to be fun, we can totally do this together. It’s going to be great” and simply coast for the duration of the time.
If you’re doing more work than your partner, and it’s obvious, it’s going to get under your skin. It will create problems, either short term or long term.
So you need to be able to talk things out at anytime.
Be aware that plans are not always going to go as said. Problems and obstacles will arise and it’s in the relationship that you have with each other that will determine how well (or bad) you two get through it.
And don’t think because it’s your wife, husband, boyfriend, girlfriend, friend, co-worker, etc.. it’s going to get any easier.
I know many of you work with a family member or a close friend and will say something like, “We work great together. Business is business and we’ll keep it at that. It won’t interrupt our personal lives.”
If that’s true, then that’s great. But in my experience, I’ve see it play out the wrong way more often than not.
Personally, I would stay away from working with family. It sounds like a great plan in the beginning, but once things get rolling, decisions have to be made, and actions need to take place, it’s a completely different story.
You don’t want to damage a relationship because of a business.
How do we pay each other
It’s fun and all to start a business and have a partner in it, but now who gets paid more? What is our hourly rates?
I’m going to give very vague advice here since there are so many variables to how much anyone is going to get paid, or what the percentage split of the company is, etc…
In the beginning, I wouldn’t even worry too much about it.
Why?
Because it’ll probably be a while into you bring in any type of real money. In the beginning, it’s going to be a couple hundred bucks here and there. If you worked on the car together and did about equal parts, just split it 50/50 and keep hustling.
But it all does start with knowing your end goal. Where is it that you want to be financially? What is an ideal image in your mind?
Because if you want to stay as a dual team and never hire on more staff, then it can be a pretty straightforward agreement. You’ll eventually want to hire an attorney to come up with some type of contract and get the legal work setup (probably a few hundred bucks), but nothing out of this world complex.
It would be different if you’re going to hire a bunch of staff, open a standalone facility, have huge expenses, etc… then you’ll need to run the numbers and see how everything is going to play out and probably get a lot more people involved.
Lastly, determine how you’re going to split up the company in terms of percentages. It can’t be an equal 50/50 split as the work or investment in the company is never exactly the same.
Is someone going to buy the equipment? Is someone opening a line of credit or getting a loan? Who’s going to do most of the labor work? Who’s responsible of sales and marketing?
You get the point..
Remember, in the beginning phases, you’re most likely not going to make much money. It’s going to take a while, so things can always change.
There are so many variables to this, you’re not going to get it right the first time you sit down and talk about it.
My final thoughts
If I had to start all over, I would still start off as a solo detailer. This was, I would be able to get everything started the way I want.
I would market my services, create systems, and run everything lean. Once I got to a point where I have too much work, I would hire a helper.
I would not bring on a partner.
It all really ties into your end goal. Let’s say I wanted a high-volume, high-end detail shop pushing out a lot of paint correction services.
Then perhaps I wouldn’t need a partner, but bring on someone who can be an operations manager and oversee a team of 2 or 3 people.
There are so many variables you have to consider. There is no right or wrong answer. I think the most important factors is painting a clear picture on what your end goal is, and being self aware of who you are and what you can (and cannot) do.