Car Wash or Valeting?

[Speed_H4ck]

Hello Everyone,

I need help in deciding something. Should I open up a car valeting business or a car wash?
I have researched about the methods, tools, chemicals and equipment.
Could someone with the correct knowledge enlighten me with startup costs.
Things to consider; I'm not going to hire illegal labour. I want everything done right. Its going to be a fixed location, not a mobile service.
Here are the pros and cons of what I have researched so far.

Valeting:
- offer 3-4 different services such as mini valet, full valet, interior valet but can consume time from 1.5hrs to 3hrs. £30-80
- Not many cars can I get by a day with two of us working.
-problem: too much time for the amount of money per day.

Car Wash:
-Hire 2 more employees, minimum wage ofc. In total 4 of us working.
-Simple service; wash, snow foam, wax spray, soap and wash and dry.
-but the problem might be the cost per car and labour costs especially in leaner months.

Does anyone have good advice about the start up costs and any important things I'm missing, esp the obvious ones.

Thanks.

Edited by Speed_H4ck on Monday 2nd September 11:42

[phil4]

I think you need to consider your marketing/appeal against price points.

For example, if you open up a carwash by a busy road and charge £5-£20 you'll get a lot of custom. Put the valeting in the same place and charge £50-£80 and you certainly won't.

The way I'd decide would be based on max income per day. Assume that you get all the cars you can in, once you've taken the money, paid the staff and consumables, which makes you more money?

Is that money enough? No point doing it if you can't even afford the petrol home.

Then do the same with a more realistic number of customers... thinking about your location and price point, how many do you think you're likely to sell, and how does that pan out profit wise?

And yes, you will have leaner months.

In short there's nothing special here about car washing, it's simple numbers, sales and marketing.

Finally... have you considered doing both at the same time?

[Pica-Pica]

To my mind, you have to go top-end in ventures like this. No point going cheap and simple, too easy to be undercut.

From my point of view, I never let anyone else wash my car.

[aka_kerrly]

Speed_H4ck said:

I'm NOT going to hire illegal labour. Sorry couldn't edit it, kept giving me 500 error.

Well put simply then you will not be making money...

Huge huge difference between what people expect and being at bottom of the market is not how to make a good living.

The majority of people reluctantly spend £5-8 for an illegal to use a pressure washer and a rag and will not spend £30 for 1 hours or pressure washing, some snow an a bit of wax.

Even the detailer market appears rather saturated now with everyone who has a DA thinking they can charge £100-200 for a cut/polish/seal.

[Plate spinner]

Pica-Pica said:

To my mind, you have to go top-end in ventures like this. No point going cheap and simple, too easy to be undercut.

From my point of view, I never let anyone else wash my car.

Agreed, you have to go top end. But then you are competing with specialists with experience and a client base.
At the bottom end you are unfortunately competing against the illegals. And as much as everyone says how horrible these places are, they’ll actually then go and pay £10 for a quick inside / out (rather than your £20) whilst drinking a coffee round the corner vaguely convincing themselves that everyone working there looked happy and legit.

Personally I’d start off with low overheads as a mobile van one man band and see how you get on with it. Expand to premises and staff when you can’t cope with demand.

Edited by Plate spinner on Monday 2nd September 11:58

[ilikejam]

I don't have any advice on the costs of running the business, but you have to carefully consider the location.

There's a wash place near me that is in the middle of an industrial estate (that is in the middle of a wider area of about 5 industrial estates) that has all sorts of industry nearby - car dealers, shipping, taxi firms and a fair few big offices- and it's always queued out onto the street, with probably 7 or 8 cars in the building at a time.

You drive in and drive to each stage yourself and out the other side of the building. They have more or less one guy power washing, one guy snow foaming, one guy scrubbing, a guy that towels and cleans the door shuts then another guy that dresses wheels/tyres and you're out in about 10 minutes. They charge between £10 and £20 depending on the size of the car with an extra £5 or so for the shuts and wheel dressing.

If they were in another area they would probably struggle, but over lunch time it's a pain to get past when all the office workers come out and block the road up queuing to get in. They must do pretty well. Downside is you have to pay for the location, upside is you don't need the huge list of cleaning products a detailer/valeter does.

[clockworks]

Would valeting in a fixed location work, unless the location had things to keep the customer occupied for a few hours? Big shopping centre, theatre/cinema, beauty spot, restaurant, etc within easy walking distance. Still limits the number of potential customers to those who want to take advantage of what's close by.

If I had to drive to premises on an industrial estate, then hang around for 3 hours or more, I wouldn't bother. I'd just clean the car myself, or leave it dirty.
If I'm going to pay someone £20+ an hour to clean my car, I want to be able to utilise that time either doing something more interesting than cleaning a car, or earning the money to pay the car cleaner. I'd use a mobile valeter.

It might work if you offered a collection service, but the extra time taken driving around is time that you aren't cleaning. Driving to the customer and doing the work there just makes more sense to me.

Drive-in car wash makes more sense - visit while you are out anyway, and hopefully not have to hang around too long. Plenty of competition keeps the price down, maybe too much for a legit business to survive?

[sideways sid]

In addition to the excellent points/queries raised, what will your site cost and how many cars will it accommodate?

With space for only two cars, your fixed costs are likely to chew up profits for anything other than cleaning cars 24/7. A larger site gives you options to have a valet bay alongside a carwash if necessary.

Starting out, I would keep it simple with a signwritten van and visit your customers at home or work to valet their cars.

[Speed_H4ck]

Ok, new plan. I have been practising detailing. It will be almost 8 more months until I get my skills right. I would like to open a detailing business.

A car may take up to 2 days to complete. I dont have a truck license, could I possibly ask the customer to drop off the car and offer a free uber ride home and pick? Also the rates £100-200 for 2 days doesn't really seem to be much. Could I get away with charging £500 for excellent and carefull detailling?

This will be done inside a garage..

[akirk]

Speed_H4ck said:

Ok, new plan. I have been practising detailing. It will be almost 8 more months until I get my skills right. I would like to open a detailing business.

A car may take up to 2 days to complete. I dont have a truck license, could I possibly ask the customer to drop off the car and offer a free uber ride home and pick? Also the rates £100-200 for 2 days doesn't really seem to be much. Could I get away with charging £500 for excellent and carefull detailling?

This will be done inside a garage..

I think that you need to look at what other people already offer and compare your thoughts with their reality!
£500 for detailing is a lot of money to spend, so you are into the people who have that kind of spare change - a very small market, and one which may already have enough companies working in it... I have for the last few years had a detailing company come out every two weeks to fully do two cars - at a level higher than just a wash and polish etc. - but not full detailing... I have paid c. £80 for the two cars - and there are not many people out there spending that (£40 p/w) so who exactly is your market?

if I drop a car off for two days - that is an inconvenience for me - my detailer came to me / work / the cars - zero hassle for me - you say you don't have a truck licence (truck?) assuming that you are in the UK, all you need is a small van with a water tank and compressor on board and ideally somewhere for grey water - and a gazebo for bad weather... if you have a car licence you can drive such a vehicle on that...

stop thinking about what you can do, start looking at where the opportunity is in the market - could you go to businesses and do cars there, what other opportunities are there - turn up in a street on a specific day and do x number of cars there?

[skinnyman]

To me there's 2 levels of car wash/valeting that will get used.

There's people like my wife, that doesn't really care about her car, she'll take it to the Albanian's down the road and pay £5 for them to use their brick acid spray and grillo pads. On the other end of the scale is people like me, I either clean my car myself (2 buckets, snow foam, all that jazz), or if I don't have time, I have a detailing company come out and do a 'mini valet' on my driveway for £40.

I don't think there's many people in between to be honest. Average joe won't be paying £20-£30 for a valet, a £5-£10 wash will do them, but then equally the car enthusiast won't be taking their car for a valeting place, and sit around waiting for 2-3hrs @ a cost of £30, when for £40 someone will do it on their driveway.

[Frimley111R]

Fundamentally, one is a job and one is a business.

It'll be your job to valet cars and as a high value luxury service it is one that can be affected by economic changes and has a niche market generally. Your valeting job will be physically demanding and repetitive. It may also be seasonal.

Car washing has a bad rep but most of the dodgy car washes are long gone or come and go very quickly. I have a few near me that have been running 10 years or more. They do a great job and I've seen people with £100k cars in them. I've used them myself and they've been faultless. 'Cons' though are that you'll be managing the lowest paid type of workers, you'll need premises in a good location, it's cold/hard work in winter (not that you'll be doing the washing) and you'll be busiest at weekends when everyone else is relaxing/enjoying their weekends. Plus it is still a mostly cash business and if you mix that with v.low paid staff... All that said, the ones near me have done up to 100 cars in one day at £8-15 and even in the week they are busy, not just weekends. Again, as said, all the good ones operate to a high standard and use quality products these days. The owner of one said the bad rep car washes got meant he had to be 110% with every financial and operational record.

There are few threads on this on here if you want to look too.