Most people starting out in the auto detailing business find that they must wash and detail cars for people while they work. After all, workers have nice cars and can pay for service, unlike unemployed people trying to save their pennies. Now, when does it make sense to set up your car detailing and washing services in a large office park filled with corporations or on a corporate campus? Sure, this is a good concept and it makes sense, so let’s talk about it, okay?

In fact, it makes sense when putting together a business plan for something like this to correctly estimate how many cars you might be cleaning each week. Many of your clients will be repeaters, weekly washes and periodic details. Still, you can’t just take the number of cars in a parking lot and divide it by the percentage of cars you think you’ll clean. Let me explain why.

There is an interesting phenomenon that occurs around 2-3 months after such services. Husbands and wives who work in these buildings start swapping their cars, so the husband, say, will drive his wife’s car every couple of weeks to do that, too. This is why the numbers often increase over time, as long as you treat customers like gold.

I would certainly fall short of using other detailing firms’ Corporate Campus model when considering price points or trying to figure out how many cars it will clean. You see, we had a franchisee who did Apple’s Cupertino office in the early days, and another who did an IBM campus. We had also laundered at Oracle, Cisco Systems, 3-Com, Sun Microsystems, etc. etc. in the 90’s We also cleaned HP campuses and most major companies on 1st Street in San José. Having a large corporate campus captured is very different than having multiple companies in a high-rise corporate building in the center of the city.

Multiple businesses in one building are better for volume. Oh, and be careful to look for aggressive price points, I saw some competitors succeed at that, but most fizzled out over time and reduced their volumes. Then there’s the concept of split menus – one is about “selling to the masses and living with the classes”, eg a $5-7 outside wash just for anyone parked in the car wash line – all the secretaries etc

Then the other has to do with executive washes, details, etc. and therefore, it would have two services under one roof; car washing and detailing services. Low cost high volume is good eg exterior only on Honda cars Toyota Camry – it’s an easy job and you’re talking less than five minutes per unit “splash and run” so why give up 60 cars per day for the low? , is there, provide service: think of “Carl Sewell” in this case, as he is the guy who wrote the book “Customer’s for Life”, probably the best customer service book ever written in the history of American business.

I bet you could get more volume from many independent companies in one place than from one giant campus, unless there were many independent buildings and offices on campus with multiple reception areas, which was what we had at IBM with 35+ buildings. . Anyway, I hope you enjoyed today’s conversation and that it helps you in your small car wash or car detailing business. Please consider all this and think about it.