If you love cars and you’re looking to start a profitable side-hustle or even full time business in 2023, look no further than auto detailing. Detailing is a fun and rewarding job that can easily turn into a full time career. If you want to start a detailing business today read this guide. I lay out exactly what a complete beginner should do if they want to have success with auto detailing. You can get your first client starting today and by the end of the year have a business generating anywhere from $5-10,000 every single month.
What You Should Offer When You First Start
Before you start your detailing business, you have to create an offer. An offer is basically what you’re going to provide your customers in exchange for their money. Many beginner detailers think they need hundreds of dollars worth of equipment and years of expertise to get started. This is completely false. In fact you can get started with no money and skills you probably already learned as a child. To start a detailing business for no money in 2023, start by offering interior details & trash cleanup. You can start by helping friends and family clean out their cars without buying any cleaning supplies. That’s all there is to it. You don’t need microfiber towels, expensive car wax, and you don’t need to know how to do a 2-step paint correction. All you need is your two hands and a friend with a dirty car. You can charge anywhere from $50-100 per car and you can expect to work on each car for about 2 hours. This means you could earn anywhere from $25-50/hr for your time starting today! It’s important though that when you start, you should start with the basics. Most people don’t need a ceramic coating or a deep interior restoration. They have a pretty messy car that’s driving them crazy and they need someone to clean it because they don’t have the time. That’s the problem you’re solving and the core of your offer. You can offer your services to busy mom’s, to dad’s that go fishing, even to businesses that need to keep their van’s looking professional.
What You’ll Need To Get Started
While you don’t need anything to get started except a solid work ethic, a few cheap items can make your job a lot easier and more valuable. For example, a few microfiber towels and all purpose cleaner you can pick up at Walmart gives you the ability to clean seats, floor mats, and dashes. That’s really all you need to start professionally detailing the inside of cars. If you pick up a $50 shop vac from home depot you can charge anywhere from $100-$200 per job. Each job should take you around 2 hours to complete, so you could be earning anywhere from $50-100 per hour! You can even borrow some rags, soap, and even a shop vac from friends or family if they’re in the trades.
If you live in a rural area you may also need a car to get around. Your first customers are likely to be friends and family so if they’re comfortable bringing the car to you then that can save you from needing a ride if you’re not old enough to drive or you don’t have a car. If you’re in a suburb or city then getting started is a lot easier. You should have no problem getting work even just walking around your neighborhood and asking neighbors if they need their cars cleaned out. My guess is one out of every five people have a messy interior and would definitely pay to have it cleaned up.
How To Get Your First Job
Your first jobs are most likely to come from friends and family, don’t be ashamed about this. All great businesses started small and all great entrepreneurs got help from people that believed in them. If you’re still in high-school you can ask your parents if you can clean out their car for some extra money. You can ask your friends and their parents if they need their cars cleaned as well. It’s important on these first few jobs to really go above and beyond. Most of your future customers are likely to come from referrals so you have to overdeliver for these first few customers. They’ll be your best advocates and bring you lots of customers in the future. If you want to start a detailing business in 2023, you’ll probably have to start with outreach. It can be a little uncomfortable at times to ask people for money, but if you can get a list of 20-30 people who will pay you $100 for your detailing services, you have what it takes to build a real business.
How To Build Your Detailing Business
Build through referrals, then social media, with three offers. After you’ve been detailing the inside of cars for a while, you can charge more for your time by offering to wash and wax the exterior of cars as well. Usually you can charge $200-$350 per exterior/interior detail, which should take about 3-4 hours of your time. This means you could be earning up to $700 per day or over $15,000 per month if you can build a consistent list of customers. To do that you need to ask for referrals at the end of every job and make sure your customers are giving testimonials. Getting a customer to do a 30-second video testimonial for Facebook or Instagram is a really powerful way to get more customers. Most detailing businesses offer 3 kinds of services. Exterior only, interior only, and exterior/interior. When you’re putting together your offers you should think about what’s most profitable per hour, not just what costs the most. As you start to scale and get more customers consistently you can start to think about things like buying a van, marketing on social media, and hiring your first employees.
To Recap: Here’s How To Start A Detailing Business For Free In 2023
- Offer interior details and trash cleaning
- Create a list of 20-30 friends and family members who will pay you $50-100 to clean out their cars
- Use that money to buy materials like microfiber towels, all purpose cleaner, a shop vac, and car soap.
- Ask everyone you know for referrals and collect their contact information.
- Build up a database of about 100 people with cars you can detail every 3-months for $250-350.
- Use that money to expand with a van, better marketing, employees.
- Don’t forget to have fun 🙂
And that’s all you need! If you found this information helpful, it would mean the world if you could share it with a friend and subscribe to our email newsletter. We share information just like this every single week that helps you grow your own profitable detailing business.