Welcome to Ghost Business 👻 Where we turn $1 into thousands building these weird but simple side hustles

The Car Is In The Details

Sweating the details… It’s popping up on almost every Facebook page I’m on. I didn’t even know this was a thing until this year. I’m talking mobile car detailing.

What is it? Car detailing is “removing both visible and invisible contaminants from the vehicle's interior, and polishing the exterior to its original blemish-free finish”. It’s how my mom wanted me to clean my room.

This trend started popping up for 2 reasons:

1. It’s a low barrier to entry. You don’t need a special skill and your expenses to get started are relatively low.

2. Popular car rental sites like Turo, are becoming mainstream which always demand auxiliary products and services to support it (like AirBnb and cleaners)

After seeing all of these posts for folks offering this service, I had to find out what they charge for this service, what their expenses are, how they are getting customers and how to build it out.

The numbers were surprising.

The MVP (Getting your first customer)

Start your engines… If you’ve been following along the Ghost Business journey, you’ll think I sound like a broken record here. It’s typically the same way to get started every time.

Offer the product/service to friends and family first for free or a discounted rate.

This does a few good things:

1. It lets you know if you even enjoy providing the product or service. If you don’t enjoy doing it for friends, you probably wont enjoy it with strangers.

2. You can figure out which supplies you’ll need without being under too much pressure.

3. You can start to rack up reviews and feedback before officially making a public offering

So, who are you customers in the car detailing game? People who rent out their cars, folks with nicer/luxury cars, companies with a small fleet of vehicles, busy parents and professionals, etc.

What you need to start:

1. Hose + Pressure washer: $190

2. Sprayer + buckets: $23

3. Microfiber towels: $26

4. Vacuum + cords: $125

5. Cleaning supplies: $89

6. Foam cannon: $20

All in: $473

What can we make doing this?

Income ranges for the type of detailing you do, here’s an average breakdown from Nextdoor:

• Interior: $150

• Exterior: $150

• Mobile car wash: $40

• Full car detail: $300

Note: these prices can range significantly for luxury & classic cars.

(Side Note: if you’re likin what I’m typin, please kindly tap the subscribe button at your earliest convenience. It gets you more of this goodness and gets me closer to my goal of writing full time 😍)

Getting Your Next 100 Customers

Riches in niches… Instead of offering the full menu of detailing, I would narrow it down. Are there parts of the car you prefer to clean or are naturally better at? Go for that instead of offering everything.

Make sure to detail your journey while you’re growing this biz. fyi: #detailing has 16B views on TikTok 🤯 

Now that you have a handful of reviews and some detailing experience, time to hit the road:

• go to local car meetups (hot reddit tip)

• offer your services on nextdoor

• neighborhood facebook groups

• put up ads in mechanic and tire shops

Once you can land 1-2 cars per week, let’s say 10 cars, that can add up to $1,500-$2,000 per week or around $8k per month.

Another way to add focus is to specialize in detailing a certain brand of car. Why?

• You get really good at cleaning this style of car

• You can hyper focus your ads and target audience

• You become “that car brand” cleaning expert

• Word of mouth is stronger

The End Goal

Automatic or manual… There’s debates on what this final product would look like. Some say opening your own shop, others say being a mobile detailer is the way to go.

I’d put the goal is somewhere in the middle. A fleet of mobile detailing carts AND a partnership with an upscale garage or parking lot.

Having a fleet keeps you somewhat nimble and allows you to be where the people are. One of my rules for business is set up where the customers are, don’t expect the customers to come to you.

Partnering with a mall/Ikea/Costco parking lot, is EXACTLY where your customers will be. They are guaranteed to spend at least an hour shopping and you can get your work done while they’r shopping.

Slide some flyers on other cars in the lot and you will have a TON of inbound.

Having a shop keeps you stuck in one area and you have to build it out and keep paying rent 😢 

Without a garage/shop, your range is wider and able to capture a larger customer base.

Viability:

1 [building spaceships] 🚀 to 5 [easy peasy] 😊 

The clutch… This side hustle can be started with less than $500. Some people love cleaning cars and this can be a lucrative business for those folks. Hiring and training people to do this would be easy. Almost too easy as they would likely start their own business after learning on your dime so expect turnover to be high.

P.S. There’s also a massive audience if you record yourself cleaning. Double it if you add an ASMR aspect to it 😻 

(As usual each business will have it’s own setbacks, and it’s all about the execution and consistency rather than just having the idea 😉)

It’s a great day to be great!

Love, Mike 👋