Previously, before I retired, I ran a franchise company and one of the business models we franchised was the mobile oil change place. We made some mistakes with building our prototype models and with our marketing strategy, but we bounced back quickly enough once we understood the challenges and fine-tuned our market segment. We learned that the money wasn’t really in the personal car market, but in the fleet business where it was stable and easy to maintain efficient work flows and take advantage of reduced inventory costs, namely filters and types of fluids and oil.

Last week, I was discussing all of this with a person who would like to get into the business, if he writes at all, so I was busy making a pretty serious set of proformas and business plan. He needed some insight and advice. He wanted to focus on the personal car market, changing the oil at large corporations and large downtown parking structures. Yes, that could work, except there are still challenges with the workflow and the inventor, which means more cost, labor, and challenges, all of which need to be passed on to the consumer, the higher the price, the less interested.

Indeed, I explained to him; “Remember I don’t recommend this to you, emphatically, I don’t think the personal car market is smart unless you keep capital costs and expenses very low. I recommend concentrating on the fleet business.”

Consider this, you get 20 new clients, complete that job, and collect the money. Now you wait 3-4 months to notify them via email or iPhone/Android app that it’s time again, but now only 10 people are interested and you have to try to reschedule them all. So now you have 10 customers instead of 20 3-4 months later, and you have to keep getting more, when only half or less are repeat customers.

So you can spend a ton of money on sales, and yes you can get customers, but you have to do 10-15 oil changes a day to make money. The more you charge, the fewer registrations and the fewer they will stay as repeat customers. That’s why fleets are better, lined up in line, guaranteed customers, low cost, high volume business model. Now, I don’t want to condemn anyone for going the corporate personal car oil change route, I’d just advise you to ramp this up with the fleet business, say in a ratio of 80% fleet to 20% personal car. Please consider all this.