Envious Eric
New member
wash, filler wax, folex on interior carpets, APC the plastics, UV protection on plastics, condition leather...take about 2.5 hours for me alone, 1.5 with help! Knock out 6 in a day and you are making some good money!
Help With Bulk Detailing
- Thread starter vtec92civic
- Start date
Envious Eric
New member
vtec92civic said:
megs wheel brightener cut 6:1 will do work!!! super time saver!
Megs APC+ will work on anything
no extraction, just FOLEX
leather gets an APC wipe down just like everything else inside!
I just did the following with a friend of mine helping the whole time:
11 hours total on a wash and wax with full interior work on 2 lexus sedans, and one toyota tundra, then a two step exterior with clay and a full interior on a 3 series BMW.
Needless to say we were both very tired, but it was a very profitable day!
vtec92civic
New member
nice stuff man. i guess now i really got options LoL. Just need to lay it out on paper and send it over to him.
vtec92civic
New member
Thanks Todd i got the e-mail you sent me with the contract and man that is some serious cut throat stuff you got there. I wonder if that is to much?
MichaelM said:
I think the way I worded it made it sound like $100 is the same as $200, when it's clearly not. Obviously if you schedule weeks in advance with retail work, 'wholesale' is a word not in your vernacular and none of this applies.
My point was that if I perform paint correction for a retail customer at $500, it is likely I won't see that customer for paint correction next week or next month. Whereas volume from a wholesale account provides a continuous workload.
At $50 per hour retail, that one correction took 10 hours (simplified). Five $100 wholesale details, at 2.5 hours average per car would be 12.5 hours or $40 per hour. I spent a little more time to make the same amount, but now I get to do the same thing next week, and hopefully twice more before the month is done.
Another point to consider is the cost of materials, using M105/M205/Ultrafina/etc is 300% more expensive per vehicle than using something like D151. It may seem like small potatoes to most, but every french fry affects the bottom line at McDonalds.
edit* For the record, I don't do wholesale work and haven't had a dealer account in more than 2 yrs.
todd@bsaw said:
From the end of your post it seems we are on the same page but I just wanted to point out this snipet. I think it's important to be clear on this point. Wholesale volume will do nothing for your margin, on the contrary if you are retail based it will negatively effect your margin or average profit per detail. BUT...
EcoAutoCT said:
That is what i'm driving at, the fact that it's busy work. Yes, as Mr. Fermani often points out, you can make good money doing this kind of work, IF you're set-up to do so. IMO 90% of the "businesses" in this forum who cater to retail work are not set-up properly for wholesale and may find it to be too time consuming for the reward. It may sound great to pick up a $40,000 account from a dealer but if say you're only making a 10% margin on the work is it worth the trouble to only make $4,000 profit on that $40k? That's a question you need to ask yourself before you start.
FWIW I think there is a great benefit to picking up account work for a retail based operation. Aside from the extra revenue, doing low margin/profit work will force you to re-evaluate your processes to gain efficiency. That will translate over to your retail work and make you more profitable there as well.
MichaelM said:
You make two great points here. I have even gotten into discussions with other detailers that are more focused on the concourse detail work about how different businesses here are set up (other Todd - Bella Machina, for example).
My initial point once was that the majority of pro detailers on this forum could successfully operate a 'concourse' detailing business just as well as the Paul Daltons in this world, but we don't have the market to do so. Every business must cater to their market, not what they think their market should be. (Other) Todd respectfully disagreed with me stating that his business wasn't set up for high-volume work nor did he know the tricks and tips to speed up a recon detail to under 3 hours. (Read TIPS and TRICKS, not cutting corners!)
Bringing that to your next point, efficiency is HUGE. Do I do retail quality when I do wholesale recon work? No. Do they expect retail quality? No. Just as David said, you exceed their expectations which is much lower than a retail customer would expect. But being able to hit a complete interior in an hour or less is a huge benefit when I do my retail work. You also learn to cut down "foot time" which is the time you are walking around the car, looking for a tool/chemical, and not doing any work toward completing the detail (this includes stopping every 10 minutes to take pictures... :LOLOL).
As far as profit margin, I think you are not taking into consideration the majority of a detailers expenses are almost negligible per detail. The expenses using bulk products on 5 cars isn't any more than boutique products on one car.
For example, lets look at one day of work (all estimated):
Wholesale -
$100 sale and 2h labor per car
$500 work day for 10h
$50 per hour
Cost of supplies: $10
Retail -
$300 sale and 6h labor per car
$300 work day for 6 hours
$50 per hour
Cost of supplies: $10
Input what you like to accommodate for your own retail sales, but I never figured the profit margin to be too far off between wholesale and retail.
edit* For the record, I don't do wholesale work and haven't had a dealer account in more than 2 yrs. (I'd also like to mention this too, though I have considered going back around to my old contracts to see if I can pick anything up.)
vtec92civic said:
It's just a general service provider agreement that you can adjust to any way you want. It's both to cover your own behind as well as the dealer's behind. You want to make sure there are no gray areas when working with other businesses for the benefit of both parties.
I made that service agreement when I started getting taken advantage of and it cut an end to that. I was having the service manager leaving cars for me to detail and when I would bill the sales manager he would tell me that was a service vehicle and not a sales vehicle so they wouldn't pay for it. When I approached the service manager, he played dumb and said he didn't know what I was talking about. I still never got paid for those vehicles. Dealership politics can be very frustrating.
By the way, the service manager turned around those "free" details as a $350 sale to the service department.
todd@bsaw said:
I agree about the chemical cost, it'll be about the same. The difference is in what you can charge for the same job being done for a retail customer.
Here is a real world situation from my shop:
2 vehicles to detail-
2008 silver Volvo S80 Sedan - Interior in good shape, exterior needs wax only, motor needs minor attention.
2008 black Volvo XC90 SUV - Interior is worse then the S80 as it is used as a kid hauler and has an extra row of seats with cracks, crevices & pockets everywhere. Exterior isn't in bad shape but because of it being black and never cared for needs spot rotary polishing and a one-step DA polish. Motor need minor attention.
Wholesale: Say you get $150 per car. That S80 will take about 2hr. The XC90 could take 4.5hr. That is 6.5 man hours for $300 or ~$46/hr.
Retail: Man hours would be the same. The S80 I would only charge $139 with the way my packages are set-up so actually i'd make more doing that car wholesale. The XC90 on the other hand, because of the polish work involved and the dirtier interior, I would charge $199 for the exterior and $150 for the interior. So total of $488 in 6.5 man hours for $75/hr.
So, for me, $46/hr wholesale or $75/hr retail, about $30 difference per hour. That is significant. Obviously if you are slow then work is work but you can't let it get in the way of retail work when it becomes available. That price difference is also a reminder to me where I need to focus my efforts going forward.
That's true and a very good real-world example, but in a dealer/wholesale setting the XC90 would not be getting any addition buffing work on the exterior. If it was asked of, that would be charged extra just like any other detail.
I had my wholesale pricing set up so if a situation like that would come up I knew I would not be working 6.5 hours for a $100 recon job. Another reason for those additional clauses in my service provider contract, vtech. I would try to sell the dealership on buffing sometimes, but the majority of the time they didn't care about the appearance enough to demand it.
Edit:
I think the biggest difference in this 'price margin' discussion then is the type of work you are doing for the sale. In wholesale detailing, the work is mostly the crappy annoying work a lot of detailers don't like (interior) with little to no paint correction while on a retail job you get a large part of the sale while doing paint correction.
In wholesale, you can work 8 hours and spend 6 hours working on vehicle interiors, while on retail detailing it's more of a 50/50 split leaning more toward paint correction.
I had my wholesale pricing set up so if a situation like that would come up I knew I would not be working 6.5 hours for a $100 recon job. Another reason for those additional clauses in my service provider contract, vtech. I would try to sell the dealership on buffing sometimes, but the majority of the time they didn't care about the appearance enough to demand it.
Edit:
I think the biggest difference in this 'price margin' discussion then is the type of work you are doing for the sale. In wholesale detailing, the work is mostly the crappy annoying work a lot of detailers don't like (interior) with little to no paint correction while on a retail job you get a large part of the sale while doing paint correction.
In wholesale, you can work 8 hours and spend 6 hours working on vehicle interiors, while on retail detailing it's more of a 50/50 split leaning more toward paint correction.
tssdetailing
New member
sticky-worthy thread for sure!
Just adding my 2¢ Is it out of line, or possbile to believe that at signing the dealer will hand the buyer your business card as part of the contract? Not something you could really monitor, but maybe next year that car could come back to you for a full detail w/out going through the dealer.
Just adding my 2¢ Is it out of line, or possbile to believe that at signing the dealer will hand the buyer your business card as part of the contract? Not something you could really monitor, but maybe next year that car could come back to you for a full detail w/out going through the dealer.
todd@bsaw said:
I have two accounts currently. One is a small used car lot and another is a mid-size dealership that moves a good amount of cars. With my smaller account there is wiggle room in the pricing because of the lower volume but not with the larger account.
With a large account you're going to have to take the good with the bad. You may get a run of small clean vehicles or you could get a run of mini-vans & SUV's but whatever they send you has to look good regardless of what you have to do. The thing is if you hand a sales manager an invoice for the month with 25 vehicles detailed and 12 up-charges over the base price for this and that you're opening up yourself to a great deal of questioning and comparison shopping on their part. Even if you have some kind of agreement in place about pricing they can choose to stop giving you work at any time. IME this is how it works around here.
I'd be real interested to hear how David Fermani had his pricing set-up with his accounts.
tssdetailing said:
I have never worked anything with the sales teams, but service managers have helped with referrals in the past for a little cash kick-back.
MichaelM said:
And yes, dealers will always price-shop if they think they can get the same quality for a lower price and I can see how up-selling can lead to that. However, I am adamant about getting paid what I am worth. I would often add some paint correction work with no extra charge if I felt it was something I could knock out in a short amount of time and bring back praise from the dealership.
The reason I was reinforced about adding the up-sell into my contract because of the following situation:
I was detailing at one dealership in which I had a contract set up for recon and detailing. I had tried upselling the sales manager on polishing it when I saw the black car and he turned it down. I was pulling another car around to the other side of the building (very large dealership) and saw another guy polishing the Volvo I had just finished reconditioning.
I walked up to the guy and introduced myself and offered my hand, and he just glared at me and said flatly, "what do you want." I was a little put off and said I was just being polite and asked him what he was using on the car. He replied, "that's my business, not yours. Are we done?"
I let it be and walked away. I mentioned it to the sales manager since I had a contract with him for detailing and could have taken care of the car just as good as this jerk did, to which the sales manager replied, "he's just a guy I use every once in a while." I later found he did a full paint correction on the car for $50 and there was no way I was willing to compete with that.
Edit:
Also, the sales manager always knew and approved any up-charges, so the final invoice was never an issue. Sometimes he just knew how long a correction job would take and what it would cost him with me, which is when he hired the other guy. I didn't mind missing out on those jobs because he kept me busy anyway.
tssdetailing
New member
Is it out of the question to create sort of a debit system, where they would pay like $1000 at the start of the month-then on the 15th you say "I did x cars and y SUV's and you've sapped up $950"
David Fermani
Forza Auto Salon
MichaelM said:
We'll okay, if you must ask...
My wholesale pricing ranged from $75 to $95 for a complete reconditioning. (Body Shop and Rental Car interior spiffs were $55). That included everything needed to do a "general" detail. Up to 2 polishing steps(with claying/4000 sanding) / complete interior details(everthing got scrubbed/shampooed) / engines. I feel it's not realistic to gripe if a dealer doesn't send you a stated amount of cars per month. You also need to take the good with the bad. We did more easy details on cream puff auction cars than we did urban assult POS. If something came our way that had an obscene amount of tar, overspray, scratches or dog hair we charged accordingly. Don't ever turn work away at any cost. Throw your workers a couple more bucks and they'll be happy.
As far as chemical costs go, I think wholesale work is much less expensive to fund than retail. Everything was purchased in huge bulk quantities. Dressing(water and solvent based), Acid, APC, Wash Soap, Shampoo and Solvent all came in 55 gallon drums. Pads, Clay, Polishes, Towels and Brushes were purchased by the case and charged out to the Sub-Contractors at a reduced rate.
If you properly clean an interior you don't need to dress or condition it. Dressing is the most expensive thing and makes car interiors look ghetto. You also don't need to wax cars either. Cut them down and glaze them out. Big cost and time savings right there. Learn a time concious system and live by it.
The biggest thing you can do to secure your spot at a dealer is to build strong bonds with everyone there. Get to know people in the Body Shop, Service Dept, Sales, Finance, Office Clerks and all the porters. Give Manger's/Owner's cars free details (regularly) and buy lots of donuts and Subway subs. Once you loose an account, it's hard to get them back.
dmw2692004
New member
A lot of great advice here. Just be weary of "the guy down the street" otherwise known as your local competition that is willing to cut their prices so low that you have to either drop yours lower or give up. This has happened to me 3 times already with bodyshops sending me 3-5 cars a week at $80 a car. I went in to pick up a car and they told me that the guy down the street would do it for $60. I told them to knock themselves out, three times(all three body shops were on the same street). Turns out the guy down the street pays his son to crank out garbage jobs and run the touch less wash/bays.
moral of the story: kiss as much *** as possible and if "the guy down the street" starts invading your territory, go have a chat with him about what his prices are doing to the local detailing market.
moral of the story: kiss as much *** as possible and if "the guy down the street" starts invading your territory, go have a chat with him about what his prices are doing to the local detailing market.
David Fermani
Forza Auto Salon
MichaelM said:
Thanks Michael. Sounds like a perfect place to open up shop if there's lots of dealers?
todd@bsaw said:
No problem Todd. Even though every detail market is different, I think my way of thinking can be adapted into every one. The mentality of dealers are somewhat constant.
dmw2692004 said:
Thanks Paul.
Yeah, reducing your prices/profit is sometimes necessary as long as the vision of long term profit remains. Look at the big picture and kiss mucho culo.
EBPcivicsi
GOT PREP?
I feel as though we are pretty efficient. I just can't see how a detail (wholesale recon) on a trade-in can be done in 2 hours. I have tried and tried, just can't do it. The wash alone takes at least one hour for us. That's with two guys, so you are already at 2 man hours. We do the engine, underside of the hood, clean all jams, gas filler door, etc. wheel wells are scrubbed, behind the spokes of the wheels, foam the car with a degreaser, wash, rinse, and clay. The car is then wiped down with a chamois (absorber), cracks are blown with air, and jams are wiped down.
At this point we move it from the "wet bay" to one of the detail bays. the steamers are cocked and loaded(one on each side), towels are ready, all chemicals are mixed, and the interior begins. We do steam every surface..seats, headliner, cracks, crevices, etc. This takes *at least* two hours(4 man hrs) and we rarely use the extractor--typically just steam over the carpets unless they need extraction. At the end we do a "fnal" vac, do the interior glass, etc.
Hopefully the car is silver/white and just needs a one-step(I say hopefully becasue that's all it's going to get at this point ;D ), but after the interior is complete, we shut the doors and start polishing--this goes fairly quickly on a dealer car *most* of the time. After the car is dry, we paint/undercoat the wheel wells.
By this time I am into the car for *at least* 7 man hours(and about $7.50 in materials) . I try to charge $30/hr for wholesale work and I understand the good/bad ratio (that ratio is also dependent upon the quality of cars that your dealer works with), but I just can't make money on wholesale. We charge 130-160 per vehicle, which is high in my area. We have three accounts and I just don't feel that the juice is worth the squeeze. I get $75 for a retail wash and wax, which takes about 1 hr...I also have a fairly steady stream of these. The wash and wax customer is my favorite because we have typically fully detailed the vehicle, so the profit margin is very good. Point being, I feel that we give away too much on a wholesale detail. Right now, retail is filling my schedule, so why do I bother with the wholesale? I really felt as though we would need it for the winter and it helped keep everyone busy, but we didn't make any money on it. Raise the price? Sure, but they will just go to the "other" guy. How much do they value quality? I guess we will see.
Btw, you should see what the "other" guys do in our area.
/rant, random thoughts
At this point we move it from the "wet bay" to one of the detail bays. the steamers are cocked and loaded(one on each side), towels are ready, all chemicals are mixed, and the interior begins. We do steam every surface..seats, headliner, cracks, crevices, etc. This takes *at least* two hours(4 man hrs) and we rarely use the extractor--typically just steam over the carpets unless they need extraction. At the end we do a "fnal" vac, do the interior glass, etc.
Hopefully the car is silver/white and just needs a one-step(I say hopefully becasue that's all it's going to get at this point ;D ), but after the interior is complete, we shut the doors and start polishing--this goes fairly quickly on a dealer car *most* of the time. After the car is dry, we paint/undercoat the wheel wells.
By this time I am into the car for *at least* 7 man hours(and about $7.50 in materials) . I try to charge $30/hr for wholesale work and I understand the good/bad ratio (that ratio is also dependent upon the quality of cars that your dealer works with), but I just can't make money on wholesale. We charge 130-160 per vehicle, which is high in my area. We have three accounts and I just don't feel that the juice is worth the squeeze. I get $75 for a retail wash and wax, which takes about 1 hr...I also have a fairly steady stream of these. The wash and wax customer is my favorite because we have typically fully detailed the vehicle, so the profit margin is very good. Point being, I feel that we give away too much on a wholesale detail. Right now, retail is filling my schedule, so why do I bother with the wholesale? I really felt as though we would need it for the winter and it helped keep everyone busy, but we didn't make any money on it. Raise the price? Sure, but they will just go to the "other" guy. How much do they value quality? I guess we will see.
Btw, you should see what the "other" guys do in our area.
/rant, random thoughts