Car, Aircraft, Boat and Motorcycle Auto Detailing Combo Business Models

It’s been well over 35 years since I started my first aircraft cleaning company, which turned into the first mobile car wash business, and in reflection I now realize why so many auto detailers have on their websites and brochures that they specialize in cars, aircraft, boats, and Harley-Davidson’s. The reality is they probably don’t specialize in anything if they do all of those items.

Nevertheless, if they want to make money, and they are in a small area or region, they have to spread around the types of services they provide throughout the sector if they want to make any money and stay gainfully employed all year round, even in the wintertime. Okay so let’s talk about this shall we?

When I first started, I thought it was silly when people called themselves car detailers and owned an auto detailing shop, but they came onto the airport thinking they would detail aircraft. Most of the people who owned aircraft were not all that impressed with someone who specialized in auto detailing. I just laughed, because I knew they couldn’t compete with me, because they only knew how to clean cars, and you have to know a lot to detail aircraft.

Most cars aren’t even made at of the same type of alloy. Aircraft are not made out of metal as cars, they’re made out of aluminum alloy, some have fabric skin. They don’t have glass windows, many of them have Plexiglas. You can’t push a buffer onto the thin skin of an aircraft and press very hard, or use the wrong kind of buffer wheel you’re liable to take the paint right off the heads of the rivets. If you use the wrong types of degreasers, you will dull the paint because the paint isn’t very thick.

If you use certain types of silicone wax or certain types of carnauba wax on Imran paint or polyurethane paint you will end up stealing the pores, the paint won’t breathe correctly, it will lose the properties it needs to stretch, thus become brittle, and degraded. Likewise, there’s different types of polish that you use on motorcycles, and different kinds of wax that works best on a gelcoat surface for boats, so you have to learn how to do each type of item.

If you run an auto detailing business and you want to get into the aircraft cleaning or boat detailing business there are things you need to know. Just putting all that information on a flyer, yellow page ad, or on your website may look very impressive – and you may even get a few customers, but that doesn’t mean you know what the heck you’re doing. Please consider all this and think on it.

write by Jessica Reeder