Building your own business is an exciting personal journey. You get to experience the ups and downs related to running your very own operations, meeting and networking with people, scrutinizing potential suppliers, and courting your target customers. But most importantly you will get to experience mistakes business owners make. All told, being an entrepreneur challenges you to go beyond your limits and carve out a special place for yourself in the market.

If you’re new to the car care industry, you might be overwhelmed with all the new information and statistics that you have to digest before you can even open up shop. There are all kinds of business models to tinker with, equipment to test out, specialty cleaning chemicals to try, and detailing services to consider. But then again you might think: running a car wash business is really simple, because how difficult could it be to soap, wash, and polish a vehicle, right? And yet, so many people fail at building and eventually growing their car wash business. If you think that being a car wash entrepreneur is a deceptively easy task, you’re well on your way to the mistakes business owners make.

So what are these mistakes that car wash business owners make? We’ve outlined five of the most common errors for you. The list is by no means exhaustive, because every misstep and miscalculation can send your car wash business into the red. Hopefully, as you craft your business plan and marketing strategy, you’ll be able to avoid these mistakes business owners make and go straight to the head of the pack.

Top 5 Mistakes Business Owners Make

1. Not hiring the sufficient number of detailers and support staff. Hire too many detailers all at the same time and you’ll be paying people who aren’t working for their salary; hire too few and you’ll be scrambling to cover as many detailing appointments as possible. Whether you operate your own car wash business or a franchised one, you should know more or less how many people you will need to carry out the day-to-day job without a hitch. Apart from the professional detailers, you might need to get an all-around executive assistant who can take calls and inquiries, schedule appointments, craft and send out promotional materials, and do other odd administrative tasks.

2. Not pushing your detailers to enrich their current knowledge and skills. Sure, you have employed the best of the best car detailers in your area, but they won’t enjoy the title for long unless you keep them up to speed on the latest developments in the car wash industry. Encourage your professional detailers to study cars and car detailing further, so you can offer more varied services that your competitors can’t hope to match. You want your customers to realize that you’re the best detailer they can hope to hire, so invest in your detailers’ skill to make it happen.

3. Not managing people correctly. You might have all the money in the world, plus the most efficiently-trained people and the latest tools and equipment in the car industry. But if you don’t know have good people skills—if you don’t build genuine relationships with your staff, suppliers, and customers—your business will ultimately fail. Entrepreneurial success is a combination of business sense and people skills. People should love to transact with you, not just because of your excellent services, but also because of your incredible professionalism and courtesy. This is what will make your business stand out.

4. Not investing in the right kind of cleaning materials and equipment. Any business will certainly fold down if it doesn’t have the right tools at its disposal. Do your professional detailers go through your microfiber wash mittens too fast? Maybe you’ve purchased the low-quality kind that tear or break apart after a few hard wipes. Perhaps you’ve been turning away certain customers because you don’t have the appropriate cleaning materials for their type of vehicle, such as a vintage car or an ATV. If you have all the things necessary to do the job, you can take in more customers and appointments, and consequently earn more profits.

5. Not paying attention to the online e-business platform. You name it—the Internet has it. These days, people find it so convenient to just go online for all their everyday needs, including scheduling their next detailing appointment and paying for it via a secure online payment facility. If you are not Internet savvy, it’s time to brush up on your knowledge of the worldwide web so you can take advantage of its strong potential as a marketing platform.

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