🎯 The business: you come to the driveway or office lot with water, power and products, and hand back a car that looks new. Premium customers pay for craftsmanship and for not having to go anywhere. Start with a vehicle you already own.

People with cars they love and no time, parents with cars their kids have destroyed, and small fleets. A full interior and exterior detail runs $200 to $400; ceramic coating $800 to $1,500 with a multi-day cure; a monthly maintenance wash $60 to $100. Fleets and dealership overflow give you weekday volume.

Detail five cars for friends at cost and photograph them in good light. Learn paint correction on your own car before anyone else’s. Set three packages and put them on a booking page with a deposit. Office parks are the trick: one lunchtime of detailing in a corporate lot, with permission, turns into a monthly route.

A $300 full detail is about three hours of work and $20 of product. Two a day, five days a week is about $3,000 a week. Coatings raise the average ticket without raising the hours much. The ceiling is your own hands until you train someone, and detailing is a craft people notice when it slips.

No license. Some cities limit washing in parking lots because of runoff, so a waterless or rinseless method for office work keeps you legal. Insurance that covers the customer’s car while you work on it is the policy that matters.

A burned-through clear coat from a polisher in untrained hands. Rain days. A generator that will not start in a client’s driveway. And the slow ceiling of doing it all yourself; the businesses that grow sell memberships and hire a second detailer by month six.