There have been many people who have come and gone in the mobile oil change business. It always looks easy on the surface and is relatively cheap to start with minimal investment compared to most other businesses. But most mobile oil change operators rarely make it past the first year. In fact, most don’t make it past the first few months. One has to wonder why such a great idea ultimately ends in failure. Let’s take a closer look.

First, the profit generated from oil changes is not enough to sustain a healthy business. After calculating the cost of goods from the total bill, you rarely get more than twenty-five dollars in net profit from your typical oil change. And that figure doesn’t include the gas used to drive to the actual location. You have to do a lot of oil changes per day to make a decent profit to support your business and personal expenses. Most fast lubes produce even less due to their substantially higher overhead, but they make up for it in high volume. The most successful fix locations are doing 60 oil changes on a bad day. A mobile oil change company, with one or maybe two people working most of the time, doesn’t have that luxury. The most a typical mobile oil change van can do is ten oil changes a day and after that the operator is exhausted. And even if a person could consistently do ten oil changes a day, he still has to generate those oil changes from somewhere. They don’t magically appear. Do you have a plan how to do that? Most start out thinking that corporate campuses will provide tons of business, especially if companies market it there. In reality, it rarely works as advertised and you’ll be lucky if you get 10 clients in a year from a large corporate campus. The bottom line is that the net change per oil is too low to make a viable business without a lot of volume.

Second, many mobile oil change operators are not very good salespeople. They are usually very honest people who are passionate about what they do and you have to love that, but I have found that most mobile oil change owners are terrible on the sales end. They are usually the type that tries to charge much less than the going market rate and think they can tell a few people about their “amazing service” and wait by the phone. That never works. You have to go out and find them. You have to do a lot of cold calling. You have to talk to a lot of fleet managers and sell yourself first and your service second. Most in the mobile oil change business don’t fully understand this or it never really applies to this side of the business. It is probably the most important part of not only in the mobile oil change business, but in any other business. I’ll go out on a limb and say that if you’re a great salesperson, you’ll do well running a mobile oil change business or franchise. If you know about cars but not sales, I recommend you work for a new or used car dealer for 2-3 months and gain some experience. It will be hard and scary, but that’s the quickest way to get good pure hard core sales without a lot of “fuzz”. Then open your mobile oil change company.

Third, you can’t underestimate the weather by limiting what mobile oil change operators can do. There are few states that have decent weather all year long. Half of the states are very cold for several months of the year and the other half are very hot for 3/4 of the year. Both are equally daunting. A fixed location can turn on the air or turn on the heat. Its operators work in a controlled environment. You don’t have that luxury. You may have multiple fleets planned for a day and it may be pouring with rain that day. Have you thought about changing the oil at 0 degrees. Your hands won’t be able to grip that oil filter or it’s as hard as a rock or you can’t feel them. Or changing hot 150 degree motor oil in humid 100 degree weather in a vehicle where the oil filter is in the middle of a hot engine manifold and you have to burn to get to it? Do you clean it and skip it or do you burn to get to it? That will pass.

Having mentioned these three main obstacles, and there are more, I will say that it is not impossible. I’ve made a hit out of it. But I wish someone would have been honest with me before my partner and I spent over $80,000 to get into the mobile oil change business. Jet Set Life Technologies sold us many unrealistic hopes and dreams of great wealth using a faulty model involving the oil end. They installed a nice van for us and their product is good, but their entire system is flawed from the bottom up. We found a way to make it work, but sadly 90% of commercial mobile oil change operators don’t. The success rate is very small. Understand what it really entails and if you think you can push yourself and not make money for 2-3 years, do it.