A failed business and lessons learned

Starting a business during the pandemic, that ultimately failed. What happened and what did I learn?

Walk before you fall, do it yourself, manage money better, just start. These are the four key takeaways of my first adventure into the realm of creating a business.

The business

Auto Detailing

A passion of mine for a long time has been cars. Working on cars, washing cars and perfecting my own personal system led me to start a business related to auto detailing.

After learning to polish cars at a young age, in my adult life I've found myself learning new tips, trying new products, experimenting with the different workflows related to auto detailing. With the rise of popularity of things like ceramic coatings, it has never been easier to get professional results from the comfort of your own home. After using my fiancee's vehicles as a test bed for various prosumer level products like the AMMO system and early coatings from CarPro, still based on Titanium Dioxide at the time, I realized that I could likely monetize something that I enjoy doing in my spare time. The perfect side business if you will.

A few family and friends cars later, I decided in January of 2020 to launch an auto detailing business. I paid a company to incorporate this as an LLC for me and handle the paperwork with the state and federal government. I had two friends' cars lined up, who would become my first customers. I went out and purchased all of the supplies I would need to take care of these vehicles in a professional manner. In addition, I purchased an insurance policy to cover myself, my tools and customers' property while they were getting their cars detailed. I completed just three vehicles before everything changed.

Fast forward three months and we all know how the pandemic affected so many lives. This business was no different. Automobiles are some of the hardest things to clean during normal times. With so much uncertainty in the early days around how the virus was transmitted, how long it stayed on surfaces, etc, I thought it best to not offer services to the public any longer and just wait it out.

Getting into the weeds

As a small aside, there were, at the beginning of the pandemic, really only two ways to disinfect a car. The first is with a steamer, which is great for established businesses. As a small business starting out, I opted to not purchase this expensive piece of equipment. The second is with a disinfectant like Lysol or Clorox, both of which are things that you generally want to keep away from car interiors. The myriad of surfaces in modern car interiors can be delicate and can react negatively with harsh chemicals like all purpose cleaners that would disinfect the surface. This left me in a position where I had not planned for this risk and my response was to avoid it. I chose to do nothing. Fast forward to today and the top auto care companies have come out with interior safe disinfectants, but those products took the better part of a few years to develop and still require extra care when using on a new surface for the first time.

Back to your regularly scheduled program

Below I will go through the items that stick in my head as lessons learned for if and when I decide to start or run another business. I believe these can be applied to most things in life and adapted from this particular situation.

Walk before you fall

Here is where walk before you fall comes into play. I should have started out slowly. I had this FOMO feeling.

"If I do not start this business right now, I will never do it."

While this may have been true, building this as a hobby with more than a handful of known paying customers could have been a smarter path to take in this instance. I had this vision in my head that I would start the business and have a line of people wanting my service immediately. It is very easy to get caught up in the moment and my advice is, don't. Take a step back and assess the situation. I should have applied my formal training as an engineer and years experience as a project manager in this instance, sometime passion trumps logic though.

Do it yourself

You will see this theme again in the Manage money better section. I would have saved myself money up front by just learning the systems I needed to utilize to setup the LLC. Funny enough, when I dissolved the company, I had cancelled my subscription to the legal service that setup the company. This forced me to learn the state's website for the dissolution process, while it seemed daunting up front, it was fairly straightforward.

Manage money better

Ultimately I was funding this business with money from my day job, which saw my salary reduced and yearly raise forfeited during the pandemic. This led to a tight squeeze on my budget. Like many other people, I reduced or eliminated spending on things that were not necessities. The uncertainties grew and I watched a decent chunk of my disposable income going towards these business expenses, particularly the insurance policies and LLC fees.

If money is your top motivation for starting a business it might not be the right fit. There are plenty of people doing side hustles to have multiple streams of income and becoming engulfed in the grind lifestyle. If you enjoy that, go ahead. For me, when I think about taking on something new and something outside of my already taxing day job, I have to be really passionate about it.

I don't do things to make a quick buck. I do things to my level of quality and satisfaction. In this instance with auto detailing, you could have found a cheaper option for sure, however the attention to detail in detailing is what interested me. Almost perfecting a vehicles paint and interior condition is what drove me to like this hobby. There is a process you can create to replicate results on almost any car, with minor tweaks depending on the situation, yet the whole thing is surrounded with so much science it is amazing. There are a very tight knit group of extremely knowledgeable professionals who have built this industry into what it is today. You can keep it as high level as washing the car, or as deep as paint thickness gages and gloss meters for maximum shine.

All this said, I spent a lot of money to limit my risk and my liability up front.

Things I would have done to save money early on:

• Used tools and products already in my possession instead of buying new
• Not spend on marketing materials (business cards, etc up front)
• Figured out the CT State website for managing an LLC

In hindsight these three things seemed like long term investments, which turned out to be my biggest expenses, thus driving my operating costs above my revenue, also known as being in the red.

The hardest part is to start

Would I have learned any of this if I did not start? No.

I am glad I did this experience, despite it being a "failure" from a business perspective. From a personal perspective it allowed me to grow in many ways, learning to expand my knowledge base into a new world of being a business owner and what it is like. I will move forward in life with this knowledge that is applicable to many situations in my life.

If I had to do it again, I would. No regrets.