Not long ago, I was presented with an interesting problem by an onsite auto detailing entrepreneur. The mobile auto detailing entrepreneur had contracted with a very large property management company to have the exclusive rights to do car cleaning on their properties. One of the properties was quite huge indeed, and the company had put forth a space for them to do the washing, but made it mandatory that all cleaning had to be done in that specific area. This is quite common, but it is also a huge challenge. Okay so let’s talk shall we?
First, because of this it means that you have to move the vehicles, and you are then doing valet type parking, or going and getting the keys in the office building, and coming back and moving the cars to the cleaning area, then moving the cars back, and running the keys back up. If you are in the care, custody, and control of the vehicle, that you need “Garage Keeper’s Liability Insurance” and it isn’t cheap.
A property manager may want you to have $3 million liability insurance aggregate for completed operations, garage keeper’s liability, and $1 million per occurrence. They moving companies brooklyn will also wish to be additionally insured, which means you don’t have the opportunity of showing them a certificate of insurance and then duly forgetting about the policy after that.
Now then, with all this known should you take such an account guaranteeing you a monopoly on the building and complete exclusivity? Well, there is a HUGE cost of time too if you have to move the cars around, it totally screws with your momentum and increases your insurance rates; the whole care, custody, and control of the vehicles on the liability insurance side, and you will have accidents as parking lots and structures have more accidents by far than even the busy city streets. Then there is the issue with driver’s licenses, look I’ve seen the available labor around downtown areas in the United States and it can be at times a little less than desirable.
Property managers of high rise office buildings always want to stick the washing and detailing crews in the dungeon and then only give them a little space to work from as it is a premium. Still the moving of cars around just completely destroys any sort of Six Sigma production efficiency. Sometimes you can put a service writer or valet salesman at the entrance to the parking lot to take orders and valet cars to the wash and detailing areas.