new business idea?

[omide26]

Hi lads,

i was looking some time for smbody to give as profesional advice as possible on my idea.i live in west of ireland in a town of 40k people,think to break my prcelain pig,get the money i might have and buy a powerfull diagnostic tool and printer(maybe bosh?).if any of u are in car repair industry what dou think of providing independent local garages with testing of electronics,diagnostics,code reading or just a print-out saying everithing is fine..bla bla.i see small locals face some sort of lack in this field and probably they wait for somebdy's help?any opinion welcome.thanks :idea:

 

[x Alex x]

if you can do it cheaper than dealer or theres not much point

 

[faster4_tec]

the only people that are going to stump up for a diagnostic readout is when they are really desperate or really thick and will pay for pretty much anything.

so if fiat says £65 to plug this in hear and count the flashs, then £65+vat they will pay. with gripe, but they'll pay.

you could maybe get friendly with a few local garages who don't have such resources and see if you can do it for them, but TBH I doubt you'll find even a small garage that doesn't have one nowadays.

internet based ecu 'doctors' have been around a few years now, so that eliminates the rest.

 

[jug]

I doubt you'll find even a small garage that doesn't have one nowadays.

true, they dont cost much and any idiot can use them, so most places have them, and those who dont will either know somebody who does or will tell customers to visit the dealer.

if you want to provide the service to local garages you need to be available during business hours, willing to travel to any garage which requests it, willing to do it cheaply enough to allow the garage to make a profit (you may get £10-20 per diag if you're lucky) and you need to be able to provide the service for all modern makes and models, meaning regular expense on software updates. also you need to be able to offer a good service, a fault code isnt worth paying for, you need to be able to give a detailed diagnosis of all modules. doing that with a 3rd party tool is practically impossible, which is why so many garages refer you to the dealer for a diagnostic, they know 3rd party tools rarely work as well. if you can afford all the equipment you require to do a detailed diagnostic on all modern makes and models, how many years will it take to get that money back and actually make a profit.

to make money with a diagnostic machine you need to forget about garages, try to find people with simple car problems who cant afford the prices dealers charge for diagnostics. most small garages charge about £30 for a diagnostic, you could charge the same but provide a mobile service so when people are stuck at home with car problems they can call you. if you advertise correctly this can be a worth while thing to do, but it wont be a full time job, or enough for you to live off, so you'll need another source of income, one that will still allow you to be available for your mobile diagnostic service. thats difficult.

self employed mechanics make their money doing the easy stuff like servicing, MOT prep, and exploiting daft boyracers who want one off mods and ICE installations. i made very good money doing that for a few years. diagnostic services would have been a good addition to my services (its also quick and easy), and it is something i considered and investigated (even made my own tool back in 2001), but i found the affordable 3rd party diagnostic tools were not reliable or universal enough to make them worth while and pay for themselves, so I never bothered. only offering a diagnostic service would seriously limit the amount of business you could do. its only the sort of thing a self employed or mobile mechanic should add to the rest of their services, its not something you can realistically make a real profit from alone.

 

[faster4_tec]

I was about to add, if you could do simple mobile mechanic stuff where people don't have the time to book into a garage, during normal office hours, or can't travel due to ..... (dead HT lead, LOL). then your sorted.

but it depends how much risk you want to put into it. and how well/accuratly you advertise, a few local papers (non tacky spread for the first month or so), yell pages, blue pages, white pages (if you have them?).

 

[omide26]

thank you all,

you are right in most regards,I should have stated that since I'm an Italian living in Ireland,I obviously need professional help when it comes to writing leaflets,flyers,brochures etc .Im not gonna do that myself!
then, what Im talking about is a really powerfull tool from Bosch,worth about euro5000 and it's not just a code reader or scaner,it does almost all makes,petrol/diesel,reads codes and retrieve results in PLAIN ENGLISH,it guides you through performing all sort of checks,gives you repair suggestions,diagrams etc
I havnt worked in a garage but I got knowledge of car electronics,however Bosch will train me and thay say you dont have to be a guru in order to perform a good lot of diagnostic checks.
I know every small garage in th UK has a minimum of scaner/code reader,(and same in Italy) but here ,at least,most of independents dont have or use such things.
My problem is this:knowing that this tool can do a plenty of tasks faster than humans (of course it cannot replace them) and what's left to the small garage is pure machanical work,all the rest goes to the main dealer,do you think this could be a good business?

 

[jug]

sounds like a very powerful tool. if it is as good as you say then you have a much better chance of selling your services to independant garages. the first thing to do is ask at several local garages if they would be interested in the service and how much they would be willing to pay. you also need to determine roughly how often they would require the service.

lets look at an imaginary example. if you think you can get £20 per diagnostic, and you can get 10 diagnostics a week, then you can probably make £100 a week (after transport costs, tax, etc). If it takes you an average of 1 hour to travel and perform the diagnostic then you get approx £10 per hour and only have to work 10 hours per week. thats fairly useless and wont pay your bills, so you need to charge more or get a lot more custom. I think in reality you will struggle to charge more than £20 per diagnostic, but if you get custom from many more garages and can get 40 jobs per week, it would be worth while and profitable. personally I dont think you have a good chance of getting 40 jobs per week easily, but that depends on how well you can sell yourself, and who you sell yourself to. i dont think the average garage will have very many occasions where they need to send a customer to the dealer for a diagnostic, but i may be wrong. if you only get one job a week per garage it would take at least 40 garages to keep you busy, and the more garages you supply the greater your travelling time and cost.

if your machine costs 5000euros (£3400) it may take you a long time to pay for it, if you assume you could get 40 jobs per week and make £400 profit, then it would take a couple of months to pay for itself. which is excellent. if you only get 10 jobs per week it will be 8 months before you make a penny profit. i guess it doesnt really matter how long it takes to get your money back as long as the income is enough for you to survive on. i still doubt it would be enough unless you can get many garages to use your services. first thing to do is some market research, go and find out what the service is worth, an how much demand there is, only then can you even start to think about how profitable it will be, and if you can survive on the income.