When considering a new Fleet Oil Change Business one has to decide whether they wish to go mobile or have a fixed site location. Let's take a case study in Idaho, if someone is in a rural area, they might not have enough volume to make hay with a fixed site oil change business, unless they are on a major highway. Let's say you are in rural Western Idaho, not near a freeway? How should you go about strategizing or deciding what type of operation to run?

One thing great about the mobile Fleet Business, is that you can schedule one day in each city and line up your accounts. Such as Boise, Mountain Home, Caldwell, Eagle, Meridian, Nampa, McCall, Lewiston-Clarkston, Baker City, Pendleton WA, Walla Walla WA, etc.

If you schedule your accounts in a given city once per month, this is easy. I see 7 - 10 areas outside your trading zone that make sense, meaning 7 - 10 days of travel out of the 30 days at build-out. Eventually you can turn over a sub-region to a family member, trusted employee, where you do the billing, they do the work, you collect 15% of the total, everyone wins.

Mobile has its advantages for fleets, but a quick lube location also has many advantages, I suppose this all depends on your demographics. The more wealthy the consumer the more they take care of their cars and stay within the 3 - 5K recommended mileage zones between oil changes.

If you are going to do a Truck Quick Lube building it might be wise to go it alone, so you can offer choice of product, some companies, only use Chevron, Shell or a specific brand, and they are pretty serious about the type of oil used. You could start with a location, get to know all the fleets that travel thru and then hit the road with a mobile oil change crew? When strategizing the type of fleet oil change business you must consider many factors, such as the ones listed above.

Just because you have a great piece of property next to a highway, does not mean you can skip the feasibility study, as the property must pay for itself and you have to change the oil in a lot of trucks to make a reasonable ROI. Something to contemplate in 2008.