How to start a mobile detailing business in Ontario

Auto detailing isn't one of Ontario's skilled trades. There's no provincial detailing licence, no certificate of qualification, and no exam standing between you and your first paid car. That's genuinely different from mechanical or collision repair, where the work is regulated and the credentials are compulsory — detailing sits outside all of it.

Which means nobody certifies you, so the market does it instead. Your photos, your reviews, and whether a customer's black paint came back without fresh swirl marks are your entire credential. It also means the rules you do have to follow are business rules rather than trade rules: registering the business, insuring it properly, charging tax once you cross the threshold, and checking what your own municipality asks of a mobile service. None of that is hard. Skipping it is what gets people in trouble.

This is the one that surprises people. GTA municipalities run sewer-use bylaws that control what's allowed to enter a storm drain, and a storm drain usually runs straight to a creek or the lake without treatment. Soapy runoff carrying road grime, brake dust and oil is exactly what those bylaws are written about — so "I'll wash it in the driveway and let it run to the curb" is not a safe assumption. Check the bylaw for the municipality you'll actually be working in before you build a service menu around a hose.

The good news is the trade solved this years ago. Rinseless and waterless washes do the bulk of a maintenance clean with a couple of buckets and no runoff at all. Water-reclamation mats catch and contain what does come off the car. And interior work — extraction, steam, pet hair, odour — has no runoff question at all, which is exactly why a lot of mobile detailers start there and add exterior packages once their water setup is sorted.

Condo and office-tower parking garages come with their own version of the same problem: drains that were never meant for wash water, ceilings too low to work under comfortably, and property managers who reasonably want to be asked first. Getting permission before you show up is part of the job, not an afterthought.

The temptation is to spend the first month's revenue on equipment you won't touch for a year. Prices move around far too much to quote here, but the order people actually need things in is fairly consistent: a reliable vacuum and extractor, good towels and chemicals, lighting you can genuinely see swirls under, and then a polisher once you're confident enough to correct paint rather than just protect it.

Power and water are the two constraints that decide what your van can do. Everything you run — extractor, pressure washer, lights — comes off a generator, an inverter and battery bank, or a customer's outlet you arranged beforehand, and each of those has a hard limit. Water is the same story: a tank that sounds generous on paper becomes a ceiling on how many exterior jobs you can do between refills. Plenty of detailers start out of the hatchback they already own with rinseless supplies and an extractor, learn which services actually sell, and buy the van around a proven menu instead of a hopeful one.

Ontario winters deserve their own line. Freezing temperatures rule out a lot of outdoor exterior work for months, water lines freeze, and coatings and sealants want conditions you can control while they cure. Detailers who get through their first winter usually do it by leaning on interior work, salt removal, and access to a heated space.

Two pieces of insurance matter and they are not the same thing. General liability covers damage or injury you cause. Separate cover for a customer's vehicle while it's in your hands — brokers call it care, custody and control, or garagekeepers cover — is what responds when the damage is to the car you were working on. That second one is what new detailers most often lack, and it's the one a single bad afternoon can end a young business over.

Your own vehicle needs a look too. A personal auto policy isn't automatically valid for a vehicle used to run a business, so describe exactly what you're doing to your broker rather than finding out at claim time.

The rest is short. If you trade under anything other than your own legal name, register that business name with the Ontario Business Registry. Start charging HST once your revenue crosses the CRA's small-supplier threshold — worth confirming the current rules at the source rather than trusting a forum post. And because municipal business-licensing requirements differ across GTA municipalities, confirm what yours asks of a mobile service before you take bookings.

Copying package prices off another detailer's website is the quickest way to lose money, because you'd be copying their van, their chemicals, their drive time and their customers — not yours. What you're really selling is time under known conditions, and the conditions vary enormously. A lightly used commuter car and a family SUV carrying two kids, a dog and three winters of salt are not the same job at any price.

So look at the car before you commit to a number. Condition drives everything: embedded pet hair, ground-in salt, spilled milk, smoke odour and heavy contamination all take hours a clean car doesn't. Scope comes next — a maintenance wash, a full interior, and multi-stage paint correction are three different businesses sharing one word. Then the access questions, because unpaid travel and setup is still your time: where you'll park, whether there's power and water, how far you're driving between jobs. Quoting once you've seen the car — or quoting a range with the assumptions stated plainly — is both more honest and more profitable than a flat citywide number.

The standard advice is to buy leads, and it's how plenty of new detailers end up working hard for someone else's margin. Lead sites charge per enquiry — detailing keywords are among the more expensive things to bid on — and then sell the same customer to several detailers at once, so you're paying for the chance to compete for work you might not win.

The alternative isn't complicated: be findable, be bookable, and be excellent at a small number of things. Before-and-after photos of your own work, a way for people to see when you're actually free, and a handful of customers who tell their neighbours will build a book faster than an ad budget. Your first ten cars are your portfolio — treat them that way.