Clean Drive Detailing
St. Michael's student start detailing business

Redmond Deck | staff editor

First-year St. Michael’s business major Ryan Clunan began his own cleaning business. An idea that began in the summer and was brought up to be his class business project, Clean Drive Detailing has been active ever since.

License to clean

Clean Drive Detailing is a student-run business that hand washes, waxes, polishes and reconditions a customer’s vehicle while the customer goes out for a game of golf.

Clunan began his business in Woodstock, Vt. and raised over $8,000 during the summer, which helped pay for school as well as helping him with his personal hobbies, he says.

“I just worked at a golf course that I didn’t really like, and I just wanted to work for myself,” Clunan says. “I’ve always liked cars so I decided to do that. There were low costs to start up.”

Clunan and his brother Matt operate the business out of an E-250 work van, equipped with a water tank and generator. He bought the van off of eBay, an Internet auction service, which ended up only costing him $900, he says. The water tank and other items were bought off eBay as well. Clunan uses his van both personally and professionally, he says. Clunan says he believes there is no license needed to operate such a business.

Getting help

Clunan brought Clean Drive into his Foundations of Business Administration class as his group’s business. First-year students Brian Collins, Meredith Austin, Nick Romano, and Kyle Brownell are all part of Clean Drive Detailing. However, they do not receive salaries.

“We receive payment as if we were stockholders, which we are,” Brownell says. He is one of the finance managers for the business.

Austin is one of the two marketing managers in the group. She does much of the promotion of the business, sending mass e-mails, spreading the word by mouth, and posting brochures around campus, she says.

“We get paid in accordance with how much we sell,” Austin says. “All five members of our group are stockholders. We get paid according to the amount of stock we have after the professors have taken out their 10 percent tax.
Basically, we get paid for the amount of work we put in.”

The price of the services ranges depending on how much work the customer would like done, Clunan says. They have a range for small cars and large vehicles. The services range from $25 for a simple hand wash and dry, rim cleaning and tire shining to $160 which includes even more, such as waxing, bug removal, vacuuming and upholstery shampooing.

“It depends on the service they want, that’s how I price it,” Clunan says. “There’s an extra charge for larger cars though.”

Word from the wise

Associate Professor Roger Putzel taught Clunan’s Foundations of Business Administration class. Putzel considered Clunan’s business a good service concept.

“Students do get ideas in college and then make successful businesses out of them,” Putzel says. “Facebook started as a lark at Harvard. Forrester Research started as a term paper in a political science class at Harvard. FedEx, according to legend, started as an economics paper at Yale.”

Putzel’s objective is not to have exactly that happen, although it would be fine if it did, he says. Putzel got the idea from the Thacher School in Ojai, Calif.

The business has been going for two years and in the future, Clunan hopes to clean boats.

“Every student has a horse, which they must feed and groom every day,” he says. “You can learn the essentials of business from running a lemonade stand.”

Most businesses created by students on campus make far less than $8,000, he says. However, on other campuses, an equivalent course sometimes would make $25,000 or more.

“They organize differently, according to a principle called ‘organization as classroom,’” he says. “The entire class breaks up into the different departments of one company. Each department does its job. At the end of the semester they sometimes make a lot of money, which they donate to a charity.”

Hitting the Web

Clean Drive Cleaning has been running very well, and better than he expected, Clunan says. There’s more of a faculty customer base, than student. The business has a Web site making it easy for customers to find out the service costs, scheduling appointments, and contacting the business.

The Web site also has customer testimonials.

“We didn't get a lot of responses from our Web site,” she says. “But we got a huge response from mass e-mails. I think it's mostly because of the convenience of just responding to an e-mail rather than having to navigate a Web site.”

Clunan says the reason the Web site did not help business much is because it’s a St. Michael’s Web site, and no one knows about it.

In the future Clunan is thinking about adding boats to his cleaning service, he says.

“I’m planning on going to Cape Cod this summer and doing it,” Clunan says. “Down there, there will be more of those [boats].”