Starting a mobile tyre fitting business, to be honest.

Identify your target audience

A mobile tyre fitting business caters to diverse customers, with varying equipment, pricing, and working hours.

• Domestic drivers at home, typically weekday daytime and evening work, across a broad area.
• Workplaces and car parks, which cluster effectively and are the most efficient option.
• Fleets and small businesses, offering repeat work at set rates with minimal marketing.
• Roadside and emergency work, which pays best per job but disrupts scheduling.
• Trade support for garages lacking a machine, which is consistent but low-margin.

Attempting to serve all five in the first year often leads to being busy yet unprofitable. Choose one or two and let routing follow.

Routing is key, not just fitting

A workshop earns when a bay is full. A mobile operation earns when the van is active and loses when driving; the difference between a good and bad day is mainly geographical.

Two jobs on the same street are far more valuable than two jobs at opposite ends of your area for the same price, and the price doesn't indicate this. That's why your chosen coverage radius is more important than your price list.

Offer time slots by area, not exact times, and guide customers to days when you're nearby. Most will accept a slot two days later for a small saving; that flexibility is more valuable than it costs.

Stock is the surprising constraint.

A van carries what was loaded that morning. A wrong size isn't just inconvenient; it's a wasted trip and a customer who has taken time off work.

Accurate fitment data is more valuable for mobile operations than workshops, as workshops can order for tomorrow. Collecting vehicle registration at booking instead of a guessed size cuts wasted journeys significantly.

The other half is deciding what stays on the van. A few common sizes cover much domestic work, with everything else ordered against confirmed bookings.

Price travel or it consumes you.

The classic first-year error is pricing against local garage rates, as that's what customers compare you to, absorbing travel to remain competitive.

Travel each way is a real cost and often under-counted. So is the time spent on a driveway that a bay would handle faster, plus the risk of arriving to find the job differs from what was booked.

A workable model is a fitted price with a defined radius, a minimum job value to avoid losses on single tyres at distance, and clear rules for beyond the radius. Customers accept all three when stated upfront and resent them when revealed later.

Admin determines your scalability.

One van run from a phone and notebook works. Two vans do not, with the same failures: double bookings, jobs without addresses, and no clarity on last month's earnings.

Key setups before the second van include a booking flow that captures vehicles accurately, a schedule that understands routes, stock reflecting what's on the van, and invoicing that occurs automatically.

None of this is unusual, and all of it is much harder to adapt once you have customers and a second driver relying on it.

Where the initial work comes from

New mobile operations often misjudge how long organic demand takes and overrate the impact of advertising.

The quickest paths to a full week are workplaces, small fleets, and local trade ties, as each generates repeat clustered work instead of isolated jobs. A network that connects you with customers seeking fitting is more valuable early on than a marketing budget for the same reason.

Domestic demand grows, but it relies on reviews and repeat customers rather than one-off finds. Plan the first six months around clustered commercial work and view domestic as the compounding factor.