Starting a mobile tyre fitting business, honestly.

Decide who you are actually for

A mobile tyre fitting business can serve very different customers, and the equipment, pricing and working day differ enormously between them.

• Domestic drivers at home, which is weekday-daytime and evening work, spread across a wide area.
• Workplaces and car parks, which clusters well and is the most efficient version of the job.
• Fleets and small businesses, which is repeat work at agreed rates and far less marketing.
• Roadside and emergency, which pays best per job and destroys any attempt at a schedule.
• Trade support for garages without a machine, which is steady and low-margin.

Trying to serve all five in the first year is the most common way to be busy and unprofitable at the same time. Pick one or two and let the routing follow.

Routing is the business, not the fitting

A workshop earns when a bay is occupied. A mobile operation earns when the van is working and loses when it is driving, and the difference between a good day and a bad one is almost entirely geography.

Two jobs on the same street are worth far more than two jobs at opposite ends of your area at the same price, and nothing about the price tells you that. This is why the coverage radius you choose matters more than the price list you write.

Practically, offer time windows by area rather than precise times, and be willing to steer a customer to a day when you are already nearby. Most people will take a slot two days later for a small saving, and that flexibility is worth more than it costs.

Stock is the constraint that surprises people

A van carries what was loaded that morning. A wrong size on board is not an inconvenience, it is a wasted round trip and a customer who has taken time off work.

That makes accurate fitment data worth more to a mobile operation than to a workshop one, because a workshop can order in for tomorrow and you cannot. Taking the vehicle registration at booking rather than a customer-guessed size is the single biggest reduction in wasted journeys available to you.

The other half is deciding what lives on the van permanently. A small number of common sizes covers a surprising share of domestic work, and everything else is bought against a confirmed booking rather than held.

Price the travel or it eats you

The classic first-year mistake is pricing against local workshop prices, because that is what customers compare you to, and absorbing the travel to stay competitive.

Travel each way is real cost and it is consistently under-counted. So is the time spent on a driveway that a bay would have done faster, and the risk of arriving to find the job is not what was booked.

A workable shape is a fitted price that includes a defined radius, a minimum job value so a single tyre at distance is not sold at a loss, and a clear rule for what happens beyond the radius. Customers accept all three when they are stated up front and resent all three when they appear at the end.

The admin decides whether you scale

One van run from a phone and a notebook works. Two vans does not, and the failure is always the same: double bookings, jobs without an address, and no idea what was actually earned last month.

The things worth having in place before the second van rather than after are a booking flow that captures the vehicle properly, a schedule that understands routes rather than just times, stock that reflects what is on the van, and invoicing that happens without you doing it in the evening.

None of that is exotic, and all of it is much harder to retrofit once you have customers and a second driver depending on it.

Where the work comes from at the start

New mobile operations usually underestimate how long organic demand takes and overestimate how much advertising helps.

The fastest routes to a full week tend to be workplaces, small fleets and local trade relationships, because each one produces repeat clustered work rather than a single distant job. A network that puts you in front of customers already looking for fitting is worth more early than a marketing budget, for the same reason.

Domestic demand builds, but it builds on reviews and repeat customers rather than on being found once. Plan the first six months around clustered commercial work and treat domestic as the thing that compounds.