Who cleans a private jet? Apparently, there’s a franchise for that

By Sean Goldsmith

RealClean Aircraft Detailing is franchising aircraft cleaning, with success depending on enough local aircraft and repeat business.

RealClean Aircraft Detailing has built a franchise around cleaning everything from small private aircraft to corporate jets. Sean Goldsmith looks at what it costs to get into a cleaning business where the customer might hand you the keys to an aircraft worth several million dollars.

There are franchises that clean houses, offices, carpets, windows and swimming pools. RealClean Aircraft Detailing went looking for a rather more expensive customer and built a business cleaning aeroplanes.

The company has been detailing aircraft for more than 20 years and is now expanding through franchising, with operators opening in markets including Wichita and Tulsa. Franchisees travel to airports and work on aircraft where they are based, offering everything from routine cleaning to paint restoration and ceramic coatings.

Aircraft detailing sounds like a tiny market until you look at what these customers own, how much it costs to maintain an aircraft and how often the work needs doing. The question for a franchisee is whether there are enough of those customers within driving distance to justify a fairly substantial investment.

There may not be many customers, but they own aeroplanes

RealClean franchisees are selling to private aircraft owners, flight schools, corporate fleets and other aviation businesses. They do not need thousands of household customers, but they do need enough aircraft nearby to keep their crews working throughout the year.

The work includes exterior detailing, dry washing, paint restoration, ceramic coatings, window restoration, interior detailing and leather repair. Much of it can be carried out at the airport, which saves the franchisee from taking on the sort of customer-facing premises required by many other businesses.

One franchise operation in Southwest Florida launched with coverage across seven airports. That creates plenty of potential business, but it also raises an obvious operational problem. If those aircraft are spread across a large area, crews can spend a lot of their day travelling between jobs rather than billing customers.

That is why population is almost irrelevant when judging a territory like this. A city can have a million residents and still be a poor aircraft-detailing market. What matters is how many suitable aircraft are based nearby, who owns or operates them and how regularly they pay somebody to look after them.

This isn't a cheap cleaning franchise

Anyone expecting to buy a van and a few buckets will get a shock when they reach the investment figures. RealClean estimates that getting started can cost roughly $229,000 to $414,000 depending on the territory, while the initial franchise fee can reach $56,500. Franchisees also pay a 7.5% royalty along with marketing contributions.

Those numbers put considerably more pressure on the sales required to make the business worthwhile. RealClean's disclosure documents provide an interesting example of what an established operation can produce. Its affiliate operation in Illinois reported annual income of around $1.9 million during the periods disclosed, with net profit above $380,000.

Prospective franchisees need to be careful with those figures. They come from an established affiliate business rather than an average across a large population of mature franchise locations, so they should not be treated as a prediction of what a new operator in Wichita, Tulsa or anywhere else will earn.

The more important numbers will eventually come from the franchisees themselves. RealClean already knows its original aircraft-detailing operation can make money. Franchising has to prove that independent owners can reproduce enough of that performance in completely different markets.

Count the aircraft before buying the territory

RealClean's territory structure gives prospective owners a useful clue about how they should investigate the opportunity. A Tier 1 territory can contain up to 400 registered aircraft and 25 aviation-related businesses, while a Tier 2 territory can contain up to 300 aircraft and 15 aviation businesses.

Those figures are far more useful than a conventional population count, although even they only tell part of the story. A buyer needs to find out what is actually sitting at the local airports and who currently cleans it.

Four hundred registered aircraft do not automatically mean 400 customers. Some owners will clean their aircraft themselves, some will already have suppliers and others may not buy the higher-value services RealClean wants to sell. A prospective franchisee needs to know how many aircraft are permanently based there, how they are used, what detailing they require and what their owners currently spend.

Relationships could make a considerable difference too. A contract with a charter operator, flight school or fixed-base operator could provide regular work across several aircraft without having to find every owner individually. The downside is that losing one sizeable account could leave a noticeable hole in revenue.

That makes proper territory research particularly important here. Before spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, a buyer should be talking to the businesses at those airports rather than simply counting aircraft on a spreadsheet.

A tiny market can still be a good market

Franchise brands usually like enormous market numbers. Everybody eats, millions of homes need cleaning and almost every adult buys coffee. RealClean is selling to a much smaller group of people, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that if the economics work.

Most people will never pay for aircraft detailing because most people will never own an aircraft. The people who do own or operate one, however, are responsible for maintaining an expensive asset and may need the same specialist services repeatedly.

That repeat business is what makes the model interesting. RealClean does not need millions of consumers to suddenly become interested in aircraft detailing. Each franchisee needs a manageable number of aircraft owners and aviation businesses within a sensible travelling area, then has to give them enough reason to keep coming back.

The company has spent more than two decades learning how to clean aircraft. Its next challenge is proving that it can teach franchisees to build profitable businesses doing the same thing. That will depend less on how unusual the franchise sounds and much more on whether each territory contains enough paying aircraft to keep the crews busy.

What We Can Learn From This

A specialist franchise does not need a huge customer base if its customers spend enough and buy regularly. Anyone considering RealClean should investigate the aircraft and aviation businesses inside the territory before becoming too interested in population figures or the performance of the established Illinois operation. The important questions are who currently controls the detailing work, how often customers buy it and how far crews will have to travel between jobs. As more RealClean franchisees mature, their results should give prospective owners a much clearer picture of whether the original operation can be replicated elsewhere.

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