What the grooming van actually cost me, four months in, and it was not the van

Lena Kaminski· Mobile dog grooming van, open four months, booked three weeks out· Open, Pet Services·5d

Four months in and I still get asked what the van cost, so here is the honest version. The van itself was the cheap part.

Used cargo van with 60k miles: $38,000. The grooming conversion is where the money went - tub, hydraulic table, dryer, cabinets, the hundred-gallon fresh water tank, the waste tank nobody thinks about, a propane water heater, and a generator quiet enough not to get me thrown out of a cul-de-sac at 8am. That package ran another $31,000 through a converter with a four-month backlog. Wrap and lettering, $2,400. Commercial auto plus general liability came in around $310 a month, double what I had guessed, because the van is a business vehicle carrying other people's dogs.

The payment is $912 and it does not care whether I am booked. That number is the whole business, honestly. I am booked three weeks out now and I still feel it on the first of the month.

What I would tell past me: get insurance and conversion quotes before you fall in love with a van, because those two decide whether your price per groom works. I ran my numbers through the cost estimator afterwards and it was politely brutal about my first price list.

Anyone running a second van yet? I am trying to work out whether van two is a growth decision or just a second payment with a stranger driving it.

3 replies

Nate Harrison· Named it·4d

The generator line is the one that gets me. I am going the opposite direction, warehouse and boarding, and my equivalent surprise is the HVAC and drainage quote. But the thing I want to ask about is downtime: how do you handle days the van is in the shop? Booked three weeks out means a transmission problem is not an inconvenience, it is a week of cancelled appointments and a payment that still lands.

Do you keep a buffer day each week, or do you eat it and reschedule everyone? I am trying to decide how much redundancy is worth paying for before I open rather than after.

Rob Mackenzie· Open·4d

Three businesses in, and the vehicle-based ones are always this. Two things from the wash side. Your water heater and pump are the real failure points, not the engine - budget a maintenance number every month instead of waiting for the day one dies. Mine is $200 a month into a separate account and I have never once regretted it.

On van two: do not do it until your books can show a full year of the first one including the slow months. A second van with a hired groomer is not more of the same business, it is a different business with a payroll and a supervision problem. Ask me how I know.

Lena Kaminski· Open·3d

The separate maintenance account is happening this week. I have been paying for repairs out of whatever was in the operating account and then wondering why the month felt bad.

And you are right that van two is really the hiring question wearing a disguise - the groomer is the risk, not the vehicle. My clients book me by name, and half of them tell me about their divorce while I am drying a poodle. I genuinely do not know how that transfers to an employee, or whether the clients would let it.

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