What Population Base Do You Serve?

[Jason74]

Thanks for replying to my question regarding what your travel distance is!

If you don't mind, I would also like to ask the following questions:

1. What is the population of your service area?

2. How many legitimate (by "legitimate" I mean visible and established) competitors are competing within that service area?

3. On average, how may repairs does your service area generate for you a week?


If I am willing to travel 20 minutes in each direction, I will be serving a population of about 70,000. Within this service area, there may be 2 other mobile service providers. With that info in mind I would like to ask:

4. Based upon your experience, assuming I work hard and smart, do you think that a population base of 70,000 can provide enough business to make a decent living (for me this would equal at least 12-15 retail repairs per week).

Thanks for your input,
Jason

[Ricersux]

Population in my service area is over 1 million.

There are several repair only and more than 40 auto glass shops in my service area and business is tight.

I have no experience working with a population of 70,000 so I can't answer if that is enough to make a living on.

[Mr Bill]

70,000 people doesn't seem like enough people to produce 10 to 15 repairs chip repairs a week.

[screenman]

2 reasonable fleet customers would give you that many repairs each week. I am sorry to say the the results depend more on your sales and marketing ability, plus of course your personal drive, but I would say that is enough customers to provide a good income. My main area is only 80,000 and I think 75% of the people do not know of me, YET!.

[Glasseye]

As a general rule of thumb, a figure of 10% is an approximate indication of the windshield annual breakage rate on cars. So if you look at car population ( not actual population) this will give you a rough guide. e.g. 50,000 cars will provide 5,000 repair/replace opportunities yearly.

[Dave M]

Glasseye,
What are you basing this "rule of thumb" on? What research or survey material did this info originate from?

[screenman]

We came up with a 1 in 6 number years ago and this was replacement figures, that may be slightly off nowadays.

[Frank EU]

We, and many others, still work with one in six. Some say one in seven. One in ten appears to be low.

[Dave M]

So, who are "we" and "some"? Not trying to be a hard-ass here, just want to know where these estimates come from.

[screenman]

Our original list came from figures supplied by a government office of some description, now where they bought them from I have no idea. I know that through my own counting 8 out of every 10 buses at one of my fleets get windshield damage each year, most get hit a lot more than once depending on the route they travel.

You could walk a large parking lot and do your own count, but that of course would only tell you how many windshields have damage in at that particular moment.

If you google this question (how many windshields are replaced each year) you will find a lot of answers.

Some of the answers I found for the USA were 15,000,000 windshields replaced out of 150,000,000 vehicles on the road, now that is replaced, take a huge amount out for those drives that did not change the glass and another figure for those that were repaired, and the 1 in 6 figure seems about correct.