Changes afoot in grad's mobile lube business.

Clinton Blatter majored in finance in college, but another aspect of his education took place at a local Grease Monkey where he worked to help pay his school expenses.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

He noted the bottleneck of business that would form every midday as seemingly everybody in Rexburg, Idaho, tried to squeeze an oil change into their precious lunch hour.

"They'd go to Wal-Mart across the street while we were changing their oil, and then they'd come back and we still had cars lined up, so they'd have to wait longer," Blatter says.

Soon after graduating from Brigham Young University-Idaho, Blatter was discussing this inconvenient truth with his brother Landon, a Denver-area dentist.

Landon recently had called an auto-glass repair service to his office to fix a broken windshield. He had an idea. "What about a mobile oil-change business?"

By the first of May, Clinton was in business with Alpine Mobile Auto Care, a one-man operation offering on-site oil changes and 12-point inspections for a competitive $36.45 per vehicle, $100 for RVs, including extras like lubricating the chassis.

Startup costs were minimal--about $30,000. Landon provided the capital for the down payment on a 2006 Dodge Ram (sticker price $25,000) and $18,000 for a 13-foot trailer to hold four 30-gallon tanks of new oil and a fifth 80-gallon tank for old oil.

Less than two months into the venture, Clinton had five corporate clients--including Oracle Corp. in the Denver Tech Center, First Bank in Denver and Footers Catering, for which he services six or seven fleet vehicles.

Blatter also landed an account with Pressed 4 Time No. 723, a franchised dry-cleaning pickup service with four vehicles.

"He was able to service all four of our vans in about two hours, which is pretty great considering he also does all the inspections," says Michelle Moffitt, owner of Pressed 4 Time No. 723. "And he let us know we had a leak in one of our motors."

An obvious double-edged sword for mobile businesses like Clinton's and Moffitt's is the high price of gas. It's a selling point on one hand, an increased cost on the other.

"We're using it to our advantage," Moffitt says. "Obviously our gas prices have caused an increase in our expenses, but we're able to use it to our advantage and tell people not only are we saving them time, but we're saving them money."

Blatter, 24, hopes by next year at this time to have enough business to warrant a second vehicle for servicing clients within a 50-mile radius of his Highlands Ranch base.

And he says, "We're hoping in five to six years to have 10 trucks going in the area. It always takes a little bit of time to start out, but it's going for us."

Along with his brother's startup capital, Blatter has found encouragement from a mentor, Christopher Ashton, who built a similar business in Omaha, Neb., before selling it.

"He had it about six years, and he had oil changes scheduled up to a year in advance," Blatter says. "He was going around doing 40 to 60 oil changes a day, with just his one vehicle. Then he sold it to somebody, and the guy was just not willing to work. I guess he went bankrupt with it. But Chris did very well."

Hard work shouldn't be a problem for Blatter, who grew up on cattle ranches in Montana and Missouri where the tractors and trucks always needed oil changes or repairs.

Tending to vehicles is only half the job now, if even that much of it. When he's not on the road pulling his 13-foot trailer or underneath somebody's car changing the oil, he's sending out flyers, cold-calling businesses or attending chamber of commerce events or after-hour business gatherings to drum up more business.

"It's just part of the job, I guess," he says of his salesman's role. "It is a little bit difficult, but that's what you have to do."

Mike Tayfor is the managing editor of ColoradoBiz. He writes about small-business money issues and how startups are launched. Read this and Taylor's past columns on the Web at cobizmag.com and e-mail him at mtaylor@cobizmag.com.