Lifelong Slidell businessman has inspiring story to tell
By KEVIN CHIRI
Slidell news bureau
SLIDELL – They say that great businesspeople are born that way.
Listening to the story of Detail World owner Tim Taylor, and the road he took to business success over the past 40 years, it would be hard to find someone who has displayed the entrepreneur spirit more than he has.
Taylor’s latest venture began 18 months ago when he bought a vehicle detail company and opened in Slidell under the current name of Detail World, now located at 101 Commercial Square on the corner of Gause Boulevard East.
Taylor had gained years of experience in the automobile business, including the detail department, that led to him and a partner starting their own franchise that now operates 14 detail shops in different dealerships around the state.
Detail World in Slidell offers virtually every product you can imagine to clean, shine and improve the look of your car, truck, boat or plane—including many products that would surprise the average vehicle owner.
“We can clean almost anything out of your car seats and have the best bug remover ever made called Splat!” he noted.
Taylor also opened a very unique aspect to his Slidell detail store in that he has a detail training center that can teach the novice to the expert how to detail vehicles. Classes are held every six weeks and he said it is also a great way for someone to start a career that can become very profitable.
Getting to his current success came through a very interesting road for Taylor, a lifelong Slidell resident. After high school in Slidell, he headed off to Mississippi College, quickly getting his start in the car business as a salesman in Jackson, Ms.
Taylor was already seeing ways to make money through business at a younger age than that. When he was 19, he and a couple of friends wanted to get into the food business at fairs, so they each put up $2,000, bought a mini-donut making machine, and operated it quite profitably at fairs for a couple of years before a man walked up to them and offered to buy the business.
“We sold it to him for $6,000 so we each got our $2,000 investment back, and made pretty good money at the fairs,” Taylor recalls. “But then he used the operation to start selling smoked turkey legs at fairs and made the name ‘Mr. Turkey Leg’ famous. Three years later he sold the business for $2.8 million.”
But Taylor would have his own good fortune coming in the future. While in Jackson he remembers walking into a corner convenience store and noticing what looked like a lot of profitable products being sold. For the next six months he picked out three corner convenience stores and would go to the stores every day to make notes about how many gallons of gas each pump had sold, and how much the products in the store were selling for.
“I was trying to figure out how much profit they made on every little thing in the store, and what was selling. I went in those stores almost every day for six months and made notes, then put together a business plan that I approached my dad with,” he added.
Taylor showed his father, a successful oil and gas man, what kind of profit he could make and was given a loan that allowed him to buy three stores. Within 10 years he owned five stores, doubled the profit in the stores, and then sold to several businessmen who showed up and said they wanted to buy the stores.
“I wrote the price for the five stores on a sticky note and handed it to them and said, ‘this is the price. I won’t go any lower so don’t come back unless you are willing to pay that.’ They showed back up and bought one a store a week for five weeks. I would meet them in a little trailer each Friday where they paid me in cash by stuffing Walmart bags full of the money,” he said with a laugh.
Then at the age of 35 he went back to the car business in sales and management, working as a buyer for 12 dealerships and flying around the country. One day when a group of cars for a dealership came in with dirty seats, he said the owner was steaming mad.
“We were going to clean the seats, but the dealership didn’t have any kind of detail shop. The owner offered me a chance to open a detail shop there and my partner and I took it, then built it to become a contracted detail shop in 14 dealerships around Louisiana,” he explained. “That’s what led me to finally buy a detail distribution company that is now Detail World.”
Detail World serves the solo car owner or the biggest professional detail companies with supplies that have made him the certified Jescar, Quantum and Stinger dealer in the state.
Taylor said he is always “thinking what business is next. My mind just works that way.”
But he gives plenty of credit for inspiration and leadership to his father, and his high school coach, Sammy Dantone.
“My coach told us kids something in one of our first meetings. He said that in life ‘your altitude will be determined by your attitude.’ And I never forgot that. I’m fortunate to have done what I have done, but it’s largely because I was influenced by some great people,” he added.
To check out their products, stop by the showroom at 101 Commercial Square, at the corner of Gause Boulevard East, or call them at 985-201-8039.