Hi detail marine,
Welcome to Marine31Online.com!
First, the next time I have a boat detailing class scheduled I'd highly recommend you clear your schedule and attend it. Nothing beats hands-on training.
Just look through any of these write-ups and the pictures alone will show you how much you can learn.
Pictures and Comments from Boat Detailing Projects
Next, if you want to make money detailing boats then you have to learn how to do one-step details, that is you need to learn how to use a one-step cleaner/wax so you only have to go around the boat twice.
Most boat owners will not pay you enough money to make it worth your while to do 2 steps or 3 steps to a boat, especially a huge boat. So you need to learn to use one-step products.
2 and 3 step procedures will always give you better results especially for colored gel-coats, that is anything but a white gel-coat finish.
But the market is what it is and knowing how to use a good one-step will be your friend. I'd also suggest doing what I call,
Cherry Picking
That is turn down customers that have horrendous boats that have never been maintained or never regularly been maintained. There's enough boat owners out there with boats in decent shape to work on so let the worst of the worst go to the other guy.
Most guys charge by the foot when detailing, so call around in your area like you're a potential customer and ask for some quotes to get your boat detailed inside and out to get a feel for your market.
Besides the above, you're going to need all the normal tools for detailing boats, brushes, APC's, cleaners, polishes, fabric cleaners, fabric protectants, vinyl products, non-skid products, metal polishes, plastic cleaners and polishes, machines, buffing products and pads and lots of microfiber towels.
Id' highly recommend clicking on this link,
Pictures and Comments from Boat Detailing Projects
There are 5 fully documented boat details with hundreds of pictures and text that will educate you about what's going on in the pictures.
Invest some time into yourself by reading, not scanning these write-ups and then start asking questions on this forum. And when starting a thread to ask questions, limit your questions to around 3 questions as it makes it a LOT easier for someone like me to answer them.
When you start a thread and ask 12 questions it gets physically time consumer to "format" the replies in a forum. I've been doing this a long time so I know that which I speak of.