Six months ago I stepped down as CEO of Be Better Online to run Mobilglas full time. Today we have two service vehicles covering western Sweden, a third about to start, and I just sent the first round of partnership outreach emails to regional windshield specialists across the country. The plan is to build a national network of mobile glass repair operators, starting with the regions where we already have demand we cannot serve.
The theory was that running a physical service business alongside a digital agency would create useful overlap. BBO could handle the marketing. The agency’s analytical rigor could inform pricing and market entry. The founder — me — could split time between strategic work on BBO and operational work on Mobilglas. Efficiency through synergy.
The reality has been more complicated than that.
Where Mobilglas came from
I worked as a windshield technician before I got into digital marketing. A year and a half at Carglass, replacing and repairing car glass across the Gothenburg area. When I left that job to start what became BBO, I kept the industry knowledge but assumed I was done with physical service work.
Then in early 2012, my former manager from the windshield industry and I started talking about a gap in the Swedish market. Mobile windshield repair — where the technician comes to the car instead of the car going to a shop — was standard practice across much of Europe but barely existed in Sweden. The insurance companies, who fund most windshield repairs, had not yet embraced the model. We saw an opportunity.
BBO invested in the venture and I took the lead on building the operational infrastructure — booking systems, pricing models, marketing, customer service workflows. The technical windshield work was handled by our co-founder and the technicians we hired. Within six months, Mobilglas was operating in Gothenburg and Skåne with real customers and real revenue.
The attention problem
Here is what I did not anticipate: the two businesses compete for the same resource, and that resource is my attention.
BBO is a consultancy. Its rhythm is meetings, analysis, proposals, client calls. The work is cerebral, asynchronous, and forgiving of interruptions. If I step away from a client strategy for a day, nothing breaks. The strategy waits.
Mobilglas is a field-service operation. Its rhythm is dispatch, execution, customer calls, and logistics. When a technician has a problem on site, it needs solving now. When a customer cancels, the schedule needs reshuffling now. When a partnership proposal lands on a prospect’s desk, the follow-up window is days, not weeks.
The two rhythms are fundamentally incompatible. I found myself in BBO strategy meetings thinking about Mobilglas dispatch problems, and on Mobilglas customer calls thinking about BBO client proposals. The context-switching cost was not measured in minutes — it was measured in the quality of attention each business received.
The insurance gatekeeping problem
The bigger structural challenge has been the insurance companies. In Sweden, most windshield repairs are covered by vehicle insurance. The insurance companies maintain approved lists of repair providers. Getting onto those lists requires meeting their standards, which is reasonable, and navigating their procurement processes, which is less reasonable.
Several major insurers have declined to add Mobilglas to their approved lists — not because our work quality is insufficient, but because the mobile repair model does not fit their existing workflow categories. Their systems are built around workshop-based repair. A technician who comes to the customer’s location does not map cleanly onto their existing provider management infrastructure.
This is a pattern I recognize from the digital world. Incumbents do not reject innovation because it is bad. They reject it because their processes cannot accommodate it. The solution is either patience — waiting for the incumbents to adapt — or volume — building enough direct-customer demand that the insurers cannot ignore the model.
We are pursuing both, but it is slower than I expected.
What the partnership outreach means
The emails I sent this week are the beginning of the national expansion strategy. Instead of hiring technicians in every region — which would require capital we do not have — we are reaching out to existing windshield specialists who want to add a mobile service offering. We provide the brand, the booking infrastructure, the marketing, and the customer acquisition. They provide the technical skill and the local presence.
It is essentially a franchise model without the franchise fee. The partners operate under the Mobilglas brand, use our systems, and share revenue. We get national coverage without national payroll. They get a mobile service offering without building the infrastructure from scratch.
Whether this works depends on whether the value proposition is strong enough to attract quality partners. That is what the next few months will tell us.
The real lesson so far
The efficiency overlap I assumed would exist between BBO and Mobilglas has been real in exactly one dimension: marketing. BBO’s expertise in digital marketing has given Mobilglas a customer acquisition advantage that a standalone windshield company would not have. Our Google Ads management, our SEO, our conversion optimization — those skills transferred directly and measurably.
In every other dimension, the overlap has been a liability. Shared founder attention means split founder attention. Shared office space means competing priorities for the same desk. Shared financial infrastructure means the accounting is more complex than either business alone would require.
If I were advising someone considering a similar dual-venture approach, I would say: the synergies are real but narrow. They exist in specific functional areas and nowhere else. The attention cost of running two businesses is not additive — it is multiplicative. Each business does not take half your attention. Each business takes most of your attention, and the gap is filled with context-switching overhead that produces nothing.
I do not regret starting Mobilglas. The venture has real potential and the market gap is genuine. But the model of running it alongside BBO, with one founder spanning both, has a shelf life. At some point — probably soon — one business needs a dedicated operator and the other needs me back full time.
Has anyone here run parallel ventures successfully? I am specifically curious about the attention-management piece — how you prevented one business from cannibalizing the other’s mindshare.