I worked for fourteen years at a family managed and family-owned business (27-years in the family) with both full-service car washes and self-service washes.
There is a STUPID amount of money in both but types of business but equally a bucket full of problems you don’t see from the outside or in the P/L accounting reports.
- Labor will always be a headache – those who will work HARD outside in 100+ degree weather for minimum wage have ongoing problems getting and maintaining the proper papers to work. Those who can work legally can’t handle the work pace and temperatures and are VERY eager to sue for both ‘injury’ and unemployment when possible. (It was not unusual to see 120-degree days without shade working on scalding hot pavement for 12-hour days – we never closed until the cars stopped coming.
- Equipment breaks constantly. Moving parts, constantly wet, and wear and tear means you will constantly be repairing, maintaining, and replacing motors, hydraulics, and electrical controls. Most of this falls squarely on the managers to conduct and downtime is EXPENSIVE and bad for your brand reputation because no one wants to pay when they can’t see the flashing lights and the colored bubbles flying even though 90% of that is purely for show.
- Theft is a huge problem. Ignore employee theft for a minute – there is a reason there are cameras EVERYWHERE. It is a game of one-upmanship to keep up with the change machine skimmers and the outright crowbar/torch thieves who can open up a coin exchanger in minutes to make off with $500+ in the middle of the night. Again, these places are not lighted like Xmas for your convenience but to deter theft.
- Vandalism is very costly. Yes, people do break equipment because they don’t understand how to make it work and have no problem using your $8K vacuum to clean up the spilled 50-lb bag of fiberglass and wire in the truck that wraps around the fan/motor and causes a fire. Yes, people run over the $75 spay hose handles/wands because they don’t return them to the rack. Yes, people try to force foreign coins into the machines requiring four hours of disassembly and testing before they can work again all the while your bay is out of service.
- Environmental issues are crazy and never go away. No, I am not talking about the people who think they are not being video recorded as they dump the truckful of 50-gallon drums of toxic cleaner in your drain trap (yeah they go to jail but expect to pay $20k to prosecute them and remediate the environmental impact BEFORE then because the type of people who pollute don’t have any money to pay). The real challenge is how ill-informed your average environmental protester is about how car washes work – hint, 99% of them are 2-3x more efficient than your hose/bucket home washing. Yes, car washes use thousands of gallons of water but that water gets recycled a half-dozen times with highly inspected and environmentally safe filters. No, I wouldn’t drink it but every drop of wastewater is cleaner than your large business wastewater that isn’t processed.
- Don’t forget good old Bureaucratic Incompetence and worse. Not only will you pretty much have to take on everyone’s misunderstanding of what modern water reclamation can accomplish but you often have to educate city zoning and inspectors about how much $$$$ your water engineers spent testing the site, building proper drainage, and water recycling to make the car wash efficient. Did I mention ALL of these guys have their hand out for $$$. When push comes to shove your attorney often delicately intimates (they aren’t stupid) you just pay because it is cheaper than fighting city hall.
What I am saying is expect your typical MBA or investment banker to have NO IDEA how a car wash works and how much WORK they involve. At the end of the day, there is a reason you pay $20 for what would take you two hours to do….VOLUME. If there isn’t volume then you are losing money hand over fists waiting for that sunny day when everyone wants to get their car washed.
YMMV but we managed more than a dozen of both automatic (ha!) and self-serve. Likewise, without proper auditing and upper management supervision, there is a huge leakage of cash out the back door like all cash-heavy businesses.