There is an express exterior wash located 30 miles east of my town in a town with very similar demographics. They have about 7000 in the town and the traffic count is 16000 per day in front of the wash with a split highway that is not super easy to enter. If you're headed west bound, you have to go just past it to a turn around to go back to the wash. It has been in business for about 5 or 6 years. He's the only one in town and the manager says he is washing an average of 450 cars per day. I don't believe he has anything to gain by inflating his numbers because he works for a franchise! To further add to the confusion, it was built by a private individual. He ran it for 2 years and then sold out to Carwash USA. I don't think they'd waste their money on a piss poor low volume site. I'm sure you might say they got it for a good deal, but they still have to believe they can make it profitable. The tunnel looks to be about 80 feet and their price points are 8, 10, 16, and 21. If he's washing 450 a day, I promise they're making money. Proformas are purely speculative anyway and I just believe that the people that do them are trained to believe you have to be in a huge metropolitan area with mega traffic counts to be successful. I really believe they are absolutely not equipped to give any good answers on smaller markets where the overhead would be way lower and there's no competition for miles. Sonny's website even had an article posted by Anthony Analetto(probably butchered that) but he literally spelled out what I'm saying. He felt that the next evolution of these washes would be smaller markets with a small footprint and low labor costs. Price points would be on the higher end since there's no competition. I love the information I've found on this site and it's been very helpful but everyone seems to be located in one of those large markets and can't wrap their heads around only making 100,000 a year.
There are always exceptions to the rule. I can show you a car wash with 9K cars per day passing its
doors, with a 1 mile radius population of 32K and 3 mile radius of 106K, that washes about 30K cars per year and I can show you a car wash with 7K cars/day that washes 140K/yr.
I've been on the development and operations side of car washing where we used Sonnys to evaluate sites and in my own experience their Proformas are on the conservative side. I've seen sites blow away the proforma numbers in the first year. Having said that, the information provided in their site evaluations and proformas is extremely valuable to investors who know nothing about the industry.
With regard to Anthony's article, you're not wrong, however, for the operators who are doing what you are suggesting, it is strategic to garner and protect market share, there is strategy behind what they are doing and economies of scale. AND, they don't always get it right either.
Can a small market express work... Maybe... nobody's going to stop you if you really want to do it, they'll be happy to sell you the equipment, but you won't be able to say "Why didn't you tell me?" If it doesn't work. A good distributor should be a trusted business advisor who will challenge you. If you want a "yes man" that just wants to sell you equipment, you'll find those too.
Best of Luck
