Remote Ownership of SS/Auto Car Washes

[OurTown]

Is there a reason you don’t see chains of self serves?

Well there's Super Wash that built about 700 washes in 25 years and corporately held about half of those at one time. They have been selling a lot of them off over the last few years and last I heard they owned about 100 of them still.

 

[Roz]

I did not want to imply that we run without humans. We have people at each location to keep an eye on things for a few hours a day. They are just basic workers.

We use various technology to help us keep abreast of things at the wash. Besides 4K cameras for the property we use $20 Waze cameras focused on all equipment and Chemcials. Not 100% full proof but gives us a very good look at things so we can direct local workers if they miss something (which happens often as workers will never be the same as an owner no matter how much we pay them). Hard to find workers who care about their work. We use hostedsolutions or ICS or go directly to our IBAs for remote control of those machines. We use CryptoPay to be able to help a SS/vac customer if an issues arrises and they lose money due to some ding dong using foreign coins or coins with substances on them. Our guys are empowered to give out tokens if there is a lost money issue and they are present, or I can turn on equipment from my iPhone then call my guy to see if he is available/able to handle the repair.

Again not saying that You can avoid visits but with some basicworker locally and technology you can offer high level of customer service and keep Ahead of most major issues. We still get punctured hoses in bays from careless customers and stolen vac claws. Never going to be perfect but we do respond to all calls and our number is visible on all equipment. Hope this info helps.

 

[washnshine]

A 2 or 3 bay self serve with an IBA may not have the revenue to compensate full time management/maintenance personnel. A lot of the sell sheets for self serve and IBA equipment, as well as general information on “building a self serve car wash” boasts the advantage of it not being a “hired labor” intensive model. I know many self serve operators are successful hiring full time management because they are pulling in enough to do so, but many of the locations I have seen would not be profitable, or at least sufficiently profitable, with full time employees. A lot of it is valuing your own time. If your wash is netting 80k - 100k, do you want to basically split that with employees? With that time, are you making more in some other business venture you may be involved in? Is the free time you get having the wash maintained by someone else worth that to you? Everyone is different where they draw that line. To generate a full time salary for an employee, you will need to require them to have sufficient and substantial hours on site, which can generally be done in a fraction of that time by an owner operator. It’s really about finding an acceptable balance and obviously gets tougher with more locations and distance.

 

[Earl Weiss]

Is there a reason you don’t see chains of self serves?

Yes.

 

[mac]

I know some operators who have 5 to7 places and that is their whole life. This is just a funky business.

 

[Roz]

I know some operators who have 5 to7 places and that is their whole life. This is just a funky business.

5-7 places is a lot of work even with paid help.

 

[sjb]

Bingo!

We had 8 SS Competitors washes within 5 miles…

now they are all gone!