soapy
Senior Member
A few years back I come up with a way of tracking weather in my ZIP code and giving a numerical number to each month based on a 1 to 10 range. I found I could get all the historical data I needed at a website called weather underground.com. I go to the main page and click on the local section. Within that section it has a history section that I click on. It askes me for zip code I am interested in and time frame. I pull up weather history by the month and scroll down to a calendar presentation that has variety of icons from sunny weather to storms. I assign a point value to each day according to the icon on that day. A full sunny day gets 1 point and a partly sunny day get 1/2 point. The other icons all represent some degree of storm activity that is not good for car washing so I do not give them any points. Since there are roughly 30 days in a month and I want to get a scale of 1 to 10 I take the total point value for the month and divide that by 3 to come up with a value. A perfect month would be a 10. ( that has never happened by the way) Most of the time the month will range between 4 to 6 in point value. If I add 12 months together and divide by 12 I get a value for the year.
I compared the last 6 years of weather factors and come up with a interesting find. I took my sales for all my washes for any given year and divided the overall sales by the weather factor for that year. This gave me a value of how much wash sales I would have for each point of the weather factor. As an example lets say 1 point = $100,000 in sales. So a weather factor of 4.3 would mean sales for the year of 430,000. I found that in the last 6 years I could take any given years sales and divide that number by the weather factor for the that year and get my sales per point. If i took the sales per point for 2006 and multiplied it by my weather factor for 2008 I would be within .005 % of the actual sales I had in 2008. ETC. This worked for every single year of mixing and matching numbers.
Not only does the weather factor number give me something to compare each year to it also is a extremly acurate ( in my case ) to showing how weather affects sales. My conclusion is that the economy has done little to change sales at the washes. It all has to do with weather IMO. As the weather factor has dropped so have sales in direct proportions. I am confident that sales will go up as weather improves.
A good year for me will have a weather factor of 4.5. This might not be a good number for other areas but for me it is. The last 2 years have shown a drop by over a full point per year. This means I have had 25% less washing days to make money each of those years. So far the this years weather factor is 1.28 for the first 3 months. Now I am just waiting for the sun to shine more.
I compared the last 6 years of weather factors and come up with a interesting find. I took my sales for all my washes for any given year and divided the overall sales by the weather factor for that year. This gave me a value of how much wash sales I would have for each point of the weather factor. As an example lets say 1 point = $100,000 in sales. So a weather factor of 4.3 would mean sales for the year of 430,000. I found that in the last 6 years I could take any given years sales and divide that number by the weather factor for the that year and get my sales per point. If i took the sales per point for 2006 and multiplied it by my weather factor for 2008 I would be within .005 % of the actual sales I had in 2008. ETC. This worked for every single year of mixing and matching numbers.
Not only does the weather factor number give me something to compare each year to it also is a extremly acurate ( in my case ) to showing how weather affects sales. My conclusion is that the economy has done little to change sales at the washes. It all has to do with weather IMO. As the weather factor has dropped so have sales in direct proportions. I am confident that sales will go up as weather improves.
A good year for me will have a weather factor of 4.5. This might not be a good number for other areas but for me it is. The last 2 years have shown a drop by over a full point per year. This means I have had 25% less washing days to make money each of those years. So far the this years weather factor is 1.28 for the first 3 months. Now I am just waiting for the sun to shine more.
