Staffing Target: 0
By Michael George

Because of constant weather changes, it's difficult to keep employees.

I detest the labor problems in the car wash business. These staffing difficulties are particularly aggravating in the Midwestern, Central, and Eastern states. In these markets, you might need 40 people on your site one day and only 20 the next. Several days later, your employee requirement could be back up to 40, only to drop down to 10 the day after. You may find that on a given day you need no people at all!

It would rain or snow for four days and when the bad weather finally lets up, you'll discover that you've lost half your crew. Now, because the sky is clear, the cars waiting in line at the tunnel entrance would be backed up into the street. But you won't be able to run the volume because you only have half your crew! The only remedy is to hire guys on the spot and try to train them in 10 minutes while also trying to run 100 or 110 car an hour! To add insult to injury, studies have shown that many car washes do 50 percent of their business for a given month in five to six days. If you've lost half your crew, you can't run that many cars on those prime days, so there goes that month's profit.

Is this any way to run a business? For the sake of my own sanity, I did a study on the employee situation and came to the conclusion that there are some things you just cannot change. These include:

• In the car wash business it is difficult to keep employees because of the constant weather changes.

• Due to these changes, a different number of people is required on different days, even at different hours.

• Most employees won't stay because of this ever-changing schedule.

I realized that if I wanted to live past the age of 40, I'd have to get rid of most of the employees! And the alternative was quite enticing: With mostly automated mechanical equipment, the labor problem would no longer exist. The service would become an express exterior wash. Now, one or two people could run 10 to 20 cars per hour or even 110 to 120 cars per hour and there would be no need to change the size of the crew! The wash would also look less busy (and therefore not discourage drive-by customers) as there would be no holdup in processing cars because half the crew didn't show or because problem cars were delaying the process - it would take only five to 10 minutes per car instead of 25 or 30 minutes per car.

In some markets, there is still a resistance to exterior washes - a belief that to wash a car in a professional manner, you have to offer full service. That resistance is, however, softening. To understand this, and my own conversion from full-service to exterior proponent, we need to pay a visit to the not-too-distant past.

BACKGROUND

My father started his involvement in the car wash business in 1955 when he opened Paul's Auto Wash. It was one of the first full-service car washes in the country. He also pioneered the enclosed isle way, air conditioned and heated it, carpeted it, and installed a stereo sound system. In 1966, when I was eight, I got my own start in the car wash business washing towels. The following year, my father built one of the first exterior washes in the country. It was a 100-foot tunnel along with gas sales on the lower-income side of town. When my father died in 1973, my mother and I took over the business. In 1975, I remodeled the exterior wash and we sold it a year later. I began menu-selling in 1977 and in that same year started an offline express detail service - quick waxes, hot-solution extractors, and carpet shampoos - processes that were familiar to me as my family had operated a separate full-service standalone detail center since 1958.

STEPPING TO EXTERIOR

I installed the first reverse osmosis system in a tunnel in 1983 and the following year added touchless fixed-nozzle blowers. This enabled me to eliminate hand finishing. The next steps were to automate prepping and, by 1990, to incorporate automated self-loading. This finally eliminated everyone in the tunnel - the staffing target "0" had been reached. To automate the self-loading procedure, we installed a barcode reader next to a gate at the tunnel entrance. Customers would pull up to the gate with their receipts, which included the barcode, and have the barcode reader scan the receipt, which cued the car and opened the gate to allow the car through.

During the 80s and early 90s I did many remodels. I bought out old rundown car washes and refurbished them. The first project kicked off in 1980. It was an old full-service car wash that was running only 20,000 to 22,000 cars through its tunnel per year. This was also the first wash I converted from online full-service to exterior wash online, where the customer remained in the car, and offline full-service, which meant the customer exited the tunnel and then pulled round to a different building in another area where the full-service tasks were performed.

FADING FADS

A fad of the 90s, which found many proponents among the car wash experts, held that customers wanted hand washing and that the equipment consequently had to be removed from the tunnel. I have been washing cars for 35 years and I have been offering express exterior wash with offline full-service facilities for 24 years. Now these same experts who not too long ago were calling for equipment removal are putting all the equipment back in and are talking up a storm about "flex service."

Back in the 1980s, when I first embarked on this venture, many people said it couldn't be done. You can't change full-service car washing, they said. Well, look at me now! I changed four of my own washes, converting them to express exterior wash with offline full service. And I've helped dozens of operators adapt their full-service and exterior washes. I was recently involved with the building of a new wash in a California desert location. Within four months of opening, the wash was running 6,000 cars a month through the tunnel, 40 percent of which were express exterior washes, and grossing $12.30 per car. Not bad for a brand new car wash!

A WASH IS A WASH

The car wash industry is no different than any other industry. Dry cleaning is dry cleaning whenever and wherever you go. Customers, whether they are in New York or Los Angeles, Phoenix or Orlando are the same. When they leave the car wash they want to leave in a clean car, they want to leave without undue delay, and they want to see value in their purchase. How you accomplish this task or how you meet their expectations has little relevance - as long as you succeed.

The patron at the cash register in McDonald's, for example, does not ask the counter help where the hamburger buns come from, or at what temperature the meat patty is cooked. Heck, despite years of advertising by Burger King that its patty is grilled rather than fried, the customer clearly doesn't care much how the sandwich is prepared! What the customer does care about is that the sandwich looks, tastes, smells, and feels like the McDonald's sandwich he bought and ate last week, the week before that, and even last year! The customer has a consistency in expectations and wants those expectations consistently met.

McDonald's, however, is not the only successful restaurant around. Its nemesis, Burger King, is nearly as successful. Think of all the flourishing diners that dot the countryside coast to coast, the neighborhood restaurants, the ethnic eating places, the fine restaurants for the gastronomically inclined. The market clearly has room for many approaches to basically the same service - providing sustenance. So it is in most industries - many approaches, each capable of success.

The car wash operator, too, can choose this approach. My approach was to convert from full-service to express exterior washing. This wash process has proven to produce quality that is very consistent. When everything is automated, you don't get the mistakes that humans make or the variances in quality or methods in prepping, washing, and drying. Every time the customer patronizes your business, he'll get the same wash and the same quality. If the facility is fitted with the appropriate equipment and the operation is professionally managed, you really can eliminate virtually all employees. I've been part of several projects where a single supervisor/manager floated around and the sales, loading, and prepping were all automated. These aren't small operations. I'm talking about 120- to 150-foot tunnels running 110 to 160 cars an hour.

Automation, with one or two employees, equals more volume, less overhead, less management, resulting in more profit.

Michael George is with Auto Wash Services Inc., a Scottsdale, AZ-based car wash sales, consulting, and training enterprise. Michael was a member of the board of directors of MCA (Michigan Car Wash Association, as it then was) for eight years and served on the board of the Central States Car Wash Association for ten years, two of which as president.