When someone asks why I’ve stayed in the car wash business this long, I usually give them the answer that sounds professional. I will talk about the operational discipline, the customer relationships, and the satisfaction of building something durable.
All of that is true, of course. But the part I don’t usually say out loud is that I get a real kick out of taking a dirty, beat-up car and watching it come out the other end gleaming. That feeling, as much as the math, is what keeps me building.
There’s a value in this work that doesn’t show up on a P&L. Take, for example, a custom homebuilder who could do anything in the trade. They could be putting up cookie-cutter spec houses on a steady margin. But instead, they’re working one house at a time, putting in 12-hour days they don’t need to.
They’re doing it in part because of how they feel when the family pulls into the driveway. Our industry has its own version of that, and most of us are quieter about it than we should be, because the numbers are easy to defend in front of a partner or a banker, and the rest sounds soft when you say it out loud.
An operator with hundreds of restaurants once told me, almost embarrassed, that his car washes are the most fun part of his business. He has 300 wildly profitable, quick-serve locations with the systems, staff, and playbooks for success.
Despite that, he is opening his fourth wash. When I asked him why, he didn’t talk about returns or diversification. He said the wash makes every bit as much money as the restaurants. And it’s more fun. He lit up when he said it.
Work Can Be Fun
The word fun doesn’t make it into many investor decks. But it belongs in the conversation anyway. The operators I’m closest to are the ones who feel something when they walk a tunnel and watch a clean car roll out into the dryers.
They like the work. Hard problems energize them. The financial case got them into this business, and a different kind of yield, an emotional yield, kept them in it. You can usually tell within 10 minutes of walking a site whether the operator has it or not.
A friend of mine spent 25 years building washes for other operators before he remembered why he had loved the work in the first place. He started in this industry as a kid, worked his way up to ownership, then sold his wash and went to work on the equipment side, helping hundreds of other operators build theirs. Recently he partnered back into a small operation.
A month in, he called me and said he’d forgotten how much he loved this. The feeling didn’t come back until he was inside the tunnel once again. He sounded like a kid, albeit with gray hair.
The feeling and the results are not separate things. Operators who chase that feeling tend to produce better cars. Customers can tell when a wash was tuned by someone who cares, not just by someone who maintains it. The shine is the proof of that attention. The more energy you put into each wash, the more your customers feel it.
Attention To Detail
The industry rewards the people who care about the small things. Every surface on the vehicle gets washed twice, in a different motion, with a different material. High-pressure, cloth, foam; each has its place. Different actions lift different dirt.
The discipline is old. What’s new is what the equipment can tell you while it works. Cycle counts by wash package. Friction-spike alerts. Exception reports when something drifts out of spec. A wear pattern shows up as a number before it shows up as a complaint. Chemicals drifting over-spec reach the operator before customers do.
No operator does this alone, especially across multiple sites. The service partners and the data the equipment produces are part of why an operator can spend their energy on the wash itself. Technology doesn’t replace the feeling of running a wash. It tells you when the feeling is right.
Even with every alert and trend report, watching the end of the tunnel still does work no sensor can do. Walk back, look at each car as it exits, and check it the way the customer is about to check it once the sun hits the hood.
The habit takes a few seconds. It catches the cars where the sensors did their job and where discipline did the rest. Streaks. Spots. The places a customer will notice the second they pull into the vacuum area. The joy is eliminating them to deliver a cleaner, drier, shinier car.
The Runway Remains Long
For every major metro that looks built out, there are smaller towns and underserved corridors where customers still drive 30 minutes to find an express wash. The operators I’d bet on, in any market and any rate environment, are the ones who still light up when they describe their newest tunnel.
They’re building in places others didn’t notice, sponsoring Little League teams, becoming part of where they operate. The financial case got them in. What keeps them excited is the chance to build new markets, serve more communities, and push the industry forward.
There’s no shame in admitting that the work itself is the reward. The trick is to let that motivation show up in the tunnel. Wash every surface twice. Read what the data is telling you. Walk the lot and check every car.
Operators who care this much produce the cleanest cars in their markets, and the cleanest cars in any market are the ones customers come back for. The yield you cannot measure is what produces the yield you can.
Good luck and good washing,
Joining the company in 2000, Anthony Analetto serves as the president of Sonny’s CarWash Equipment Division. In this role, Anthony leads the innovation of new products to drive client success and oversees all operations, engineering, and supply chain management. Washing cars for more than 30 years, Anthony was the director of operations for a 74-location national car wash chain prior to joining the company.