I watched “Groundhog Day” again the other night. Bill Murray keeps waking up to the same morning, the same song, until he finally learns what the day was trying to teach him. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth checking out.
Some lessons in this business work the same way. You keep running into them until they stick. Here is one of mine.
Customers don’t judge you on the day everything runs right. They judge you on the day something breaks, and on whether they felt it.
Redundancy Is A Promise
Redundancy is more than a maintenance line item. It’s a promise the customer never sees you keep.
No customer pulls in thinking about your uptime. They feel outcomes. A dry car. A vacuum that pulls. A pay station that makes the transaction seamless. When one fails and nothing is behind it, the customer leaves with the one story they’ll tell everyone they know about your wash.
Every surface should be cleaned multiple ways. Top operators have their tunnels tuned in. Every surface gets worked by multiple motions, a mix of materials and actions, and the combination beats any single one.
The real value shows up when something retracts. When the top brush lifts off a tall vehicle, a mitter or high pressure is still working the roof. When a wrap folds back, the side brushes keep turning to cover the doors and quarters. No surface rides on one piece of equipment alone. Build the tunnel that way and losing one motion never means a dirty car.
Drying is where a wash lands or falls apart. More air, matched to your line speed, carries the car out gleaming instead of damp. Be sure to spec your blowers a step above the minimum, and the same air that sends every car out drier is the cushion that saves you when one quits.
Nothing extra bolted on, just one investment pulling double duty. When a motor goes down, the customer hardly notices, which is the whole point.
Beyond The Tunnel
The failures customers remember often occur outside the tunnel. For some, that is where redundancy thins out. The wash process gets all the planning. What’s your backup plan for the vacuums, dryers, and pay stations that the customer sees and feels most?
Be sure to size your vacuums so if one producer goes down it never leaves a customer without suction. Pull into enough washes and you’ll eventually come across one with cones in front of some vacuum stalls, or worse, a broken vacuum available for a customer to use. It can happen to anyone, but you can’t let it happen to you.
Your best insurance is redundant producers on separate trunk lines, so one failure doesn’t ruin every customer’s day. If that’s not an option, I’ve seen some operators convert several of their least used stations to point-of-use vacs to ensure something is always available.
In reality, a failed producer is extremely rare. What I typically see is failed maintenance. Stock spare nozzles, hoses, cuffs, and filter bags. You want your customer posting a picture of their sparkling car on social media, not fighting a bare hose where the nozzle should be.
Today’s integrated payment systems are stable and dependable in a way older generations never were. But I’ve broken enough phones to know that no electronic system is ever failsafe.
The old move of flipping to cash-only when the POS went down is gone. Many of your customers carry neither cash nor a card. It lives in the phone, in a wallet app. Turn them away over an outage and you don’t just lose the sale, you lose their future business.
My son keeps a simple backup way to take payment on his phone at his washes. He has never once used it. That is the point. Preparing for what will almost certainly never happen matters as much as preparing for what will.
Don’t forget the back room, where redundancy means a second way to run. One example here is to plan excess capacity into your hydraulic packs. If one goes down, that headroom lets you split the load and run a brush off a healthy pack while the failed one is repaired.
I won’t list every part, or point out that the swap itself needs hose, fittings, and a swaging tool on hand. The goal isn’t a spare for every part that could break. The goal is a plan, built for your own back room, that keeps cars moving while you fix whatever does.
Know Before It Fails
Every backup we discussed so far waits for something to break. The better move is to see it coming. Sensor intelligence can catch a friction spike or a motor pulling too hard long before a customer ever feels it. Remote monitoring and exception alerts flag the bearing starting to go while you still have time to swap it on your schedule, not during a Saturday rush.
That is redundancy that stops being a spare on the shelf and becomes a set of eyes on the whole wash. Today’s technology makes it easy, and it’s the closest thing we have to never being caught off guard.
I hope you have a chance to watch, or rewatch, the movie. When Groundhog Day finally lets Bill Murray move on, it’s because he learned to get the day right. The lessons worth repeating in this business are the same ones. We keep running into them because the price of forgetting is a customer who paid for our best and left dissatisfied.
Back up the things that ensure they leave as a raving fan of your wash. Invest in seeing the trouble before they do. Do both, and the day something breaks becomes a day nobody outside your back room ever notices.
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.