You Have to Ask the Right Questions OR Have the Right Partner
As I think back to when we entered the car wash business and our first wash was failing, I remember a conversation I had with a financial partner. “Did we get bad advice?” My answer today would be that we got the right answers to the questions we asked, however, we asked the wrong questions. After all, you don’t know what you don’t know.
We asked questions like “can this site wash cars?” The answer was “yes, of course it can, any site can wash cars.” Ours could even wash enough to stay in business, but what we didn’t understand was the relationship between pieces of equipment, chain speed, dryers and anything else that it REQUIRED to wash that car. We needed a partner who knew that we were asking the wrong questions; we needed a partner who was also an operator; we had neither.
Washing the car is the easy part. It’s setting up the wash that is the tricky part and that’s all the stuff you don’t know how to ask about. How long should my conveyor be? How do you calculate chain speed and why is that important? How many dryers do I need? All of these questions and more need to be asked before an architect or engineer put pencil to paper. Understanding the relationships between how to wash a car and whether your site can wash a car is what Focused Car Wash Solutions excels at. We are operators who wash cars every day.
Aaron Green
