How Mobile Carwashes Can Work With Fixed Site Carwash Companies
If you sit down and talk to a carwash owner at Starbucks about the mobile carwashing business, you will generally get an earful of complaints about how they don’t recycle the water, and how they often work on commercial properties without permission, and even that they allow the waste wash water affluent to run into the storm drain. Yes, those are common complaints and condemnations of mobile carwashes, although, I can tell you after 27 years in the industry that not all mobile carwashes do those things.
Of course, if you do talk to a mobile operator, they will have reciprocal complaints about fixed site carwashes. For instance the mobile operator might say something like; they hire illegal aliens, they make you wait in line, they charge too much, they leave streaks on your car, the equipment can scratch your automobile, and you better check to make sure nothing is missing out of your car once the wash has been completed. Indeed, those are common complaints and condemnations, but not all fixed site washes in the industry do those things. Are you beginning to see my point?
It seems to me that there is a way to solve these ongoing feuds between the two different methods of operation. First of all I can tell you this, I have worked with fixed sites before in the industry, and I’ve had our crews purchase purified water from them so that our crews could wash without streaking the windows when cleaning car dealership new cars on the lot. I’ve also worked with fixed site carwashes, where they would offer services to their customers such as motor home washing at their home, and send our mobile crews to do the work, taking a 20% fee for getting the customer.
This way the fixed site could offer additional services to their customers, and farm out the work to the mobile crew, while still making money. It makes perfect sense. Sometimes it pays to bury the hatchet in industry, and work together towards a common cause. There’s no reason that both types of operations cannot cooperate and profit from working together. That’s always been my belief, although I still see the animosity in the industry between the two sides of the coin.
If I were giving advice to a fixed site or mobile auto washing company, I would sit them down and explain this to them, and actually I have in the past, it is amazing how that light bulb goes off in their head is soon as I explained the potential eventualities in making more profit. Please consider all this and think on it.
