Wash Week 09

We had a great turnout in Atlanta on Friday, wrapping up a week of great networking and sharing amongst operators and suppliers.  Our Atlanta group was our largest yet, and we had so much great knowledge in the room, the seminar was a great success.

In the afternoon, instead of rotating tables, we had a large group discussion on ideas for increasing revenue.   We talked a lot about customer retention, and how important that strategy should be when putting together our marketing programs.  We talked a lot about ensuring that we get the proper data from our customers – how did you hear about the wash etc. – so that we can know what’s working and what’s not.   We also talked about how people are using email marketing effectively and what typically constitutes a compelling email.

We also had a great discussion on the importance of employee training and how this should be a continuous practice within our washes.  Operational excellence is directly affected by your employee performance, so incentivizing them, training them and rewarding them will create a better experience for your customers. 

We have a big pile of notes from each of our sessions in Irvine, Chicago and Atlanta and plan to compile those over the next few weeks to create a “toolbox” of great ideas that came out of Wash Week.  I’ll plan to post some of them on the blog so that those of you who weren’t able to attend can see some of the great information that came out of the week.

Thanks to all of those who participated in Wash Week!

Hi and welcome to the last day of Wash Week! We’re just about ready to kick off the final Wash Week Seminar in Atlanta.  Throughout this entire week we have been given great opportunities to learn from one another. Yesterday, we were treated to 2 more great webinars: Revising your Marketing Strategy to Reach Today’s Consumer presented by Ryan Carlson and Evaluating Your Business to Remain Competitive and Profitable presented by Fred Grauer.

Those of us lucky enough to be in Chicago on Wednesday got a sneak peak at Ryan’s Webinar. During the Thursday presentation he focused on the same ideas of knowing your customer, being known for something more than soap and water (and being the first in the area to be known for it) and the importance of being visible. One of the “tidbits” he provided was the importance of having your business registered on Google – we sometime lose track of the ever changing ways people are finding our businesses. And, I can’t help continuing to think about the fact that the average person that falls into our younger customer demographic carries an average of $3 in cash. We really need to think about these concepts when we think about who our customers are and who we want our customers to be. Ryan also had the opportunity to provide a little more insight on the importance of our role as owners and operators in making our marketing programs work. It is always a good reminder that the success of our marketing programs depends on our ability to commit and follow through on the plans we put in place. An investment in a loyalty program or any other intensive marketing program doesn’t mean much if nobody knows about it.  

Fred’s presentation during the afternoon was a perfect follow-up to Ryan’s message about committing and following through. Fred focused on rethinking and improving our businesses in a time requiring change. He reiterated that there are endless tools and resources available to help us as car washers and business men and women to evaluate our business. He even pointed us to some of his personal favorites. Being directed to these resources reemphasized that it is up to us as individuals to determine where we can improve and how we can do it. There is no secret that is going to be the magic answer for all of us. Rather, each of our businesses is unique and it is up to us to invest time into determining what is right for our customer and therefore our business.

 It is amazing how much knowledge is out there for us to gain from others in our industry and I am grateful to Ryan, Fred, Hank and Gary for presenting the Wash Week Webinars this week.

I look forward to sharing some final Wash Week reports with you from Atlanta.

We  had a great program today in Chicago with a lot of fruitful discussion around saving dollars and increasing revenue at our car washes.  Particularly today, we spent a lot of time talking about power management.  We were fortunate enough to have Jim Belanger with us who gave us some great tips.  He gave us some great tips about working with your power representatives to review your operation and power usage, and also gave us some understanding on how to negotiate rates.  He spent some time helping us to understand the value of VFD and how it can save us quite a bit of money on power rates. 

We also spent some time talking about ways we can reduce costs by chemical management and reducing labor through technology.  It was great to hear about what’s working and what’s not here in Chicago market, and I was grateful that all of the operators and suppliers in the room were so willing to share.

We were also realy lucky to have Ryan Carlson with us who gave us a preview of his webinar tomorrow and the top three things that we need to think about as car wash operators when marketing our businessses.  He reminded us about the importance of knowing our customer and designing marketing collateral and messaging to the demographic most likely to frequent our washes.  He aslso reminded us that it’s so important to be known for something.  It’s so important to be the “first” in our market – be it, the first that accepts credit cards or the first environmentally wash in the community – to be memorable.  Finally, he talked about being visible to your customers – by updating your web site, ensuring that you are being visible in search engines as well as keeping your site visible. Ryan discussed pricing and menus and the importance of helping your customers understand what they are buying, using visual queues in your menus.

You can hear more about Ryan’s marketing tips tomorrow at 11:00 AM ET during his webinar.  Also, don’t miss Fred Grauer’s webinar at 3:00 PM ET tomorrow on evaluating your business.  If you haven’t registered yet, you still can.  Just click here.

It’s hard to believe we are over halfway through Wash Week.  I hope you have been enjoying the information as much as I do.  I’ve got one more stop to make in Atlanta on Friday – and if I haven’t seen you yet, I hope to see you there.

Hello! Welcome to day three of Wash Week! Yesterday, we had the opportunity to hear from two industry leaders during the Wash Week Webinars Reducing Expenses through Power Management and Partnering with Suppliers for Higher Profits and Lower Costs.  I hope you had the opportunity to participate in these presentations. If you did miss them, the International Carwash Association is working on posting recordings of the sessions on www.carwash.org. You’ll be able to logon to the site and listen soon.

Those of us who had the opportunity to participate were treated to two extremely valuable educational sessions. Let me start by highlighting Gary Dennis’ presentation Reducing Expenses through Power Management. This guy really knows what he is talking about! The best part is that he has data to back it up. Gary shared with us the various options for cutting our power costs and outlined the financial impact each of the various methods can have on our business. Although, we all very aware of it, the part that really hit home with me is how much of an increase we have seen in what we are charged for energy and how quickly the cost is continuing to rise! I’m not certain any of us can afford to not change how we look at energy. The greatest part of this Webinar was the number of questions that were received! It reminded me how important this topic is becoming as we are all looking more carefully than ever at ways to reduce our expenses.

Switching gears, yesterday afternoon we heard from distributor Hank Richard who talked about how working more closely with our suppliers can result in more profit for us. Here is a place where we all have some different thoughts and experiences. For some operators, working with suppliers is a really positive experience. For others, well, I’ll just say this isn’t everyone’s favorite part of the job. Regardless of which perspective you have, I think Hank’s presentation was a good reminder to us that we’re all in this together. We’re all looking to profit in this industry – we can’t get there without our suppliers and they can’t get there without us. Hank made a point I can’t help but keep thinking about – our business as operators is not really all that different from the businesses our suppliers run. If we keep thinking about our relationships from the standpoint of how we are alike, it makes it a lot easier to get on the same page.

Today, Wash Week heads to Chicago. If you’re in the Chicagoland area, I invite you to join us at the O’Hare Hyatt. For those of you not able to join us, I’ll be sure to share some of the highlights with you right here on the Wash Week blog.

Until then – I’d love to hear some thoughts from those of you who participated in a Webinar yesterday. Did you learn anything that surprised you or did anything reinforce your current practices? Please share your comments below.

We enjoyed a great kick off to Wash Week yesterday in Irvine, CA where I was joined by several great table facilitators and an enthusiastic group of operators and suppliers who had a lot to share and offer with each other.   We begun the day with a brief introduction from ICA president, Lisa Lyons and then got right into our discussions on reducing expenses – specifically through water regulation, power management, equipment review and chemical management.  All of our groups had really rich discussions about what they were doing in their own washes or what they were seeing in others.  There were some great discussions around the use of investing in equipment to manage chemicals and water and the eventual ROI that those washes who did this saw within a fairly short amount of time.  I really enjoyed listening to the collective knowledge of those folks in the room.

Throughout the seminar, we were sure to capture all of the ideas that the participants and facilitators came up with.  Our plan is to capture all of these ideas throughout the week not only from S. California, but also Chicago and Atlanta and put together a document that will help participants really examine where they can cut expenses in a strategic way, and increase their revenues.

Yesterday afternoon, we had a great discussion on innovative marketing techniques.  It seems as though more and more operators are using technology such as twitter and facebook to advertise to their customers.  One operator has also seen some great success in using an opt-in text messaging service to reach out to his customers, particularly on rainy or slower days.  We talked a little bit about using web site optimization tools as well as other free tools such as google analytics to track the number of visitors to your web site and make sure that the information on your site is meaningful for your customers. 

We also had a great discussion on charity car washing.  Quite a few of the people in the room are doing some really innovative stuff – going straight to city hall to show through data how much water is being saved in a professional car wash and receiving in turn, city hall’s endorsement of the program.  Another operator shared the charity program that he had put together through the local school system and how it not only drove significant traffic to his wash, but also helped the school raise a large amount of money for its programs.

The afternoon definitely went by far too quickly, and I am excited to have further conversations with the participants in both Chicago and Atlanta.  Our industry is special in the way that we are so willing to share information and knowledge amongst each other, and especially while times are challenging, it’s more and more important that we do this.

I’m off to Chicago today for Wednesday’s programs and am looking forward to hearing the webinars being offered today.  I hope you tune in.  I would love to hear your thoughts on some of the content from today’s seminar as well as some of the webinars.  Please post them below!  Until later!

It has been so fun getting ready to head out to Irvine, Chicago and Atlanta and I am really excited about the program we have planned.   We have spent the last few weeks talking about what we want to accomplish with each of the seminars as well as with the online webinars and I think we’re going to have a great program and a great week full of car wash education. 

I had a call the other day with the table facilitators who will be joining me on the road to discuss what they’re seeing in the industry, how they felt about the topics we defined and how we would like to see the day go.  We have a great group of facilitators who really know their stuff and I know they are going to help make this week a huge success. 

In California, I’ll be joined by Lisa Lyons (ICA President), Brad Hooper, Yogi Moody and Richard Castellow.  In Chicago, I’ll be joined by Ryan Carlson, Jim Belanger, Bob Kopko and Greg Natonson.  Finally, in Atlanta, I’ll be joined by Bruce Arnett Jr., Lennox Bundy, Gary Dennis and Bill Towhey.  Don’t miss a chance to come and network with these guys (and girl!).  They truly know their stuff and are going to make this program great. 

I hope you have enjoyed reading about what’s to come in the webinars next week too.  If you aren’t geographically located near one of our Wash Week cities, you should definitely take the opportunity to attend the webinars.  Like our facilitators, we have some great minds leading those sessions. (Register here)

At each Wash Week seminar, we’ll give participants the opportunity to submit questions and issues that they are looking for advice on.  Are there any topics you’d like addressed by our experts?  If you post them down in the comments, we’ll be sure to answer them and then post the responses back on the blog next week.

Let us know what you think of Wash Week.  I’ll be blogging all week about what we’re seeing out there, as well as tweeting while I can from the seminars (you can follow us on twitter at http://twitter.com/carwashorg).  I hope you’ll join the conversation and let us know what you think!

Have a great weekend and I hope to see you next week virtually or in-person at Wash Week!

Hi and welcome back to the Wash Week Blog! I hope you all had a great 4^th of July weekend. Unfortunately it seems that weather was not a friend to many of us, but things should be clearing up and hopefully it will be a great week to wash cars! 

Just before the holiday I had the opportunity to talk with Hank Richard who will be presenting the Wash Week Webinar Partnering with Suppliers for Higher Profits and Lower Costs on Tuesday, July 14 at 3:00 p.m. ET. Hank started the distributorship Car Wash Technologies in 1998 and has since grown his business into a $10 million a year business and has an install base of over 450.  His success has no doubt been a direct result of his firm understanding of how to best make sure the owner/operators he partners with are successful and profitable.

During our conversation I asked him to elaborate on what he means by partnering. He prefaced by saying that he knows the term “win-win relationship” is a bit overused but that when it comes down to it, that is really the best way to describe the concept. He then went on to bring up a theme we’ve heard from some of the other presenters – it is about making money! The end goal of both the operator and the supplier is profit and both are likely to experience greater success when they both acknowledge the common goal and look at how they can help each other succeed.  His presentation, he explained, is going to discuss how when an operator approaches his/her supplier as a business partner, the supplier can help make the operator more profitable. This does not translate only into the cost saving on supplies but has a much larger impact in the services the supplier can provide to help the operator increase per car revenue and the ability to wash more cars.

I think this makes sense in theory, but was looking for a way to translate it into my business. Hank suggested I think of the operator/supplier relationship in the same way I think about the operator/customer relationship. He then provided the example of a fleet account. If a customer with a fleet of 100 cars wants to sign up for my wash program, that customer will deserve and require a proportional amount of my time.  If that fleet customer has a special concern or an issue I better deal with it quickly and professionally or I’ll lose the business.  Translation – the more dedicated I am to my supplier the more time, attention and service my supplier can provide me and when executed right, we both profit. In that perspective it makes perfect sense! Hank has promised his presentation will include a few case studies so that we can see how this “win-win” approach has impacted his customers.

I’m looking forward to some more insight on how I can become more profitable and I’m extremely interested in hearing it from the distributor point of view. If you would like to register for Hank’s Webinar or any other Wash Week event go to www.carwash.org. You can also hear more about the presentation by listening to an Interview with Hank Richard hosted by the International Carwash Association.

Until then – share with us how improving your relationship with your supplier has impacted your business. I look forward to your comments below.

Hello and thanks for visiting the Wash Week blog! I hope you’ve logged onto www.WashIdeas.com this week to hear Ryan Carlson interview me and International Carwash Association Executive Director, Eric Wulf, about this blog and all other Wash Week activities. After our recorded discussion, I had the opportunity to ask Ryan a few questions about his participation in Wash Week and am excited to share some details with you!

Ryan is going to be participating in Wash Week as a facilitator at the Chicago Wash Week Seminar and will be presenting the Webinar Revising your Marketing Strategy to Reach Today’s Consumer on Thursday, July 16 at 11:00 a.m. ET.   

Ryan’s family has been in the industry for over 26 years and he has become a guru on all things related to car wash marketing. At Car Care World Expo, he presented the session Marketing in a Down Economy where he outlined how great businesses have overcome weak economies to thrive and how those practices can be applied in the car wash industry. His presentation was extremely informative so I was very interested to hear more about the Webinar he is presenting.

I asked Ryan why we will benefit from thinking about our marketing strategies at a time when there are so many aspects of our business demanding attention. He pointed out that our businesses are not the only things changing. It is 2009 and our customers have changed. Our existing customers spending habits are not the same and our pool of potential customers is expanding. Our communication to our customers has to keep up. He is exactly right – just as Fred Grauer pointed out this is a time of change and we better change along with it.

Ryan knows that marketing is a large topic and evaluating our strategies isn’t always an easy thing to do. He reminded me that we have a lot to learn from one another and is going to share the success stories of other operators during his presentation. I asked Ryan what we’ll learn about new technologies out there since this is his specialty – he assured me that he would be sharing some new technology related tips and tricks – guess I’ll just have to wait until July 16 to find out what they are.

If you want to hear more from Ryan, register for his Webinar Revising your Marketing Strategy to Reach Today’s Consumer and other Wash Week events at www.carwash.org.

In the mean time – please let me know what you have been doing to revamp your marketing plan in the comments section below. 

Welcome back to the official Wash Week blog! I hope you have been enjoying the various Wash Week updates you have been receiving through this blog, Twitter and the recent podcast at www.washideas.com.  If you aren’t following the International Carwash Association on Twitter yet, I invite you to follow us @carwashorg.

As I mentioned last week I’m going to have the opportunity over the next few weeks to talk with the various speakers that will be sharing their knowledge on the Wash Week stage and will be sharing tidbits from our conversations right here on the Wash Week blog.  Most recently I had the opportunity to speak with Gary Dennis. Gary is a 7 year veteran currently running 4 car washes in Georgia and Alabama. Gary’s involved with other various car wash business ventures including a distributorship which sells chemicals, vacuum equipment and custom motor controls. Gary will not only be hosting roundtable discussions during the Atlanta Wash Week Seminar, but he will also be presenting a Webinar on Reducing Expenses through Power Management on Tuesday, July 14. He presented on this topic during Car Care World Expo 2009 and the feedback was tremendous.  It is fitting to have him back during Wash Week to provide us more insight on how to cut costs!

Knowing that Gary has knowledge from both the operator and distributor perspective I was curious as to what sparked his excitement for power management. I couldn’t help but laugh when he told me he was tired of writing ever increasing monthly checks to the electric utilities and decided he better find a way to reduce electrical consumption. I should have known his motivator is the plain and simple motivator all of us have – money!

I asked Gary why car wash operators, between all the different demands on, should focus our energy (no pun intended), on power management. Again, his response, money! He pointed out that power is not only one of the largest costs to our business, but that rates have nearly doubled in recent years and are expected to continue to grow.

Clearly there is motivation for operators to invest both the time and dollars related to power management, so I asked Gary where to start. His first piece of advice is that we each understand what factors impact energy costs at washes. It doesn’t make sense to invest time and money to improve processes we don’t understand. That led to my second question – what options are out there for those of us looking to reduce energy expenses. Gary advised that there are several options but that most involve reducing horse power, the use of Variable Frequency Drives (VFDs) or a combination of both.  There is also the opportunity to change utility rate plans in some areas.

Through his research and his own experience Gary has seen savings of 14 – 28%. During our conversation, he couldn’t stress enough that power management is an untapped opportunity. We are leaving thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars on the table by ignoring this opportunity to reduce expenses. He also pointed out that based on the focus on green initiatives and the current political climate he believes this has to be at the forefront of an operator’s focus – I can’t help but agree!

Gary will be providing us more of the technical details about Power Management as well as sharing some case studies during his July 14^th presentation. To register for Gary’s Webinar Reducing Expenses through Power Management and other Wash Week events, visit www.carwash.org.

For even more information you’ll also have the opportunity to view The Cleaning Edge episode Power Management during Wash Week. The Cleaning Edge is an International Carwash Association member benefit, but all episodes of the Cleaning Edge will be available to the entire industry during Wash Week – I encourage you to check it out! 

In the mean time – I invite you to comment below and tell us if you have implemented any Power Management strategies and how it has impacted your bottom line.

Welcome back to the official Wash Week blog! Between now and Wash Week, I will have the opportunity to talk with several speakers and facilitators leading our events, and I will share what I learn with all of you right here.

This week I spoke with Fred Grauer who will be presenting the Wash Week Webinar Evaluating Your Business to Remain Competitive and Profitable on Thursday, July 16 at 3:00 p.m. During our conversation I learned that Fred has a ton of enthusiasm about sharing his knowledge with the car wash industry. He has visited hundreds – if not thousands- of car washes in his over 50 years of experience (rumor has it he was born in a car wash), and has picked up nuggets of information and hours of stories from each operator along the way.

So – after hearing all about his history in the car wash business (and 50+ years includes a lot of history), I asked him to tell me about the Webinar he’ll be hosting during Wash Week. He started with a comment I think most of us can relate to – everyone wants to know what they can do to improve, but most of us don’t know where to start. He then elaborated that he can’t tell each one of us in the business what in particular we need to do – there isn’t any magic change or formula. Instead, he is going to share his recommendations about how we can think about our business models and understand others to determine what we can do to make our businesses competitive within our own markets.

Recently, I’m sure we’ve all been thinking about how to improve more than we had to in the past. No matter how much we try to hide from it, a lot of change is happening right now. Fred’s philosophy is that you can’t worry about the change you can’t control and instead, take advantage of it. Use this challenge as an opportunity to re-evaluate your business and make your own changes that are going to help you survive (and thrive) despite everything outside of your control. The goal of Fred’s presentation is to help us figure out how to re-think our car wash business strategy so we can make smart decisions that will result in profit – or as Fred stated, he’s going to give us some pointers on “how to keep our eye on the ball”.

I look forward to hearing more of Fred’s thought’s during his Wash Week Webinar on July 16. If you’d like to hear more about this presentation directly from Fred, you can listen to an interview from June 23 of Fred hosted by the International Carwash Association.

To register for this Webinar and other Wash Week events, visit www.carwash.org.

If you have a thought or a challenge you would like Fred to address during his presentation, leave your comment below. In the meantime I’d like to hear how you’ve used all of the change occurring right now to the advantage of your business or how you’ve used change as a catalyst to grow your business.  Share your experience below.