Okay, so you have a mobile car wash business and you want to increase your income generation by adding some car dealer lot wash contracts. That makes sense because car dealerships have a lot of cars and they need to be cleaned up to sell them; Nobody wants to buy a dirty car, right? Sure, so your next question is what price can you charge and still make money? Not long ago, a successful car wash entrepreneur asked me about this;
“I noticed in one of your posts [articles] you suggest $.85 for twice a week. Wow, can you do that without having the contract to detail as well?”
He was referring, of course, to the synergy gained from detailing for car dealerships and also keeping the wash contracts as a bundled service, which is the preferred strategy for mobile car detailers and mobile car wash companies. But what if you only had the batch wash contract and not the detail contract? Does it still make any sense?
Well, yeah, actually, we had a lot of accounts that were just wash accounts at $0.65 to $0.85 per car, where we didn’t have the detailed contract yet, for the car dealership. For example, at the Sacramento Auto Mall, all the car parks are located on the street that looks like a giant circle, and we would have teams going in different directions on that street, and we would never give up. By the time we were done with one side of the street it was time to start over, they just looked every day for the whole day.
Some of the other dealerships wanted us off the lot by 10am so they could sell cars, which makes it difficult in the winter due to icing when water is poured on cars in many areas.
Detailed contracts for car dealers are great when the economy is good, but you have to understand that car dealers are very slow to pay and you don’t want to become a bank where you are servicing them and they are paying you. three months. That just costs you a lot of cash flow and all that work until you get your money.
Remember that in a service business “cash flow” is king, everything else is just talk. You’re better off going find something else to launder rather than let a company tax you with payments and accounts receivable. And remember that God made the dirt on day one, and that covers everything, so you should be able to find something to wash other than just car lots.
It seems that the mobile car wash entrepreneur agrees and is also thinking about this. We used to think of car lots as busy work, keeping our teams busy and therefore making money, but it wasn’t our best profit center. Please consider all this.
