Okay, you have a mobile car wash business and want to increase your revenue generation by adding some car dealership 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 itemize as well?”
He was referring, of course, to the synergy gained by detailing for car dealers and also by maintaining contract washes as a bundled service, which is the preferred strategy for mobile car retailers and mobile car wash companies. But what if you only had the batch laundering contract and not the detail contract? Does it still make any sense?
Well, yes, 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 watched every day all day.
Some of the other dealers wanted us to be 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’re servicing them and they’re paying you. three months. That alone 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 finding something else to launder than letting a company demand you with payments and receivables. And remember that God made the dirt on day one, and that covers it all, 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 thinking about this too. We used to think of car lots as a busy job, keeping our teams busy and therefore making money, but it wasn’t our best profit center. Please consider all of this.