Many carwash industry analysts wonder what the future will be. There is much debate on this amongst carwash owners, suppliers and industry analysts. Recently we were asked our perception of what the future of the carwash industry will bring in the United States. The inquisitive chap wished to invest heavily into the industry and buy and/our build carwashes throughout Tennessee. Well we have not seen any carwash industry reports, which we feel to be complete enough to use as a basis for the decision making process of to green light a project or say NO GO. Tennessee itself has a decent customer base and it is a good market indeed. There is so much information out there in all the trade journals, internet and trade shows, but most is not good enough in my humble opinion. More importantly our belief is to look regionally market-by-market, rather than lump the Industry together since it is so diverse. Having been to every city in the US over 10,000 population; We can say that, no two regions are so similar that you would make a cookie cutter business model and go for it. We do recommend buying more and building fewer. There are significant hassles in building from scratch and the lost time means lost sales. If you are to build car washes, you need pre-fab, smaller units and ballsy expansion growth and watch for closed market good ole' boy networks unless you are big guns going in and that means more legal and lawyer costs when you butt heads with city planning commissions. If you are going to attempt to slam markets in that way, lock and load and play to win, because they are. We are, everyone is. Consider this in 2006. |
