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| From left, managers Chad Crabill and Keenan Perez stand with owner Jim Utterback inside the lobby at Evergreen Car Wash. |
Jim Utterback isn’t one to back down from a challenge. Eleven months ago, the new owner of Evergreen Car Wash & Detail in Evergreen, Colo., took over a dysfunctional facility with a bad reputation, intent on building a gem in this small community about 25 miles outside of Denver.
Utterback says the carwash was plagued by inconsistent operating hours, inconsistent quality, unprofessional employees, drug use and poor management. In addition, customers were not greeted promptly, the site was dirty, and a confusing menu of wash services was hampered further by high prices and no signage.
In a bad economy, that is certainly a recipe for disaster, but Utterback believed the carwash had real potential if it were run behind a best practices philosophy.
“If it was a great site that was making money, it would not have been available, that’s just the bottom line,” he says. “This site had a terrible reputation in a town where everyone knows everybody.”
In determining whether or not he should take over the carwash, Utterback said it was crucial to examine why the carwash wasn’t making money and identify what wasn’t working mechanically and operationally. Once he made his assessments, Utterback then had to ask himself two critical questions: “How do you fix it, and how long will that take?”
“This wash is in a small town with small-town pros and cons,” he notes. “I like the small-town mentality of business. You get to know a lot of your customers at the business as well as outside the business.
“The wash was absentee-owned for four years, which wasn’t the best scenario,” he continues. “In my mind, a lot of the things that were wrong at the wash could be fixed.”
Adding to the difficulty of a career-altering decision was his home life. In order to become owner of Evergreen Car Wash, Utterback would have to leave his steady job at Motor City Wash Works in Wixom, Mich., and move 1,300 miles away from his family.
“I found out about Evergreen Car Wash & Detail through a mutual friend of the owner,” Utterback recalls. “One morning I received a call from my friend, and he just said, ‘The wash is yours if you want it!’”
Utterback quickly met with the owner, visited the site, assessed the potential business trappings and ultimately came to the conclusion that owning the carwash could be a great opportunity.
“From the time I found out about the wash to the time I took it over was only about five weeks,” he explains. “I went from having a very stable and happy professional career to jumping in my car loaded with cloths, leaving my wife and two children in Michigan to move to Evergreen to own and operate a full-service carwash.”
Born a Carwasher
It is reasonable to assume that Utterback would not have been able to pull such a quick trigger on a move with such high personal consequences if he was new to the carwash industry. Instead, he used a lifetime of knowledge to help guide his thinking.
Utterback’s father built carwashes with Gulf Oil in the late 1960s before working for an Ohio-based distributor that sold Sherman carwash equipment. In 1971, he purchased the distributorship and moved the family business to Michigan.
“Many of my friends say I was born in a carwash pit,” notes Utterback. “I started towel drying cars at the age of 12 for a friend of the family’s carwash, and throughout high school I worked for my father’s distributorship, Riverbay Equipment Co., doing service, carwash installations, delivering chemicals and so on.”
After college, Utterback went back to work with his dad and took over the solution company that sold Turtle Wax products. Five years later, he left to work for Turtle Wax Industrial as a business development manager. He eventually made professional stops at Belanger Inc., Armor All and Motor City Wash Works, before assuming ownership of Evergreen Car Wash & Detail last December.
He signed a 20-year lease which gives him the option to buy the carwash at any time. His price is fixed for five years before moving to terms based on the Consumer Price Index. If he chooses to sell, Utterback says he and the property owner will split any profit above the agreed purchase price.
“My purchase price was based on the value of the land and building, not the business since there was nothing worth buying,” he explains.
Utterback believes his experience on the vendor and services side of the carwash industry will serve him well as an operator.