Flex Service--The Yin and Yang of Carwashing
Retrofit your operation for increased profitability

By Steve Okun

In ancient Chinese philosophy, Yin and Yang represent the constant push and pull in the universal balancing of life. Through mindful periodic adjustment and adaptation, life's forces must constantly be kept in balance. And so it is in the application of flex serve as an effective operating platform for high-performance carwashing and detailing.

A natural process

Evolution has a way of purposely replacing outdated or significantly inefficient methodologies. When self-serve gasoline pumping entered the marketplace, many viewed it as a passing fancy that would never be embraced by the consumer. But evolution changed the entire way gasoline was marketed. Likewise, flex serve provides that needed enhancement with an aggregation of best practices from full-service and exterior carwashing, traditional detailing and leading-edge production processing, as well as insights gained from consumer research scrutiny.

A new classification

The time is right to adopt flex serve as a new category of professional carwashing, right along with the traditional full-service and exterior formats. In an effort to avoid confusion, it is important to distinguish flex serve from other methods of carwash operation.

Flex serve is a "total service" carwash-operating platform that provides three essential components:

1. Ultra wash. A significantly enhanced exterior carwash component performed in a distinctively upgraded automatic carwash tunnel.

2. Express after-care. Separate component that provides adept cross-trained hands-on staff performing rapid-delivery detailing services.

3. Self-serve accommodation. Coin-op vacuums and impulse vending in a 365/24/7 customer-friendly format.

Flex-serve is not off-line full service

Off-line full service offers a well-intentioned but imperfect fix to an already inefficient traditional full-service process. To confuse it with flex serve is to ignore significant operational and marketing improvements created by the flexible new operating paradigm called flex serve.

In flex serve, service consists of thoroughly washing and drying the exterior of the vehicle and using mounds of foamy soap lather throughout the washing process. This type of wash will also remove bugs, crud and splats from paint and clean wheels and tires. It's a "no excuses" clean--no touch-up cleaning should be required for wheels or whitewalls. The car should also be dry, with no exit- end wiping required. There needs to be a total commitment toward establishing and maintaining the best process available, along with continuous attention to incremental improvement.

In achieving that, we also must recognize and commit to consistently making the cleaning and drying performance of the process exceptionally good. In essence, the vehicle must be very clean, and it must be dry and free of water spots.

The transition

Successfully achieving a thoroughly clean and dry vehicle may mean making a critical evaluation of your current system. Modifications will likely be needed and finding the right mix of equipment, chemicals and positioning will require careful consideration and professional assistance. Nevertheless, an absolute commitment to upgrade must be exercised. The investment made will be quickly recovered.

If new equipment is in order, you must find, research and assemble all of the required washing and drying elements. There is little room for compromise in this task because every oversight will generate unwanted cost. Consequentially, you may have to live with the pain of your mistakes for a long time, so avoid cutting corners.

Avoid prepping

When implementing a flex-serve ultra-wash layout and choosing equipment, a prudent commitment must be made to provide equipment that eliminates the need for prep activity. We've all seen excessive pre-wash activities that swell labor costs and create a perceived need in the customer's mind. Rather than locking yourself into an open-ended process of additional labor requirements, it is better to do everything possible to eliminate the labor need. Once you start the prepping process, it is exceedingly difficult to eliminate it without upsetting customers. Avoid giving something that you can't easily retract. Instead, if you have a seasonal bug problem, build in the solution when you are choosing equipment and designing the layout. If heated water will complement the process, build it into the system. If a pressurized series of arches with special nozzle configurations is needed, the recovery cost will pale in comparison to lost time, disappointed customers and added labor costs. View your washing methodology as a manufacturing process and commit to building a better product.

Exit-end wiping

When deciding on the ultra-wash layout and scrutinizing equipment choices, great care should be given to providing the appropriate air-drying equipment and including spot-free rinsing. This eliminates the need for exit-end wiping and reduces the risk of water streaks.

Hands-off technology currently exists to provide a dry, spot-free vehicle in most cases. However, with the changing body styles and increased popularity of small trucks and jumbo sport utility vehicles, greater care should be given to the selection and upgrading of the drying process, especially with the allocation of more drip space as well as responsible conveyor-speed control.

Adaptable flexibility

Traditional full-service carwash configurations all follow some basic lot layouts--some big and some small. When flex serve was developed, it was precisely designed to be scalable to fit all operations, big, small and everything in between. So if you currently own a full-service facility, chances are the upgrade to flex serve will be relatively simple because the area you currently use for exit-end wiping and window cleaning can easily be retrofitted for express after-care. That upgrade will enable you to provide every one of the express after-care services presented in a flex-serve menu, which means you'll be able to furnish over 95 percent of what a traditional detail shop offers.

All that is required for express after-care is an area 20-by-25 feet with a drive-through configuration. And you only need one production cell to effectively upgrade to a flex-serve format. If you have double that space, you can add another production cell and be able to produce even greater profits. Because the flex-serve platform is scalable, you can add more production cells, either in tandem or laterally, and increase your performance capabilities accordingly.

Teamwork

It takes a team of just two people to staff a flex-serve production cell. And although the typical production flow utilizes a standard team of two people, the flexible design enables double-teaming (two teams of two) to be utilized as needed during increased demand times. Consequently, each work cell is designed for a maximum staff of four equally supplied and cross-trained workers. Extremely efficient cellular processing utilizes the clustering of cross-trained teams that work in an ergonomically enhanced work bay called a production cell. The cell is designed to accommodate one, or when appropriate, two production teams.

For example, a Ford Excursion or GMC Suburban with a very dirty interior must be processed within the 15-minute-or-less express guarantee. If there are two teams available, both teams will process the jumbo vehicle well within the time promised, while providing dazzling service that gets the vehicle out in almost half the time. Customers take note of such things and become invaluable word-of-mouth ambassadors, so it's not simply what you do but also how you do it that matters.

Each cell has a design footprint of 25-by-20 feet. This basic footprint will adequately serve the largest passenger vehicle on the road, the Ford Excursion. Having free and clear access to all parts of the vehicle for unencumbered task completion reduces time and worker fatigue.

Matching performance with demand

It's important to keep in mind that the flex-serve operating platform enables carwash operators to throttle their express after-care volumes in direct correlation to their performance capabilities, thus avoiding any backup delays.

Although new operators find an initial spike in express after-care volume during the beginning weeks, most flex-serve operations tend to hang around 20 to 30 percent of total wash volume in hands-on after-care services.

Moreover, the net profits for those express after-care services far exceed even the best full-service operations simply because flex-serve operations can price their services more effectively and consistently maintain a far greater return on investment.

More adaptability

Even though most operators deem it best to provide express after-care services all year round, some may not be able to in areas with harsh winter weather unless they enclose the express after-care activities inside the protection of a heated, well-lit area.

While it makes sense to offer all of the services all year, some operators simply choose to offer express after-care services seasonally, with an interruption for a few harsh-winter months. If special circumstances keep some operations from initially offering the complete flex-serve platform, clever marketing will enable the successful launch of an initial program with an anticipated phase-in of the remaining services at a later date.

Competitive pricing

By establishing three separate profit centers within the flex-serve paradigm, each one becomes an independent operating unit that permits closer scrutiny and more-effective resource management. Flex-serve pricing provides robust competition to the most low-priced in-bay automatics and can become any rival full-service operation's worst nightmare. And by pricing sharply, the full-service disparity will become painfully evident to the consumer who most likely will remain a full-time customer of the total-service offered by flex serve.

Total service

Flex serve offers a more-sensible business dynamic than exterior-only washing operations because it enables a carwash to fulfill the entire needs of their carwash customers, instead of asking them to go elsewhere for supplemental services.

Flex serve provides the most-effective customer-retention platform of any carwash or detailing service because it takes the customer off the market by eliminating the need to visit other car-care centers. That's why flex-serve operations are referred to as total service carwash operations. There's simply no need for customers to go anywhere else.

Upgrading to flex serve

At last there is a way to effectively operate a carwash and provide labor-intensive services in a profitable way. Instead of trying to make an outdated full-service concept work by merely moving it off-line, investigate the significant benefits of moving up to the next level of washing in the 21st century--flex serve. It really does fit just about everywhere.

If you are currently operating a full- service facility, you can retrofit your operation to an effective flex serve because the operating platform is infinitely scalable. If you clean windows and perform a final wipe-down after the conveyor, you have room for an express after-care production cell, and the flex-serve production cell improves overall performance by more than 200 percent.

Looking for robust net profits, incomparable consumer acceptance, greater versatility and more-powerful customer retention? Flex serve provides the quintessential Yin & Yang balance to savvy carwash operators who recognize the need for a sensible alternative to full-service washing as well as a potent new dynamic for exterior-only operations. The time has come for total service carwashing.

Steve Okun is the founder of S.M. Okun & Associates in Jupiter, Fla., a company that provides training and strategic planning to the car-care industry. He can be e-mailed at smokun@hotmail.com.

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