Transcription
A lot of people are under the mistaken premise that you buy a car wash and the checks just keep rolling in. Woohoo, passive income! I'm making passive income from these businesses. Aaron and Tony were here all the way through last night. I was here till 5:00. I started around noon. We did almost 400 cars yesterday in between both car washes. Absolutely insane in terms of the business we've got due to this dust storm from either Texas or Arizona. With all the cars that have been going through the car wash, everything is breaking. I want to show you a pump that like literally exploded last night, leaking high-pressure water, and it flooded our roof. It's not like we have 440 volts running at 200 amps in here at all. I feel like I am trying to scoop up the ocean with a grain here, but man, it was a mess. This pump absolutely flooded the room last night. We had that much water in here. It's like clockwork: you get a bunch of business, and then everything starts breaking.
We had some body hit this car wash. It reset the sensor. We kept shutting down on everybody. It was hitting the door on the backside. The arm is what got hit. Someone ran into it, and it pushed the sonar system out of whack. If you look as it passes the car up here, it comes dangerously close. Made a flot of water, just craziness. But, you know, on the other end, we are making decent money. We really, really could use somebody here working the whole entire day. The problem is, if we hired somebody on full-time, I did, you know, did the math, it'd be about $35,000 a year in total compensation, which sounds good. But there was a problem: to be one person, and realistically, we have to have two separate people. So a full-time person or full-time equivalent would add what amounts to another, you know, $35,000 per year. We would be sending them here in the car wash on days that don't really make sense. So our margin that we need to hit to keep the lights on would actually hurt it a lot.
One of the secrets or things that I run into is, you know, with Express washes where they have a subscription model, if those employees are not actively charging for subscriptions, they will go bankrupt. That's why you're seeing a lot of these Express tunnels close up because they have people that are not selling subscriptions enough. They're not selling subscriptions, they don't make money. So we're kind of caught in between a rock and a hard place, cuz, you know, $35,000 is on your bottom 50% of car washes, let's say that are under the median. That's how much they make a year. Throw in debt service, they kill them. Now, we do well on our car washes, you know, we're very blessed. But it's a situation where we just can't do it. This means that me as an owner and Aaron, my business partner, sometimes we have to come here and do things like recycle the money. So thankfully, we upgraded these card readers a while ago. Very thankful for Monx Group and the readers. They work well. It is a situation where if we didn't have these, we would be up a creek without a paddle. You know, they boost sales. Even just adding tap to pay has increased sales per unit metric by, I'm guessing, 3 to 5%, which is super cool. And it also decreases my need to recycle money endlessly. We would have to probably have $10,000 on hand in just dollar coins to make it a go without credit card readers. But since we do have credit card readers, it helps us a time. But, you know, calculating labor costs is absolutely huge when it comes to running a location, whether it's a lawn or a car wash.
Wow, whole there's some quarters still. Keep us running for another couple hours. The money that's coming in, I'm not going to put it in my pocket. I've got to make some decisions on what am I going to take that money and reinvest it in. So we're reinvesting it in cold patching the parking lot. I feel bad for this Ace Hardware and a lot of the small ones. They normally have to cordon them off cuz so many people come through and they steal people's crap. And until a small retailer like this, a $200 Milwaukee tool is a crapload of money that walks off. It's insane. They'll steal a tool from the local hardware and they're out $250 bucks and then they sell it on the street for $50. It's awful. We need 14 bags of the, is it asphalt, the cold patch? I saw your tool aisle was open. Does that mean you thieves have slowed down a little bit? Uh, I don't know if they slowed down. We just caught some that were stealing from us from here and and Baltimore. Oh, wow. We set up a little state corporation. Nice. And they were spending $4, $500 every time they were in. They were also stealing. Holy crap, $100 at a time. That's insane. So we caught them. They went to court. We got restitution. And did they have any money or assets you could go after getting the restitution? No, they just wrote, they wrote us a check that day. That's that's ridiculous, cuz I know that when you lose a $200 tool, that's big, big money. Absolutely infuriate me. Yeah, cuz you got to sell five more tools to repay for it. You're absolutely right. Absolutely right. And then, you know, that's what drives the prices up on everybody. I mean, everybody knows that. But I talked to this, they make missiles for Lockheed Martin or something like that. That's pretty. Oh, it's wild cuz they were showing me to prevent thieves from laundromats. That was the, the thing I was talking to them for. Abol. Incredible. Some of the stuff that's going to be out, they said five years. Yeah, so that would be nice. Be interesting. Have a good one. You too. Thanks. That was a cool story.
This is one of those things where you guys can tell me what you would do. Are we doing the right thing? Are we doing the wrong thing? For them to chew up the parking lot and redo the whole thing is $50,000. Circleville's $40,000. Our parking lot does not look great. The old owner of this did a great job with the parking lot when it was made back in 1995, but it's kind of reached near the end of its life. And the problem is, unless you start doing constant maintenance on it or get it redone, you run into the the hazard of having these automatics there. So they come out here on Hall Road. They got pothole, giant pothole, pothole, little pothole, pothole, pothole, pothole. But I don't want to spend $50,000 on having the parking lot redone. Aaron is much more apt to spend that money on it. And I look at this and I, I, I say to myself, I would rather have a line of vacuums here, free vacuums, like a lot of the big car washes, the institutional ones do. Because a lot of people wash their car cuz they get a free vacuum. It's, it's a big, big psychological deal. So I would rather invest in free vacuums or vacuum systems, bring more customers than I would repaving the parking lot. Very few people come to the car wash and say, I'm never using it again because there's a pothole there. But there's a lot of people that would say to themselves, I'll come to the car wash and use it because I know that I can get a free vacuum if I buy a $15 wash or $18 wash, which is my goal. I would like two or three more vacuums here, and I want to give my customers the ability to get a free vacuum with the auto. So to really fix this right, we would cut it out with a saw, square it off, and redo it. Israel is standing on a patch where they did cut it out with a saw, and it looks great. They saw cut part of Circleville, it looks great too. They're doing a great job on this. They're really quick. We've been here for what, five minutes? They're going to have this thing looking great. I'm very impressed with how good cold patch works. They did part of the Circleville parking lot when we had to excavate the septic line. Looked great. We're now friends. I gave him a 50-cent or 60-cent air freshener, however much a tree is wholesale. I give them away when I'm here, and it's like people freak and love you after you give them a 50-cent thing. Would you like a free air freshener? I got vanilla, strawberry, black ice, and piña colada. Guys, cool. That's the best. That is not even close. That is our top seller. Thank you. Thanks for coming to the car wash. Thanks for coming to my car wash. Can you imagine how much better I would do if these were my kids' homemade cookies? Okay, cool. Thanks for coming to THH. Would you like a free uh air freshener? Sure. I got vanilla, strawberry, uh black ice, and piña colada. Piña colada, please. There you go. Cool. Nice, man. Thanks. Got black ice, vanilla, strawberry, vanilla. Okay, cool. Thanks. Thank you. Car wash does a good job. Consider giving us five stars on Google Maps. Each positive review will generate about $100 an extra income for us over the next three months. So good. Take black ice. Black ice. Cool. Thanks. Appreciate it. Yep. Appreciate you coming to my car wash. You investment joy might be. I love. I saw the car wash. I was like, I know that dude. Yeah. So what you got there? Uh, free, free air fresheners. I got strawberry. Yeah. Thank you. Would you like a free air freshener? Sure. I got piña colada, vanilla, strawberry, and black ice. Piña colada. There you go. Thanks for coming. Would you like a free air freshener today? Of course. I, you know, I was here when this broke down over the weekend. Oh, this stupid machine here costs more than my house, and it has endless problems with it. If you give me your phone number, um, I was, I didn't get to P, I didn't get to get one. I'll give you a freebie. I'll just run you through for free. If you coming here now. Ah, that's really sweet. Oh, no worries. I just want everybody to have a good car wash experience. Was it you that was giving away the free car washes? Might have been, cuz someone had posted online. Oh, yeah, yeah, that was me. A God bless you, honey. That's sweet. He does, he does, believe me. This is my favorite one. That's what I want to hear. Just consider giving us a five-star review on Google if you think about it, cuz that really, really helps. My daughter's just got her learner's permit, so we were all driving around, and I was like, we'll go to the car wash and wash it. And, you know, of course, I made that mistake. It feels like every time I show up to the car wash, something has to break. Like my off. Yeah, it has to break. There has to be a problem. So we were here for like an hour and a half, and she was like, Dad, we were just coming here. You said five minutes to do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's been, you know, an hour and a half. Let you know, I love my daughter. She's great, but man, she's like her mom. She, she's very much. She notices things. And she, you said five minutes, and it's a, you know, it's an hour and a half. I'm hungry, Dad.
The other thing that we're heavily considering is getting rid of these vending machines here. These make me decent money, but what I want to do is put in a glass front vendor so that we can sell the little trees and everything and take credit cards, as well as have like 20 different products. Some of these car washes I'm running into, they're selling extra $500 to $1,000 worth of vending products because they start selling car detailing products, which is pretty cool. So that's something that we want to do here too. Figuring out, you know, what are we putting money into and getting a good ROI on. $5,000 booster pump that Aaron wants to get so that we can make more spot-free water, cuz we're on the verge of running out. You're going to get your truck and run over it 20 or 30 times, right? Yeah, good thinking, guys. I have no clue whether that's that's right or not, but it sounds good to me. Yeah, those, those are the ones that want to dry out. Uh, if they can't get it, I just need to come here and do it myself on one of these days that it's dry. Got six months to do it. Uh, when we built our church in Grove City, they did it in such dry weather that they were able to save $70,000 on the parking lot. Um, so they're going to get this one done, so that's good. We got 70-degree weather here in Ohio today for the first time in 2025. It's going to be good. We're going to go to Circleville and go sell some credit card machines. We've had plenty of problems here too. Air fitting broke off this morning, shut the car wash down. I lost a dozen cars, you know, $15 a piece. It broke off. Lost $150 over the $3 [Music] [Music] valve.
All right, so we load this up. This is one picture in the past. A picture of only quarters is only worth like $2.25. So now on money, it's significantly more dense. Lose these either worth. They won't go. That's a lot. Holy crap. Working the bucket doesn't fall off. $327 just set. Look at all those [Music] ones. You want to do this with customers here? Absolutely not. Ever, ever. Not great, not terrible. [Music] [Music] [Music] It's okay. I have like $700 that we can vend out before we're out of money. Hey, Mom. Hey, babe. How's it going? Good. I mean, it's just been a nut house here. I'll pay for your car wash. We've had a good day, honey. No, here. No, no. I don't need it for my lunch yesterday. I know. It's fine. About you with you and got so many bills. I don't know how you do it. Well, God helps us. Uh, no, we had our best day ever yesterday. We did between both locations, I think we did 400 cars. They had seven people in line for the automatic. I don't even know how anybody could get in there, but they did. But then our big problem was we had an elderly gentleman come through the car wash with, he swears it wasn't a ladder rack, he said it was a lumber rack. And I don't, there's no difference between a ladder rack and a lumber rack. He was parked back in the bay. The machine hit him and shut down the whole thing. And then he started going through a line telling people to leave, and then it messed up the machine afterward. I have had to drive back. I've been here four times a day. So my mom stopped while we were filming and said that the apothecary person is either angry or complaining. So we're going to try to figure out if I'm buying coins off this person or someone's trying to use them at the laundromat or what. Howdy. Hi. Hi. My mom stopped me at my car wash. You doing okay? I don't know. It depends on what you're going to tell me. Um, no, no. Bless her heart. She's so sweet. I'm Paula. Nice to meet you. I just said, hey, I said, your, your customers are telling me that they're putting their money in the machine and getting the gold coins and the gold coins aren't working. Are they working? Not working at the laundromat. The car wash? Yes. Okay. And I'm like, I don't know why. To me, it didn't sound. Why you give someone change that they could buy you? I've seen it reject a coin once in a while. Okay, but it's not consistent. And they just, you put it back in and it recycles and it's fine. I wanted to come over and figure out what was going on. She said, you have some of them? Yeah. And I said, well, I bought some for my grandkids, but I can't keep buying these gold coins. Yeah, um, cuz I get my younger people get a mixed up. It's just not. It's all good. I think I'm down to two now. Okay, cuz I will buy every single one that I can take off of you cuz we have so many customers that come and get them. They get mad at them thinking that other businesses won't buy them or they think that tokens. We were going through so many quarters at the car wash that we switched to these cuz on a day like today, I have to switch the quarters out two or three times. Like I have to go and recycle quarters cuz our machines only hold a very limited amount of quarters. But we go to these, they hold four times more. So that's why we made that decision. Thank you. Nice to meeting you too. She's right. She understands the situation. My mom doesn't understand. She did not help the conversation at all. But what is happening is people, people don't understand that we take dollar coins. Put a sign on it. Not okay. Oh, so it didn't start at all? It started, but it has no suction. Okay. The customer just said it's not having hardly any suction on it. So I'm going to have to go through and take a look at it. It's not that there was no suction, just was a little, little low. Better than the old. Is the B-10? You're working over there? Yes, it is. I was in here, uh, Saturday. Put a dollar in and the guy only got a quarter back. Uh, did you check it to make sure it wasn't a dollar coin? Cuz we've switched from quarters to dollars here. So those are the new, the new dollar coins. I don't, I didn't know. I just thought, oh, yeah, no worries. So these are the new dollar coins, or they look kind of like this. They're, they look like a quarter, kind of, but they're thicker. I'll check. I'll check it. My, I, I got a jar of quarters. Okay. Not you. And see, check it, cuz some of these are the older Susan B. Anthony type, and they look like quarters. And, um, some of our customers don't realize that we switched over to them. Cuz so I could take that one coin and put it in. Yeah, and it counts for a dollar. Yeah, and it's not a token. Cuz some people think that we're using tokens. We're not using tokens. They're actual dollars. Okay. I'll check. See. Yep. All right. Thank you. Don't, don't back out. Don't back out. There's an elderly gentleman here, and he's about ready to hit me. Are you filming this? This is ludicrous. This is ludicrous. Poor guy. I mean, he, he literally would have just sat in the parking lot for the next hour. I've seen people do it. I live in a county of 60,000 people. There's 13,000 people in Circleville. I don't understand. Like, I've never been to this car wash before. Been here since 1992. They've never been here before. That's, I mean, it's a good problem to have, I guess. Oh my gosh, these storage lockers are definitely more passive, but every so often, I still have to come down here to my the locker and make sure everything's going right. There has to be a process and system. We had to come down here and put up Lorax cameras, and we also had to come down here and put up solar panels with lights because we have people causing all sorts of crazy problems here at the storage locker facility. So your job for a while is to set up processes and systems and hire people. Now, I, I would say of the people that I've done coaching or training or help with on businesses like this, some of the best people are IT people because they understand how to build a computer program. I would think that blue-collar type people would be the best, and I would say to an extent, they're the second best because what happens with a lot of the blue-collar people that I like and I appreciate, that was essentially my dad growing up. What happens is with people that are used to having a blue-collar type job, they're used to doing all the work themselves. So then they buy a car wash or self-storage facility or whatnot, it ends up being just a new job, which you got to avoid too. But then I run into some of the IT people, the stock bros, the investor type people, and they think that they can just buy one of these businesses that seems ultra passive, and then they go bankrupt because they have to deal with the homeless people at the laundromat, they have to deal with the broken airlines on the car wash, the soap running out over the weekend and not cleaning people's cars, and then them giving one-star reviews on Google, which can destroy a business overnight almost.
So I'm looking for my old credit card readers. We're selling these because we got the new Monx ones, and we just don't need the Crypto Pays anymore. Good riddance to them, cuz their support was terrible. No offense. Well, no offense, Crypto Pay, but let's be honest. I've called you multiple times, and you said go somewhere else. So I did. If you see the credit card readers before I do, where are they? Yes, it is. You did see them before me. Grant, good job. These are the old credit card readers. Hardware was good, support was miserable. Adding credit cards to our car wash was absolutely wonderful. They're $3 to $500 a piece. So if I have 30 machines at $500 a piece, it's $15,000. Two months worth worth of revenue at my laundromat, not just net, my actual income. To retrofit our car wash when we initially bought it, we spent $6,200 between two locations, which is half of the the laundromat, and we made that money back within six months. We, I never would have thought that putting credit card readers on vacuums would have been so valuable, but it has been. This is what we're dealing with at this car wash. Stuff's breaking down. If we get it fixed, it's great. If you don't fix your equipment, you take care of it, it can become a nightmare super fast. All right, got a $1,000 place to put in the machine, and I've got to fix reverse osmosis. Can I help you? Yes. Howdy. I put $20 in here, okay, and I just want to get a car wash, and they gave me these. What are those? Dollars. Oh, are they? Yeah, those are American dollar coins. We've got new signs coming in that explain to people that they're American dollar coins. Those are the newer ones. See it now? Yeah, they're not tokens or anything. So I put them in here, right? Yes. All of them. Every piece of equipment takes those other than some of our vending machines there. We haven't put a new acceptor in them yet. Thank you. Oh, no worries. I got my car sitting in there, and I'm waiting on something to happen, and nothing happens. Yeah, uh, back. Yeah, back up. There's no one behind you. Make sure your window's up, and you'll go in till the light on the left starts flashing red. Stop. Okay, and then you'll be good to go. All right, well, well, thank you for coming. Sorry for the problems. Thanks. I'm actually filming right now. Today has been just an absolute insanity. It'll take me five hours to explain everything. Yeah, but yeah, up the good work. I appreciate it. This one's running out of water, so it's just, it's just the last. My last four days have been like this. We've been busy, but everything that can break is breaking, right? It's [Music] [Music] awful. Give this guy an air freshener. He's a subscriber. Black ice. Thanks for coming. Thank you. Nice. There's the patch. Looks good. Probably use a little extra around the edges and some motion. Nice. Cool. Three. Got a bunch of them done, and there's a baseball field parking lot for no good reason. Nice. Oh, wow. They did the big one too. Oh, that looks fantastic. Holy crap. Can you see it? Guys went over there, man. They did a bunch of them. 10 minutes later, I have $11,000 in coins. [Music] And a barely did we make any money today? Yeah, we did. Woohoo! How about here? We did. Woohoo! This will pay for approximately $110 of the Saltville. Look at all this passive income. I don't know if you could see it earlier. This trash can is just full of passive income opportunities. Look at all that. I say it is that it, you know, has $1,000 in wrappers in here, so that's how passive it is. But if you don't have a great process and the ability to once in a while hop in your car and go fix something, you're going to get absolutely destroyed with a business like that. All of this hazard to my health and everybody else's health to make a YouTube video for today.