Braxton McKee / Personal Blog
I wash cars.
Mostly by making what’s next make sense.
I write from firsthand experience about car wash memberships and retention, customer strategy, CRM and lifecycle marketing, technology, and whether the idea can actually work at the site.
Main areas of focus
Membership & Retention
How customer behavior, visit habits, lifecycle communication, churn, and membership value affect sustainable growth.
Customer Strategy
How operators turn ideas, data, promotions, and customer insight into decisions that can actually be executed.
Car Wash Technology
How CRM, point-of-sale systems, integrations, automation, and implementation choices affect operators and customers.
Featured writing
Start here
· 4 min read
The Membership Is Not the Product. The Habit Is.
Selling the membership creates access. The habit is what makes it valuable.
Read this insight
· 3 min read
The Quiet Customer Is Usually the One You Miss
The angry customer may still care enough to tell you what went wrong. The quiet customer may already be gone.
Read this insight
· 5 min read
The Car Wash Industry Is Not 10 Years Behind Anymore
The technology is here. The next gap is whether operators can build the people, ownership, and habits needed to get value from it.
Read this insight
Current questions
What I’m Trying to Understand
How much technology can a business absorb before it creates more work than leverage?
What skills matter when answers are becoming cheap, but judgment still is not?
How do growing companies keep frontline reality from getting filtered out of their decisions?
When does being the person who always helps become a bottleneck - for the person and the organization?
How does building a career in a rural part of the country, isolated from the in-person networks, shape the way you think about ambition, trust, communication, and opportunity?
Why I write about this
Started at the wash. Still thinking about the wash.
I entered the car wash industry at 18 as a part-time membership salesperson at Suds Car Wash in Pikeville, Kentucky. Since then, I’ve worked across sales, marketing, product marketing, customer success, and customer strategy.
That mix has kept me close to site-level execution and larger multi-site operator challenges. My current work focuses on customer strategy in the car wash technology industry.
Talk shop on LinkedIn.
If something here sounds useful, familiar, or worth arguing with, send me a message. The good car wash conversations usually start there.