Braxton McKee / Personal Blog
I wash cars.
Mostly by making what’s next make sense.
I write from inside the work of car wash growth: memberships, retention, customer strategy, field execution, technology, and the leadership decisions that determine whether strategy actually works.
Main areas of focus
Marketing Leadership
How growth work earns field trust, creates clearer decisions, and survives the reality of an operating business.
Growth Systems
How teams move beyond campaign calendars into rhythms, ownership, feedback, and practical learning loops.
Field Intelligence
How operator reality, customer language, and site-level signals turn into better marketing and customer strategy.
What I’m learning now
Marketing leadership inside a real operating business.
Today, I’m spending more time thinking about how marketing leadership works inside the business itself: how to build trust with the field, create demand without creating confusion, make brand promises the business can deliver, and turn customer behavior into better decisions.
The work is less about having more ideas and more about making the right ideas usable. The closer marketing gets to operations, the easier it is to see which messages create clarity, which promises create pressure, and which systems help teams make better decisions.
Featured writing
Start here
· 5 min read
Marketing Only Works When the Field Trusts It
The strongest campaigns are the ones the people closest to the customer believe they can stand behind.
Read this insight
· 5 min read
Brand Is What Operations Can Actually Deliver
In car washing, the brand is tested every day by the customer experience, not by the words around it.
Read this insight
· 5 min read
Growth Strategy Has to Survive the Site Level
If the idea cannot make it through the lane, the lobby, and the local customer conversation, it is not ready yet.
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 from site-level sales into marketing leadership, customer strategy, technology, and growth work for larger operators.
That mix has kept me close to both sides of the business: the daily reality of wash sites and the leadership decisions that shape multi-site growth.
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.