From the pay station to customer strategy
I got into the car wash industry at 18, in Pikeville, Kentucky, as a part-time membership salesperson at Suds Car Wash. I was not chasing some master plan. I was in school, looking for a better job, and ended up standing near the driveway trying to explain a membership program to real customers in real time.
That turned out to be a pretty useful classroom.
At the site, you learn fast. You hear when the offer makes sense and when it does not. You see how weather, speed, staffing, trust, signage, pricing, and the customer’s mood can change the outcome. You also learn that a strategy is only as good as the people and systems that have to run it while cars are waiting.
I later became Director of Sales and Marketing at Suds. After Suds was acquired by Mammoth Holdings, I worked in marketing as the company expanded. Over time, my work moved across sales, marketing, product marketing, customer success, and customer strategy.
I later joined Rinsed, where I have worked across e-commerce, content marketing, product marketing, customer success, and customer strategy. That work has kept me close to both sides of the industry: the daily reality of wash sites and the larger challenges multi-location operators face as they grow.
What I spend time thinking about
I write about making growth ideas, technology, and customer strategy practical for operators. That usually means memberships, retention, churn, pricing, loyalty, CRM, lifecycle communication, customer behavior, and the gap between what sounds good in a meeting and what actually works at the wash.
The thread is pretty simple: the site matters, the customer matters, the operator matters, the technology matters, and none of it works if those pieces do not connect in the real world.
How I tend to look at the industry
I am interested in the messy middle. The place where a good idea has to survive weather, labor, point-of-sale limitations, chemistry, throughput, customer expectations, and a team that already has plenty to do.
That does not make me anti-technology or anti-growth. The opposite, really. I just think the best ideas are the ones that make the business easier to run, easier for customers to understand, and easier for teams to execute.
This site is where I make sense of that in public. I also keep a small list of conversations and contributions where I’ve talked through these ideas elsewhere.
Send me a message on LinkedIn if you want to talk shop.
The views expressed here are my own.