Evan Carmichael advises starting a car wash by partnering with an existing auto shop or dealer instead of leasing your own location. Test the business on their premises, build customers and cash flow, then reinvest profits into your own site later. His wife did the same with a salsa-dance business, renting gym space first.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of #AskEvan. Today I'm answering a question from one of our readers, Zunaid, who wrote in. He came across my profile on Twitter and here's his question: I've been toying with the idea of starting up a middle to high-end car wash, but I have no idea on where and how to start. So thanks for the questions, Zainaid. Here's the thing. I hate spending money till I'm making money. And it's so easy to lose a lot of money on a business like a car wash because you have a lot of costs. You got to have a location, you got to have supplies. And as much as possible, I try to figure out a way to get started without spending that money. Anybody can spend money, right? It's easy to spend money. Not everybody can make money. And car washes can be successful, but they can also bankrupt people, right? It's this cost of getting those businesses going. So what I try to do is find a way again to start it off without spending too much money. You're going to have to get a little bit of your supplies, I guess, in order, but I wouldn't spend money on a location yet. If you're signing up a lease, you know, you got a lot of costs that you'll have to carry for a long time. I'd start by partnering up with another business. So find a company that has a related business Maybe it's a mechanic, an auto mechanic, maybe it's a dealer, somebody who's in the car business, and offer to do car washing service out of their location. And it does a couple things. First, it tells you, do you really want to be in the car wash business? You know, better to test it out small, see if you like it, see if you enjoy the people, seeing if you're enjoying this business or not and you want to keep doing this for the next 10 years, or if you get into it and figure out This sucks, you know, I don't want to do this, I want to do something else. So you're testing it out without spending a lot of time or a lot of money, especially, to get it going. That's first. The second thing I'll also tell you is it'll teach you about the types of clients you're going to get, it'll teach you about location, it'll teach you about how to run a business. You can learn from whoever you're working with, whatever company you're working out of, and it'll more importantly bring in money that will be able to fund your expansion. So if you're able to start this business off out of a different location and you're making some money, you know, now you have some money to invest back into the business. You're up to the point where you can go and get your own location. Now you're investing from profits and you're not pulling out of your own pockets or going out and getting a loan or an investor for it and putting, you know, yourself on the line financially, you know, potentially for a very long time for it. So that's what I would do to start, honestly. Go find another business in a related field and find some way to partner up with them where you're doing your car wash service out of their location. It's not ideal, I know, you know, you want to, you have the big vision and that's awesome, but you want to take baby steps every day and make sure you're doing something every day to take that business and make it go forward. You'll figure out if you want to do this business or not, you'll be investing back into the business from profits And it's honestly one of the best ways that you can go and build your business. Great example just to tell you is my wife's company is a salsa business and she started by working at a gym. So she teaches people how to dance. She'll teach 6,000 people here in Toronto how to dance salsa. And it's easy to go up and spend money on this, right? You can go and buy an office or rent an office and drop Tens and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on this location, depending on how nice it is. Um, but who knows if it's gonna work or not? Who knows if you even like this business or not? So she started by renting location space out of gyms. So she partnered up with local gyms who have extra space at night, one room, and she'd pay them for that room, and she'd build up the business, and she found that she really enjoyed doing it, uh, and built up enough of a nest egg that then she can go and afford to go and get her own location. And it took a while to do it, but she's building from profits. She has a hugely successful business, and she made sure that she really enjoyed it before expanding that company. So hopefully that helps. You know, just try it out, honestly. Try it out and get those partnerships going. It's gonna save you a lot of time, headache, money, and hassle. So for those of you watching, you like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. I love seeing those come in. It makes my day. And I'd love to hear what you have to think. Please leave a comment under— underneath the video. If you have a comment about this video or a question for your own business, I'd love to be able to try to answer it for you. So thank you, and I'll see you on the next episode.
