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Mobile truck cleaning or fixed site truck washing: both?

Before I retired, I was running a franchise company and one of our main markets was cleaning trucks, most often truck fleets; trust me there are a lot of them and they get dirty constantly so there is definitely job security in that sense. There are heavy industry equipment cleaning, there are fleets, and there are freelance truckers on the road as well. So how do you serve them all, or do you want to? Is it better to find a niche and focus there, or try to be the launderer of this whole sector?

All good questions, so let’s talk. About 8 months ago I was contacted by a gentleman about cleaning oil field equipment, presumably in TX, CO, WY and ND. He was trying to decide if he should wash on site or set up a truck wash at a fixed location. Now there is good money in cleaning oilfield equipment. On site is good too, there are all kinds of things to wash, you are never out of work, but somewhat difficult to manage with many trucks in remote places. I hear things going off in some places right now, ND for example, but there’s no place to stay, and it’s colder than a witch’s chest, not sure if I’d go for that, and anyway, where the hell? do you get labor? importing people from all over the world to work in those conditions right now, it’s crazy.

What about on-site installation at a trucking terminal? Well, I can remember in Memphis, we had a deal to clean trucks at a terminal from a trucking company for Swift, $45,000 a month, park a truck there with a recovery system, and then dump that tributary into their recovery tanks at the place. Our franchisee at the time did not want the account. If you could do a deal with Wal-Mart, their distribution centers are huge, you could dedicate yourself full time to a unit at every location they had. The problem with many of these terminals is that their sizes are small. But outside of Los Angeles, if you look at some of the LTL operations or grocery stores that carry their own produce, 3000 units, you could make it work. The challenge is to reach each unit per period of washing frequency, it is a logistical problem in the middle of basically; controlled chaos.

Your laundry crews must really want to rush, or it will never happen. Hire some hungry, athletic, and enthusiastic college-age kids, pay them a commission for each unit washed, and let them figure out how to get to it all. They’ll wash between loads, follow them out the door by matching the numbers to their checklists.

In fact, there are many ways to view this business. It is difficult to wash everything, there is so much dirt in the world, and it is everywhere, everywhere, you see? Consider all of this and think about it as you prepare your business plan and truck wash strategy.

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