WashMetrix, a unified data analytics company, has set its sights on optimizing site operations and financial insights for the professional car wash industry. The company’s software offering is purpose-built for car wash owners to leverage their data in a centralized dashboard. This helps car washes make quick, informed decisions during a period of continued growth and consolidation in the more than $15 billion industry.

The U.S. car wash industry is expected to continue to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 4.8% through 2028, according to market research firm Grand View Research. In all that growth, and at that pace, there are bound to be both challenges and opportunities.

Michael Murry, CEO of Champion Xpress, is an early adopter of the WashMetrix platform and said it’s helping them look at their operations in ways that simply weren’t possible before. “To keep a sharp sword as you’re building washes and running washes you have to stay on top of your data,” Murry said. “It’s one thing to be able to collect the data; it’s another to be able to be creative with the data and use it to find ways to keep the customers happy by providing a better experience.”

Champion Xpress is a growing company with 24 washes across several states. With a growth strategy centered around greenfield development, the company expects to be above 40 locations by the end of 2023. None of that is possible without a solution like WashMetrix to free up their human capital.

“We’re growing fast and compiling and analyzing our data was taking up a lot of time for us – pushing a lot of ideas we wanted to explore to the back burner,” Murry said. “WashMetrix frees up our people to go back to those ideas. With the creative ways we’re able to segment the data we can make informed decisions and stay nimble.”

“We’ve spoken to a lot of leading car wash companies who all have similar challenges,” said WashMetrix Co-Founder Rex Womble. “Car wash companies are looking for ways they can make all of their different systems work together to give them a more comprehensive picture of the business.”

For Murry, the ability to pull in data from different systems into a segmented view is critical to ongoing growth. “You’ve got POS information, but also pulling in from our HRIS, and our accounting space,” Murry said. “For example, we wanted to look at our peak hours to look at areas we could optimize and WashMetrix was able to give us the view into our data we needed to make smart business decisions.”

Womble points out an additional area of expense as organizations grow.

“As the race to consolidate happens, you run into several different hardware and software systems in play, with no easy way to make them communicate,” he said. “That means you either need to replace everything or build your own solution.”

This hits home for Andrew Zamora, CEO of Racer Classic Investments. Zamora completed the successful sale of Racer Classic Car Wash to International Car Wash Group in 2021 and has been growing a new brand – All American Car Wash. Now up to 10 locations, Zamora’s washes have two different POS systems.

“We’re split between two systems, one in the north, one in the south,” he said. “The cost to move all of those to one system – to rip and replace – is cost prohibitive. But we still need a way to see our data so we’re manually pulling all that data into a dashboard that means something to us.”

Zamora still must take that information and connect it with his financial system with data that can be as much as 45 to 60 days out. “We have great people who can get us really strong numbers to help us make decisions, but those numbers are old by the time we can use them,” he said. “WashMetrix gets us a view of the data much faster because it’s talking to all our systems. That means we can make those decisions more quickly to make sure we’re operating at the top of our game.”

That focus on excellent operations is only increasing as interest rates rise and private equity firms grow more cautious. Excellent operations, fueled by strong data and reliable analysis of the numbers. “It’s still about being able to put out a clean, dry, shiny car … giving good service and a good product,” Zamora said. “To do that consistently you need to have true cost and true cost per car basis across your locations.”

A recent article in CAR WASH Magazine, the industry’s preferred source of information, cites several major car wash platforms creating their own data warehouses and analytics solutions to solve the problems Womble cites. “You have to have one source of truth when it comes to your data,” he said. “And when you’re working with several different point-of-sale providers and different controllers and different financial software … being able to centralize, clean, and leverage that data in useful ways makes all the difference in the world.”

WashMetrix integrates with all major point-of-sale and accounting systems, including Sonny’s, DRB, Micrologic, QuickBooks, Sage, to display a consolidated view of an operator’s true financials, budget vs. actual details, and historical analysis so owners can easily identify trends, find variances, and benchmark site performance effortlessly. Notably, WashMetrix synchronizes with existing point-of-sale and accounting systems to transform raw data into a unified dashboard of analytics. “We’re not leveraging any of the built-in reports from any of the providers,” Womble said. “Instead, we’re taking the raw transaction data and turning it into actionable insights and KPIs for today’s car wash business owner to easily track unit level economics.”

Maybe more interesting is that WashMetrix is removing the need to hire data analysts to make sense of the information by providing easy-to-use dashboards with KPIs proven to make a difference to operations in the car wash market. “Sure, I could hire a team of people or use existing staff to manually pull reports, consolidate financial data and provide weekly analysis around that data,” said WashMetrix Co-Founder Palmer Dean, who co-founded Alpine Car Wash in Dallas- Ft. Worth. “But if I have a reliable solution that can automate this workflow and give me the KPIs I need in an easy format, without all of the overhead, why would I do anything else?”

Zamora agrees. “The more locations we have, the more time pulling and reporting on the data takes,” he said. “If we can utilize WashMetrix at a relatively inexpensive cost to speed up the process and free up our people … how could we not use it?”

Womble’s been here before with Co-Founder Chetan Chouhan. The duo built Archeio Technologies, a company focused on similar challenges in the oil and gas industry that was successfully acquired in 2019 by Quorum Software, a Thoma Bravo portfolio company. “We built our last company around providing purpose-built, affordable and intelligent software solutions designed specifically for the industry,” Chouhan said. “At the time, the horizontal software vendors did not address the specific needs of the customers in that vertical, resulting in sub-optimal business processes. Today, the car wash industry is in a similar space and in dire need of modern technologies to help operators scale and optimize.”