Mobile car wash on mopeds for the emerging Chinese car wash market?
Well, it seems that the Chinese like clean cars just like us Americans, and it seems that all the cars they are buying from the commercial car wash sector cannot keep up. There are all sorts of issues, like energy, cost of land, and water usage. So where do China’s 470 million middle class go to wash their cars? That is once they buy a car. In China, the middle class means about $1200 per year in earnings or about $3 (USD) per day and the cost of a car wash could not reach more than a tenth of what it costs here.
Well, we must also realize that the labor costs are also one tenth. So is it feasible? Is there room for hundreds of thousands of car washes? Maybe not in Shanghai, Beijing or some of the other dense cities, but mobile car washing could certainly work and employ large numbers of Chinese as well.
What about mobile car wash operations on mopeds, tricycles, carts, and other variations depending on the exact location? Would it work fine? How about larger units for larger industrial areas where buses, trucks, planes, marine equipment, farm equipment, construction equipment, new cars, trains, etc. would be washed? Is this a viable business model?
My answer is YES, yes it is.
In a nutshell, a smart entrepreneur, not residing in the US, but a Chinese entrepreneur, could produce mobile car wash carts that would be pushed by operators. In this way the cost would be low, since we must remember that the cost of a car is from $2500 to $4000 and the cost of washing would be a tenth of the basic (mobile) wash here of $5-7 USD, so we are talking about $ .50 – $.70 per car wash, but still possible.
That is, “if” the washing machine kept 33% and was charged a fair rental rate, the business person who owned 25-50 cars would make a good amount of money. The royalties collected could be substantial, but it would have to be a local entrepreneur, not a US-based franchisor. After all, since the Chinese are excellent copycats, they would simply copy the business model, and the US franchisor would never receive a cent.
The franchisor couldn’t trust that market or maintain ownership rights to the business model and still get paid, so they would have to get paid up front, but I don’t see how anyone would pay $100,000 to $500,000 up front. for something I could copy. and steal, and even if his limited knowledge of the copy was wrong, in his mind, he would be a shrewd business person to cheat the US-based franchisor.
Meanwhile, others would copy them and put them at a disadvantage by stealing their concept and competing directly with them, while they had paid us. As the founder of the world’s largest mobile car wash franchise company, those are my thoughts.