Unlock Hidden Potential - Maximize Revenue at Underperforming Sites

September 18, 2023

In this 45-minute webinar, we discuss the essential benchmarks for gaining insight into car wash performance.
 

 

Transcript

Kayla Ivey, Product Marketing Manager Thanks for joining, everybody. Happy to have you here today. We're going to be talking about how to unlock hidden potential at underperforming sites. So if you own multiple sites, there's a good chance you have at least one site, maybe it's a handful of sites, that are underperforming in the sense that, they're not meeting expectations of what you had for that site or they're kind of under the mark of what you have for the rest of your portfolio of sites.

So these can be tricky to have the capacity and know how to really dive in and figure out how to resolve. So we're going to go through basically, like, a diagnostic process of how to dive into a site that is underperforming, how to really analyze what's going on with that individual site and what the root cause of that underperforming is, and then actions based on what we find through that process. So you'll leave with, you know, action plans that you can do on your own. And then we will also, toward the end, go through a case study. So, like, basically a real site that we did this process with.

We'll walk through the process together and then show you what actions we put into play and what the results were at that site. With that, we will go ahead and dive in. Just a couple of housekeeping items. There's a Q&A button at the bottom of your Zoom screen. That's the only button that you'll need to interact with us through the webinar. So chat will be disabled. You can put anything you need in the Q&A, including technical issues. Make sure to ask questions as we go. We'll try to save a few minutes at the end to go through some of the questions. We have quite a bit of content today. Should be right around 40, 45 minutes or so. And if we don't get to your question, we'll follow up in an email. We'll also be sending out the recording of the webinar. So you'll have all the content as a takeaway as well. We'll do some quick introductions and then get into our discussion.

My name is Kayla Ivey, I'm a Product Marketing Manager for DRB®. And my background is, I came from the SUDS team, which is the marketing and analytics arm of DRB. So through that, worked for about six years with lots of different types of car wash owners and helped them with marketing strategy, how to grow their business, how to add memberships, all those types of strategies. So that's kind of my background and what I'm bringing to our discussion.

Jennifer Henderson, Strategic Advisor: Hi, everyone, my name is Jennifer Henderson. I do a little bit of a lot of different things for SUDS, but primarily focused around strategy, both client-facing and internal. And my background is in senior leadership roles in marketing, primarily in tech and adjacent sectors.

Kayla: And then just a little background on SUDS, if you're not familiar before we dive into our content for today. So SUDS, like I mentioned, is the marketing and analytics arm of DRB. So part of the DRB family of brands, And SUDS, I think the best way to understand it is we help owners answer critical questions about your car wash business.

There's a few examples on the screen, I won't go through this in-depth, but if there's anything you're wondering about your business and you want, you know, someone to analyze data, come out with an insight and then be able to execute upon those insights, that's really where SUDS specializes. And so through that, we've been able to really hone in on what we're talking about today, which is, what is it that makes a site underperform and what can we do to address it? So that's what we'll go ahead and get into next.

Jennifer: So how do you know if you've got an underperforming site, beyond just intuition or gut instinct? There's a few KPIs that you can look at that are going to give you some insight into whether performance is where it should be. So number one, let's start out with capture rate. And this tells us sort of briefly of the available non-member customers who are visiting your site, what percentage of them are you converting to membership. So during a promo, we'd like to see that at 10% or above, for example. So if your capture rate is low, it might be a bunch of different things. It could be a lack of sales effort by your CSAs, a perceived lack of value by customers. They don't feel compelled to join.

Next KPI to look at would be churn. How many members are you losing month over month? Some attrition is inevitable, but if you're constantly seeing churn that, consistently seeing churn that's over 5%, or if it's steadily increasing over time, that's a red flag. That's something that you're doing or maybe something that you're not doing is driving members away. Could be pricing, customer experience, et cetera. Member count over time. We like to see this growing steadily, with spikes for when you've got a marketing promo happening. However, if you're seeing that member account over time is relatively flat or worst case scenario, even declining, then, you know, that's a sign of underperformance.

And finally, looking at traffic volume. If your capture rate is good but memberships are low, the issue could be traffic. You're getting people to sign up when they come on-site, you simply just don't have enough people coming through the door. And one of the things that we can do in that case is compare you to the rest of the industry to see where you line up there. And you yourself can also look at deviations from averages if you've got more than one site. Is somebody there not meeting the same traffic metrics as everyone else? So once we figure out there's some underperformance here that we want to address, then we need to look at what are the root causes.

And SUDS has almost a decade of experience helping operators boost performance at sites. And through that, through trial and error, we've uncovered that most sites that are underperforming tend to fall into one of four categories. And those are the four categories we're going to talk about today, how to identify if that's your category and then how to address it. So number one is location, number two is customer experience, then you've got market awareness, and finally pricing. So we're going to dive into each of those and what that means for you right now.

Kayla: All right, so we'll start with location and we start with this one for a reason. So we recommend kind of first analyzing the site location itself and understanding what your challenges are in regards to that just so it can help set you up for what action planning you need to do with some of these other categories. So getting this one knocked out right off the bat helps you really understand your site.

So we recommend essentially thinking of this like you would a site that you're looking to purchase, acquisition, or new builds, whatever it is, how you would analyze a site that you're looking to buy. So similar factors that you want to go through here. So thinking about your traffic, overall volume of traffic that's driving down your roads next to your wash, and the speed of the traffic. Are you close to a traffic light where they're slowing down enough to see you in time to make a turn? Things like visibility, how difficult or easy is it to see. Are there any visibility challenges from the road? Things like ingress and egress.

Are there things blockading someone's ability to turn in, like a median? Is it difficult to navigate in and out of that could, you know, deter someone from wanting to visit the wash? Proximity to high-frequency retail, such as big box retailers, Walmarts, grocery stores, and things like that can be really impactful. And then also competition. So competition isn't necessarily a bad thing, but analyzing, you know, proximity to competitors and also kind of the quality and, you know, what you're up against in terms of competition in the market. So all of those factors are things you would evaluate if you were looking to, you know, buy a site.

So kind of take that outside perspective on your own site that you already have and start from the ground up on what your challenges may be or hurdles that you need to overcome with the location. Best way to do this is use a site analysis report. So we recommend using our report called SiteSelect. It really specializes in going through kind of that diagnostic of everything about your location, gives you a sort of grade, if you will, on those various categories. And then in addition to that, it'll also tell you a projected member count and projected revenue based on the location factors, such as marketing and operations, and things aside, the location itself could produce how many members and how much revenue at site maturity. So that'll help you deduce, is it location that's causing my problems, is it something else? So it's a great place to start.

Jennifer: Okay, so what if you find out that location is your challenge? So, first off, you need to understand a less-than-ideal location doesn't mean you can't still grow, it just might take you a little longer. It might be a slower path to site maturity. So there's a number of levers that you can pull to compensate for location issues. The first one, the easiest, the low-hanging fruit is signage. Just simple signage to capture drive-by traffic. And this is especially effective if customers, to Kayla's point, have to slow down, they have to turn against traffic to reach your site, et cetera. So put up a banner advertising your new promo. And the goal there is someone can see that once, register it, and then make a plan to stop the next time.

So with location, what we're ultimately trying to do is seed the idea of your existence in the head of the consumer and have them say, "oh, okay, I'm going to do something and take the extra step to visit," because in some cases it might require an extra step. The other option that we would recommend around location is a pretty aggressive digital ad campaign. So we want to drive people in for the first time, make them aware of your existence, give them an incentive to come on-site rather than relying on organic traffic. And what we could do to combat for a hard-to-find location or difficult to access is we could take those ads and drive them to a landing page that has your location and directions on it. Again, helps people find your site and helps them set the intention to potentially visit in the future.

Kayla: So next root cause that we see commonly leads to site under-performance is customer experience. So indicators of this could be high churn, low traffic, kind of just some of those, you know, KPIs that might mean customers are visiting but, you know, something about their experience is causing them to not return or, you know, to leave. And so we'll walk you through a couple things you can do to evaluate if this could be a challenge at your own site. One recommendation we have is to get this from an outside perspective. It's important to have this be kind of a third party point of view just because of course you as the owner, you know, have every intention to be putting forth a quality product, a great service, you know, great experience for your customers, that's what you intend to do and that's what, you know, you expect to be happening. But getting that third party point of view can really be eye-opening on what is truly happening at this site.

And if you're experiencing under performance, it's kind of worth going that extra mile getting that outside point of view and seeing if there's anything you can tighten up here. So one way to do that, secret shopper. So if you haven't done that before, you can either hire someone that, you know, goes through the wash and reports back in a more formalized way. You can also just get someone you know who doesn't know your car wash employees to go through the wash and maybe tell them ahead of time a couple things to look out for or just have them report back what was their experience like. Were they greeted by someone at the point of sale? How was the employee interaction? How was the cleanliness and the quality of the site? This can be as formal or informal as you want it to be, but just get that outside perspective in one way or another. And then the other thing we recommend you do here is to really sort through and analyze your online reviews.

So Google reviews, Yelp reviews, whatever you have at your fingertips, you probably keep up on these on, you know, a regular basis, making sure customers are responded to and taken care of. But this is the opportunity to kind of look at it, you know, compile them all and start to analyze all in one place. So you can almost think of it as if you were analyzing like a survey results or something like that. Look at it all in one and start to kind of parse out themes, patterns, you know, things people are mentioning again and again and see if you can, you know, get anything from that in terms of what your customers might be experiencing on site.

Jennifer: What do you need to do if you find out your challenge is customer experience? So after you've taken a look at your online reviews, the next step there is to survey your customers to understand better what they want. And you might need to incentivize that, you give away a free year of membership as a grand prize to get retail customers and members to complete a survey, but what we're looking for there is to hear it from the horse's mouth. What do they like, what do they not like about the experience of doing business with you? You also need to think long and hard about implementing some CX and sales training for your CSAs.

And that might be something that comes out of the survey or your review of online reviews. We want everyone to have a consistent experience when they come on-site. We want it to be friendly, professional, and geared toward making sure that everyone is so happy they're going to come back again and again, and training will help you do that. And then finally, messaging. If you've done this hard work, and CX stuff is, you know, one of the trickier pieces of the puzzle to troubleshoot. If you've done that hard work of listening to your customers, of working with your team and you've made operational changes in response to this, then you need to message that out. So, for example, if one of the pieces of feedback that you get is, "hey, we wish your hours were different, we wish you were open later." If you go ahead and make that change, then there needs to be a big old sign on the side of your building that says, "now open later," for example.

So CX is all about hearing what your customers want, making the needed adjustments and then communicating that back to them because even small changes make a difference. And just simply asking for feedback and engaging with it shows people that you value them. And that goes a long way to building a really positive customer experience.

Kayla: Okay, so our third common root cause that we see is market awareness. So this could be, you have excellent service, great quality but people just don't know you're there or not enough people know that you're there. So a couple things you want to look out for here. One is just is your traffic, you know, are your traffic numbers way below what you would expect in terms of, like, actual car count visiting your site? That's typically a market awareness challenge maybe amongst other things. One thing you can start with is looking at your location. So go back to step number one where we did the site analysis and kind of location overview. If you look at that and you have any issues or challenges with your location, such as you're off the beaten path, visibility is an issue, turning into the site is an issue, any of those challenges can lead to a market awareness challenge as well.

So think of those as kind of going hand in hand, you're going to be dealing with both. So look at your location. Another couple of things you can do to look at whether market awareness might be your particular challenge or opportunity is, if you've got a high capture rate but also high retention, so you're selling memberships in a healthy manner, you're keeping those members, you just have overall low volume of memberships and low traffic volume.

So you're doing the right things, you just don't have enough volume to sustain, you know, what you need to. So that's market awareness and we'll talk about things you can do there. Couple other things you can look at. Your online presence. So look at things like your number of Google reviews. So when you did that analysis in the previous step, are you looking at dozens of Google reviews or are you looking at 100s of Google reviews? So you can start to kind of get an idea based on your online presence.

How many people are aware of your business? You can also look at things like your social media followers and how many people are engaging on social media with your posts and things like that. Next you can look at your marketing. So there's a couple things you can think about here. If you're a new site, think about what you did for your grand opening. So if you did a major go-to-market campaign where you had multi-channel, you know, you're reaching out via digital ad, print ad, you spent a healthy budget, that's one thing. If you didn't do that, market awareness could be a challenge. And even if you're a new site in general, market awareness is something that's a hurdle for everyone in the beginning. So it might be something to consider if you're a newer site. If you've been open for a while, you're going to think more about what you've done regularly in terms of marketing.

So if, you know, maybe you've run some promotions, some campaigns, things like that, but if your marketing has been limited primarily to social media posts, email blasts, signage on site, those are great tactics to reach people who already know about your business essentially. So those are good kind of upsell tactics, but think about what you're doing that's more outbound. So easiest way to do that is think about, what are you paying for on a regular basis in terms of paid digital ads, paid social media ads? What does that part of your marketing, you know, overall marketing structure look like and do you have opportunity there?

Jennifer: Okay, so market awareness is actually not a bad one to have to troubleshoot. And essentially where you get started there is start doing the things you haven't been doing until now. So ramp up your digital ad campaigns, that might be including geofencing, social, Google ads, YouTube, Nextdoor, do an SEO audit of your website. Are you coming up in search results? If people are searching for car wash plus your town or city, are you up there in the search results? If you're not, you probably need to upgrade your onsite SEO and look at those keywords. In addition to that, look at the rest of your digital presence. Is your Google My Business listing built out? Is it complete, is it accurate? Does it have your hours and contact info on there? Have you claimed your location on Yelp, et cetera? All those little things you need to button up.

You can do a review generation strategy to increase market awareness and drive exposure. You know, ask people, as they've come through the wash, how was your experience today? If they say, great, ask them to leave a review. Put up a sign with a QR code asking for reviews. We've even had clients who incentivize their CSAs to go after good reviews and it's worked out really well. They're talking to people that are happy, they're shepherding them into the review process and being incentivized to do that. That just helps build your online awareness and helps people see, you know, hey, this business is active, people like it, seems to be a going concern. And then finally, get out into the community.

We have a lot of clients who pursue local opportunities, whether that's partnering with not-for-profits, sponsoring or partnering with sports teams, et cetera, or other marketing vehicles, that they might do sponsorships of local events. Figure out where you can kind of be a part of your community and be active in that capacity because that gets your name and your logo in front of an audience on a regular basis that then you're going to stick in their mind the next time that they're looking for a car wash.

Kayla: Okay, and then our last root cause for under-performance we see is pricing. This one can be harder to detect on your own. I'll go through quite a few indicators, you know, that could indicate essentially that this is one of your problems. You can also do kind of process of elimination of the previous three steps. If you've kind of gotten to the end and you don't still know what is going on, it's definitely worth looking at your pricing. Some other indicators you can look out for. So one is, when you're doing your Google reviews analysis, looking at your online feedback from customers, take note of mentions of pricing, mentions of high pricing, quality not matching pricing, whatever that is. It doesn't mean we're going to lower your pricing, it just means there's something going on with pricing that maybe isn't quite, you know, adding up to what it needs to.

So it doesn't mean we're going to lower it, just means we're going to evaluate it deeper. You can also look at how you stack up to competitors. Competitor pricing should not necessarily be what you look at to form your own pricing. We can go into that later, but you do want to be aware of where you sit in the market. And if you're significantly higher, significantly lower, you know, take that into account and it might be worth looking at pricing on a deeper level. There's a couple things you can also look at in your own KPIs. So as you're looking at your own data, do you have high capture rate and high churn? So basically, in other words, you're capturing a lot of members and kind of churning them out. Treadmill of doom, right? You've got healthy membership capture but you're losing them after a month or two of recharging.

So that can definitely be an indicator of something not being quite right in your pricing model and a sign that you want to look at that. Another is kind of the flip side, which would be low capture rate. So you're getting a decent amount of traffic but your capture rate is pretty low. You're not capturing a lot of those people into membership, meaning there's probably something off about your pricing model. In that case, you want to look at both retail and membership because it's really about the value proposition between the two.

And then last thing you can look for as an indicator is a large percentage of customers purchasing one wash package, whether it's retail or membership, if you're seeing 40, 50, 60% of your customers purchasing one wash package, especially on the bottom, that's definitely an indicator that pricing can be optimized. It can also be optimized if you're seeing a large percentage on the top, it just might not be as much of an issue as an optimization opportunity, but if you're seeing a large percentage on bottom wash, bottom-middle wash, if you've got four or more packages, that's definitely something you want to look for.

Jennifer: So what do you do if you find out that your challenge is pricing? Well, we have a solution for that, PrecisionPricing. So if you're seeing that skew where things are skewing heavily to the bottom, you're seeing low tenure and elevated churn, you know you have a problem. We recommend that you do a PrecisionPricing analysis with us to optimize your pricing, improve ticket averages, improve overall revenue. And we found that on average optimizing pricing can add an additional 2 to $3 in both retail and member ticket average. And we'll get into that with our case study in a few minutes. And that really adds up across every single car that's coming to your site. Could be additional 100s of 1,000s, if not millions of dollars, depending on how many sites you were to do this for. The other important thing to think about with pricing, especially if you've gone ahead and optimized your pricing, is then rolling that into menu and pay station design so that you're using consumer behavior principles to draw people's eye and attention and ultimately decision making to where you want it to go, which is that top wash and that top package. So don't just stop with optimizing the pricing, make sure you're communicating that visually to your customers as well.

And then finally, no matter what your challenge is, or even as a hedge against future challenges to under performance, there are a few things that we would recommend. One would be a referral or a sharing campaign. This is great because you just simply ask your current members and customers if they want to share a free wash with a friend or multiple friends. This builds your database of contacts, it creates more exposure to your brand, bringing in new people, and it leverages positive word of mouth. So people are more likely to take you up on that offer because it's not coming from your brand, it's coming from someone they trust. Upselling, we would love to see operator, we'd love to see clients, but we'd love to see operators in general do this more often. You've got people who are coming on site and giving you their money.

So how can we get a couple dollars more? How can we take those people who are already there and increase the value of their transaction? So we can do that with upselling. That might be a BOGO offer, you know, 50% off your next wash if you pre-purchase it today. It could be an upgrade for a dollar or $2 more, go from the bottom to the top package. Just little things that we can do that can take that captured traffic and make it more lucrative and profitable for you. And then finally, customer feedback. Customer feedback is the number one best way to keep ahead of underperformance. This will tell you where things are trending with your customers and what you need to be aware of. Before the flag turns red, you know, when it's still yellow, you can understand that and keep a handle on it by proactively collecting customer feedback, whether that's annual surveys, whether that's simply your CSAs talking to people each and every day. Feedback will really help you keep on top of performance before it starts to become a real challenge.

Kayla: Okay, so next, just for the last few minutes we have here, also now's a good time to put in any questions into the Q&A if you do have anything. But we want to leave you with a case study. So we'll walk through together this real example of a site that we worked with over the last year and, you know, what we were able to do with them, what the results were. So this was a multi-site operator that came to SUDS in February of 2022. They had multiple sites that needed, you know, special attention and, you know, performance to be boosted at. For the purpose of our discussion today, we're just going to focus on one site so we can walk through this process together. So the one site we'll talk about had just over 600 members. It was not a new site, this was an acquired site, so a previous ownership. And these owners had owned it for long enough that they were, you know, expecting to see bigger membership growth and they were just seeing very slow growth. Membership numbers and revenue were nowhere near what they expected for this site.

Capture rate, as you can see, is really low when they started working with us. So we knew something was going on here pricing wise, training wise, what have you. So this is something we wanted to look into. And then churn rate was on, not super high, but on kind of the high moderate side. So part of the overall picture that we wanted to dig into a little deeper. So this site really wanted SUDS to help them analyze what was going on at this particular site, what could they do to really boost performance. So we'll walk through those same steps that we did before starting with location. So we ran a site select report on this site to understand first what are we up against in terms of the location itself. As you can see, so this is the, it's basically a synopsis of our SiteSelect report. So there's lots of data kind of in the backend and on additional pages. This just shows the synopsis of how the site ranked on traffic, population, visibility, all of these factors. So overall, looks pretty good. This is a actually really healthy site. Most factors, they're ranking good.

And then there's a couple averages, so maybe something a little bit to look at, but overall, looks pretty healthy. And then you'll notice too, up at the top here, projected members. So this is really important to us because we know they're at just over 600 members. This location analysis says this site can do 2,700 to 3,200 members. So something is, there's a big delta here. Something's going awry. And we know based on this, this is the location report telling us what this site can do at maturity. It's not the location itself. So we can kind of scratch this off our process of elimination and no it's not the location itself, it's something else. Next we looked at customer experience. So the things we'll kind of drill into for our discussion today is their online reviews. So they had hundreds of Google reviews just for this one individual site, which was great.

We had a lot of data to work with. As you can see, they're at 3.7 stars. So kind of middle of the road. And as we looked at this, it was very stark, really positive review, really negative review, five star review, one star review. Like, that was kind of the pattern. And so it wasn't that people were having a mediocre experience, it was either really great or really terrible. So what we kind of came up with from that is this was, you know, the experience that a customer had varied greatly depending on what service they purchased and what employee they were working with and kind of what day it was. So that really was a consistency problem.

So this is something we can relay to the operator that they can, you know, put into place different tactics on their end, but that was very interesting. So it was a very inconsistent customer experience. Next we looked at their market awareness. So kind of the red flag here was they said that they had been doing promotions and some marketing. However, when we looked at what was really going on online, they weren't really reaching very many people at all with their promotions. So they have a good offer here for their holiday campaign, for example. It's only getting liked by two people, one share. So not a lot of engagement going on.

And really what this is, is they were doing kind of organic posts and kind of that approach we talked about earlier, where they're doing a good job reaching existing customers but not really doing a lot to outreach to new potential customers. So through this and through looking at their traffic and kind of seeing how that's stacked up to what we expect industry-wide and based on their SiteSelect report that, you know, traffic on their street was good, they had a market awareness opportunity. So this is something that we honed in on. And then lastly, we looked at pricing. So some of the things that I mentioned before really jump out when you look at their distribution. So here's their retail packages and what percentage of customers are buying each wash. They had almost half of their customers buying the bottom wash. So that's one of those pricing red flags we mentioned to look out for.

This is really dragging their ticket average down and there's opportunity to optimize, absolutely. And then only 4% are buying their top wash. So there might be something to look at here in the market. Are we priced too high? Do we need to optimize kind of our, you know, package strategy here? And then just to sum up. So through that kind of process of elimination, if you will, we identified the two biggest challenges that this site was experiencing were market awareness and pricing.

Jennifer: So what did we do when we figured out those two key factors driving underperformance? We did a grand reopening campaign to get attention to the site, to expose it to more people, have them come in, try for the first time, convert to membership. We did a pricing analysis, which I'll talk about in a second, Kayla's already mentioned. We gave them a new website, we did a brand refresh, a signage refresh, and we did one of those previously mentioned review campaigns. So what happened when we did the pricing analysis. At the end of the day, ticket average jumped up to almost $3. And you can see here the change in distribution. So we knocked out that $22 top package that no one was really biting on and realized we could get a lot more people to bite on the $18 package. We took them from four to three using a dominated alternative approach.

And we knew, based on experience and having done this time and again, that there was room to move people up the ladder there. So we didn't get discouraged that 48, almost 50% of people were on the lowest package. We said, hey, there's still an opportunity there to move people up, which we were able to do. And if you see the new distribution, it's much more in line with that hourglass shape that we like to see. What happened based on all of those things I mentioned as solutions? Well, membership more than tripled, capture rate went up almost, or over 3X.

And I'll note here that their capture is over 13% for promos. So this is an average of promo and non promo periods. And then finally we reduced churn by more than half. What's interesting here, if you look at growth, and the thing we should note is this client has continued to work with us. So they didn't just, you know, have us come in, do our magic and retool things and then leave. They realized that those measures that we're putting in place now and those programs that we're running will continue to pay dividends over time. So they've gone from 619 members when they started with us to 2,673 today.

And the really interesting thing about this is, it is bang on where we projected that their site could get to and what their optimized result is. So using those interventions we discussed, doing the analysis, then running these programs, we were able to take them from underperformance to max performance in pretty short order, in under a year.

Kayla: Okay, so that's the end of our process and we just wanted to give you kind of a summary slide here 'cause it's a lot to digest. So kind of going through this as a recap, once you've identified a site or multiple sites that need this attention and evaluation, first go through in order and establish your site's unique challenge. So go through the location analysis, analyze what your customers are saying, look at, you know, your market footprint and how many people you're reaching and evaluate if you've got any pricing opportunity.

Then from there, you can build your own unique action plan, if you will. And you know, some of these are going to be longer term, some are things you can implement and see results right away, but you can kind of build that unique action plan now that you know what your site's individual challenges are. So this is a lot, it's a lot of attention and resources to dedicate to one individual site, or if you've got multiple sites that need this, we're more than happy to help. If you're interested in talking through the process a little bit more or understanding, you know, how SUDS can help, please scan the QR code and we can have a conversation about, you know, what some of your challenges are at your sites and how we might be able to help you out with that. With that, we're just about up on time, but I think we've got time for just a couple of questions.

So let's jump into that. Okay, so let's start with, how quickly should I expect to see results after implementing some of these tactics? Good question. So I think it definitely depends on what your individual challenge is. So some of them are going to be more of a quick fix, if you will, such as pricing. So pricing is going to be, you implement it, you're going to see increases in ticket average pretty much, like, overnight and then those obviously will add up over time. Other things like, you know, the example we shared where they had maybe a little bit of hangover from previous customer experience, because this was an acquisition site. You know, going through that ongoing process of communicating that this is new ownership and kind of dealing with making sure that there's a new and improved customer experience, some of those things can take a lot longer.

So it's good to put some of these kind of quick fixes in right away and you should see a boost probably within a couple of months. And then a lot of it will be kind of ongoing as well and you'll see improvements over time. Okay, what should you do if you have a site that used to perform well but now isn't? Jennifer, you want to take that one?

Jennifer: Sure, so you need to figure out what changed. So if things were going well and then now they're not, something has changed and that might be, a competitor has moved into the market, maybe they're running a promo, maybe they're undercutting you on price, maybe they're just simply, you know, pulling people from you that ordinarily you didn't have competition for. It could be something has changed on the customer experience side. You know, maybe you have, you know, hired a bunch of new people and the customer experience, they haven't been trained up enough and the customer experience has fallen off.

Or it could be, hey, performance was doing really well and then to save a few bucks, we cut marketing spend last year and we've seen performance take a nosedive since then. So the number one thing, if you've got a site that was performing well and now isn't, we've got to dig in to figure out what's changed. And the good news is, if it was doing well once, it's pretty safe to say that we can get it back up to where it used to be. So it's not as dire as a site that has kind of been, you know, bumping along at a low level the whole time, but we do want to look at what's changed and how do we troubleshoot that as effectively and expediently as possible.

Kayla: Okay, there's a few more here. So one question was, the slide about the retail average per car before and after, were we just showing single retail washes excluding member washes? So answer to that is yes, on that slide, we were only looking at retail, however, there was a whole flip side of this strategy that involved membership. Just for simplifying the discussion, we just showed you retail. However, we did major restructuring on their membership pricing as well. They were at, I can't remember the pricing off the top of my head, but they had two packages that were high. They were on the really high side. So we went to a three package membership strategy, brought the membership pricing down significantly and the volume definitely skyrocketed. So it was kind of a combination of ticket average change and volume change on the membership side.

And then the other question about pricing real quick and then we'll let you guys go. Did you change the pricing at all locations in your example or just a low performing site? We changed the pricing at all sites. So this is an important, it's a great question. We generally try to get as close as we can to a one pricing strategy approach across your entire portfolio unless there's specific markets that are very, very different, but yes, this was something that we implemented across the board and the results were fantastic.

Okay, I think we're about out of time. I know there's a couple more. So we will follow up with you all if that's alright. We want to let everyone get back to your day. Thank you so much for spending your time with us and we will follow up in a few business days with the recording, as well as the answers to the rest of your questions that didn't get resolved. So let us know if we can help with anything. And thank you so much.

Jennifer: Thanks for your time, everyone.

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