Finally Chris and I could find the time to both attend the annual carwash convention in Las Vegas this year. Chris attends each year and was dying to demonstrate to me  just how hard he works whilst on tour! and unfortunately he was right , racing from carwash site to site for the days leading up to the convention. Talking with business owners , suppliers of chemicals , machinery experts and technology groups who are at the cutting edge of what is happening in the industry of vehicle washing. It really is an impressive group of global contacts that Johnsy has assembled , all willing to share techniques and tactics as well as solutions to issues that seem to be be common to all continents. Therefore we dont have to make the mistake to learn, it has already been made and solved for us .

We are able to offload plenty to them too. Our point of sale system of IT always blows them away , when we show them what we can view remotely whilst away and the types of reports we can draw on to continually measure the performance of our people.

We landed in LA and barely was Chris off the plane and we were visiting the global headquarters for NS , one of the biggest wash manufacturers in the world. Thomas and Francis drove us to several of their sites which wash many times more vehicles per day than ours !! California is the home of full service carwashing , so we loved seeing what works there and how it is done.

On to SanFrancisco , a beautiful sightseeing city but we saw NONE of it as Chris had lined up Jeff Copeland to show our Aussie contingent around the carwash industry instead !! Man are there some huge sites in San Fran. Lozanos  keeps an unbelieveable  pace up all day, Matt and Jeff’s site is a ripper , a place called Divisedero touchless wash is simply crazy and the delta queen (pictured)is themed as a steam ship but moves more like a ferrari. 800 cars per day is nothing to these groups which have 2nd and 3rd generation workers who are absolute legends.

Then of course Jeff had us all to dinner for his (more likely his wife, Holly’s ) best ever ribs . They lived up to expectations. A great night.

Then to Sacramento , the home of Arnie to experience the generousity of Kelly Rielly, from Kellys carwash group. His willingness to impart his experience to us was inspiring . He began washing cars for his dad when he was 11 and  at 28  started on his own. He now has plenty of sites which are so well looked after that his 16 year old one looks no worse than his newest of a couple of years. No one knows their market better than Kelly. We had a shocker in the car heading the wrong way many times on major interstates and too much time spent on confusing on and off ramps but the day ended and a beer was enjoyed by all.

Now to Vegas to get confused by all the latest and greatest for all types of carwashing. Johnsy has spent 6 years cutting through guarantees and promises ,to settle on suppliers that we are very happy with. This year we want to improve our speed of wheel cleaning, we”re investigating barcode readers for quicker greeting and maybe we can improve our signage in certain areas. The show (as pictured ) was perfect for all areas.

Now we are back with the work of implementing new ideas ahead of us . One thing we immediately notice is the workrate and diligence of our staff. They never seem to slow when the pressure is on and we are very proud of what we have begun.