Wax, Water and a Lot of Hard Work

Staff writer Thomas Heath's "Value Added" column appears Tuesdays on the WashBiz blog. Most weeks, it profiles local entrepreneurs, discussing how they make money and what they do with it.

David DuGoff loves rainy Tuesdays. He relishes big trees that drop nasty yellow pollen all over cars. He prays for a couple of feet of snow every January and February. Not all at the same time, but enough to throw lots of salt and sand slushing around the roads.

Why the passion for weather? DuGoff is the owner of College Park Car Wash, down the street from the University of Maryland on Route 1 in Prince George's County.

DuGoff takes his business seriously. He is on the premises almost every day at the 24-hour car wash. He preaches a work ethic that would make any small-business owner proud: Do the fundamentals right and profit will follow.

"If we keep the lot clean and everything running, if we do the fundamentals, the blocking, tackling, running and catching, we will have a good business and make a nice living," said DuGoff, who has kept it simple by concentrating on one car wash and making it the best he can.

He can reel off the names and alkalinity levels of soap. He can riff on clearcoat, brake dust and car paint. When I tell him that the prewash, tire wash and dropless rinse are gimmicks to make customers spend more, he instantly responds with a litany of facts about soap levels and water pressure per square inch.

"I built this," said DuGoff, whose family ran a string of nine service stations that they sold around 1990. Before they sold, DuGoff noticed something. Self-serve car washes at a couple of the stations made more money than gasoline sales did. So when the family sold, DuGoff kept the College Park site.

"We looked at College Park and thought maybe it's not a good gas station site," he said. "But maybe we just build as big a car wash as possible and just go with that."

He has five self-serve bays and three automatic bays. Ten or more cars can be washed an hour in an automatic, compared with three to four in the self-serve. A car wash in each is about the same, around $10, although self-serve customers may spend a little bit more on average. That equates to about $100 an hour from the automatic and roughly half that from the self-serve.

The industry average is 1,800 to 2,000 cars cleaned a month, per bay on a self-serve, DuGoff said.

"We do substantially better than that," DuGoff said, adding that all his metrics are above the national average because of location, and the wealth and population of the Washington region.

The automatic washes are priced at $6, $8, $10 and $11 a wash. The $11 is most popular.

"We can do over 300 cars in automatics a day," he said. "That's a nice day. But the average is closer to 150."

The two full-time employees and one part-time are the biggest expense. Electricity and gas to make hot water are next. Chemicals and water softeners to remove calcium are also in the mix. DuGoff rolls back a bunch of money into the business every year to buy the latest equipment and repair what he has.

Here is one big advantage DuGoff enjoys over others: zero debt. Because his family owned the land, he didn't have that cost, which today easily runs to $1 million for an acre that's commercially zoned.

He leaves no revenue source unmined. For example, DuGoff makes sure his vending machines are always full and operating, so customers can buy microfiber cloth, wax, soap or air fresheners. And DuGoff adds his own little touch: He slips in an occasional envelope with a couple of tickets and a parking pass to the Washington Nationals or to the University of Maryland basketball or football games. It keeps customers coming back and is cheaper than advertising.

I figure he grosses more than $500,000 and clears nearly half of that after expenses. He didn't yell at me when I ran that by him. He built a nice, Frank Lloyd Wright-style home in Chevy Chase. He also owns a Mercedes convertible and Ford Escape Hybrid.

"We make a good living," he said. "We are not becoming millionaires. I know if I work hard and if I maintain the operations, people will come. It's very satisfying to me in that way. I see the results of my effort."