How to clean up in the car wash biz
In other parts of the nation, a car wash could probably get by offering a few specials, weak vending-machine coffee and assorted pine tree air fresheners.
Not in California.
Here, customers may drive as far for a wash and wax as they do for work, and competitors offer free Wi-Fi, gourmet coffee, pet accessories, aromatherapy supplies, fish ponds and high-definition television, said entrepreneur Kami Emein.
“Here, it seems like everybody loves their car. It’s like a hobby for them, and they bring a lot of personal feeling into it,” said Emein, a small-business owner who has made a living buying, upgrading and selling more than two dozen car washes throughout Southern California.
Now, Emein has decided his flagship is a rundown car wash that he spent $3.5 million on four years ago in Inglewood.
Century Car Wash is in a “challenging” area of rundown storefronts and adult video outlets.
At first, the car wash received the standard, light remodeling job costing a few thousand dollars. But Emein had a vision in which the revitalization of Century Boulevard would finally reach his business. Inglewood city officials want to lure Los Angeles International Airport travelers to new shops and restaurants in an area that has grown west toward the airport.
In preparation for that day, Emein has showered $475,000 on the car wash, transforming it into an neighborhood oasis that has lured car owners from as far away as Gardena. And business has accelerated.
“I want to be prepared to represent Los Angeles to the world,” Emein said on a recent weekday morning in which Michael Jackson videos dominated several large screens inside the car wash.
Inside, away from the soaping, customers can browse through Giorgio Ferraro designer suits and Boncenni dress shirts, test their skills on a Pac-Man video game machine or relax in $900 massage chairs. A humidor holds a selection of Arturo Fuente and Macanudo cigars. Neighborhood teens inspect rows of fake bling jewelry and wristwatches.
Some customers don’t even bring cars.
“It’s just a good place to kick back,” said Lydia Price, who sat sipping coffee, describing herself as a nearby resident who enjoys car-watching.
Nearby, an espresso machine was constantly busy.
“They have really good cappuccinos here,” said Saroeung Donelson, a limousine driver for Inglewood Cemetery & Mortuary.
Refrigerators hold spring waters, soft drinks and energy drinks worthy of a truck stop convenience store. T-shirts and greeting cards line other sections.
With a row of tall metal columns decorating the front, the business stands out among drab neighbors and draws customers who weren’t even thinking about getting their cars washed.
Rhonda Trostad, a flight attendant for Alaska Airlines, had some time to kill on her way down Century Boulevard to pick up her daughter at the airport. After 10 minutes at Century Car Wash, she had bought hot chocolate and some greeting cards and had a clean car.
“It’s very nice. I would come back again,” Trostad said.
The facility is sprawling by most car-wash standards, covering 35,000 square feet with eight lanes for the initial vacuum and trash collection.
The car wash is wide, clean and lined with video cameras, the latter having a purpose that Emein learned the hard way: The only time drivers always check every inch of their vehicles is right after they have been washed and waxed. That simple fact has led to multiple visits to small claims court.
“By the time they pick up the car, it’s so clean that every little scratch and bump is visible and the customer actually believes that because he is seeing it for the first time, it had to have happened at my car wash,” said Emein, who has experienced it so many times that he now has a routine. It begins with “walking the pattern,” showing the customer clearances between the car and potentially damaging objects as it passes through the cycle.
The south wall of Emein’s cramped office is lined with old filing cabinets in various shades of brown, white and gray. Emein says he has learned to keep everything. If the walk-throughs don’t work, he pulls out reams of paperwork — material data safety sheets — on all of the products he uses.
Very little has come easily to Emein, who readily admits that he became a small-business owner without any expertise in running a company. Emein’s father was a pharmaceutical salesman in Tehran, Iran, in 1988 when Emein came to the U.S. at the age of 21 with two brothers and a sister.
Working as a bank loan officer with limited credit and resources, Emein had no serious interest in the types of businesses he began to acquire.
“We had little money, so we needed a business with cash flow. It’s about what you can buy,” he said in explaining why he started with liquor stores, the first in Torrance in 1989. The strategy was simple: Buy low and sell high.
Emein said he acquired the store for $200,000 and sold it two years later for $250,000, then bought two more liquor stores in Santa Monica for $500,000 and $180,000, respectively, later selling them for $650,000 and $330,000. Emein said he got rid of the stores’ “get-drunk wines,” familiarized himself with California wines through visits to Sonoma and Napa counties, and piggybacked off some very good years for California reds to change and build the store’s clientele.
“That is how you create money. That is how you create the next down payment and buy bigger and better,” Emein said.
But those successes also included legal battles. Emein said he agreed to buy one former owner’s stock of beverages, then found out he had made a huge mistake.
“There were a lot of old jug wines. Some of the labels were partially missing. There were whiskies that no one had ever heard of. It was very scary. I think we could have used it for fuel in a emergency,” Emein said, adding that the seller intended to hold him to the obligation to buy the stock. Emein was able to knock $40,000 off the price in court.
The switch to car washes, which began with Lancaster Car Wash in the high desert in 1994, was equally rocky at first. Emein remembers a legal battle over a simple order for a $900 pipe-cleaning machine that turned into a nightmare when the company delivered a $3,000 behemoth of a machine after an employee wrote down the wrong equipment number.
Emein said that much of that is behind him now.
His Century Car Wash has cleaned as many as 10,000 vehicles in a month, compared with about 5,400 a month before the renovation. And he hopes for more, once Century Boulevard’s revitalization reaches his block.
On a recent day at the car wash, he worked the rows of customers, both new and old, like a politician three days before election day, drawing out smiles and laughter and boisterous, arm-wrenching handshakes.
“The risks are lower for me now,” Emein said, “because I know what I am doing.”
