The Detail Guys have identified three primary attack market
areas and four sub markets for mobile Car Care, Auto Detailing and Car Washes in Q1 2003.
We have looked at such things as area lay offs, money flow, housing starts, real estate
bubbles, number of cars over $30,000, number of cars which are 2 years old or newer and
general economic well being. We also took into account the number of executive type
incomes, levels of education, levels of achievement and water supply.
We have determined that our target markets for Q1 of 2003 will be Tampa Bay, Dallas,
Newark New Jersey, San Francisco and Suburbs, Riverside Country, CA and Detroit. With the
latest economic data in we see things in these markets that many people do not see. But
how can they know what we know. They simply do not have the data we do, how can they know
the difference between a good market and an average one?
Many have asked us how we came to this conclusion, but when you filter 23 levels of
data through your programming and look for statistics that other market sectors may
overlook, you will always come to different conclusions. Some of our decision making
actually came from laid off employees who might work in mobile Car Care, Auto Detailing
and Car Washes Industries. people laid off in various sectors of retail after Christmas
would naturally migrate towards the car care business, car washes, automotive detailing or
into the carwash labor pool automatically. We have spent so much time driving around these
markets, talking to people, property managers, transit districts, water resource teams,
economic development districts, environmental consultants, temporary agencies, head
hunters, brokers, chambers of commerce that we really feel we know what we are talking
about. We have reviewed other peoples data in other industries and put stats on top of
stats and filtered through endless data and spending countless hours in preparation.
Some of our decisions of course were to make sure our most vulnerable competitors spend
money to keep or attain market share. For instance Ziebart wants to attack the Tampa Bay
Market in March, fine but we will have already launched prior and they will need to spend
in our estimation over $2 million in that campaign to beat us. If not we believe in our
opinion that failure maybe a more than possible scenario. If we use Ziebart's money on top
of our market prowess to educate customers on additional forms of mobile car care services
than generally are covered at fixed site car washes, then we will expand the pie of
customers for both companies and eventually through better service and prices take their
customers too as they exit the market place for unencumbered territories where we
dominate. We need competition to spend money in marketing to help us achieve our goal.
This is similar to the martial art of Judo, where you use your opponents energy against
him as he advances and add some of your too it as you conveniently slam the ever living
crap out of him onto the mat. Does this make sense to anyone?
We believe companies such as Ziebart, SparkleWash, Fleetwash, Tour de Lube, Wash On
Wheels and others are in a critical cash crunch whereas WashGuys are in relatively similar
condition as last time this year. As larger customers in unyielding market sectors tend to
decrease the normal interval of payables this causes hurt to the cash flow of our
competitors. If the competitor is a franchised company they will be able to give less
services to their franchisees, if all company owned units such as Fleetwash who generally
competes on price and environmental washing abilities, they are vulnerable and must cut
costs. But where to cut the costs. The competitors in our industry cannot run as mean and
lean as us so they have to cut out any fat, if they are running leaner than others there
is less to cut. Where will they cut? We believe in equipment, marketing and advertising
and management salaries. If so no one will call them and their companies risk the
possibility of a negative work place from those remaining. Why are we even worrying about
the competition in 2003, after all Wash Guys are the team to beat, right? Yes, we are the
team to beat and we are busy trying to beat last years achievements. We believe we can
easily do this on this present course, however why not pick up the pace a little? That is
what Lance Armstrong would do in the Yellow Jersey. What we do see in the mobile Car Care,
Auto Detailing and Car Washes Industries is an unwillingness of competitors to lose site
of the shore line in order to make a new discovery, create a new innovation or push beyond
what was "Just Enough" yesterday, because that was then and this is now. We
cannot let such a thought process permeate our team, we are looking at a bigger picture
and by adding a few high impact territorial market decisions into the equation where
competitors lurk, we can fulfill our mission faster by bringing a higher caliber and
quality service to those future customers that our competitors have been holding for us.
We thank them for holding these customers for us, "Muchas Gracias', however it is now
time for those customers to find out what true service is all about.
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