Industry Expert Q&A: Why Car Washes Are Turning to Coast

Maintaining equipment is a huge part of running and operating a successful car-wash business. Not only is the business completely dependent on the millions of dollars in equipment used to wash customer cars, but the process involves throwing corrosive chemicals on that equipment all day every day. Daily inspections and preventive maintenance tasks add a level of oversight, but it quickly becomes difficult to track if you own multiple locations. It’s especially difficult if you’re using paper, spreadsheets or several different piecemeal apps to track your maintenance strategy.

Ryan Easter, a nationally recognized car-wash expert and founder of The Allied Advantage, faced this very challenge throughout his 15 years in the industry. But it wasn’t until working as the VP of operations at New Jersey-based Spark Car Wash when he started using Coast in 2023. We spoke to Easter about his unique vantage point as a professional coach in the car-wash sector combined with his hands-on experience using Coast to oversee multiple car-wash locations.

Car-Wash Challenges

Coast: During your time at Spark Car Wash, what were the key pain points that urged you to move to Coast?

Easter: There are a lot of piecemeal apps that are used in the car-wash industry. I couldn’t find anything that did everything we needed in one place, and I was sick of asking the team to sign onto multiple apps. 

I’ve been part of organizations that use paper or solutions like Jolt, but Jolt is antiquated; it’s so difficult to use. You have to build out everything yourself, and the UI is terrible. That’s what drove me to find Coast. [The other options were] taking up way too much time.

I needed a checklist and work order tracking system, maintenance tracking as well as asset inventory that I could monitor from my office. I needed a scalable platform with remote reporting capabilities. 

Coast: How did you hear about Coast, and what were the key reasons you chose it?

Easter: I found Coast after extensive Google searching and was blown away by the capabilities. It had everything that I wanted and more to the point where I could not only drop the checklist app we were using but some others as well.

Coast: What about other CMMS software like MaintainX?

Easter: I never purchased this solution, but I spoke with them for years. They had no solution for asset inventory. I do have friends that use it for work order management. They do what they do very well, so for people who are comfortable with using it for just that, it works. But the car-wash industry is behind in a lot of areas. We have to purchase app after app to piecemeal a system together, and I’m not comfortable with settling for that. I wanted one app that could do multiple things well.

What Coast does that no one else could promise was offer a one-stop shop. It could even take over Slack because the communication platform is so good. It offers work order management, asset management, preventive maintenance, checklists, vendor management and the communication aspect. So, I didn’t need to piecemeal all of this stuff together.

This also improves engagement. It’s easy to forget the app that’s left by the wayside, but if you’re in the ecosystem already, you see the maintenance requests come through more easily.

Implementing Coast

Coast: How did the implementation to Coast’s CMMS go? What was that process like for your team overall?

Easter: We started using Coast in mid- to late-2023, and the implementation was a stark contrast to the one we had with Jolt. With Jolt, I was provided with a decades-old platform and had to build out the work for every line item, so from start to finish, I had to build everything.

My experience at Coast was the complete opposite. The team asked me what I wanted and said they could build it. They basically said, ‘We’re going to hold your hand; all you have to do is provide us the info for what you want, and then we can jump on a call and do revisions or whatever you want.”

That was amazing.

Coast: How many people were using it? 

Easter: When implementing, every person in the company used it — from frontline hourly workers to middle management to me on the leadership team monitoring and making sure it was all working. The [car-wash equipment] maintenance is so intensive that everyone is involved. For instance, we had daily opening and closing checklists, so we built out QR code posters that employees could scan to access those checklists.

Coast’s Positive Impact

Coast: In what ways did Coast positively impact your business?

Easter: I had to do a predictive ROI analysis to make sure I was covering the cost of the investment, and that basically came down to two big buckets. The first is, if we’re actually doing the preventive maintenance consistently and regularly, we’re extending the lifespan of our equipment.

[The second involved asset and parts inventory.] To keep track of inventory at car washes, there’s never been a good solution. With multiple locations, there’s a lot of scattered spare parts, and sometimes you buy too much of something or you don’t have something you thought you had but you need it. 

So, you have two great things happening here — less downtime and the ROI associated with that. We were tracking for 99.9 percent uptime, and alarm bells would go off at 99.5 percent uptime; that was the variance we were able to achieve. We saw a decrease in parts inventory costs as the result of knowing where things were.

We also built everything in advance; we were building for scale. [Coast] would be great for a mom-and-pop car wash, but it really shines in this industry when you have five or more locations.

Coast: What advice do you have for others considering Coast as their CMMS solution?

Easter: Look at all the options out there; you’re going to find people using Jolt and MaintainX. When you look at Coast, you’ll see that they have everything these apps are doing, plus everybody else. This is a one-stop shop; you can have one app that everyone can use instead of asking them to download all these disparate apps and hoping that they actually use them.

Coast: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Easter: My experience was that the Coast team was really responsive; they really cared; they wanted to get better. They weren’t too busy in a good way, and they showed they cared about their customers.