Scheduling labor for car wash operations has never been easy. For instance if someone owns a fixed site carwash they often have employees show up at 8 AM to 10 AM when the carwash opens. But if there are very few cars which show up to be washed, that labor is not needed, and to have them on the clock is quite a problem, it's quite costly, and it means you start out your day losing money for several hours.
Further, if the weather is poor fewer people will show up get their car washed, but as soon as the sun comes out that everyone shows up. If you don't have the labor there, then the lines will be long, upset customers, or they will merely drive by and decide not to stop and wait in the line.
You can understand how difficult it is to decide how much labor to schedule the day before. And obviously it doesn't make sense to schedule your labor until you look at the weather reports. Now then, let's consider the common problems in scheduling labor for mobile car wash businesses. In essence it's a similar problem as that with the fixed site carwashes, but there are other issues as well. First, there may not be enough room in the vehicle to take more than two helpers.
Secondly, much more than three helpers means that you keep bumping into each other as you work, and you become inefficient. Third, you never know when you'll be stuck in traffic for an extra 20 or 30 minutes on the way to your first job, or in between your stops. When this happens you are paying labor to sit in your truck, rather than working. The problem becomes exacerbated when your workers have sat down inside the vehicle for a long period of time in route, and finally you show up at the job site.
By this time your labor is tired, lazy, and really doesn't feel like working. Worse, it's hard to get in a groove, and stay in the work mode if the weather isn't very good, and you get stuck in traffic, and then you come to the next job site where you have lots of work and cars to clean as the sun has come out. And, consider this mixed with a rain or shine account such as cleaning a fleet of vehicles that are parked in a row. In that case you are dealing with regular citizens who don't worry about the weather, you are on a regular scheduled route.
These are some of the common problems when scheduling mobile carwash labor and these issues should be noted until you get good at it, or you will be paying more costs for your labor than need be, which can severely cut into your bottom line causing you not to reach your revenue goals for the month. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.
Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, http://www.carwashguys.com/ and now runs the Online Think Tank. Lance Winslow believes writing 24,222 articles by July 22, 2011 at 2:22 PM is going to be difficult because all the letters on his keyboard are now worn off now..
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