Before I retired, I had built up a mobile car wash franchising company. Towards the end of my career the Internet started to become quite a factor in the business. It became a great recruiting tool and having a website made our franchisee real, and we noted that our competitors that had no website, at that time, were not taken seriously by the customers. Today, of course some dozen years later everyone has a website in the industry.
During this time concierges started to enter the industry. These folks would set up a website portal, grab all of the traffic online, and then attempt to find operators to do all the work, while taking a percentage of each job for their efforts. Many operators were angry about this because, these companies basically took the web traffic by using SEO type strategies and then sold the customers back to the actual operators. I had always told such companies where to stick it, when they contacted our company to use our franchisees to cover all of their promises to the customers who emailed in orders.
One thing I noted when dealing with concierges was that they would be quite pushy with our franchisees, demanding that they dropped whatever they were working on right then, and handle their referral customer first. This was unfortunate because our customers which we were working on at the time, were steady customers, and they were quite important us. However, the concierges would demand that their clients get first treatment, and if we didn't give them top-of-the-line priority and put their customers in advance of our own, they threaten to cut off their referral flow, and give those customers to one of our competitors.
I can tell you that if you are running a business using independent contractors and mobile carwash teams to service your clientele that this is a mistake, not only is it in bad form, it's unprofessional, and it will lead to animosity between the contractor, and the concierges. Another issue that happens is if one company has too much business it will refer its excess business to a secondary competitor or an independent contractor.
Currently with all the employment restrictions, withholding taxes, worker's compensation insurance, and now ObamaCare, it really doesn't make sense for mobile carwash owners to hire more people unless they have enough to keep a whole full rig busy. There would be no reason for them to expand their business or hire more people, therefore they either go down to the local Labor Ready and pick up a few workers, or they use an independent contractor.
When paying independent contractors, there should be a bonus for happy customers as well as immediate payment. If this occurs then all of a sudden it is worth the independent contractor's time to stop what they're doing and do your work first, if not all the threats, belligerent attitude, and demands are liable to get the concierges or the contracting company on the blacklist of the independent contractor. Indeed I hope you will please consider all these thoughts 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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