My Business magazine -- Waterless car wash

Waterless car wash

Ecowash Mobile’s waterless car wash service is expanding internationally, having built a strong foundation in the local market. By Andrea Toal

THERE CAN’T BE too many people who, having trained as a veterinarian and worked as a marketing director for a leading pet care brand, give it all up to start their own car wash franchise. But Ecowash Mobile’s co-founder, Jim Cornish, was quick to recognise an opportunity to indulge his lifelong passion for all things car related. “I was always looking for something I could do that involved cars, because I knew it would keep my interest up,” he says.

Ecowash Mobile now operates 60 car washing vehicles within Australia, and has developed a presence in 12 other countries, including mainland Europe and the US. It worked on the US launch of the latest Lamborghini and was responsible for all the detailing for Audi at this year’s Cannes film festival. In Australia the company has worked alongside the likes of Subaru, Holden and Ford.

Cornish and his business partner, Stewart Nicholls, started Ecowash Mobile in March 2004. Having decided on the concept of a mobile car wash service, they located a European product that can clean without water, making their offering both convenient and environmentally friendly. They bought a car each and began to service the Sydney area. “We just went out and started washing cars ourselves,” says Cornish. “From day one, consumer acceptance was extremely high and we knew we weren’t going to stay a small business for long.”

With expansion on their minds from the outset, the question remained of how best to grow the business. “The question was, do we expand through a traditional management model or franchise,” explains Cornish. “The downside of employing more people and buying more cars ourselves was that as the company got bigger we would have needed a huge number of employees to support it, but the biggest problem would have been guaranteeing a high enough level of customer service to make a success of it.”

But the company’s commitment to ensuring the quality of its customer service by heading down the franchising route came at a price. “We sacrificed a lot by going with the franchising model,” explains Cornish. “In selling a franchise we don’t make anything like what we could have by owning every vehicle. But on the upside, we’ve got small business owners caring about their clients at a local level and that’s made a real difference to our service.”

Preparing the business for franchising was made easier by the fact that Cornish and Nicholls made the decision to franchise so early on. “Because we decided fairly early on in the piece that we would go down the franchising route, everything we did from day one was designed for that purpose,” explains Cornish. “We put systems in place for everything.”

Another key to Ecowash’s early success as a franchise operation was the attention its founders paid to branding. The first two cars Cornish and Nicholls purchased looked much the same as the current fleet. “People were approaching us to buy franchises within the first six weeks of us being on the road,” says Cornish. “I think it’s because the cars always looked like they were part of a franchise. The design just seemed to make people think that way. In a recent ad we even talk about being Australian because I think a lot of people thought we were an American company.”

The first franchise was sold in August 2004 to a Sydney-based franchisee. It wasn’t until August 2005 that the company went interstate, a move which also prompted Cornish and Nicholls to adopt a master franchise model. “We didn’t see that it was feasible to have franchisees at a distance without a local support structure,” explains Cornish. “That’s the structure we now have in most states in Australia.”

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