🔒Milford-based Splash Car Wash grows through innovation, acquisition

It started with a classified ad. Mark Curtis was a commercial lender for a regional bank, but aspired to be an entrepreneur.

“I’d go through the ads every Sunday and look for businesses,” Curtis recalled. “And I saw one in Greenwich for a broker selling a car wash.”

The broker shared that the business serviced more than 50,000 cars a year.

“I thought to myself, how hard can it be?” Curtis said.

Over the past 40 years, since opening his first location in Greenwich in 1981, Curtis, the CEO of Milford-based Splash Car Wash Inc., has come to understand just how hard, as he’s grown his business from one site in Connecticut to more than 30 locations across the Northeast, including the recent acquisitions of express car washes in New York and northern Vermont, as well as a full-service location in Westport.

Curtis was not always as bullish about growth. In fact, it took 13 years for Splash to open its second location, in Bedford Hill, New York. But over the past two decades, consumer trends have moved from the home driveway to professional car washes.

According to a 2020 research study commissioned by the International Car Wash Association (ICA), the percentage of drivers who report most frequently washing their vehicle at a professional car wash has increased from nearly 48 percent in 1994 to 77 percent in 2019.

In North America alone, more than 2 billion cars pass through car washes with retail wash sales topping $15 billion annually, according to ICA. The industry’s growth has been fueled by consumer focus on vehicle maintenance, busy consumer schedules and time constraints, and the increasing quality of a professional car wash, according to Grand View Research.

Evolving industry

The car wash business model has shifted greatly over the past 20 years, Curtis said.

If the no frills wash typified Curtis’ 1980s business model, today’s car wash is defined by the bells and whistles, including hand-washed cleaning options, squirt guns for kids to shoot water at cars as they pass on the conveyor, and a store in some Splash locations.

The company’s technology has also advanced to both increase efficiency and reduce its environmental footprint. Curtis notes, for instance, that all water at his sites is recycled and the eco-friendly computer system measures each car’s length to ensure water and soap are not wasted. Additionally, Splash uses cleaning chemicals that are biodegradable and better for a car’s surface.

And customers are flocking. Splash typically services nearly 2 million cars in total and, despite the initial impact of the pandemic — which caused locations to close temporarily last spring before rebounding over the summer — the company has largely weathered COVID-19’s impact.

“There was really pent-up demand [during the shutdown] and more customers opted for the exterior wash versus the full service, which includes interior cleaning,” Curtis said.

But the company developed a sanitizing spray to clean all interior touchpoints and those numbers have begun to normalize.

Splash’s monthly subscription service — a growing trend and revenue driver for both Splash and the industry at large — has also helped the company maintain its 600-employee workforce, which Curtis sees as his most important differentiator.

He said he puts a lot of attention on building a positive company culture and Splash has been recognized five times as a top workplace in the state by Hearst Media.

That’s in part what attracted Mark Schwartz, CEO of Boston-based Palladin Consumer Retail Partners, to collaborate with Splash Car Wash in 2018.

Palladin, which has invested, financed or managed more than 100 companies, had been looking to make an investment in the car wash sector for more than a year, and liked Curtis’ company.

“Splash has built a strong operating team that could manage a larger organization,” Schwartz said. “The company also has a [diverse] platform, of full-service, hand-wash and express wash locations.”

Over the past two years Palladin has helped Curtis evaluate market opportunities, improve operational efficiencies — such as updating equipment — and create a better customer experience. And the company shows no signs of slowing down.

“We have six new [car wash] builds on the board right now and are discussing a couple of acquisitions as well,” Curtis said.

Curtis is also working with Schwartz to convert some of his existing locations to express sites, which is a fast-growing segment of the car wash industry. This model is largely automated and features automatic pay machines, self-service vacuums for interior cleaning and few employees.

Curtis sees that model meeting market demand in some locations, while other sites may cater to more hands-on, but higher-priced service.

It’s a formula that’s working for Curtis, who says revenue growth has been steady year over year, except for hiccups from the 2008 Great Recession and COVID-19.

But the banker-turned-entrepreneur finds satisfaction in a simple thought.

“I get to make thousands of people happy every day because everybody feels happier with a clean car,” he said.