The Pitfalls of Passive Income and Absentee Car Wash Ownership

From a part-time fast food worker to a Wall Street financial analyst, most people generate income from an exchange of time for money. They work a set number of hours for a set wage per hour.

In this setup, there are only two ways to make more money. You need to either increase your wage per hour or work more hours. If it’s difficult to convince your company to increase your wage, you’ll need to work long hours to make more money.

One way to escape the limits of exchanging time for money is to pursue business ownership. As a business owner, you can make more money by increasing business profits. This puts you in control of your income and, when a business is profitable, you make money even on your days off.

Passive income is a term that applies to a variety of techniques, like business ownership or stock market investing, that do not require active work. Social media influencers who advocate for a passive income lifestyle often point to business ownership as an example of passive income at work.

These influencers can sometimes suggest self-service car wash ownership as a means of passive income.

But there are some problems with the passive income mentality, especially when it comes to car wash ownership.

Is Owning a Car Wash Passive Income?

Self-service car wash ownership, on its face, looks like it has all the right elements of a good source of passive income. Customers are paying you to wash their own cars. So long as you keep your car wash equipment in good condition, it doesn’t seem like you need to do anything. You just sit back and rake in the cash, right?

The problem is that this mentality focuses on doing as little work as possible on your car wash.

Passive Income Could Become Absentee Ownership

Sometimes, when all is right in the world, your car wash won’t require a whole lot of work. Perhaps your region gets a fortunate series of dusty weather and no rain forecasts. Perhaps a flock of birds descends on your city. In this rosy picture, somehow your equipment never breaks down and your detergents never run out…but that’s just not realistic.

More realistically, car washes, even self-service car washes require some work from week to week. If you don’t complete this work, your car wash will fall into disrepair. Over time, your car wash will look worn down with trash cans overflowing and broken car wash equipment. This erodes your customers’ trust and, therefore, your profits.

Expecting very little work will, at best, sets you up for disappointment when you realize just how much work is involved. At worst, it will set you up for failure as you steadily become an absentee owner.

There is no replacement for the business management side of car wash ownership. The only potential solution to owning a car wash without doing any management work is to hire a car wash manager. In that model, you exchange some of your profitability for someone who can do work on your behalf.

A Better Philosophy: Limit Your Dirty Work

All car washes have hygiene and maintenance needs. One major aspect of car wash hygiene is the car wash pits. Car wash pits require monthly or quarterly decontamination and cleaning.

Some car wash owners work on these tasks themselves. If you talked with other car wash owners, you’ve probably met someone who talks about rolling up their sleeves and shoveling car wash pit sludge late into the evening. Shoveling pit sludge by hand takes a lot longer than a vacuum truck so it can’t be done during peak hours.

It’s a commendable image to see a car wash owner neck deep in a car wash pit long past when they would have liked to have gone to bed. But it’s a far cry from the cushy “passive income” business ownership lifestyle that you might want for yourself.

When you hire a car wash pit cleaning company, like Pit Crew, to clean and decontaminate your pits, you fully eliminate the dirtiest work you could do as a car wash owner. Pit Crew also has the advantage of being very quick because we use vacuum trucks built for the job. Even if we pump your pits during the day, we can do it in off-peak hours to not impact your profits.

Make Car Wash Ownership Easier on Yourself

While calling car wash ownership “passive income” is a stretch, limiting your dirty work gets you closer to one of the promises of passive income: growing your income without sludging through long, strenuous days.

Contact Pit Crew today to learn more about how our team can take the dirty work off of your plate.