Creating Your Dream Team

Every car wash owner wants their operation to run like a dream. Before that can become a reality, you’ll have to assemble the “dream team”.

Hiring right is where it all starts. And to hire right, you must have a detailed job description for all key positions. When used correctly, job descriptions can enhance accountability, increase self-motivation, and decrease unproductive time.

People do better work if they understand three important aspects of their job:

• The goal and purpose for the existence of the job
• The outcomes or results they are responsible for achieving
• The actual duties or activities to be performed in order to accomplish those specific outcomes

The key is not to toss aside the job description once you’ve made the hire. Referring back to the job description on a consistent, scheduled basis helps people remember what their job is, why it’s needed, and what is expected of them.

All employees should understand they are responsible for other duties as needed and assigned. However, the job description is a valuable resource and tool for regular check-ins to measure how well a person is doing at achieving specifically defined outcomes and meeting organizational goals for their position.

Let’s start at the top!

Even the owner needs to have goals, outcomes, and duties down on paper. This keeps a conveyor car wash owner focused on the job of overseeing and facilitating the successful operation of the car wash by directing the management to achieve profit and other specified objectives.

Each employee in a car wash organization is accountable for different duties, but all positions—including the owner—have critical outcomes for profits, customer satisfaction, and organizational capacity.

Defining Roles & Responsibilities

Directly under the owner in many car wash organizations is an operations manager or a district manager, depending on the size of the company. This position exists to develop and support store managers in their efforts to manage employees and serve customers. In turn, the store manager’s goal is to develop and maintain a team of people who provide all levels of wash and detail services to customers in a clean, safe, friendly, fast-paced environment.

Critical outcomes include maintaining budgets, increasing car counts, reducing down time, decreasing customer complaints, and maintaining a clean and customer-friendly facility. Specific duties include conducting daily maintenance of equipment, monitoring sales hourly, ensuring all vehicles are cleaned to quality standards, and cross-training employees on new tasks so everyone can perform every task at the car wash.

Rounding out the manager positions is the assistant manager who may be responsible for coaching service advisors and conducting periodic checks throughout the day to eliminate cleaning problems in the wash process.

It’s equally important to define non-managerial roles. At a full-serve car wash these would include the service advisor, cashier, vacuumer, prepper, drive-on attendant, drive-off attendant, dry down finisher, and express detail technician. At an express car wash there are CSAs and shift supervisors.

Developing Your Dream Team

The bottom line is, for every position at your organization, make sure there is a well-crafted and detailed job description explicitly stating the reason the position exists, the critical outcomes expected, and the primary duties of the job.

All goals, outcomes, and duties should be customized to your organization’s car wash operations. This means if a store manager’s incentive program is based on an increase in unlimited wash sales, the goals, outcomes, and duties should be specific to that.

As you use job descriptions to build your dream team, be mindful to implement an effective training program with the goal of being a “learning organization”. Part of continuous training will be revisiting those job descriptions regularly to assess how each person on the team is doing in meeting established goals, obtaining results, and performing specified duties.

Would you like help with defining roles and creating job descriptions for your team members? Contact Brink Results by calling (239) 334-1050 or email: info@BrinkResults.com to schedule a free consultation.