In the last few months I’ve been receiving an unordinary number of compliments on Metro Car Wash. It’s nice to hear; we’ve been working very hard to make our Company better. But of course, like anything that comes together, it takes more than hard work. Hard work has to be directed. I thought I’d take the time on this blog to mention where Metro’s impetus for improving our car washes came from—the unusual place we found direction. For what it’s worth, I think it can be applied to just about any business. And so maybe this can be a help to someone else too.
Curiously enough, Metro’s “business makeover” began with Anna Karenina, the novel by Leo Tolstoy. More specifically, it came after reading another great book, Guns, Germs, and Steel where the author Jared Diamond introduced me to the Anna Karenina Principle.
Anna Karenina begins like this: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
The Anna Karenina Principle, based on this opening line, essentially says the following: To have a happy family, everything has to be just about perfect (there has to be love and respect, kids have to be obedient, there’s a good economic income, etc.). But if just one small thing is off, it can take away the entire shot at happiness. In other words, it doesn’t take much to mess things up!
Diamond used this principle to help describe an evolutionary trait. Metro Car Wash adopted the Anna Karenina Principle in a different manner.
We said: All great car washes are alike; every bad car wash is bad in its own way.
What did we mean by this? We decided that for a car wash to be a great business it has to be succeeding in all of the following areas:
§ A Quality Product has to be delivered
§ The product has to have a Value Price
§ Great Customer Service has to be delivered
§ The Facility has to be clean and inviting
§ The Employee Working Environment has to be fun and positive
§ And all of the above has to be accomplished while managing cost
If a car wash falls short in any one of these categories, then it can hurt the entire business. To repeat what I said earlier: it doesn’t take much to mess things up!
But thinking about our business in this manner really gave us direction. We started with that simple list and created a Plan that addressed fixing our business in any area we felt we might be falling short. Of course no one is perfect. And every business knows there is room for improvement. But by simply taking the time to write down everything that has to be in place to be a great business, we found we had a much clearer view of the path we needed to take.
That path, by the way, wasn’t an easy one. Another thing the Anna Karenina Principle did for us was to show us just how far away we were from the Company we wanted to be. It took well over a year before we felt things started coming together … and we’re still not satisfied. But that’s another thing Tolstoy is doing for us: he’s given us a measuring device that we can repeatedly match ourselves to. We see what it takes to be great and we gauge ourselves constantly to see how we’re doing in chasing that goal.
It may not be scientific. And it may not be earth-shattering. But this simple principle has helped us a ton. I hope it might help some of you.
And until next time, stay clean my friends.
DJ DripDry
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