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The Transparent Podcast
The Transparent Podcast
Anuj Thakkar - Soap, Water, and a Lot of Grit
Ready to stop dabbling and build something that scales? We sit down with Anuj, Owner of Super Shine Express Car Washes, to unpack how he went from a single family-run wash to five thriving locations with a sixth on the way. The journey isn’t “set it and forget it.” It’s systems, people, and an ownership mindset that turns a small operation into a durable local brand.
Check out their locations in Georgia in Alpharetta, Dacula, Braselton, Hoschton, and Hamilton Mill. You can also find them online at supershineexpress.com.
Also, get your first wash FREE by texting Transparent to 47757 at any location!
Welcome to the Transparent Podcast. I am your host, Nick Ford, and this week I am joined by a guest, Anouj. I'll let you introduce yourself.
SPEAKER_01:Hey everybody, my name is Anoof the Car, owner of Super Shine Express Car Washes. Um yeah, I'm really excited to talk to Nick here about uh small business owners and small businesses and kind of a story a little bit about where Super Shine started and where we are today.
SPEAKER_00:Perfect. Yeah. So I I started the podcast, and the idea behind the podcast is to bring transparency to the world of small business. Uh, really wanted to be able to just share from business owners' perspectives with people who uh might be on the fence about entrepreneurship or wanting to get into it or at the beginning stages and just be able to learn from people who are at different stages of small business, and some people are in you know larger businesses now and have scaled. So being able to learn from different people uh is is awesome. And you know, I started transparent staffing about come up on five years ago now, which is which is crazy to think about. But you know, one of the things that I that inspired it too is I love Shark Tank because I love being able to hear from these business owners and hear these sharks negotiate with them and and talk about things. And one of the things that the sharks focus on, I want to get your perspective on it, but they'll tell these entrepreneurs that they need to go all in. You can't if they find if they sniff out that they're someone's got a full-time job while they're doing the business they're pitching, they don't like that. So, what do you think about starting as a side hustle, or do you just gotta jump all into the into the waters and and go all in?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, no, that's uh that's a really good question, right? A lot of people do have security when they have a full-time job. They want to get into their own business and start a small business, so they started out as a side hustle and try their best to supplement the income they're making in order to then transition over to that. It can work in some cases if you're good with time management, but I can tell you from experience, um, just my own experience, and we can take a step back for a second. I can kind of just talk a little bit about how Super Giants started, but um, that would be great. So you can kind of see where my transition happened, right? I was, I was, I graduated college, joined. Uh my father had one car wash um that was like an in bay automatic car wash and changed it over to an express car wash, one of the first sea store express car washes. When I graduated, I was interested in what he was doing from an entrepreneurial standpoint, and I learned a lot about the car wash woe at that time. This was in 2014. But the business in itself didn't catch traction until later. I went to corporate America, I worked in corporate America, and I did sales for a while, and I found myself starting side hustles, right? I started a clothing brand, um with uh clothing brand, pretty much, and uh that took off. But I learned that if you don't if you don't jump into something full scale, you can only scale it so far. And there's and and your focal points and everything, your environment around you won't shift as strong as you need it to, if you're not all in on something. So when I when I tried to, when I started this quoting, but when I joined the car wash industry with my father seeing the growth that I could take it um and kind of coming in at a uh like a sweat equity level and the salary to kind of prove to myself that I need to grow something, you know, rather than going out and getting an investor, I'm coming in and coming into more of like a family lineage on what's been going on on one. Um, but fast forward, I you know, I tried to do a clothing brand at the same time, it just doesn't line up. I've tried to do corporate with his clothing brand at the same time, it just doesn't line up. You can't get as far as you need to. Um, fast forward now that I went all in on the car wash, we are sitting at five car washes um all at scale and uh working on our six month right after this. So nice being able to scale short. So I would say you can start out as a side hustle only for a short season, but a business, especially like a service business, like a car wash or an auto shop, it doesn't stay on autopilot for long. You can you can't you can go into it part-time, but at some point you're gonna have to go all in if you really want it to grow.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So you say you you need to be clear about like what you want out of the business going into it. Like if you're gonna have a side hustle and maybe you plan on that staying a side hustle, then maybe that's okay. But otherwise, you need to plan on jumping all in at some point and have that kind of timed out.
SPEAKER_01:It's not fair to your people, it's not fair to your businesses, not fair to your customers. If you're happy in, they will see right through it, right? Uh I'd like to add one part to it though. When you're jumping into a small business and you're jumping all into it, there comes a time during that period where you can find systems, processes, and people and training them to a certain degree to where then you can grow. Now, growing within the same space is ideal, but then growing to a point where it's it can get to a point where it is an automated and more of a more of a um overseeing approach to diversify your portfolio. A lot of business owners do that, but they start off by going all in on one thing.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:That's the only way to do it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And I would add too, I think, you know, when you're looking at like Shark Tank, for example, then this applies to people who are taking on capital to start their business. If you're taking on capital from an investor, they're going to expect you to be all in. 100%. If you want to take someone else's money, they're going to want you to be all into it. And so I think that's important. And then there are some businesses that can be a side hustle and stay that way. Like, for example, I've I've done real estate investing in the past where it's like you, you know, you have a rental property. That one can somewhat be on autopilot. You get good tenants in there and you don't have to be hands-on every day in it. But something like I would think, you know, a car wash, you got a lot of hourly employees that you're managing, you've got you know, multiple locations now, you've got capital and invested into it and into you know the space and real estate and stuff. So that seems like you would definitely you need to be more hands-on unless you've got really good operators that you've hired under you that you trust to to run things, um, which I'm sure you've gotten to that point. If you have five locations, you have to have done that somewhat. So yeah.
SPEAKER_01:No, you're 100% right. That's exactly right. It's the nature of the business that you're in that can tell you whether or not it could be a side hustle. Side hustle, what you're saying in real estate. Those are more investments, right? I don't I don't consider them those are businesses that are generating income. They can't that there is property management and stuff, but you know, there are businesses out there you can consider side hustles, but they're really just you know, on a cash flowing basis, not necessarily like a day-to-day operational need.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, unless you're talking Airbnbs, because those do get more hands-on with dealing with people going in and out of them every week.
SPEAKER_01:But sure, yeah, but yeah, not the new companies and stuff that that can handle it for you. So you can make less, right? But now you've become an investor, not a business.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. Which that allows you to scale and and acquire more properties and stuff too. Um so you know, with the with the car wash business, um uh your your new locations that you're opening now. I think you heard me say that the first location was a convenience store and car wash.
SPEAKER_01:So you're right, you're right. It was I mean, consider it like a big car wash at the back, we had a lot of property back there. So it's not like one of those, it's not technically a gas station that has like an attached. We have one of those too, but not one of those um like in bay automatics where you go in and you sit there and the car gets washed. It's a full tunnel, about a hundred foot. So it's uh it's it's scale, right? We've got about 20 uh vacuum spaces over there, and on one side of the spectrum, we have also what we call a flex service, which is an interior cleaning option and detail at this site. But we've scaled it to that level. Now all the sites are like that, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So as you continue to grow, um, what what is your mindset around acquiring a business, like acquiring an existing business or buying a franchise or something like that versus starting something from the ground up and building it out yourself?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, that's a really good question. So your your your your question is is whether what what the pros and cons are, I guess, from the business from a ground up versus acquiring a running business andor becoming part of a franchise. What are you saying? Yeah, yeah. It's funny. Uh people have asked me that. People asked me, it's super china franchise. I said, no, it's not, it's our own private company, right? Um I would say starting a business from ground up gives you a lot more control, but it is it's so much harder. These are the two differences between buying a business in franchise andor starting up your own. The one word I can say is infrastructure. Businesses that you buy come with somewhat of infrastructure, right? You can then bring in your ideas and your capabilities into that infrastructure. Franchises, you the reason why people go franchise route because they provide you with infrastructure and training and how to run that business based on how they've done it and the proven success, right? So building a business from ground up and from scratch, you would then have to integrate your own infrastructure. Right. If you want me to talk about Super Shine, we've done it from ground up, from acquiring a business and bringing it in infrastructure. We've done we've not done any type of franchising, but Super Shine started with one car wash. We then it he had the name Super Shine. I then brought the branding in from a like a Superman logo, like a superhero logo. Um, and because this industry, if you if you differentiate yourself across the board, people like to see that as small business owners, right? People like to pay money to small business owners. So the CarWatch industry, I think doing it yourself and having your own brand is important, but you have to have brand marketing and brand image and um localized branding around people getting to know who Super Shine is. So being sporadic in certain cases, like opening up an office in Atlanta and then opening up or opening up a car wash in Atlanta, and then opening up one in um Macon and then opening up one in Florida, it's a bit tough not to get into the operational side of things, but it's a bit tough to get people to like see you as like a brand, I guess, in the area. We keep it localized. We got Dekula, Hamilton Mill, Alpharetta, Grazleton, Hushton. You know, it's all like a corp, right? So when people are driving by, all of our members can go to any of our sites, and we're covering all the localized area. Um, so from our business, a localized uh approach is so much more operationally strong. But I would say, you know, uh starting from scratch gives you full control of your brand, your culture, your systems, but it's also a grind.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:You're building every process yourself, making every mistake firsthand.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah. When I think about like buying a franchise specifically versus like maybe acquiring a bit another business, but like when you buy into a franchise, you're paying for the playbook. Like they've got the playbook for you to go run. And so, and hopefully they have like centralized marketing that they can push out and roll out for you, especially like with the grand opening and that kind of thing. Because I've met with some franchise groups and and that's kind of the deal. Um, you know, but like and then with acquiring a business, I think the risk, well, I think the risk with buying a fr into a franchise or acquiring a business, if you're a first-time business owner, is I think you miss out on a lot of learning. Like you miss out on learning a lot about the business that you haven't ever run before. Like and just up, especially operationally, not understanding so many things that you have to, it's a grind having to set all that stuff up on your own when you're starting it from scratch. But like for me, starting transparent staffing from scratch, I learned a ton operationally that I would never have understood or known if I had like bought a staffing franchise or something like that.
SPEAKER_01:So it goes from two ends of the spectrum reactive versus proactive.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_01:If you buy a business, you don't know what you're doing, everything is reactive. You're handling problems as they come. But if you have infrastructure, you can be very proactive and stop problems from happening before they actually happen. We build the infrastructure ourselves in-house. But if I like to add somebody into this mix, it's very important that I do. Is my business partner who I brought on, uh, came on as like a head of operations and then joined our uh leadership team as a more of a partner, um, as he's been with us. Uh, his name is Brian Lancaster. Um, you know, he came from a world where he was in corporate car washing and they were building corporate stories and he helped that infrastructure build. So, my biggest thing was when I had purchased the Brazulton location, we we were purchasing a running business. We knew we can take it further based on the area growth. And we came into it with no real, like strong infrastructure. When we brought on Brian Lancaster, he brought in infrastructure. So I think a lot of times, if you do ground up, there's only so far you can go. And I like this is how I like to tell people, and this is really important. Think of it like a windy road, right? If you're if you're driving down a windy road, you have to then turn and you have to you're about 35 miles per hour, 25 miles per hour on a windy road. But you're heading in the same direction when somebody brings in infrastructure into your company, you can then streamline it and drive a lot faster to the end to your goals and what you're trying to do from a growth standpoint. So, you know, asking for what you want, bringing in the right team into your business if you're doing ground up is the is the key. If you've never done it before, um, you know, it's not cheap, but at the same time, if they see the same vision you do, then sky's the limit.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, no, that's great. Yeah, I think yeah, you know, having that clear path to be able to follow and having the infrastructure and the operations, because you know, sometimes especially entrepreneurs that are wanting to get into it, they're idea people and like big picture vision people. And sometimes the operations and processes can get lost, and like having that built out, that's that's a learning curve for me because I'm not super operational organized organized person. So I've had to like create guardrails for myself.
SPEAKER_01:Of course, yeah. I mean, this is what I would tell the people if anyone's listening to this, take the hybrid approach, learn from proven systems, adapt them. And even if you buy a franchise, the key is ownership mentality. Don't just run it, make it yours, regardless to that. That's how I would say.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. So with you, uh, y'all continuing to scale, you know, I know y'all just opened a new location. It sounds like you're looking toward your sixth location. So, what are the biggest challenges you face in scaling now with trying to scale and grow and add more locations?
SPEAKER_01:Uh in any business, the hardest part is in uh opening another location. It's I guess it's like duplicating your culture. Right? It's duplicating your infrastructure, it's adding more uh efforts into scaling that business. Every location, every spot, every place we go has a different demographic, has a different uh mentality, has a different income pool, a lot of different so uh anybody that has a small business knows that the hardest part about running a business is finding good people. That's the and and it's funny because I'm talking to transparent staffing, so your that's why I exist. Your your exactly your motto is probably hey, we will find you people that work for you. So that that's why I think staffing companies are a fantastic touch because the hardest people is to find the hardest part is finding people. Um you can you you can't be everywhere either, right? So you can't scale if you don't have um a chain of command. Um so you have to build systems that make the customer experience the same, whether you're on site or you're not. That's very tough to do because no one's gonna care as much as you.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what I was about. No, no one, no one's going to. And yeah, and that that's a challenge that I've had with transparent staffing, you know. I so I would sit in uh corporate offices at other companies, and they've got these, you know, like vision things on the on the wall where it's like the you know, three things that are like define our company and how we operate. And I'm like looking at that and then looking at like a leader talking to us that I don't agree with, and they're not, and I'm like, do you see what's on the wall and then the way that you're talking to us right now? Like, like, and I was and and I started transparent staffing partly because of that, because I wanted to do things differently. And being transparent to me means just being open and honest with candidates I talk to that I'm sending to a new job and with clients. And I just think being as transparent as possible with people leads to better outcomes with recruitment, like just 100%. And just being real, like even if it's a negative thing, like hey, here's three things I think are positives about this candidate, and here's one thing I think that you need to pay attention to. And then the client is like, oh, well, there I know there's gonna be negatives, like no one's perfect, but now I know and can and can address that. And so that and I was I'm so afraid of I don't know if I was afraid, but I want to have control over like that culture, like the the original vision. And like you were talking about being able to duplicate yourself, like no one's gonna duplicate you perfectly. So figuring out how to you know um give up give responsibilities out and start pulling back of what I'm involved in is is tough.
SPEAKER_01:So yeah, and then and and then from a growth scaling your business takes capital. Growth takes money, and most importantly, it takes discipline. You can't scale something, you can't scale chaos.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, that's 100% true. You gotta have organization, especially as you continue to grow. Um, yeah. Well, so you know, you and I are in B and I together, and so you have the positive quotes each week, which I I'm a huge fan of. And uh I love just studying successful people because I think if you study successful people, you'll be able to learn so much from them. Um and so I listen to like motivational speakers and stuff like that. Like uh, I think I've mentioned this quote in NBI, Ernest Nightingale. He says the um definition of success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. So continue working toward a worthy ideal. What's that word ideal?
SPEAKER_01:I love that quote. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Um that's good.
SPEAKER_01:I've heard that before.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's the best definition I've heard. Um, but what so when you look at successful people, you know, I don't know what the stat is. You might you might know it what how many what percent of small businesses end up failing. But what do you think separates those people? We've talked about some of these things, but what do you think separates the people who end up succeeding from the failures?
SPEAKER_01:Um just from like uh the moral of what I'll say next would be that it's an option for them.
SPEAKER_00:That's great. That's really good. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:You know what I'm saying? Like in my mind, it's like, oh, that that is something that's an option for you. Failure is an option for you. That's insane to think about. That's the first step, right? It's not an option. Failure is not an option, and that resonates. Once you have that in your mind, it's not an option. That brings two things mainly consistency and grit, right? And it is also gonna bring discipline. So you have to have your mindset that failure is not an option at first, but that's what I guess separates people. A lot of people quit when it's I guess stops being fun. Uh, you know, things are not as glamorous, and you're dealing with staffing issues, you're dealing with equipment breaking, you're dealing with bills stacking up, not enough money coming in. Um you're you're trying to figure out ways to make it work, but they kind of give up. Uh they they have negative mindsets, they have no positive outlooks, they are not putting themselves out there. Uh, and the people who succeed and win are the ones who keep showing up, they keep learning, they keep adjusting, they keep refusing to let them like a short-term frustration kill a long-term vision, right? That is what that's what that's what separates them. Uh, you can't you have to be you have to see what's in the future. You have to have goals. A lot of these business owners, they don't have goals. They're like, I want to start a business to make money. That's fine. But then they're spending profits, they're not reinvesting. You have to, in my opinion, if you're a business, you should be only taking a very, very small percentage of your profits for your own personal use. You shouldn't be using the profits, they're not designed for you to go spend. Your profits are on on personal whatever, your profits are designed for growth.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And you have to have reserve. The economy goes up and down, a lot of people don't prepare for it. People live in a short-sighted world um with no humility, right? You have to stay as a student. You are not the smartest person. There's always somebody doing something better. You never want to think you know everything. That's that's it. I I'll tell you right now in the Car Wash game, I am a very small guy. Even my partner, we I mean, he has 20 years of experience in this game, he's super sharp in what he does. I've got 10 years in this game, very sharp at what we do from both ends of our strengths and weaknesses, or mainly our strengths. We have so many weaknesses, and we're learning something every single day. But showing up, being here, even if I'm if I if I have another business that where I'm trying to build a development company or uh or or or anything else, I'm on site, could I do my job from home because of the team I have 100%? But will it will it run at the scale that I want it to? Absolutely not. You have to be involved. The second you think you made it, you start sliding backwards. That's just that's just how you there's no there's no making it, I guess you could say it's there's no there's no ending goal, it's yeah, consistency. So that's what separates people who succeed and who fail.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and I uh yeah, and your point at the beginning where you're talking about uh oh, failure's an option for you. And I think like I think the ultimate failure, like thinking that your business is gonna fail or whatever, that's important. And also, but I also think like in the short term, there's going like you're gonna have a piece of equipment that fails and you're gonna have to deal with it. So like learning to deal, like I think that I was an athlete, I played college baseball. I think learning how to deal with like the short-term failures and getting past them. Like I love this statistic. Like in baseball, the best hitters in the world fail seven out of ten times. If they're hitting 300, they're doing great, and they just failed seven out of ten times. And they learned how to deal with it and not let it tear them down, you know. So 100%. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't you can't.
SPEAKER_01:The failures definitely can't be an option in your book.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like Freddie Freeman, he's not gonna hit it.
SPEAKER_01:Go ahead. Where's it exactly?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, like Freddie Freeman, he if he struck out once and then gave up, he's not gonna hit the walk-off home run in the World Series.
SPEAKER_01:Like, yeah, what a beast, by the way. Um, I'd like to add something to that is that before you jump into a business, learn the business. I'm not saying learn it to a degree where you know everything about it, because I also think that that's that defers the whole idea behind risk taking in life. Yeah, right. But you have to make it calculated. Failures come from people who think it's easy, who think, oh, how how hard could it be just to open water? Like, okay. Sounds good. You know, oh I just buy the equipment and then uh and then the installers will install it. Here's you know, this much money I have in a bank account. I want to open, I can't tell you how many people have never been in a car wash game, never owned a car wash in their life, and they want to open up a car wash with zero knowledge. Yeah, and and and in their minds, they're like, Oh, this is super passive. This is so easy. How hard can it be? You hire people, you know, and uh it's just really soap and water. I mean, everything else is kind of running itself. And I laugh, right? I'm like, okay. So I have a distribution company, right? It does consulting, distribution, chemical distribution, uh, equipment distribution, and um service, but also has a consulting component for the car wash industry, right? We started about a year ago and uh we we help people who want to get into the industry, understand how to get into the industry and what to expect um before they make a mistake, right? Very important. You know, we then we'd explain to them, you know, this is the right type of equipment to buy. These equipment manufacturers, they love new players because they will provide them with things they don't need. They will give them a full list of items that they have to put they should put in their tunnel because it's more pure. They're paying for things that are not needed, they're they're they're getting um crazy markups on and tying them into contracts that are selling chemicals to them at 100-200% above uh like real cost. Um and they're just milking these people because they have got a little bit of money and they went and got a six, seven million dollar loan to build a car wash, and they realize that you know they don't need that. So we help them on the front on the on the on the front end and the back end before getting into the business to make sure this is what they want to do. We help them and understand that you can get in. But the guys that don't do that, the guys that just think it's easy and passive, and that's with any business, um, those are the ones that fail every single time. Realize that they're in it way over their head, and there's much more to any business. Um you know, even in real estate, like you talked about. Like I'm gonna buy a piece of property and I'm gonna rent it out and I'm gonna make money. Like, okay, well, what about upkeep? What if something happens, or to you know, tear up something? You know, you have to manage that property at all times. You need to pay what's needed to keep that property up to par, otherwise, your value of that property is declining. And the goal is to leverage that for more.
SPEAKER_00:Um, yeah, and having reserves to fix those things, and the roof's gonna go out at some point, the AC is gonna go out at some point. They're gonna someone's gonna leave the sink on, it's gonna leak, and they're gonna be after the flooring.
SPEAKER_01:You are the ones that have to fix it. It's It's not their fault. They're renting from you. You were the owner. If you're the owner of anything, it's your hundred percent responsibility.
SPEAKER_00:The buck stops with you. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I mean what you're doing before you do it. Understand what you're getting into, and understand that if you don't have a team in place with you, there's no way.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I think the other thing I'd add to the success, the successful people thing. Um, that uh Ernest Nightingale quote, the progressive realization of a worthy ideal, in that podcast that he kind of has, and I have it actually have that posted on the Transparent Podcast too. But he um he talks about the the thing that separates successful people is having goals. Because he he believes that you will become what you think about. So having goals that you're you're working toward and knowing where, like you were saying, knowing where you're going um is so important because like, yeah, you may you may you may have a failure one day, but then you have you stay focused on that end goal. And like that's where the most successful people in the world have come from. Like Steve Jobs, you know, say what you will about about him. There's some things that are negative about him, but he had an envisioned future that no one else saw, and he was the unbelievable marketing genius. That that iPhone presentation, the first iPhone that he revealed was just unbelievable. Like it was like magic. But uh but uh yeah, so kind of as we come to a close here, where where do you now with your time, where do you spend your time in the business? Like uh now that you're at five locations, where's your time most valuably spent?
SPEAKER_01:If uh I mean, I guess as the owner, um, as a partner in the business, my time is spent on people and on systems. Uh, I would say a lot more. It's providing the support to all to all ends of the spectrum when it comes to people in leadership, people in operations, people in sales, um, and then all the way down to you know management level, right? Is I I oversee a lot of it. I support and strategize on a lot of it. Um early up early on in the business, I would say it's it's about doing the work yourself. Later, it's about building a team that can do it work the work better than you. Uh that comes back to my humility, is that like you can't if you want to hire somebody, Steve Jobs says it all the time. I you gotta hire somebody that's smarter than you, better than you. You know, they're working for you, but I like to tell all of my managers, all of my people, you work with me. Everybody here has a role, everybody at this company has a role to play. Now, where you are at currently in your role is the role that you play, right? Yeah, I uh I handle a lot of the um money coming in, coming out. I make time to look at all the numbers, not just revenue, but trends and uh you know, labor costs and repeat visits and customer feedback. And you know, I I I'm not above anything, right? I'll go out there and load cars right now. I I I I would if it's needed. Um, one major thing I like to say is that I would not expect somebody to do something that I wouldn't do myself in my own company.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I can't I can't I can't expect them to do that um if I'm not gonna do it myself.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and it helps so much as a leader to be able to jump in and do those things. Not necessarily because you need to jump in and do it, but because it's hard to tell someone to do how to do something if you've not done it yourself.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, if I if I'm out there, you know, if I'm fixing vacuums and I'm doing I'm loading cars all day, or I'm grading cars, or I'm managing people, and I'm scheduling people, and I'm doing all this stuff, the business is gonna stop growing.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:If I'm developing people and processes, it's getting us.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So as we close here, um, I'd like to call them, call it wantrepreneurs, but what would you tell the entrepreneurs, the people wanting to get into entrepreneurship? What advice would you give them that are wanting to get into it?
SPEAKER_01:I would say do it. I would say go for it, but learn what you're trying to do. Find what you're good at, find what you're interested in, don't just chase money because this industry makes a lot of money, but truly believe in what you want to do, right? Um, don't just look for passive all the all the time. If you want to be an investor, that's not an entrepreneur necessarily, right? An investor is somebody who gives money to an entrepreneur in order for them to work and you get paid. If you get lucky enough to find that, that's fantastic. People do all the time, right? But if you are looking to become an entrepreneur in the business, I would say you can't, it depends on the scope of business that you're trying to get in. If you're trying to do like e-com, you can do it as part-time and then jump in full time. If you're looking for a car wash or staffing company, or you know, a business that requires you to be there, whether it's a franchise or whatever it is, I would say, I would say money is the last of your worries because everyone always says, Oh man, I wish I could do it, but I can't afford that. Well, I don't have the money to be able to do it. But I can assure you, there are millions and millions of people looking for people that have drives, have ambition, and are capable. And if you can start your side hustle, instead of it being a side hustle to in the business, start the side hustle in creative the business plan, right? Yeah, have A to C right where can I get started? What can I do to get there? All of it, what what what this industry does it look like what industry, what does this industry look like? Learn everything about every competition in your area, where it's where it falls, where you can fit in, how you can bring uh value to the table, how much market share is available, and then if you have that full plan in front of you of how much you can make and how much is you need a full project cost. How much is it going to take truly for me to make this work? And then at the very end, you can then look at your own finances, you can then start talking to partnerships with people, you can start talking to investors and people that are in the market, and you let them know your vision and goal. And you need all the confidence in the world to do that, and you just have to put yourself out there and know that it will work because you put the work in on the back end, learning A to C about the business, and here's everything you need to know based on industry. Now, with AI and Chat GPT and Groc and all of these resources, there's no better time than now to give you everything you can with chat and everything. You can do anything, you can be anything, you can research anything, you can learn anything. Yeah, so never be scared because you do have a really nice resource now. Don't be scared, they will tell you generally what you need to do. That's what I would say to them.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean, um, I I I love that. Yeah, you could literally go into Chat GPT and say, write me a business plan for a car wash, and it'd probably spit out something pretty good.
SPEAKER_01:I've done it. Um I've done it just to see. I want to see what it says.
SPEAKER_00:It's kind of scary.
SPEAKER_01:It's it's it's it's it's amazing sweatiness.
SPEAKER_00:It is amazing.
SPEAKER_01:If you're not used, if you're not you if you're not using it, you are missing out. I mean, you don't want it there, though. You're like you said, would you call them a wantrepreneur, right? Yeah, you just want you want it, but you don't actually want it. You have you like the concept of wanting it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. And I think the what you said is perfect. Uh but I I would add, you know, with with the wantrepreneur thing, take the first step. I mean, test the market, get do some research, ask Chad GBT about it. Do something. Like sitting on the fence is gonna be just as frustrating or take just as much time as taking the first step and just researching the business. And one of the best pieces of advice that I got that uh my grandfather owned a company, he had probably 300 employees in a life insurance company in in Dallas, and he sold that business. And I asked him when I went into my first job, I want to be an entrepreneur at some point. So, what should I do now to prepare for that? And the advice he gave me was learn your the entire business. If you want to start your own staffing business someday, learn the whole business, not just your job. Become an expert in your area, but learn how the service team works with the accounting department and the credentialing department and all these other areas because you're gonna need to understand all of it. And yeah, and don't just jump in blindly um without a plan. Um, like you said, it's easier than ever to come up with a business plan and you know, research and and things like that.
SPEAKER_01:Um year. I say you need one year. You take one year, right? One year, and you spend time researching, learning, thinking about it, constantly thinking about it, constantly researching it, constantly using Chat GPT, keep building out your business plan, keep adding to it, talk to people in the market, talk to people that do this. Learn and learn and learn, and you spend I would say eight to twelve months doing that, your environment will change. The people that show up in your life will change. You are generating like a a um a vibe, I guess, to create it. That this is you are becoming that person. You have to believe that you are already that becoming that person. So when you do, everything's alive. The investor will come, the people will come, the ideas will come. You might even find somebody looking to do very similar things as you and you can partner with, you can mitigate your risk doing that. It's uh you just gotta have some humility, and you better know that you're not the smartest person out there, and you always have to keep learning, and don't be scared anymore. With the resources we have today, don't be scared. Bailar is not an option, there's always a way out.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I love your focus on the humility part of continuing to learn. There's I don't remember who it was. It was a uh I think it was a Japanese um entrepreneur or philosopher or something, but he said something like uh the smartest person is in the room is the one who speaks last because they have the benefit of hearing everyone else's ideas.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. I 100% agree with that. That's something I'd like to take with me. That's that's really good. Yeah, you don't work on that.
SPEAKER_00:Um I think this is great. Yeah. Yeah, no, go ahead. I keep talking over you.
SPEAKER_01:No, no, that's on me. I was just uh I was just gonna say, I mean, yeah, you know, um on the on the what you were talking about, humility, it's it's the most important thing.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Uh as we as we wrap up here, tell us a little bit more about where your locations are and where we can find you.
SPEAKER_01:Right, yeah. So Supershine Express, uh, and that's express belt with just an X, so Supershine Express uh XPRES dot com. Has all our locations. Uh, we have a location in uh Brazilton, um, which is like Flyer Branch. Uh we have a location in Hushton. We have a location in Alpharetta, Georgia, off Highway 9, Grassland Parkway. We have a location in Dekula, Georgia. Um, and then we have a location in Mulberry, which is considered Hamilton Mill, which is uh near the close to the Mull of Georgia, about eight minutes away. That's our brand new location. That's the one I'm sitting at right now. This is headquarters. Um so yeah, you can visit any of our locations. Uh right now we're running$10 first two months specials on memberships. So when you sign up for some limited car washes, that's our goal is to you know uh provide value to people that can they can keep consistently washing. You can use any of our washes. We do um oil changes at two of them and uh preventative maintenance on vehicles. We do interior cleaning detail services, ceramic coatings. Um, we've we have uh outsourced window tinning, uh car wrapping at the Alparetta location um that we've tied in with. So full car care centers across the board. If you're a member of Super Shine, you get discounts on everything. So emissions, you name it, anything is for a vehicle when it comes to uh preventative care, preventative maintenance, cleaning detail, and just an express tunnel wash with a superhero themed attached to it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's what I think we've got. There's nothing like the feeling of driving away in a freshly cleaned car.
SPEAKER_01:And it's just it's the coolest feeling. And and seeing people, I'd like to add one thing that separates my my business from other car washes is we uh we do butler service. Butler service is at a uh when you are cleaning the inside of your vehicle yourself, you we have guys that are walking around helping you with touching up your tire shine, inspecting your vehicle and making sure you're satisfied and sending you back through the tunnel if you're not, um, making sure everything looks good, helping you out with your mats. It's truly your own butler that can help you clean your vehicle um throughout the day, mainly for week hours from like 10 to 3. We typically have somebody out there giving you air freshener, whatever it is that you need to help your experience 10 times better at Super Shine.
SPEAKER_00:That's awesome. That's uh that's a great differentiator. Well, um yeah, Anuz, this is great. I appreciate you taking the time to be on the podcast, and I'll leave a link to the website in the show notes.
SPEAKER_01:Please do, man. Thank you guys so much. Uh first car wash free. Anybody who's never been to Super Shine, your first car wash will be free. Um nice. And uh you can uh you can text uh uh transparent staffing to 47757, and you'll receive a free car wash.
SPEAKER_00:Awesome. That's great. Appreciate the news. Thanks for being on the show.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you.