PULL QUOTE FROM JASON JOHNSON: The biggest impact we make in the community for sure … as entrepreneurs or as business leaders, as managers, is to be kind to the people that we work with … and they come home actually having had a good day.

Brian Maughan: This is BUILT, the podcast where you meet creative leaders in the commercial real estate industry and hear how they do what they do.

I’m your host Brian Maughan, Chief Innovation and Marketing Officer with Fidelity National Financial.

In our fourth season of BUILT, we’re taking a closer look at the community impact of real estate revitalization and development.

In this episode, we’re talking to Jason Johnson. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Quick Quack Car Wash, an empire of car washes in five states across the Southwest. It all started with just one car wash in Sacramento, California, and has grown to the fourth largest car wash chain in the nation.

Jason Johnson: We have just under 200 locations and just over 3,500 employees. We started in 2004 and it's a 20 year “overnight” success.

Brian Maughan: Each location is managed and operated by a local team. And that’s the key to Quick Quack’s success, if you ask Jason.

Jason Johnson: My role, number one is to build a team. And certainly, the real estate piece is part of what we do, but you know, not necessarily the focus of our business. It's just something along the way to build a bunch of car washes.

Brian Maughan: For Jason and Quick Quack, their work isn’t just about washing cars… They have a company mission statement they live by:

Jason Johnson: We change lives for the better and it's actually not our customers we believe that applies to, it's the team, it's each other. And it's how we decide who gets to come in the door, is people who are actually interested in making a difference in each other's lives or our team.

Brian Maughan: Quick Quack’s mission statement shapes the culture of the car wash empire, which takes root as soon as a new location opens.

Jason Johnson: When we open a new car wash, we do a grand opening, we run the car wash for free. And we find a family in the community that's in need and then we'll ask people to make donations during this free car wash for whatever amount they want to pay for the car wash, or above that. We donate all of that to the family. Then we match that with our own funds. And so the team learns that before we work for ourselves in this new building, this new carwash, we're gonna serve this family, And it teaches our team, a brand new team that we've just hired at this new location, kind of our culture and how we serve other people. And, we've done it now a couple hundred times and we're gonna keep doing it.

Brian Maughan: When Quick Quack opened a new location in Lehi, Utah, they ran the carwash for a special little girl, Leah Landing, and her family. Leah has Down syndrome and autism, and her medical needs add up fast for the Landing family. 

ARCHIVAL: “In the middle of a snowstorm, you typically don't stop to get a car wash ... But car after car pulled up to the Quick Quack in Lehi, these drivers weren't here to see their car shine. [“Oh, we got another one.”] They were here to see a special smile.

All the cars here are here for Leah…

… The community is showing up here for Leah and her family. Thank you. Making donations that are all being matched here by Quick Quack. 

Brian Maughan: That was a December, 2022 news clip from KSL news.

Brian Maughan: Quick Quack’s tradition of serving the community they’re a part of sets the tone for the locals who are coming by as new customers—and the locals who just started their new jobs.

Jason Johnson: Not everybody laid on their twin bed as kids and daydreamed about one day working at a car wash, right? It wasn't on the list. The kids who wander in, it's often a first job and they often come from homes where there's not a lot of mentoring either, you know, in their community or in their home. And so we get a lot of opportunity to work with young people.

Brian Maughan: Quick Quack’s “Store Leaders” are more like mentors than managers.

Jason Johnson: In the long run, the greater impact is teaching. And so we start day one with goal setting.

And it's not carwash goal setting. It's not Quick Quack goal setting, it's personal goal setting. A lot of our store leaders get to sit down with this person on day one and teach them to set very personal goals and in their one-on-ones weekly with that person, they're following up on that very personal goal and it's often not to continue to work at Quick Quack Car Wash. It's, “I wanna go somewhere else and do something else.” And they're actually helping that person make appointments, set up interviews, help them with tuition or books, get into the program, do a ride along for whatever it might be. But they're working to help them set very personal goals and achieve them so that when they get into that program, they don't surprise us by not showing up at work that day. We're kind of high fiving them as they walk out the door and saying “Congratulations,” and the whole team's celebrating.

And what's been really rewarding is a lot of those people have gone onto school, finished a degree in accounting or construction management or HR, and they've come back. And it's really, really rewarding as they know we've got kind of a special culture, that they know how well they were treated here and are now back with us, they're back home.

Brian Maughan: Tell us a little bit about your journey. How did you get into this role—this overnight success, as you said, that has been going on for 20 years. What happened prior to 2004 that led you here?

Jason Johnson: Yeah, so business school had a real estate finance course. It was an elective and we were supposed to build a business plan, and I convinced my professor to let me do both an operating business and a real estate business. And it was car washes. And it was this idea that, here's this industry with no brand, no scale, no management team. No one knows the name of their car wash. They only describe its coordinates. And I go to the one on this street and that street and the name of the car wash is usually “Carwash.” So it was just such an opportunity in this industry. So I built the model, and then went to work at Hewlett Packard.

I went as a financial analyst for HP, networked into some friends, and tried to find money cuz I didn't have any to build a bunch of car washes cuz it's a lot of real estate and, you know, about $5 million a project to build these things. And, found a great group of now partners who are dear friends, Tim Wright and Travis Kimball, Greg Drennan and Chris Vaterlaus who both Travis and I were kind of the chief cook and bottle washer, so we did the grunt work of making the thing go. And Tim, Chris and Greg really helped us with the financing, both their own money and, and helping us find outside financing. And, and that was really the, the story of how we got started, um, kind of pushing this thing uphill in about about 2004.

Brian Maughan: When did you know it was gonna work the way that you thought it was? If you modeled it out? Was it carwash one, carwash two, carwash 187? What was it?

Jason Johnson: Somewhere around carwash 10, which took us about seven years. So it was, high adventure, and really scary at the beginning. I mean, we really struggled to figure out the model. It was a challenge to get the marketing and the branding right. It was a challenge to get the people and the culture right. You know, sadly we struggled to get the equipment and the soap to work right. So it, you know, kind of name your piece of the business and we struggled with it. And it was, it was a long journey. I was a little kid, you know, 10 years old, I'd wash the family car on Saturday. You know, Sunday morning I'd see the car looked good. Somehow we couldn't replicate that at scale with all this equipment and chemistry, to actually get the product to work right. But it took us some years and, and sincerely people, I mean, every time Travis and I could fire ourselves and hire somebody to replace one of the roles we were doing, they did it better than we did.

And that was, you know, that kind of first seven year journey of about 10 or 11 sites, that finally got us over the learning curve and kind of knew how this model worked. I'll say one of the thing besides the people—and the people's one, two, and three – for us number four was actually a membership model. And one of the things we discovered along the way was this idea of offering unlimited car washes for a monthly fee. That really unlocked a lot of the upside in this business and kind of figuring that math out, that was a big part of the journey.

Brian Maughan: I wanna talk a little bit about what it takes to build a car wash… You're in many states right now. You're in many sites, just under 200. What do you or members of your team that you've kind of brought on to do this... What do they look for in that car wash location?

Jason Johnson: There's a quantitative and a qualitative piece of this, so my background, my undergraduate degree was in economics. The whole idea for me was that we could put math behind this and actually quantify what makes a car wash site and actually build a model.

But it starts off with a lot of “art,” a lot of, you know, “lick your finger and put it up in the air and see which way the wind's blowing” and go, yep, this looks like a good location and some of it's normal retail stuff. It's traffic going by the site, it's the retail in the area. But over time we have built a very quantitative model for this.

But the other thing is, is really, you know, real estate at the end of the day is a hand-to-hand combat in relationships and negotiation at the store level, at the dirt level. So we brought in, in 2015 a group of folks that we had built a relationship with over years from McDonald's and they just had deep relationships with developers and with construction companies. And at the end of the day, everything's in negotiation and regardless of how good the model is to predict that this is the right spot, you still have to win that hand-to-hand combat to get that spot.

But those are some of the pieces. There's a quantitative model and then there's this whole, how do we get the deal done. And just knowing the math that it's a good site isn't enough.

Brian Maughan: How much land do you need to build a carwash?

Jason Johnson: So if you can find the perfect rectangle, it would be about three quarters of an acre. But not everybody seems to want to parcel out their land in that perfect shape for us. So usually if it's a square, it's gotta be about an acre.

Brian Maughan: Do you own all the land that your car washes are on?

Jason Johnson: Most of it. We've never done a sale lease back. We do have some ground leases, but so it's tricky to get a carwash financed, because it's not a main food group for anybody, including banks. So if we can own the land, it certainly helps us to have some collateral. So we've had to try and own as much of the real estate as possible.

Brian Maughan: And what's the number that you get to? You mentioned that you were just shy of 200 car washes. What are you trying to get Quick Quack to? How many perfect rectangles are you trying to get to and how many states?

Jason Johnson: Right now the pace is to add about one a week and that's the pace that we're on. So we're doing a ground break and a soft open, you know, either side of that experience about once a week. Um, and we think we can do that for a decade. There's just so much white space in our industry. There's so many places that don't have anything like what we do.

So we're trying to work contiguously from where we are in the Western US. We don't want to jump all over the place and build one everywhere. So we really go densely into the markets. We are to build a circuit of car washes where you can use the membership that creates more value for you. We want to be in three places on your ant trail. We want to be, by work and by where you run your errands and by home.

So if we can put, you know, lots of car washes in your area, that's what we want to do. But we think we've got a decade of work to do to build what eventually could be a national brand, but really we're West Southwest U.S.

Brian Maughan: Quick Quack aims to have a meaningful local footprint. They grow in an intentional way to fully service the communities they become a part of. So they have to partner with the right people who can help them find the right property.

Jason Johnson: And so to find people in the real estate industry who were really good at what they did, but also would be very kind in those negotiations and build long-term relationships, both with developers and and construction companies and with the cities to get approvals, which is probably the biggest challenge actually, and this whole thing is going through that entitlement process.

Brian Maughan: And are cities interested in car washes? Are they happy to work with you?

Jason Johnson: The answer is no. They don't like car washes. They don't want us near anything else or in a good retail location. So it's a challenge. And, what was interesting to me about the whole car wash industry was, there's a lot of bad actors in this space, both in their use of water or the way they treat their team in terms of labor. I mean, just a lot of bad behaviors, a lot of rundown looking locations, and so we have to overcome all of that. Then you also have the issue of water usage and noise.

Brian Maughan: What makes Quick Quack different from a operating business perspective? What is it that makes it so unique as a carwash that I as a consumer want to come in and participate or give you my business?

Jason Johnson: That's the critical question in any business: how can you differentiate? And for us it starts with real estate, actually. You do win or lose on real estate. If you’re in a bad location, you're not gonna win. If you're in a great location, it's almost hard to lose, but you can. So it does come down to the customer experience. And those are really two pieces of culture. So how we treat our team and then how they treat you.

And, you know, shockingly people don't get this in business, and do it so very poorly. and a lot of fast food seems like a really comfortable with a kind of grumpy, dirty model. You kind of walk in and the people are grumpy and the site's dirty and what really distinguishes some fast food places is kind of clean and the people are nice, which seems unusual. You can win just on that. So equally important or maybe slightly more important than the actual product, how clean or dry or shiny your car is, is actually just that little quick interaction you have with our team. If they seem professional and especially kind then it makes all the difference in the world and maybe slightly more important to you as a consumer, than actually how the car turns out, which is also critical.

So the two pieces for us are your interaction with our team and you know, the cleanliness of the site and the friendliness of the person, and then the actual car wash itself. Does it come out clean and dry and shiny?

Brian Maughan: I want to talk about what it takes to build a company that builds those car washes.  You mentioned you have about 3,500 team members that are part of Quick Quack.  How much of that is on the construction, kind of before the soft launch world, and how much of that is in the actual day-to-day operations running, feet on the street, feet on “the rectangle” kind of employee?

Jason Johnson: We run about 10 team members per location. So you know, about 200 sites, so 2,000 of those are gonna be folks that just work at the store. Then we've got maintenance people and regional leadership and operations. So, 23, 2,400 that are probably working directly at the car washes.

Then we've got a bunch of folks who work in accounting and HR and marketing, but unique to maybe some other folks is we have a group of people who work in IT. So we have a large technology team that actually writes our own software. We have a large manufacturing and R&D team that we're researching how to do some unique things in our space. And then we have a large real estate team that does everything from design, site selection, negotiations and construction supervision. So we've got a big real estate team as well that work on development.

Brian Maughan: And the reason a vibrant, healthy company culture can exist across all these locations, within all local teams, and from the top at Headquarters—Quick Quack’s “Service Center”—is because of that mission statement. “We change lives for the better.”

Jason Johnson: I think a lot of companies, almost all, have mission statements. Most of them, nobody at the company knows what the mission statement is and not the CEO nor the consultant that they hired to write the thing. But really for us, it's how we decide who gets to come in the door is people who are actually interested in making a difference in each other's lives or our team.

And look, we're a for-profit business. The biggest contribution we believe we make in the community is that we're kind to the people who work in the community and they come home actually having had a good day. They come home happy. And honestly, I think the biggest thing we could do as entrepreneurs or as business leaders, as managers, is to be kind to the people that we work with.

There’s this Clayton Christensen quote, he's the Innovator's Dilemma author from Harvard Business School, and he said, “Management, if practiced correctly, is the most noble profession.” And I think, you know, the inverse: management when practiced incorrectly is like the worst profession cuz you just make everybody's lives miserable. 

So the biggest impact we make in the community for sure is how we treat our team.

Brian Maughan: Was that always the vision? Was it always the model? How did it come about?

Jason Johnson: Travis Kimball, I mentioned early on, he was always pushing us to think about culture and he kept saying, if we don't design a culture, one will emerge. And, twice it did and it wasn't what Travis and I were trying to create. It just emerged kind of on accident and it was a bad culture. We had a tyrant that showed up and we didn't know was making life miserable for some of our team. And when we found out we “promoted 'em to customer” cuz that's what we do when someone breaks our culture, is we promote them to customer as fast as possible. So what's interesting is we started to put the words down and we came up with the mission statement and we knew what inspired us. It was teaching and, and making a difference in people's lives. So we got the leadership team back together and talked about it. We came up with: We changed lives for the better as a mission statement.

Then we had to still come up with the “culture words” and that took time. We started with 10 words that described our culture and no one could remember 'em, so we had to get it down to three. And that was smart, kind, and driven. So smart just means you have to be good at the job. That's number one. You need to be the best. We're trying to find the most talented person to do this job. But then a lot of people who are very talented are obnoxious and very hard to work with, and they kind of know they're talented and they want to make sure you know that they're talented. So we also require people to be kind. And they're not mutually exclusive. And then there's lots of smart and kind people who don't do a lot. Maybe they just play video games all day. We're looking for smart, kind, and driven. That last piece is we figured out you gotta have a motor, you have to go fast because we're moving so fast. We're building sites fast, we're washing cars fast. And so if you don't move fast, we might be really nice, but we're gonna run over the top of you while we're smiling. Right? So it's gotta be all three.

Brian Maughan: All three? Man, that's a high bar. I think that's fantastic.

Brian Maughan: Is there anything, looking back on your last 20 years that you would do differently? Not because you regret it, but just in the way that you have grown your company, is there any one thing that just kind of jumps to the top of your mind?

Jason Johnson: I get asked this a lot and, and it's really about people. And it is a tricky, you know, catch-22 where you just, you're stuck between, I don't have dollars to hire more people, so I'm kind of doing everything myself, but as soon as I hire someone, great, then everything improves. And, I wish I would've fired myself faster from a lot of the jobs that I didn't do well, which is kind of all of them. And so as we've added great people, and I could name. An incredibly long list of great people here at Quick Quack who've just made this incredible contribution to our culture, to our development, to everything that we've done.

I don't think I understood as an early entrepreneur how much just biting the bullet and paying a little extra to get somebody awesome early. It was so much better than doing what we did.

Brian Maughan: You mentioned that, what you're doing with Quick Quack, a new car wash a week for the next decade. So let's say that happens. You're now at, we'll call it just shy of 800 car washes. What's next? What happens then?

Jason Johnson: At some point you still have to win by just being the best. So along that path, it's not just about having a bunch of sites, it's continuing to improve this culture and actually also continuing to improve the product to make it faster, cleaner, shinier, dryer.

But in the end, you know, because at some point somebody else has to run this place and somebody else has to take over and continue, I hope to grow it without me and without the original founders here. And, you know, when that point comes, what we really hope for, and we talk about this as a team, is that we will have had enough business success that our culture actually will be something for other people, they'll want to emulate it outside of this amazing, you know, car wash industry, which I love, but it's not necessarily the first thing people still think about when they want to decide what they want to be when they grow up. And so we hope to be successful enough. That some of these really good things we're doing that no one knows about will make a little dent in the universe in terms of maybe how people manage and lead and that's something everybody here shares.

Brian Maughan: You have to get your wings, so to speak, before you have the credibility to even talk about what that journey to get your wings looks like. So maybe we could do a car wash, title insurance kind of duo thing in each of these communities.

Jason Johnson: Yeah, if we set up a booth to say, “Hey, there's a car wash guy and a title insurance person here to share some thoughts on leadership.” There might not be a long line.

Brian Maughan: [Laughs] There might not. Might not at all. Jason, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us.

Jason Johnson: I appreciate the time.

Brian Maughan: Thanks for tuning into Season Four of Built! We have more great stories coming up…with our next one in just two weeks. 

You can find all Built episodes wherever you get your podcasts. If you like the show, please give us a rating or review on whichever podcast platform you use. It helps new listeners find us.

Built is a co-production of Fidelity National Financial, PRX Productions, and Goat Rodeo. From FNF, our project is run by Annie Bardelas. This episode of Built was produced by Jay Venables and Morgan Flannery. Our Senior Producer is Genevieve Sponsler. Audio mastering by Rebecca Seidel.

The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

The archival clip you heard in this episode was from KSL NEWS. The music was from APM Music.

I’m Brian Maughan.

And remember, every story is unique, every property is individual, but we’re all part of this BUILT world.