Car Wash Enterprises: Clean Start
Automotive
Written by John Zorabedian   
Sunday, 01 June 2008
Car Wash Enterprises: Clean Start - American Executive - RedCoat Publishing
Victor Odermat regretted leasing his car wash company almost as soon as he had done it, but he brought it back from the brink.
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Mascott Equipment
Automatic car washes popped up along increasingly crowded US roadways in the 1960s. Victor Odermat, an ex-Marine, bought his first car wash in 1962 in the Seattle area, expanding to dozens of locations in Washington by the 1990s.

Odermat’s Brown Bear car washes and Hungry Bear Market convenience stores became a dominant brand around the Puget Sound, and other companies took an interest in acquiring the business. Odermat never wanted to sell his company, he said, but he agreed to a 10-year lease with Tosco Corporation in 1995. But what Odermat thought would be a chance for his employees to benefit from the backing of a bigger company turned south quickly.

Car Wash Enterprises: Clean Start - American Executive - RedCoat Publishing
Victor Odermat, owner
“The reason I leased the company was because the president of Tosco convinced me that they would offer my employees more and greater opportunities. I took them at their word,” Odermat said. “Within nine months, it started to fall apart.”

Tosco soon bought Unocal’s retail assets and Circle K convenience stores, and plans to expand Brown Bear down the West Coast were set aside. Rather than keeping Brown Bear’s car washes running smoothly, poor management practices led to a disintegration of the company’s customer-service focus, Odermat said. After waiting in line at one of his car washes for 25 minutes while the crew took an unannounced lunch break, Odermat had had enough.

Odermat and his son, Lance Odermat (who is an attorney), negotiated a termination to the lease agreement in 2003 with Tosco’s new parent company, ConocoPhillips. ConocoPhillips agreed to pay a settlement for reneging on the terms of the lease, and Odermat had his company back. As Odermat explained, he felt he had a chance to rectify a wrong.

One of Odermat’s first tasks was to ask one of his long-time former managers, Steve Palmer, to come back and help him run the company. Palmer, who had worked for Brown Bear for 15 years—since he was a teenager—left the company in 2000 due to problems with the new management. “I didn’t like the direction they were taking the company,” Palmer said.

Odermat said he fired about a dozen car wash managers who had let things slide badly—opening and closing car washes at will, creating a lax attitude about customer service, and permitting an anything-goes atmosphere with employees. “If the manager is not in charge, overseeing what is happening with the crew and on the premises, bad things occur,” he said. “That was a real problem, and no one was paying attention to any detail—whether it be people, the customer, or the equipment.” Odermat brought back his former general manager and reconstituted his management team.

Cleaning out
Odermat understands that the customer is what makes his business go, and Brown Bear has always been about providing customers with a pleasant, family-friendly experience. He came up with the Brown Bear name in the 1960s with the idea of having a stuffed bear at every location, which families could have their pictures taken with.

“I came up with the idea of going up to Kodiak Island in Alaska and shooting myself a brown bear and taking him to Jonas Brothers taxidermy in Seattle,” said Odermat, who was born is Alaska. That dream was never realized—and shooting a bunch of brown bears for the amusement of his customers became “politically incorrect,” he said.

But the idea of making a car wash a place where kids and families wanted to go stuck. Brown Bear locations do feature brown bear families—bronze statues of bears (Odermat also sponsors the brown bear exhibit at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle). And the employees are all expected to greet customers with a friendly smile or wave and to wear their uniforms in a clean-cut and respectful way. As a former Marine, Odermat said, he expects his employees to exhibit sound judgment and a sense of duty to the customer and company.

“Being a Marine, we say semper fidelis—always faithful,” Odermat said. “I think that it’s imperative to treat people as you would like to be treated.” Odermat feels that way about his employees, whom he describes as an extended family. “When my company was taken by Tosco and ConocoPhillips, it appeared to me that my employees were nothing more than a number,” he said. “They could be discarded without any thought to what’s happening to them or their families. That’s contrary to what I believe. I owe an obligation to take care of my employees as if they were members of my family.”

Treating customers and employees with respect has paid off for Odermat and Brown Bear. The company hired a market research firm to find out how well Washington consumers recognize their brand. The results were astounding—nine in 10 surveyed had heard of Brown Bear, and more than four in 10 had visited a Brown Bear location in the previous six months.

Now that Odermat’s company is back running like it used to, buyers are interested again. But Odermat said he won’t go that route again. “There are opportunities to franchise, but my belief is if we franchise we lose control of the operation, so that’s not attractive,” he said. “Someone wants to franchise and build in Los Angeles, but again, Marine Corps philosophy is keeping lines of communication and supply short. I don’t visualize in the near future we will move out of the state of Washington.” 
 
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