Carl Howard, UNC-Chapel Hill ’87, is the COO for the second largest car wash company in the country, AutoBell. He resides just south of Charlotte in Fort Mill, SC with his wife and two children.
DSF:Tell us about yourself.
CH: I grew up in Charlotte, and went to high school here. My family is a real source of inspiration for me. I have a wife, who I have known since high school, named Misty. My son, Chase is 11 and my daughter, Melissa is 8. I went to college at UNC Chapel Hill. When I wasn’t doing athletics, I was working at car washes on the weekends in the family business. I would come back in the summers, and would work in the business as well, sometimes as a manager during the summer.
DSF: What made you decide to go to UNC-Chapel Hill, and what was your major?
CH: Well, I knew that I would major in business wherever I went, and I had always wanted to go to Chapel Hill. When I was in sixth grade, we took a field trip where we visited Raleigh, and we visited both UNC-Chapel Hill’s and Duke’s campuses, and I was a big Tar Heel basketball fan. Having seen the campus in sixth grade, I knew that’s where I wanted to go, and that was really the only place I applied when I was a senior in high school.
DSF: What made you decide to join the Alpha Delta chapter once you got onto campus?
CH: That’s a good question. I half-heartedly rushed my freshman year, and really didn’t click with any of the fraternities that were on the campus at that time. So, I backed off and began running track, which I did for two years, mainly because a friend of mine who was a Morehead scholar and now is my doctor actually was running on the team. So, I got into track, and forgot about fraternities and that stuff. Actually, it was my roommate, Greg Nivens, who had visited Delta Sig and kinda encouraged me to take a look at it. I did, and I enjoyed the people who were there. I enjoyed the aspect that the house was on the golf course, and the people weren’t like the typical Carolina fraternities that we had visited in the past, and it stuck. I stayed with it, and I made a lot of good friends who are still my friends today.
DSF: Tell us about the first day you worked in a car wash.
CH: The first day I worked a full day, I was about 12 years old, and working the vacuum the whole day. Back then, we had hand brushes that we would brush the bumper and the windshield area, because some of the equipment wasn’t as efficient as what we have now, and when I wasn’t vacuuming, I was getting a good workout with the brush. After about 8 hours of that, I decided that I didn’t think the car washing business was going to be for me. (laughs) But as I got older and saw the broader scope of the business, I realized that there was a lot of opportunity here, and so once I got out of college, I came back and started working in the company.
DSF: Tell us more about the company.
CH: AutoBell was founded in 1969 by my grandfather and my Dad, and was initially founded as a showplace for vehicle washing equipment that my grandfather was selling, but it became a larger business. For the first three years, they built a car wash each of those years, and then the economy slowed, and they slowed their expansion. Now we’re up to 47 car washes, and we’ve been building three-five per year for the last several years.
DSF: Can you talk about the business model that you guys are working from currently?
CH: To talk about where we are, I have to talk about where we’ve been. We started out as an exterior only, conveyor car wash with high volume full service gasoline. When the oil embargo hit in the early-mid 70s, the full service gas margins went away, and that was where our profit was coming from back then. That made us realize that we needed to focus on car washing to generate profits. At that point, we had four car washes. We decided to go full service, which means we clean the interiors as well as the exteriors, generating more dollars that way. With the exteriors, we put the vacuums at the exit end, which to some people doesn’t seem like anything monumental, but back then it was quite different.
Over time and in our current model today, we realized that putting our vacuuming at the entrance end of the car wash and allowing our people to vacuum the car as it was moving down the conveyor toward the car wash was a more efficient way to do it. We have been doing that since the mid-70’s, and it still works well today.
Our basic model is that we build very efficient buildings in order to keep our investment level as reasonable as possible. We build nice facilities, brick and brightly lit, but we build them at the right size so we can generate the dollars that we need to in order to move forward.
DSF: Can you talk about your current size of the business?
CH: We are currently at 47 car washes, having opened one in South Carolina recently and another one up in Raleigh. We have locations across North Carolina, and we are represented in Virginia and South Carolina as well.
DSF: What are your primary responsibilities as COO of the company?
CH: Basically, anything operational is what I am responsible for. In the car wash business, operations is pretty much all there is. In AutoBell, we have a store manager, and assistant mangers at each store. We also have a layer of District Managers who cover 6-8 stores a piece, and I deal with them more on a day to day basis than anyone else. I mentor and coach them, and look at the overall operations where we could possibly tweak things here and there to gain efficiencies.
Probably one of my biggest things right now is looking at different measurements to make sure that we are evaluating the store progress as we should. There is no real roadmap, or company to follow who we can learn things from, so I look outside of our industry to what other similar businesses are doing. I also look at metrics to see how these other businesses are measuring their performance.
I network with other operators, travel to other car washes to look at how they’re operating, and see if there is anything to be learned in that regard. I spend also a lot of time evaluating and looking at potential new sites, and evaluating existing locations for purchase.
DSF: You have worked your way up the ladder and have become COO. Can you talk about how that has changed the way you work with the guys who are District Managers and store managers, and how they have respect for you.
CH: Well, as I said earlier, I started out vacuuming cars working weekends in high school, and I started as a car wash manager after college probably for three years. Then I became a District Manager over 7 stores. As we grew, we began to bring on more and more, to the point in which we have six district managers currently. I have done literally every job, from installing equipment, to managing car washes, to vacuuming and detailing, and it does help that the guys understand that. It’s good that they understand that I understand where they are coming from and respect the difficulty of their job. On the other hand, I hold them to a standard, which they respect also because they know that I have been there.
DSF: Talk about the experience you had with one of your college professors regarding your summer work.
CH: I had a Strategic Business class in college, and the professor was a little bit of a jerk. The first day of class, he asked us to write down on an index card what we had done the previous summer. Of course, I wrote that I had managed a car wash, and talked about the responsibilities. We put a lot of responsibility on our store managers. I tell everyone that they are the ones who make this company successful. He happened to select mine as one of the ones he picked to talk about, and was kinda laughing about it, literally, and began to tell a story about he had once had a slack job one summer at a factory in the Midwest, and how his #1 goal was to find a pallet without something on it so he could stretch out and take a nap. My face, I know just got redder and redder as I got madder and madder. Really, having grown up in the business, I never saw it from the negative perspectives that people see it. We have always endeavored to run a very efficient and well-managed and service- oriented company. I guess it was my first big wake up call that not everyone sees this business the way I see it.
DSF: Talk about where you developed your leadership skills, and what you think leadership means.
CH: I think that my overall philosophy of leadership is that there are certain characteristics of leadership that people innately have, and there are other characteristics of leadership that are developed. In all honesty, I developed my core leadership skills that I have developed were through sports. The team aspect of sports, which I played organized sports from second grade on, really benefited me. What I learned was that while there are certainly brighter stars on each team, everybody contributes to the effort, and the team is only as strong as its weakest link. Learning those lessons really helped me understand what it takes to get people on board with whatever you’re trying to do. They have to fully understand it. They have to be trained well. They have to practice hard. In business, your business is only as strong as its weakest link.
My experiences in the Fraternity were better than they would have been in the dorm life, because everyone was your friend – even though sometimes you didn’t get along with everybody. There were times when you disagreed, but at the end of that meeting, it was over. You’d go on, have fun and do the things you’d do. It was my first experience with the whole process of selecting people, promoting people, and that was a valuable experience.
DSF: What are your hobbies when you’re not working?
CH: I like to golf a little bit and hunt. I still run, not like I used to when I was in college, but I still do that to stay in shape. I am a pilot, and that’s not really a hobby because with it, I am trying to stay proficient. I am instrument-rated, and I fly about 100 hours per year, which for a private pilot, is probably about average. I would not classify piloting as a hobby, because it is a skill that I enjoy doing, but it is also part of my business.
DSF: Talk about your future plans.
CH: We’re interested in growing this company, and we’re on a path that I don’t know where it will lead, but I know that we will constantly monitor how we’re doing, and as long as it’s successful we’re going to continue to grow it. We feel as though we have a model that is scalable, and our industry as a whole is a growth industry. Our international association does surveys every year to the motoring public, and we are still only reaching about 50% of the motoring public. The reason that is, is because there aren’t enough convenient locations. I see us where the restaurant industry was perhaps in the 50s. I just see a huge potential, and as long as people drive cars, they’re going to want them cleaned and until we’ve reached 100% of the potential market, I see a possibility for growth.
DSF:What is a piece of advice that you would give to other Delta Sigs to be successful?
CH: The one thing that I know is that I decided early on what I wanted to do, and I did it. So my advice is that once you decide what it is that you want to do, go at it full boar. Whether it’s to be in a business or an engineer or architect, set that as your goal, and then take steps to work toward it. The key to whatever you do, is that you need to enjoy it.
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