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Today, we'll visit Atlanta, Georgia; upscale and modern,
it's widely known as the crowning city of the south.
There, you will find Hennessy Lexus, one of the crowning dealerships for Lexus North American.
Hi. Welcome to SONNY'S The Car Wash Factory.
I'm Anthony Analetto, and today we're going to visit with Hennessy Lexus,
the largest selling Lexus dealership in the state of Georgia.
Hennessy Lexus is nationally recognized for superior service
and has earned the elite dealer designation from Lexus USA.
This is a company that is truly committed to customer service.
The folks at Hennessy approached our SSO Zeev Josman
about building a car wash tunnel that would not only handle the peak
demand of well over 100 cars per hour, but it had to provide
safe and reliable wash that would clean with the same quality
that the Lexus owners demanded.
We sent the video crew out to interview Zeev and Joe Gaunt.
Joe is the parts and service director at Hennessy Lexus.
The goal was to find out about the project and how it's increasing
productivity and customer satisfaction.
Let's head out to Georgia now and visit with them.
Well Hennessy Lexus is a chain of - I believe they have 13-14
stores here in Atlanta. Most of the dealerships have washes.
and they sell a lot of Lexuses and high-end cars so
to get their ratings from the customers back to the Lexus corporation
they need to deliver top quality service, and that means
clean cars - whenever a car gets serviced, they get a car wash for free
It's complimentary. It's got to be delivered on time and meet the expectations of the customers.
Well we used to use two guys that actually hand-washed all the vehicles
We saw the time was anywhere from 20 minutes a car to
45 minutes a car to try and get our customers taken care of.
We knew it was a huge demand and seeing a couple other dealerships
that had automated car washes, realized it was a great
area of opportunity for us to make a change.
About 2 years ago we went with this. We got the time down to a little less than
5 minutes a car. We've run about 75,000 washes through there which
was absolutely impossible for us to do the way we did before.
We've never had the machine quit. 75,000.
It is a huge selling point for us to turn around and tell a customer
that while the car is in for service, we're going to go ahead and do a free
wash and vacuum for it - do the windows and everything.
It comes out in very easy fashion; so little work. The machine does most all the work for us.
Over- you know over the course of I'd say probably 2-3 years
the cost of ownership on the machine- you've depleted the cost of it.
You're well beyond the initial investment. The equipment itself
gosh, depending on how many cars you do a day, you could probably pay
it off in a little over a year. You know, you're labor cost goes down
by having any type of- you know- automated car wash.
Your quality comes up because even on the best day, there's going to be a guy
that's going to miss one panel here; that's going to leave a little bit of soap on
or they're going to use a chamois that's got dirt in it and may scratch it up.
I think anything that's automated, you can dial down the quality a lot more
And that's our biggest thing is the quality of the wash;
making sure that our guests are getting what they're looking for.
With Lexus, Lexus is luxury. And everything that we're trying to do;
this fits in hand in hand with what we're working with.
One of the biggest reasons I went with SONNY'S, and I got the commitment
from Zeev early on, was the parts are local. The parts are domestic.
We're not having to wait for a week or two weeks to get a part shipped over from overseas.
I work with two other manufacturers with other car washes that
when the car wash would go down, and it was frequent - at least once a month -
It would be a couple of days to a couple of weeks before we would get the parts available.
Early on, when we were building this, we had one piece that didn't-
that we didn't have available. It was maybe a link for the conveyor.
The next day, they had found me another part.
It was brought in from another site. The next day, it was ready to go.
Out of our facility, we just put a- almost a 10 million dollar expansion.
The single greatest thing I've been enjoying is the car wash. I think
it's been the best part of our whole experience.
Everything that SONNY'S does to educate the dealership on-
on what car washing's all about and- so they can make a good
decision on what's good for them. You know, whether it be a 35 footer,
45 footer, 55 footer; conveyor or non-conveyor;
really what's good for that dealership and what works for them and I think
SONNY'S, with all the information that they have and the resources that they have
they can deliver.
A commercial car wash, I think, is-
the only way to go in a dealership, in the future
because as we all know labor is going to continue to rise
and it's not dependable and we- this car wash comes to work every day
and it does the same job every time. And it's not that expensive.
The return on investment is there within a year, two years, three years
they can pay for the wash they put in.
Our thanks to Joe Gaunt of Hennessy Lexus.
We appreciate the behind-the-scenes look
into their service facility
and how they're utilizing the car wash to serve their customers
and manage their inventory.
We also appreciate your interest in SONNY'S The Car Wash Factory
and invite you to learn more about car washing
by reviewing all the case studies available on our website.
sonnysdirect.com
As always, good luck and good washing.