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CASE STUDY

SPREADING THE LOVE

THE PEOPLE, PLACES AND PRACTICES THAT

A car wash is a common one. Maybe it’s a truck rental or a general auto repair bay. Heck, it could be an alignment machine stuffed into the side of the shop.

These could all be secondary profit centers to the quick lube. In times of strained car counts and longer drain intervals, many operators are looking at ways to pick up an extra buck— or hundreds.

Different organizations can define profit centers in different ways. Sure, the retail additive display in the waiting area could be interpreted as a profit center, but this story focuses on the bigger parts. The quick lube is the beating heart profit center for most readers of NOLN. A full 84 percent of respondents in the 2019 Operator Survey said that more than half of their revenue comes from quick maintenance services like oil changes and basic fluid exchanges.

At the core of an operator’s desire to add profit centers is the idea of complement. The ideal addition doesn’t detract from the core quick lube business. It might even drive customers from one profit center to another.

This article is less about choosing your profit centers and more about maintaining a healthy balance between them. To keep your multiple profit centers from getting too unwieldy, focus on three main aspects: People, places and processes.