For 25 years, Ervin Washington has been washing cars the same way. “All hand-washed from beginning to end,” he says, as his staff of four descends on a dirty Subaru and makes it dazzle in under 20 minutes. Unlike many of its competitors, Ervin’s does it all — exteriors and interiors.
“I managed to stay in business by doing good work, being honest with people and trying not to overcharge them,” Washington says. “Everything I made I put back into my business. That’s what kept it alive. I just didn’t buy myself anything. My wife and I have been together 30 years. She went along with it. She didn’t see the vision at first.”
Open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Washington keeps three to four employees on hand every day. But when business is slow, he makes a simple calculation. “I just send them home, and I work myself,” he says. “That’s the only way I could do it. That’s what I had to do to survive.”
From his corner spot at the intersection of Route 1 and Lewistown Road near Ashland, Washington has watched several automated car washes set up shop around him. “7-Eleven has three car washes,” he says, “and everybody thought that was going to hurt me. It didn’t, because it’s nothing like a hand wash. You go through the machine, and it’s not going to get it but so clean.”
An RV in the oversized bay at Mega Wash (Photo by Claire Fortier)
Washington’s latest competitor, MegaWash, may disagree. Opened in 2021 by Richmond real estate developer Miles Morin, the massive stand-alone car wash is less than a block from Ervin’s. Morin built the 6-acre, $6.5 million development around a gap he saw in the market — a car wash that could handle oversized vehicles.
MegaWash offers a tunnel that easily fits large vehicles, including buses and RVs, as well as a touchless tunnel and several self-serve bays sized for cars. “Touchless” washes use chemical soaps to loosen and dissolve dirt and high-pressure water jets to blast away the grime, manager Steven Earles explains; there are no brushes, foam rollers or cloth strips. Even the width and length of the vehicles are determined by computer, he says.
The block-long journey from Ervin’s Car Wash to MegaWash represents a dramatic evolution — not just of one stretch of Route 1 but of an entire industry. Nationally, car washes have gone from a $10 billion collection of independent businesses to a private equity darling. Last year the industry generated $20.7 billion in revenue, according to IBISWorld, with overall profit margins of 14% to 15%. Driven by a membership model and consumers pressed for time, the industry is projected to grow faster than the overall economy over the next decade.
And here in Richmond, where Flagstop Car Wash was named one of the region’s 25 fastest-growing companies in 2025 by Richmond BizSense, the business shows no signs of slowing down.
Tyree Brown, co-owner and COO of Car Pool, which offers full-service washes at four locations (Photo by Parker Michels-Boyce)
Meeting the Market
“Our industry was very fragmented, mostly mom-and-pop shops, up until the 2000s. That’s when things really started to change,” says Jamie Nester, who joined Flagstop in the mid-1990s and is now its chief growth and development officer. “From 1981 to 2022, we had 12 locations. … Now we have 30, and eight more on the drawing board. We have a good foothold in Richmond, so we have started to branch out toward Charlottesville and Fredericksburg. We don’t want to go into a market where we aren’t going to be one of the dominant players.”
Founded by Bob Schrum in 1981, Flagstop began in Chester as a single gas station with a car wash. Originally a full-service operation, it eventually shed its interior cleaning to focus exclusively on express exterior washes — although customers can finish the job themselves at free vacuum stations near the exit.
“Bob always told us that whoever stuck with him and helped him grow the business, he would sell them the company when he retired,” Nester says. Schrum kept his word, selling to Derek Haynes, Craig Marable and Nester in 2017.
A similar story unfolded across town at Car Pool. Started by Barry Percival on Chamberlayne Avenue in 1977, it is the oldest car wash chain in the area, with four locations around Richmond that offer interior cleaning as well as exterior washes. Co-owner Tyree Brown got his start in the industry in 1981 by vacuuming cars part-time. He joined Car Pool later in the decade, worked his way up through the management ranks to become chief operating officer and, in 2024, partnered with chief financial officer Mark Harrison to buy the business.
“Bob Schrum and Barry Percival really had a parallel trajectory,” Brown says. “Bob’s thing was Chester, Petersburg, ... and Barry was Richmond proper. I learned a lot from Barry. He was one of the industry mentors at the time. He catapulted me into multisite management.”
Then there is Max Koehler, who represents a different path entirely. In 1969, Koehler was a young worker at Autobell Car Wash in North Carolina; he spent decades dreaming of his own shop. He had a different vision than Flagstop’s express tunnel model, though. “I kept my finger on the pulse,” he says. “People wanted full service.”
After moving back to his hometown of Richmond, Koehler started scouting locations. A couple blocks off Broad Street near Innsbrook, the mixed-use corporate center, he found a site that was affordable, had the zoning for a car wash and was large enough for a full-service business. Koehler opened WashYourWay RVA in 2017 as a single-location boutique operation. “Richmond has built a reputation on great service and great providers,” Koehler says. “I wanted something Richmond would be pleased with.”
Max Koehler owns WashYourWay RVA, a single-location boutique operation in Glen Allen. (Photo by Jay Paul)
The Road to Profit
As Nester, Brown and Koehler were all working their way up, the industry around them was quietly transforming. The story of those changes begins more than a century ago.
The first mechanized car wash, called the Automobile Laundry, opened in Detroit in 1914. By 1946, a winch system could pull a car through overhead sprinklers and air blowers, though human attendants still did the scrubbing. The real leap came in 1951, when three brothers from Seattle — Archie, Dean and Eldon Anderson — introduced a system that used automated brushes to do the scrubbing. No human hands touched the car.
The industry’s rocket-ship trajectory is largely credited to Dan Hanna, who is often called the “Henry Ford of the car wash business.” The Portland, Oregon, entrepreneur opened his first Rub-A-Dub car wash in 1955 and invented the first mechanized wash rack in 1959. By 1987, Hanna Industries had 30,000 patented automatic car washes in 66 countries with annual sales of $70 million.
However, early soft-touch systems often left fine scratches in car paint — a problem that was corrected in the 1990s by better brush and cloth technology, but not before it created an opportunity.
Brown remembers the next transition well. In the early 1980s, he started vacuuming cars at the former Hot Springs Car Wash on Midlothian Turnpike. “That car wash is no longer in existence, but at the time was considered state of the art,” he says. “It was touchless — it cleaned vehicles with water and specially titrated detergents.” He describes elaborate filters to clean the water. “Back in the ’80s, that was state of the art.”
The modern express exterior tunnel with the self-serve kiosk, gate and free vacuums arrived in the early 21st century. Pioneered by Benny’s Car Wash of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the automated pay terminal and a moving conveyor belt meant a single attendant could guide an entire operation, making it less expensive to run — and to use. Speed and price became the only metrics that mattered, so many full-service and standalone touchless operations didn’t survive.
But Flagstop thrived. “When we took over in 2017, we made a few changes,” Nester says. “We decided to get out of the full-service business and focus just on express car washing.”
Co-owner Jamie Nester at a Flagstop express tunnel location (Photo by Jay Paul)
Clean Machines
The lower staffing requirements and turnkey operations were only part of the draw.
“The biggest difficulty in our business are the elements,” Brown says. “Late spring and fall are probably the easiest times. But the summertime, it’s brutally hot.” Keeping his employees cool and well hydrated during the summer is Brown’s big concern. “We try to keep Gatorade, ice, fruit stocked to keep our team hydrated. When it’s cold, my business partner does an exceptional job of making sure everyone is outfitted to combat the cold.”
Koehler knows weather woes firsthand. The year after he opened WashYourWay RVA, the area was hit with monsoon-type rain. “It was awful, and we just kept asking when it was going to stop,” he says. “It was the rainiest year on record. It was ulcer inducing.”
The answer to the weather problem turned out to be the industry’s next great innovation: the membership program.
“You can have times, like pollen season, that are great, and you are washing a ton of cars,” Nester says, “but that creates ups and downs with cash flow and staffing. The membership model really fixed that. We have fixed costs on our equipment, our labor and our buildings — you have to pay for that up front, and that cost pretty much doesn’t change. Where the membership model comes in is that we can wash more cars, more frequently and at a better price, and we are still not at capacity. That really stabilized our industry.”
Brown agrees. “Membership truly does drive growth. Private equity loves stable, recurring income.”
The numbers explain why. Net profit margins for an established express car wash can range from 40% to 60%, according to MMCG Invest, compared to an average small-business net margin of 10%. Private equity has poured $2 billion into the industry in the last three years alone.
A shift in consumer behavior has fueled demand. In 1996, about half of all car owners washed their vehicles at home. Today, 79% take their cars to professional car washes, so more than 8 million vehicles are washed in the United States every day. Part of that shift is simply time — a tunnel wash takes three minutes, versus 30 to 45 minutes to wash a car yourself. And with a subscription plan, people can wash their cars as often as they like.
Housing is driving demand, too. In Richmond, 57% of city households rent rather than own. With 2,500 new apartment units added to the metro area every year since 2021, according to the Richmond Multi-Family Market Report from real estate broker Marcus & Millichap, thousands of residents find themselves without driveways, without garden hoses and without any option but a professional car wash.
That expanding customer base is exactly why Flagstop pursued private equity. “We started seeing where we wanted to grow faster but didn’t have the financial backing to build three, five, seven more stores,” Nester says. In early 2023, the management team sold 80% of the business to the New York-based Garnett Station Partners and used the resulting capital to more than double the number of Flagstop locations.
Brown decided to take the opposite tack with Car Pool. “In the early 2000s, we ran under the tutelage of Virginia Capital Partners,” he says. “In November 2024, my business partner, Mark Harrison, and I purchased the company. It was a tremendous switch. We’ve bucked all the trends, we really have.”
Ervin’s Car Wash near Ashland (Photo by Claire Fortier)
The Next Wave
Back on Route 1, Ervin Washington is still doing it his way. Twenty-five years in, his assessment of the competition hasn’t changed. “They good for a fast wash, to knock the dust off,” he says, “but if you truly want it cleaned, then you come to Ervin’s Car Wash.”
Washington isn’t the only one championing the full-service car wash; Brown sees the next wave coming. “About 15 years ago, the express exterior came on board, and then the memberships came on board,” he says. “But ... it is difficult to discern the difference from one [express exterior] car wash to another. I really think there will come a time where there will be a greater emphasis on the interior of the vehicle being done. It may be by robots, it may be by people, but we cannot ignore the fact that at some point people will want that interior done.”
Regardless of their stances on interiors or private equity, all four men have similar reasons for working at the car wash.
“A car wash is basically like a big robot,” Nester says. “You have mechanics, you got electrical, you got plumbing. You kind of become a jack of all trades. It’s a lot more encompassing than people realize. It’s just something I fell in love with.”
And then there’s the customer service aspect. As Koehler puts it, “It makes me happy to see the look on someone’s face when they see their car and it’s clean and shiny.”
“It’s so intriguing to see the joy a clean car brings to people,” Brown says.
“It’s been good, I’ve been blessed,” Washington says. “We do good work. That’s all I like to see go out the door, good work.”
