Jim Rooney came to be a car wash owner after spending time as a factory rep for the Chrysler Corporation. His background is unique and brings a different prospective, as he has spent his entire career working under the automotive industry umbrella.

Rooney is in the process of building his fifth wash and has just finished a year as president of the Southeastern Car Wash Association. During his presidency, Rooney sought to unify the automated side of car washing with the detail side of the industry and has been a supporter of the IDA and its high profile introduction into the car wash associations.

Recently, I had the opportunity to quiz Rooney about the impact of his time with Chrysler had on his career as the owner of a chain of car washes in the Knoxville, Tennessee, market.

The following is extracted from that conversation.

PERRY: How have you been able to take the Chrysler pricing/market share model and transfer it into your car wash business?

ROONEY: You know what one thing I learned most as a factory rep with Chrysler? During the 12 years I was out in the field talking to the dealer principle every day, I think what I learned most was to how to be a businessman.

I have a four-year college degree, and then I spent 12 years with these dealers, and I felt like at the end of that journey, I had a master’s degree in business. What it taught me most of all was how to think like a businessperson, how to look at the market from an entrepreneurial perspective and how to take chances.

Every day, I would go in and sit down with successful businessmen that had millions and millions of dollars of product and investment on their properties, talk to them about their strategies, their businesses and how they are going to advance their businesses. While I was talking with them, I was learning.

At the end of that journey, I think I walked away with a healthy perspective on how to take a chance and be brave.

PERRY: Chrysler has been a risk taker. They have been risk takers in design. When you think back over the last few years and some of the vehicles that have put on the market, they have been a little risky, but they have made it work.

ROONEY: Yes, they sure have, and I think that’s what you have to do. You have to take a chance and take risk. Put something out there and let people give their honest feedback. You either like the idea or you don’t.

You know, I am reminded of an old quote that I heard in the industry. “Should we go to the public and ask them what they want us to build? The response may have been, ‘We want faster horses.’”

What I learned was that sometimes the public doesn’t know what they want. They only know what they know. They can only stretch their imaginations so far and sometimes you have to throw a product, service or combination out there and see how it sticks.

I think that is what our dealer community taught me, and that’s what we are trying to do in our organization today. Taking those chances, throwing them out there and see what the reaction is.

PERRY: Do you have some sort of internal mechanism where you evaluate how you are performing against your client expectations?

ROONEY: Oh, absolutely! Our theory is, if you can measure it, you must measure it. You can measure a lot of things. I think that owners in our industry usually measure four or five metrics, but there are another 150 metrics you can measure. You can correct things that perhaps drift, and you can correct them sooner rather than later.