When I first started in this industry, I loved making the automatic car wash machine sound like something mysterious — a high-tech device of extraordinary complexity — whenever I explained it to a customer. I did not really understand how friction washing or wash chemistry worked, so I liked to describe the machine in language I did not understand myself, all high-flown words, to cover up my own ignorance.
After years on the job, with some experience behind me, I explain the machine very differently: in plain, objective language, I tell the customer how the machine works and how the wash works, so that they understand it. And every conversation teaches me something and makes me better at it.
In the old story “The Oil Seller” (Mai You Weng), when the old man is asked about his skill at pouring oil, he brushes it off with a single line: “Nothing but practice makes perfect” (无他，唯手熟尔 — wú tā, wéi shǒu shú ěr) — describing a craft that demands patience, a sharp eye and long practice as if it were nothing at all. Sonny’s, the American car wash equipment maker in the business since 1949, has a motto that says the same thing in its own way: keep washing simple.
In reality, designing, building, delivering and servicing an automatic car wash machine is a very complex process. The principle looks simple, but making a machine that lasts, washes well, keeps working for ten years or more, fits all kinds of cars and keeps washing safe — none of that is easy. This is an industry that needs deep experience to design, a complete supply chain to bring together more than a thousand kinds of parts, professional installers on site, and professional service people who can handle every kind of wash problem. It is a highly professional industry.
Because the industry is so professional, the companies that last in it all end up at the same place: making the wash simple for the customer.
True professionalism shows in making complex things simple. A strong company has experienced people in every department, each doing their own job well. It can build standard processes for production and delivery, and it can raise the teamwork between production, marketing and service, so that a complicated process becomes orderly — and that is how it guarantees quality and raises efficiency.
The industry’s professionalism does not come on its own. It is built over years of holding to one guiding principle: put the customer’s needs first. The late Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt wrote in his 1960 essay “Marketing Myopia” that any company that wants to succeed and keep prospering in competition must change its old habit of putting the company first, and truly start from meeting customer needs — truly satisfying the customer and the market.
The company that took this furthest may be Walmart, with its customer-first principle: rule one, the customer is always right; rule two, if the customer is wrong, see rule one.
But putting the customer’s needs first raises a hard question: customer needs are many and they change. How do you respond to them in the shortest possible time?
Good companies predict what customers will need as the market changes, or they prepare the technology in advance for needs that may arise. Innovation does not always lead an industry — but innovation aimed at customer and market needs will always, at the critical moment, win customers or open a new front.
In today’s downturn, every company — private companies most of all — faces survival first. At a moment when you must watch today’s income and have no time to build for the long term, the industry’s professional spirit is more precious than ever.
For every company that takes the long view and wants to build a great brand, only by truly putting the customer at the centre and constantly refining its professionalism can it bring its professionalism to its fullest — and build a lasting drive from within. And when, one day, a customer asks why we are so good, we can smile and answer with confidence: nothing but practice makes perfect.