The Sacramento Inno Awards recognize some of the year's most talented and successful players in the tech and startup community. This year, the Business Journal recognized companies, products, and leaders in the in the innovation space. Joe Steele of Quick Quack Car Wash is this year's Innovator of the Year.
Joe Steele wants you to be able to get your dirty car cleaned faster.
That’s part of the job for the director of information technology with Quick Quack Car Wash, the Roseville-based company whose motto and website are dontdrivedirty.com.
In the last year, Steele’s team launched a proprietary quick-lane technology that lets members drive through the wash without going to a cashier.
The development team, which includes software developers, designers and data analysts, built the quick-lane technology in house.
The same team also built and launched the MyQQ app, which was also built from the ground up in-house for IOS and Android.
The quick-lane system reads the license plates of members, and checks them through the fast lane automatically, so lines at the car wash can move faster.
That customer recognition system also allows the company to compile a dataset of member behavior and participation to be able to improve the experience. The license-reader technology is not too much different technology from what some cities use to check license plates automatically for parking enforcement, but the sensor and recognition technology is put to a completely different application with Quick Quack.
The MyQQ app is another customer-facing application for the company. The free app has more than 80,000 downloads on Apple and more than 10,000 downloads on Android.
Steele started as the controller for Quick Quack in 2014, as the company grew in five years from 18 to 150 carwash locations.
Quick Quack now has more than 200 locations spread over five states, and it has 20 more locations opening soon.
The company started with a single location in 2004 is now the fourth-largest car wash chain in the country. One of the hallmarks of Quick Quack is membership. Anyone can buy a single carwash, but customers who opt to be members get unlimited washes for the cost of about two carwashes per month. That membership is now enhanced with the quick lane identification technology, in that it gets members through the wash faster. It also allows the company to compile metrics on useage, time of use, location and other data.
Quick Quack’s are set up as exterior-only car washes, where the driver sits in the car as it gets pulled through the washing system, which uses colored lighting to make the cleaning journey a little more entertaining. Some locations can wash up to 165 cars per hour. The washes also offer clean wipes for use on the inside, and they have vacuum stations set up to allow drivers to clean the inside of the cabin of pet hair, leaves or whatever cereal is laying on the carpet.
Where real estate allows for it, Quick Quack is making its second approach lanes into member fast lanes, so members don’t have to wait in traffic as long to get a shine on their car.
Steele was named director of information systems with Quick Quack four years ago, and he soon after that implemented a cloud-based point-of-sale system that allows employees to take payments wirelessly at the customer’s car. That proprietary system was also purpose built in-house for the company.
Steele also managed the team that developed the company’s proprietary enterprise resource planning, or ERP, software to automate systems, payments and other functions.
A graduate of California State University Sacramento in accounting and information systems, Steele previously at worked as an accountant, and he has been a certified public accountant.
Quick Quack has locations in California, Arizona, Texas, Colorado and Utah. Some of the things those states have in common are car culture, drought restrictions and a lot of dusty, dirty cars.
In California, at least, the state in drought years practically outlaws car washing at the curb if water flows down the drain.
That drives more drivers to car washes, and at Quick Quack, those drivers can feel better about their clean cars because Quick Quack recycles 100% of the water it uses to wash cars. The company also uses biodegradable and nontoxic cleansers.
