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Customer Base

sudsurfer

Member
Is it possible to estimate your customer base? Say you wash 50,000 cars in a year. How do you determine the base number of customers?
 
It’s possible but not always straightforward.

For example, one company that makes POS suggests 25 percent. So, 50,000 washes would be 12,500 unique license plates or average of four washes per customer.

This is for mature business, normal distribution. Meaning some small percentage of customers will only visit once a year whereas a small percent will visit several times a month.

Lifecycle plays in too. As wash ramps-up from launch, customer loyalty will change from practically nothing to perhaps 75 percent by third or fourth year.

Unlimited washing complicates this because it increases baseline for both capture rate and customer loyalty rate and redemption rates vary. Average is 4 to 5 washes per month.

Gas sites are another issue. Since 70 percent or so of washes are sold at the pumps, nature of customer base depends on site location characteristics.
 
The only data that you might easily get of hold of is your credit card charges. Do a sort by the last 4 digits of their CC number, and you will have some sort of customer base except for cash.
As far as gas sites, ours only produces 10 percent of our sales.
 
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