Parable of the Car Wash

I have a favorite story that I tell my staff all the time. It takes place one day when I was on my way to get some chicken for lunch. I came up to the stop light and there was this sheepish looking young man standing on the sidewalk with a piece of paper in his hand. It seemed like he was almost lifting it for me to read… a little apologetically. I couldn’t tell what it was at first, but finally I saw that the second word was, “wash.” Finally, I put together that it was a car wash sign with a very faint arrow underneath. I thought maybe it was just a joke and drove on.

About fifteen seconds later, I pulled into the parking lot for the restaurant and saw some 8.5 x 11 inch pieces of paper taped to cars written in colored pencil. When I got right up next to the signs, I could tell that they said, “Car Wash.” But I looked around and I didn’t see anything that looked like a car wash. I started to pull around to the drive-thru and noticed about five kids sitting on the sidewalk – in the shade where they were barely noticeable. One of them had another of these small signs in his hands.

I doubt you’ll be surprised to learn that there were no cars in line for the car wash. I was shocked at how somehow this group of people had not learned what seems to be common information for every teenager in America.

All my life, I’ve seen kids with big signs, covered in colorful magic markers and huge arrows. One kid usually thrusts the sign at my car over and over while another jumps up and down and still another forcefully points where I should drive my car. Sometimes they’ll plea sometimes they’ll scream. Never in all of my life have I seen what I saw on that funny day.

However, I find myself doing the same thing with my own business some times. And I constantly see artists making the same mistake. They assume that if they’re good enough, people will just show up somehow.

If you want people to know about you, you have to be aggressive like most kids putting on a car wash. You have to have a big, bold sign that moves back, forth and sideways and cannot be mistaken. You have to have someone saying in very simple terms, “drive your car here” or the equivalent for your business. And you have to have someone who is willing to say over and over with some sort of loudness, “I am here! Buy my product.”

If you follow the parable of the car wash, history has proven a consistent outcome.

p.s. We duplicate CDs.