Detroit Car Washes, Cash, Drug Dealers, and the Character of Your Goals

Several years ago, I used to run an asphalt business out of Detroit, Michigan. I use the phrase “out of Detroit” loosely because in the eight years or so I was in the business, I only did a few asphalt jobs in the city of Detroit. Most of my work was in the suburbs. The reason I did so few asphalt jobs in Detroit then is that the city was in ruins and very few people could afford to maintain their asphalt. I did, however, keep my equipment in the city of Detroit because it was much cheaper to keep it there than elsewhere. In the course of storing my equipment in Detroit, I would go through the city each day and stop at gas stations and other locations to fuel up, purchase sodas, and so forth. I would always ask the gas station owners if I could do any work for them and they would always say no. However, I very quickly learned that abandoned or out-of-business gas stations were always a good place to find new work. Once a gas station closed, very often it would be converted into a hand car wash. There were two classes of hand car washes back then. One class was run by working-class men who seemed to have been in the business for decades; the other was run by men who were incredibly flashy and looked like they had never worked a day in their lives. The flashy men were the only ones in the entire city who would allow me to do work for them. They would typically have thousands of dollars in hundred-dollar bills in their wallets, and they would always pay me in cash as soon as the job was done. When I first discovered these hand car washes, I felt like I had discovered a diamond in the rough. The owners were often young men in their 20s who dressed very, very well and had gold watches and drove expensive new German cars. Inside, the men had private offices that were furnished in a palatial sort of style with expensive televisions and furniture. The funny thing about these car washes, though, was that they never appeared all that busy. The challenge of these hand car washes was that they would typically go out of business very quickly. One would open and then a year later it would be closed. I would rarely deal with the same man twice. It was confusing but a worthwhile effort to find these little car washes run by flashy young men, because they paid so well. After being in the asphalt business for several years, I started going out and selling services to various types of customers at different times of the year. For example, I might try to sell to automotive dealerships around Detroit one week and to car washes the next. In one of my last years in the asphalt business, I hired a man to professionally paint lines in parking lots for me. 

TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE, PLEASE VISIT US HERE: https://www.bcgsearch.com/bcgceospeaks.php?id=11697