Express Car Wash Acquisition & Membership Financial Model

Description
Buying a single express car wash with SBA financing and need to know whether the deal actually covers its debt? Every other car-wash template makes you type a guessed monthly revenue and ignores the one thing that decides value: how much of it recurs. A car wash lives or dies on its membership base, so this model builds your revenue from a membership engine instead.

It models your member base the way it behaves — a stock that fills with sign-ups and drains with churn — around one signature identity: steady-state members = monthly sign-ups ÷ monthly churn. From that base it builds recurring membership revenue (members × ARPM × 12), adds one-off retail, and shows the number a buyer and a lender anchor on: your membership penetration, the share of revenue that recurs. Then it underwrites the purchase like an SBA acquisition — enterprise value, capital stack, DSCR, the unlevered EBITDA yield, cash-on-cash, payback and a 5-year exit.

What it builds for your deal:

• Membership Penetration Engine — steady members = adds ÷ churn, with tenure (1 ÷ churn) and gross LTV (ARPM ÷ churn). Move churn, sign-ups or ARPM and the whole base, the revenue and the penetration recompute.
• Variable cost done right — cost rides on the washes members actually take, not the flat price they pay. The trap that sinks naive car-wash models, fixed.
• 3-wash-type toggle — one switch reloads the whole economics (ticket, ARPM, sign-ups, throughput, labour, multiple) from an editable preset table: Express Exterior, Flex Serve and In-Bay Automatic.
• Year-1 cash runway — see how the recurring base smooths the seasonal dip that sinks retail-only washes, month by month, while the SBA note is due.
• 5-year P&L, EBITDA & SDE — EBITDA struck after a market owner/GM wage, SDE added back, at SITE level (explicitly not the corporate margin).
• Full SBA underwrite — enterprise value at your multiple, the capital stack, DSCR, an unlevered EBITDA yield, cash-on-cash, payback and a conservative 5-year exit.
  
  

Why this one: every formula is machine-verified — the full calculation graph is recomputed by three independent engines (including Excel itself) before release. Honest by design: the headline is penetration, DSCR and the unlevered yield, not a cash-on-cash flattered by leverage. Works in Excel and Google Sheets (no macros, no add-ins). Educational planning tool — not financial, legal, tax or investment advice; validate the seller's financials and your SBA terms before relying on any number.