“Wash Depot is the second largest car wash company in the United States with 84 locations in 13 states. We also operate 29 quick lubes and 9 gas stations with convenience stores. Our 2011 revenues were in excess of $160 million.
The senior management of Wash Depot is financially very sophisticated. I am a former investment banker and our CFO worked in the financial groups at GE, Lotus and Fidelity. In addition, Wash Depot operated as part of the largest privately held bank holding company ($20 billion) in the United States for the better part of the last 10 years.
With this as background I would highly recommend Compass Fleet and Adrienne Andre as a provider of merchant services. Since 1997, Wash Depot has processed credit cards through Bank of America, PNC, First Data, Paymentech, and until recently Chase. We have known Adrienne and Compass for many years and recently switched from Chase to Compass Fleet. This was not done lightly because (i) the deal we had from Chase was excellent (all the major processors told us that they could not compete with the Chase rate) and (ii) changing credit card processors is disruptive.
Adrienne was able to beat the Chase deal, and she beat it materially.
After 3 months, our Controller estimates that we will save in excess of $200k in credit card fees annually as a result of the Compass Fleet deal.
In addition, Chase was requiring Wash Depot to satisfy the Level 2 requirements for PCI compliance which would have cost $100k annually. Through Compass Fleet we are treated as a Level 4 processor which will cost less than $5k annually.
Further, the Wash Depot team has found Adrienne and her team to be extremely helpful whenever we have a question or a problem and made the transition from Chase more than palatable. I do not waste my time making recommendations for vendors. In fact I do not think I have given more than 3 or 4 such recommendations in my entire career. This an exception, but I have found Compass Fleet and Adrienne to be exceptional.”