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The car wash business is an unknown market for many, and thus, it has been S Group’s interest to find out more about that market. S Group has its own car wash brand called ABC Carwash. Two Master’s students from Aalto University School of Business: Johannes Korhonen (Accounting) and Dima Syrotkin (Management and International Business) were challenged to research the market of car wash business.

Students researched comprehensively different issues in the car wash business and created a thorough market analysis for the customer. The work was executed as a custom-made student project which means that students gained an opportunity to solve real and current topics for S Group in a three-month period. 

‘The work required a lot of digging for information as we gathered data from many different sources throughout the project. One of the biggest challenges was that there was very little information available on the Internet regarding the car wash market. Nobody seems to really know that market very well, so we needed to gather small pieces of information from many different sources,’ tell the students.

How to increase sales from ancillary businesses?

According to the project’s academic supervisor, Dr. Mikko Hänninen, the project for the S Group tackled an important issue facing many retailers today: how to increase sales from ancillary businesses, for example, a car wash business, when growth of the main business, in this case, service stations, is not foreseeable in the near future.

‘Focusing on the ABC car wash business, Dima and Johannes worked incredibly hard to understand the car wash business in Finland and the trends shaping the sector in the medium to long-term. As a supervisor, I am happy with the amazing work done by the team and I believe that they were able to deliver much-added value to the client as well.’

On the client-side, the Aalto team could work with Tiina Vehmala-Viksten, Development Director, and Jari Hankonen, Engineering Field Manager. They think that the project went very well and that they (the ABC chain) were well informed about the progress and steps during the project.

‘The most important achievement of the project was the analysis of the car wash business in Finland. That is important because there is not any official and common organization, which collects data about the car wash business as a total in Finland. To get an understanding and the big picture of the car wash business requires a lot of work.’

‘Based on the results of the project, we will continue the work to further analyse car wash markets and our own car wash network and at the same time, we evaluate our next steps and measures for the future in our operations. Big thanks to the whole Aalto project team for smoothly, well, and in time delivered project.’