In recent years, the International Carwash Association (ICA), has entered “good problem to have” territory. The growth of private-equity investment in car-wash businesses, combined with environmental restrictions on driveway car washes and simple consumer convenience, has led to an explosion in facilities and employers. In 2024, there were approximately 60,000 car washes in the United States, a number expected to double by 2030.

That growth means the industry is expanding, but businesses have needed education and training to match, says ICA Chief Learning Officer Claire Moore. “We’ve always strived to create a professional workforce in the car wash industry,” she said. “With the influx of money, with larger organizations now, we’ve definitely seen a nice professionalization happening.”

So a few years ago, ICA conducted a job-task analysis of its industry, from corporate managers to frontline hourly workers, to determine what kind of education was needed in this new environment. It quickly became clear that mobile education would be necessary. That was definitely true for frontline workers on their feet at car washes. But it could often be true of managers as well. 

“Car wash employees aren’t in front of computers all day,” Moore says. “In fact, there’s sometimes maybe one computer in the entire location that’s used to kind of run the whole thing, and maybe a few tablets.”

So in late 2024, ICA transferred and expanded its training to a new mobile-first LMS, branded as LEAD. “We spent a whole year before we even touched a piece of content, literally talking to customers of all different sizes, going on site with them, understanding how they train, how they work, how what kind of content they’re missing, or what kind of training they’re missing,” Moore says. The goal was to create bite-sized on-the-spot education across all tiers of the industry org chart.

Mike Thompson, CEO of Learner Mobile, which helped develop LEAD, notes that the iterative nature of the mobile training makes training more retainable as well as accessible. “[In the past] managers used to have to go into a back room for a couple of hours somewhere and take their training,” he says. “And there’s this thing called the forgetting curve: Once they spend that much time in training, it’s gone. But if they’re able to, in the moment, access this information and then care for that customer without ever leaving them, then that’s made a big impact.”

The new training structure has benefited ICA’s bottom line as well, generating $600,000 in nondues revenue in its first year. And because ICA gets real-time data about what’s working, it’s able to identify and stand up new training tools quickly.

“Just this past year, we launched 24 more safety courses and we launched 20 more course templates for onboarding frontline workers,” Moore says. “Typically, the most we were able to do before that was maybe 15 courses in a year. So the fact that we got 44 new courses on board last year, it’s awesome for us to be able to be that responsive to what our customers need and that quickly.”

Moore says that associations looking for mobile-learning partners ask for clarity about what their development roadmap looks like, bright lines about who’s responsible for what, and what support looks like.

“As with any technology, there’s always going to be something,” Moore says. “But if we can quickly respond and make sure that it’s not affecting the way they work, or what their training looks like in a day, then we know that we can continue to serve them.”