Success Story: Brad Phillips is a managing director at Incline Equity Partners, Pittsburgh’s largest private equity firm, and the deal lead on Mr. Magic Car Wash‘s expansion. Incline created this expansion by buying a quartet of local car wash businesses in different parts of the city in late 2021 and combining them to form a 10 location platform that has kept growing and improving. Mr. Magic now has 23 sites, 16 of which are local to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area.
“Any time they see a Mr. Magic, my kids love it,” Phillips said. “They’ve been through most of them with me, and it’s, ‘What’d you guys do with this one?’ Or if we pass a car wash we don’t have as Mr. Magic, it’s, ‘Hey, do you want to buy that one?’ It’s been a fun family experience for me to have them see a lot of what I do on a day-to-day basis be real and tangible for them.”
The big reason Incline bought, buys and builds Mr. Magic is the car wash industry can be “very, very profitable.” That’s the assessment of Jack Glover, Incline founder and managing partner. Glover started scouting the sector in 2019 and personally invested in some car washes in Florida in early 2021. He still owns them.
Incline bought into Glover’s car wash concept, too, and within six months was putting together what’s now Mr. Magic, assembling a nucleus of car washes in its hometown, the standard PE move of capitalizing on an industry ripe for consolidation, spurred by the evolution of wash technology — largely tunnel car washes, meaning a conveyor belt pulls the vehicle through a tunnel where all of the steps of the process from presoak to drying are performed — and of membership programs.
“What we like are businesses where you have predictable, recurring revenue,” Glover said. “I said, ‘Let’s start looking in and around Pittsburgh,’ because I knew there wasn’t a big provider here.”
Incline does not run the day-to-day. Joe Krydick, a veteran restaurant operations manager at Dunkin’, Taco Bell and Red Robin in the Pittsburgh area, joined Mr. Magic as vice president of operations in August 2022 and less than a year later was promoted to president and COO. Krydick spends much of his time working with Mr. Magic’s leadership teams and making sure its locations have what they need to be successful. That includes operations, customer experience, staffing, training, equipment, membership growth and supporting expansion.
For more information visit https://inclineequity.com/, and https://mrmagiccarwash.com/.
