A national drive-in restaurant chain hired us to run the parking lot program across 3,000 of its sites. For a drive-in, the parking lot is not back-of-house — it is the dining room. Power-washing, degreasing, and restriping is simple work at one location. The job here was doing it 3,000 times, nationwide, at a price the chain could actually run a program on.
The scope
Every site got the same treatment: power-washing, degreasing the lot, and a full restripe. The trades are not complicated. What a program this size demands is a cost structure and a routing model that hold up at 3,000 units — because the math that works on fifty sites falls apart on three thousand if the program is not built for it from the start.
Why it worked
Scale at a reasonable price is its own discipline. We built the program to move efficiently across the country — crews routed to minimize drive time and downtime, a repeatable per-site process so the 3,000th lot came out like the first, and a documentation rhythm that gave the chain a clear read on every location without anyone chasing updates. The chain was not buying degreaser. It was buying a contractor that could take a nationwide footprint off its plate and keep it off.
For a drive-in, a clean, well-striped lot is the customer’s first and last impression. Doing that consistently, everywhere, on a budget the brand could sustain — that was the whole value.
The result
The program started at roughly $5M in first-year contract value across 3,000 sites. The chain liked what it got: by year two, the relationship had expanded to nearly $20M. A near-fourfold scale-up in a single year is not something a client does for a vendor — it is what happens when a contractor proves it can carry a nationwide program and the client decides to give it more.