I bought an automated car wash. Here's how my husband and I turned a $16,000 investment into 3 locations that made $340,000 in profit last year.

• BreAnna Nixon and her husband put down a $16,000 payment on a self-service car wash in 2017.
• They only wanted a second income when they began the venture with Nixon's brother and his wife.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with BreAnna Nixon, who bought a car wash as a side hustle that is now her full-time business. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

By 2017, my husband, Josh, and I had been running a business together for three years. He worked as a general contractor, and I did administrative work for his projects. We began considering building another income source.

After some research into semi-passive income, we started looking into car washes. Buying a car wash is an investment in real estate and can be a self-sustaining business.

We came across a run-down car wash in Nephi, Utah. We saw an easy opportunity to spruce it up, attract new buyers, and build our real-estate portfolio.

Now, we run three car washes, which made about $340,000 in profit in 2022, with my brother and his wife.

We used seller financing to put a small down payment on our first car wash

Josh and my brother, Joe, approached the owner about buying it, and he agreed. He was tired of maintaining the business.

The owner knew we didn't have much money to put down, so he was willing to structure an alternative-financing option.

The timing couldn't have been more chaotic — I had a baby in March 2017, and we sat down for our first meetings with the owner in April to arrange the seller financing.

I brought my three-week-old baby to the initial meetings, but by June, we'd agreed on a lease-to-own option. This structure allowed us to pay a monthly fee with the option of eventually owning the property.

Josh and I put $16,000 down up front, and Joe and his wife put down the same amount.

At the time, the car wash was making $8,000 a month and was valued at $400,000.

For the first 2 years, we worked on the car wash alongside our full-time jobs

Between 2017 and 2019, we worked on this little old car wash. No one told us how to run the business — we jumped through each hoop as we went along.

During those first two years, we didn't pay ourselves. Josh and I continued to work for our business, and Joe worked full time as an air-traffic controller.

The self-service car wash still required between about 20 and 40 hours of work a week while we were renovating it. We didn't have to hire attendants. I handled paperwork and insurance. Josh and Joe shared responsibilities involving maintenance and upgrades.

Unless we were installing new equipment, we only needed to be at the car wash when systems broke. However, this still required around 20 to 40 hours of weekly work for maintenance and renovations.

Fittings, hoses, spray nozzles, or guns can break anytime and take a whole day to fix. Sometimes we had to fix equipment from midnight until 6 a.m. bringing the kids along, but we enjoy being together as a family.

As we made small updates, we kept the car wash open and reinvested all the earnings. Overall, we didn't do much more than replace coin-operated systems with ones that took credit cards, add automated-pay systems, repaint the location, and add new signage.

Once we figured out a preventative-maintenance schedule and improved each portion of the car wash, we slowly took the reins off and let it flourish.

Owning a car wash required more time than we anticipated, but the money was worth the effort

We were putting all of the money we made back into the car wash account until we could buy out the lease. This finally happened in January 2019.

We used the income from our hard work over the previous two years as our down payment, which totaled around $80,000.

We held a grand opening to reintroduce the car wash as a locally owned and operated business. Our kids handed out popcorn and treats. By the time we officially re-opened, we'd made around $200,000.

Our initial goal was to have a nice, passive side hustle making around $12,000 a month. But once we started improving the location and learning more about the industry, we saw the possibility of making the car wash our full-time job and changed our cash-flow goals.

With the car wash under our name, we began to pay ourselves a salary. Josh walked away from contracting in 2019, and we focused on making our side hustle our main source of income.

June 2019 was the first month we made $20,000. The car wash was revalued at $1.8 million in November 2022.

We added two more car-wash locations and doubled our income

With two years of experience, we could secure a construction loan for our second car-wash location in May 2020.

We found an old building that used to be a car wash, and within a month, it was up and running with two automatic car washes and two dog washes. We used the funds from our first car wash to buy the second. It was appraised in 2022 and valued at $3.1 million.

In 2021, we leased a portion of a gas-station property with a poorly functioning car wash.

We don't own the real estate, but we are making money from the car wash. The owner of the gas station is thrilled — our car wash is bringing him extra income, too.

Our team remains small. We've hired five attendants and a general manager who oversees all locations and attendants.

We pay ourselves $80,000 a year working 20 to 30 hours a week

The additional locations nearly doubled our gross income. With this extra help, my husband, brother, and I each work 20 to 30 hours a week on expanding our car-wash business.

We have been paying ourselves an $80,000 yearly salary.

Seller financing, research into run-down locations, and speaking to owners were essential to reducing $100,000 in initial up-front costs when we decided to take on an additional source of income, which now pays our salaries and provides employment within the community.