The Challenge

As a company in a high-growth phase, Spark didn’t have established training programs to draw from. The content that existed wasn’t at the level of detail a car wash associate needed to be productive in their first week, and building a comprehensive, car wash-specific curriculum from scratch would have taken time the company didn’t have.

“The time to build out a unique program at the level of detail we needed for a car wash associate to hit the ground running in their first, it would have taken us years. We don’t have that much time opening 10+ stores every year. We needed something yesterday,” said Cartledge.

The challenge went beyond content creation. With new locations opening regularly and a workforce spread across three states, Spark needed training that delivered the same experience to every employee at every site, without depending on individual managers to build and deliver it from memory. Experienced GMs, by nature, tend to skip over fundamentals that feel automatic to them but are essential for someone brand new.

“Anything that makes their job easier, they’re going to be receptive to. But you really take it for granted – the basic knowledge level and the consistency of putting every person through the same training,” said Cartledge.

Content as the Foundation

Spark had its own LMS platform. What it didn’t have was car wash-specific content at the depth and quality the business needed. That’s what brought them to LEAD, not for a new platform, but for a course library and customization toolkit that could be plugged directly into their existing infrastructure.

Working with LEAD’s content development team, Spark built a 33-course training program organized around three priorities. Safety and compliance came first, with topics like wash safety, chemical handling, lockout/tagout and fire safety where LEAD’s existing modules were strong enough to be deployed without modification. Associate-level role training came second, with courses for Greeters, Tunnel Operators, and Parking Lot Attendants lightly customized with Spark’s terminology, branding, photography, and operational approach. Fully custom modules rounded out the program, with onboarding essentials like “Welcome to the Wash,” company values and brand identity content built specifically for Spark.

The result: 12 plug-and-play LEAD modules, 15 lightly branded courses, and six fully custom builds: spanning safety, compliance, onboarding, role-specific operations, customer experience, troubleshooting, and sales. A comprehensive curriculum assembled in a fraction of the time it would have taken to develop internally.

Christine Budowsky, Spark’s HR Director, led the content build alongside LEAD’s development team, designing the training tracks, tailoring content to Spark’s operations and managing integration into their own LMS.

“The courses were thoughtfully organized, high quality, and integrated seamlessly into our learning platform, making implementation virtually effortless. LEAD has been a valuable partner in supporting our employee development.” — Christine Budowsky, HR Director, Spark Car Wash

What makes Spark’s content strategy especially intentional is how it scales beyond the wash. The values, brand identity, and facility orientation modules are assigned for corporate employees as well, ensuring everyone in the organization, not just their frontline, understands the business from the ground up.

Building a Sales Culture

The course library was originally built for new hires. But Spark’s leadership saw an opportunity: 175 existing employees who had never been through the material. The company had invested in strong content and wasn’t yet using it to upskill the people already on the ground.

This launched “Building Our Sales Culture”, a company-wide initiative in May 2026. Spark assigned 5 to 7 sales-focused courses to every store employee based on their role. But the rollout wasn’t just digital. Spark created a dedicated Sales Manager position at each location and built a train-the-trainer model around the content. GMs and Sales Managers led their teams through the modules together, then ran in-person practice-your-pitch sessions with live customer scenarios so employees could apply what they’d learned before stepping up to the pay station.

“We always say the GM should be the most difficult customer, and nothing should be a surprise for the employee because they’ve already seen it in practice with their GM.” — Amanda Cartledge, Vice President of HR

Across all locations, 838 individual LEAD courses were completed during the initiative, reaching a 92% training completion rate. Every employee who finished earned a “sales certified” pin, a customer-facing badge reading “Ask Me About Our Memberships”, a visible signal to both the team and their guests that they’d completed the full program.

In June, Spark launched a store-wide capture rate competition to measure whether the training translated into performance. Locations competed for cash prizes and trophies, and early results showed capture rate improving by multiple percentage points, a meaningful lift in a metric that directly impacts recurring revenue.

Why It Matters

Spark’s partnership with LEAD demonstrates a different model for how operators can approach training, one built on content, not platform dependency:

Speed to Readiness. Building a car-wash-specific curriculum internally would have taken time. LEAD’s content library collapsed that timeline, giving Spark a 33-course program assembled in weeks, and not from scratch, but from a foundation designed for the industry.

Consistency Without Dependence. Every employee at every location goes through the same content, the same way. The training doesn’t vary by which GM happens to be running the site that day – it’s documented, assigned and tracked.

Content That Travels. As Spark opens 10+ new locations per year, the curriculum is already built. New sites plug into the same training program and the content scales alongside the business.