SCWA 2026 Recap
SCWA 2026 Recap
Location & Date: Fort Worth, TX Feb 25-27 2026
Who Attended: Mel Ohlinger, Mike Ohlinger
With another SCWA conference under our belts, we can confidently say that this is one of our favorite shows and is a great way to kick off the year's trade show season. The only downside is flying out of Appleton --- our luck flying out of our regional airport and not hitting crippling delays or Home-Alone-worthy runs to make connecting flights has been...difficult.
Anyways, we arrived down in Ft Worth on Tuesday afternoon and headed to what we called our "Haunted House". Kind of disingenuous to call it that --- the interior was nothing of the sort. The Three Danes in was a huge highlight of our time down there. A charming, historic house with some amazing hosts (and all you can eat homemade pastrie)s. Not a single ghost sighting though. Bummer.
We headed over to the convention center on Wednesday fairly early to catch some of the other early attendees and met some of our industry friends. We've been saying this all the time now, but the smaller regional show footprint just feels more fun, less like a vacation, and more like a family reunion. There's always a friendly face to bump into and something new to catch up on.
Shortly after the floor opened, Mel delivered a quick-talk about utilizing AI tools to enhance your website's visibility online. It's a topic we get asked about often, as LLMs are just starting to become more commonplace as a defacto search in lieu of traditional browsers. Making sure that your carwash business can not only rank, but become visible in AI search results and summaries is critical right now, and essential to stay relevant as the tech marches on. It was a great, engaged audience with some good, pointed questions.
Following the presentation, we spent the rest of the afternoon on the show floor. Even though ICA is typically meant to be the place to reveal new products, new tech, new solutions, there were a lot of discussions to be had about what's new. New tech is really accelerating and integrating quickly --- and it's great to see powerful tools get in the hands of small business owners who can make the most use of them.
The next morning we attended the table talks in the main conference room where Mel hosted a table dedicated to social media. These are some of our favorite parts of the show, where conversations start to run in weird directions and we get to know what operators are actually struggling with, or find out what's actually working in the real world.
We ended our trip in Fort Worth by visiting an upcoming wash from some exciting new operators and finding one of the best Cajun places we'd ever been to. We're still busier than ever, but are looking forward to continuing our trade show trek with Heartland next month.
Until next time!
-Mel and Mike --- Ohmco
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