Miguel Gonzalez built a career on a customer’s question

A parking customer wanted to build a car wash. He already knew Miguel Gonzalez’s point-of-sale system and had a reasonable question: could it work there, too? Plenty of businesses begin with a founder announcing what the world needs. This one took an interesting turn because a customer asked for something. There was a car, a transaction and an operator trying to keep the day moving. Gonzalez took the question seriously.

That request carried a former New York Stock Exchange software engineer into an industry of tunnels, payment machines and repeat customers. His company, Micrologic, had been developing technology for parking. The car wash presented a related problem with its own practical demands. A working system had to make sense to the people using it, at the moment they needed it.

More than two decades later, Gonzalez remains Micrologic’s founder and CEO. In October 2026, he received the Carwash Con East Hall of Fame award for his support of the convention. Tom Hoffman Jr., the previous year’s recipient, presented it. A career that began with software and a customer’s question had acquired something harder to put on a product sheet: a place in the industry’s communal memory.

A detour worth taking

Before Micrologic, Gonzalez worked as a software engineer at the NYSE. He also attended the New Jersey Institute of Technology from 1992 to 1995. The subsequent move into parking technology put his engineering experience to work in a business where a transaction accompanies the arrival or departure of a vehicle. It was a concrete place to apply a programmer’s attention.

Micrologic began in a spare bedroom in Roxbury, New Jersey, in the late 1990s. Its early work included a touch-screen parking POS in 1999 and a handheld version in 2001. These were tools for people handling vehicles and payments, with the screen and the user’s working position both part of the problem.

The parking customer’s inquiry arrived several years into the business. Gonzalez investigated the car wash systems then available and decided to develop an offering for that market. The customer had supplied an invitation, rather than a finished specification. Following it required learning the requirements of another trade. A convenient resemblance between two businesses was only the beginning of the work.

The engineer notices the parts

By April 2013, Micrologic was working with ARCA on automated cash kiosks for car washes, including the Fujitsu F53 in the design. Gonzalez’s comments about the equipment are revealing in their specificity. He talked about reliability, features and the ability to configure the machine differently. The praise was directed at a component and what it allowed his team to build.

“I love the modular flexibility of the unit.”

Miguel Gonzalez, discussing kiosk hardware, 2013

He described versions ranging from a stripped-down machine to one equipped with more features. There is a pleasing lack of ceremony in this kind of engineering enthusiasm. A founder can talk about transformation for an hour; a useful module still has to fit. Here, the attraction was the freedom to assemble something appropriate to the job.

That detail helps bring Gonzalez into focus. His public career includes the design decisions inside a payment machine as well as the larger decisions about where a company should compete. The two belong together. An operator eventually encounters strategy as a piece of equipment, an interface or a task completed during the working day.

When describing his requirements for a payments partner, Gonzalez listed reliability, security, transaction speed and support. He also wanted a company able to respond around the clock to his customers’ demands. The list places the supplier relationship inside his own service obligation. A payment system arrives with promises that other businesses will expect Micrologic to keep.

It is another view of the work behind the executive title: selecting partners whose performance becomes part of the customer’s experience. The machine may stand unattended, but the business around it involves several parties. Gonzalez’s requirements made room for the occasions when the equipment and its users need somebody to answer.

A seat at the industry table

Gonzalez’s involvement extended beyond selling systems. The New York State Car Wash Association welcomed him as a new board member in its winter 2018 news. Board service placed him in the same association as wash owners, suppliers and other people whose businesses depend on the trade’s condition. It gave his name a place on an industry roster as well as a company sign.

He also joined Brian Bath of Innovative Control Systems and Todd Davy of DRB Systems on a New Jersey association panel about making more money with a POS. The discussion covered labor costs and marketing. The setting matters: representatives of different suppliers sharing a platform, discussing the practical use of their category. The business question was broad enough to bring competing companies into the same conversation.

Industry life also supplied a less technical appearance. At a New York association Mets event, Gonzalez and his family took part in an on-field photo opportunity and appeared on the Jumbotron. Micrologic sponsored the photo opportunity. For once, the large screen was displaying the supplier himself. An industry association can accommodate both a board agenda and an afternoon at the ballpark.

The founder as tour guide

In May 2023, a bus of New Jersey car wash operators stopped at Micrologic’s headquarters in Parsippany. Gonzalez personally showed the group around. The company had relocated there in 2022, and he was also the tour’s bus sponsor. It was an unusually literal way to bring potential conversations to the company’s door.

A headquarters tour makes a different demand on a founder from a presentation on a stage. People are walking through the place where the work happens. For Gonzalez, it also continued a familiar pattern: meeting operators in the settings organized by their trade associations. The visit put a building, a working business and its founder on the same itinerary.

The route continued to Pop’s Place for lunch and then to another wash. There is something agreeably grounded about that sequence. Technology had its allotted stop; food and the operating sites had theirs. Gonzalez’s company occupied a place within that wider working world, among the owners and suppliers who were spending the day together.

Let the customer meet a person

El Car Wash began implementing Micrologic systems in 2024, testing at one location before extending the rollout. Its team described using tablets to speak with customers while they waited, explain plans and help with accounts. For Gonzalez, the partnership joined his company’s technology to an operator’s own way of serving its customers.

His description of the purpose was modestly worded: the systems were designed to help washes operate more effectively. That aim has a human consequence. When an employee can carry the interface into the queue, the customer can ask a question of a person. The location of the screen changes the location of the conversation.

The example gives substance to a topic Gonzalez has addressed as a speaker: customer experience technology. The connection between a tool and an encounter is easy to overlook in a catalogue. At an operating wash, the connection is immediate. Someone is trying to choose a plan, and someone else needs the information to help.

The next question is about keeping customers

In March 2026, Micrologic and OptSpot announced a partnership connecting operational information with marketing execution. OptSpot’s CEO, Levi McClendon, brought a system organized around building a contact list, converting customers into members and retaining them. Gonzalez explained that operators had been asking for more strategic help with marketing.

The announcement adds another customer request to his career. An operator can have information and still need a plan for acting on it. The proposed partnership gave Micrologic a way to pair its platform with another company’s marketing work. The question had moved from accepting a payment toward maintaining a relationship over time.

He was also billed as the keynote speaker for the Heartland Carwash Association’s March 24-25, 2026 product show in Bellevue, Nebraska, with AI and automation on the agenda. His speaker profile connected those subjects to practical business use. For an audience of operators, an idea eventually has to answer a familiar question: what does it help us do?

Recognition, with more work on the schedule

By October, Gonzalez’s calendar had brought him back to the convention community, this time as a Hall of Fame recipient. The award recognized his support of Carwash Con East. It belonged to the same side of his career as association service, panel discussions and the bus tour: participation in the trade beyond the delivery of a product.

His public activity also includes a LinkedIn article titled Becoming a Better Leader, published in February 2018. The title is a small but apt addition to a long-running founder’s biography. Running a technology company creates a continuing obligation to learn, explain and work with people. A product can receive a version number. A leader has to keep revising without that convenience.

Gonzalez’s story keeps returning to the operator with a question. Could this parking system work at a car wash? Could the kiosk be configured differently? Could the information help the business hold on to customers? Across the years, those requests have supplied a durable subject for his work. The cars continue through the tunnel. There is usually another question waiting outside.