When she accepted an invitation to come to Damariscotta for a New Year’s Eve gathering in December 2005, Terri Herald had no idea she had just made a choice at a fork in the road of her life.

At the time, the recent college graduate was single, living with her parents, and working as substitute teacher while she looked for a full-time position. In the years that followed the fateful 2005 party, Herald would become a wife, mother, and a business owner.

Herald was born in Skowhegan, grew up Madison, and now lives in Bristol. Graduating from Madison Memorial High School in 2001, she matriculated to University of Maine at Machias. She graduated as a certified middle/high school teacher, but her initial plan for going to college was to launch a career as a corporate trainer.

UMaine Machias was perfect for her, Herald said. Her parents lived more than 90 minutes away, and she thought the small campus was ideal.

“I’m a small town gal, and I didn’t want a big college,” Herald said. “I wanted a campus that felt like a community, and a home, and small enough to get around and what not. They had business education as a program and there wasn’t a lot of that, per se.”

At Machias, Herald met Kristen Magnussen, now the wife of The Lincoln County News Publisher John Roberts, and to this day one of Herald’s closest friends.

The Robertses extended the invitation for the New Year’s Eve gathering and that was where the then Terri Godin met her future husband, Darick Herald. The Robertses have since denied setting their friends up to this day, but she is not entirely convinced.

“They were having a gathering of friends for New Year’s Eve, and he was there,” she said. “They didn’t invite me down telling me they were introducing me to my now husband. They just invited me down to go hang out with friends for New Year’s Eve, and I was like, ‘yeah, I’ll come down.’

“We went on our first date the next day. I lived in Madison so I stayed down here, and he said ‘hey, you want to get lunch’ and I said ‘yeah,’” Terri Herald said.

It wasn’t exactly love at first sight, she said, but the connection was immediately obvious. Darick Herald was funny and easy to talk to and they shared a similar sense of humor and values.

“We have pretty much been together ever since,” she said.

A few months later in 2006, Terri Herald moved to the area and took a job with what was then Damariscotta Bank & Trust.

“I figured John and Kristen are here,” she said. “People I like are here and I am near the ocean, so if things don’t work out with Darick, I’ll be OK.”

To date, things between the two have worked out. The couple married in 2008. They welcomed their first child, Charlotte, in 2013. Charlotte’s little sister, Josie, followed in 2020.

In 2014 they went into business together, buying Coastal Car Wash and Detail Center from the company’s founder, Ralph Najim. The decision to buy the business, which has locations in Damariscotta and Boothbay Harbor, came about gradually. Darick Herald’s good friend Justin Waltz was the operations manager for Najim and continues to work for the couple today.

When Najim decided to sell, Waltz recommended the Heralds buy it.

“Ralph Najim was wanting to sell it,” Terri Herald said. “He didn’t just want to sell to just anybody. He really wanted for this to be a legacy.”

At the time Darick Herald was looking for a change from his third-shift job in Wiscasset and Terri Herald didn’t think the business would require the kind of attention that would require her to quit her job with DB&T to work for herself full time, which she did within a year. DB&T merged with Bangor Savings Bank in 2020.

The Heralds bought the business with support from her parents, which helped with the financing. The couple was able to buy her parents out within two years.

“The price he wanted for this, Darick and I ourselves never could have purchased, so having my mom and dad on board, having their help was tremendous,” Terri Herald said. “We never would have been here without it. The other piece of that is no bank would have looked at us. We didn’t have the kind of the money to drop on a down payment that we needed to have for both businesses. Ralph wasn’t willing to separate them, and even if we wanted just one I am not even sure we could have gotten a loan for this place, so Ralph was our bank.”

Najim as banker proved extremely beneficial after the COVID-19 pandemic shut the country down in March 2020. This month the Heralds will make their final payment to Najim, the original eight-year agreement stretching to nine years due to the pandemic.

Terri Herald credited Najim for his understanding and flexibility, given the circumstances.

“It was supposed to be eight years,” Terri Herald said. “Thankfully, he was our bank, but I think a lot of banks were pretty helpful to businesses in that time frame anyway, because what are you going to do? You are not open. You can’t pay your mortgage when you haven’t got any money coming in ... It pushed our timeline back a little bit but after seven, eight years, what’s the difference?”

Working with a spouse can present its own set of challenges, but Terri Herald said the couple complements each other just as well professionally as personally.

“My job is to make sure this place has the bills paid, and get the employees paid,” she said. “(Darick) is not a sit down and do paperwork guy, and I am. I pushed paper a lot when I was in the banking world and I like that. I feel accomplished when something is done.

“Our marriage is the same way,” she said. “We balance each other out. He is like, ‘let’s get this done’ and I am like, ‘we don’t have to get this done right now. We could go have some fun for a minute.’”

For Terri Herald fun revolves around family and friends. The couple traveled extensively before their first child was born, and they have a particular affinity for ocean cruises. They like to get away once a year when they can, an annual effort that was interrupted by the pandemic.

Cruise ships, Terri Herald said, are essentially a floating city, with all the comforts of home and more.

“It’s a way to get away,” she said. “Somebody cleans your room twice a day. It has great food at your disposal all the time, beverages, … warm ocean you can swim in.”

Since buying Coastal Car Wash, the couple has expanded the range of services they offer and invested a significant amount of income modernizing and updating the facilities.

“We don’t believe in debt per se,” Terri Herald said. “What we do is based on our capital, so if we have extra money we are paving the parking lot or upgrading equipment. We are buying new washing machines for the laundromat. That’s all from money we have generated from doing business in the area.”

One of the first things they did as business owners was begin offering interior and exterior detail services for boats and RVs. With boats particularly, what used to be an early spring demand has now extended to the point where they are detailing boats all summer long.

Within the last four years they purchased a trailer to establish a mobile detailing service, which has proven very popular. The last couple years, the Heralds have taken the trailer to the Duck Puddle Campground in Nobleboro where they set up, mixing business with pleasure.

“Once we get the trailer up there, people are like ‘oh you can come do mine next?’” Terri Herald said. “Campers with seasonals especially, they love it. We go in and wash ‘em down, wax ‘em up. It’s fun because as a family we go and hang out at Duck Puddle and the guys work for part of the day. It’s a working weekend and a fun weekend.”

Coastal Car Wash and Detail Center operates at 369 Main St. in Damariscotta and 219 Townsend Ave. in Boothbay Harbor, the latter of which also includes The Harbor’s Choice Laundry and Dry Cleaning.

Where she is behind the scenes most of the year, in the summer months Terri Herald focuses on managing the laundromat.

“The laundry business takes up a lot of my summer and that can be stressful and hard because that’s the time your kids are out of school and you want to spend time and do things with the kids and it is not always that way,” she said. “When you own a business you do what has to be done to make sure your customer is looking their best or get what they need, whatever it is.”

In October, the car wash will celebrate its 30th anniversary of operation. In business now for almost 10 years, Terri Herald concedes she has outgrown the stress of a new business owner, suddenly responsible for everything.

“The first couple years I was not sleeping, so that was fun,” she said.

Later this year, Terri Herald will conclude her second consecutive term on the Damariscotta Area Chamber of Commerce and Information Bureau Board of Directors. She expressed pride in the developments in the chamber during her term, which includes the renovation of the information bureau building at the corner of Main and Vine streets in Damariscotta.

Membership in the chamber has also helped her connect professionally and personally with people in the community she is now an integral part of, Terri Herald said.

“Darick and I, we don’t sit down and like say this is what we both believe in,” she said. “It is not something we have ever done, but we know it works. We take care of our family, we take care of our community and we take care of business. By doing so we put the good out there and it has always come back.”

For more information about Coastal Car Wash and Detail Center, go to coastalcarwashmaine.com or find the business on Facebook.

(Do you have a suggestion for a “Characters of the County” subject? Email info@lcnme.com with the subject line “Characters of the County.”)

(This article appears through a content-sharing agreement with the Lincoln County News)