Jordan Berry [00:00:00]:
Hey, hey, what’s up guys? It’s Jordan with the Laundromat Resource Podcast, and I am pumped you’re here today because today we have, uh, on show 257, an anonymous person coming on the podcast. But don’t let that dissuade you from listening to it or watching it because she brings some golden nuggets. There is— this is jam-packed. I mean, it’s jam-packed with practical tips on how to run a successful laundromat, which she is doing. It’s part of the reason why she wanted to stay anonymous. So really, really good stuff in this one. Before we jump into it though, couple quick things. Number one, this episode, as well as any other episode that we have, you can go to laundromatresource.com/show257 or whatever show number it is to get the show notes.

Jordan Berry [00:00:47]:
That’ll have all the links, uh, contact information, all that stuff will be on the, the show notes page. So for this one, laundromatresource.com/show257. To get all of that information. I haven’t really mentioned this too much on the actual podcast, but we have a couple teams on board here at Laundromat Resource where we help people through the acquisition process of laundromat. We call that our acquisition package. It’s like a done-with-you package where you get a one-on-one coach that walks through that whole package or that whole process from the search phase to crafting a compelling offer. to once you have that offer accepted, to going through all that due diligence. And then we leave you with a 90-day roadmap on that way you’re not just holding the keys, you know, not knowing what to do, deer in the headlights like I was when I bought my first laundromat.

Jordan Berry [00:01:38]:
We’ll walk you through those 90 days. So that’s our acquisition package. We also have a done-with-you, we call it our concierge package, where we actually have a team that goes out and sources deals for you. So if you’re frustrated or you just don’t have time, to go out and find deals, or you’re just not having success, we’ve got a team that does that for you. And also we’ve got a team who will help you on the backend after you own your laundromat. If you’re trying to grow, you’re trying to start pickup and delivery, you’re trying to start wash, dry, fold, or drop-off laundry service, we’ve got that. It’s called the Laundromat Playbook, which we can help you as well. So check that out at laundromatresource.com/consulting.

Jordan Berry [00:02:15]:
Go book a free strategy call if you’re interested in one of those. And, uh, we’d love to help you get started.

Anonymous Guest [00:02:20]:
All right.

Jordan Berry [00:02:20]:
All right. Shameless plug over and let’s jump into it with our anonymous, wise, experienced guest. Let’s do it. All right. Thank you for coming on the show. I’m super excited to have you on today and cannot wait to hear about your experience in this industry, but why don’t you give us a little context on you and then we can kind of jump into how you got into the business. Thanks for coming on.

Anonymous Guest [00:02:47]:
All right. Well, thank you so much, Jordan. I really appreciate the invitation. It’s really lovely that you have this podcast. And, you know, we both know that there are so many people out there who are wanting to buy a laundromat, who are wanting to get into the business, who are just trying to get information that can help them better understand how to approach getting a laundromat or starting a laundromat, building a laundromat, you know, taking over what’s called a zombie mat, you know, something that’s got the infrastructure and the machines are probably still there, but it’s just a complete dump. Should they do it? Should they not do it? You know, the whole list of questions that I’m sure both of us have been fielding for years. And so one thing I’ll tell you is I have spent years— my businesses are in New York City, and I focused exclusively on New York City because the market is so big there. And, you know, you go anywhere in Manhattan and there’s a bodega on every corner, and you think to yourself, like, if you’re a tourist, for example, You see all these bodegas, they’re on every single corner on every block in Manhattan, and you think, how on earth are these businesses staying in business? And it is absolutely stunning the extent to which they’re thriving because there are so many people in such a small concentrated area that you don’t have to go beyond a block or two and you can be making money in Manhattan.

Jordan Berry [00:04:14]:
That’s right.

Anonymous Guest [00:04:15]:
The biggest issue for those of us who own businesses in Manhattan is the rent. And so just for context purpose, if you are in Manhattan and own a business that’s on any of the avenues like 1st, 2nd, 3rd, Park, Lexington, Madison, and so forth, your rent for like a 600-square-foot store could easily be $15,000 a month. Wow. And so you have to be very careful about the kind of business that you’re going to put into a space like that that’s that small. And, you know, it doesn’t matter how many people are there. If you put in the wrong kind of store, you know, the only people making money are the people who own that property and you’re going to go out of business. Now, if you’re on the streets, any of the numbered streets like I am, the rent is like one quarter of that. And so those are really great places to look for opportunities to have these businesses take over a business, buy a business, start a business.

Anonymous Guest [00:05:18]:
But you don’t have the same foot traffic as they do on the avenues. But in my experience, I haven’t had any problem being successful or profitable being on one of the numbered streets as opposed to the avenues. So it, you know, it is possible to be very successful with these businesses. Even when the market is completely saturated, and so by way of example, two my two stores are located three blocks away from each other. One is a dry cleaning drop store, and the other one is a laundromat. And so within the span of probably a two-block radius in either direction on the north or south end of my two businesses, so that would encompass roughly a six. A 6-block north-south, and then just 2 blocks in either direction, there are probably 13 dry cleaning stores and my laundromat, and they’re all still there. In fact, there’s a dry cleaning store directly across the street from my laundromat, and 3 doors down from them is another dry cleaning store.

Anonymous Guest [00:06:31]:
And then at the end of the block, and I’m probably, I don’t know, 8 doors down from the end of the block, there are 2 dry cleaning stores right there. And everybody’s just humming along, just doing what they’re doing, because everyone picks up their particular customers, and, you know, people develop relationships with the people who work in the stores, and that’s where they go to do business, or they get a referral from a friend, or it’s somebody new who’s moving into the neighborhood. In Manhattan, we have a tremendous turnover of people in July and August, Because a lot of people come to New York to go to school, they’re getting new jobs and whatever. They are picking a location based on someone telling them to go in a certain neighborhood. They start there, and a year later, they’ve had a chance to be in the city long enough that now they have friends in other parts of the city. Takes forever to get from the East to West Side, so you just move. And so there is a steady flow of people going in and out of every one of these neighborhoods every single year. And in my dry cleaning store, I had data, customer data going back probably 12, 13 years.

Anonymous Guest [00:07:38]:
And about a year ago, I sent— I used one of those text messaging systems to do an outreach to my entire customer list. And it was probably like 6,500 people on that list over roughly a 12, 13-year period. And it was shocking the number of people who had moved out of the city during COVID and the rest of the people who had just simply moved over that timeframe. And what I realized when all was said and done is I only had about 400 active customers that were current out of that 6,500 list.

Jordan Berry [00:08:16]:
Wow.

Anonymous Guest [00:08:16]:
Yeah, really shocking. And they’re all like within roughly a 2-block radius of the store. And so, like, that taught me a lot about how I was gonna approach marketing because my customer base literally is up and down the street. And keep in mind that on most of these, you know, avenues and street-numbered streets, they’re all like 5-story walk-ups unless you’re in an elevator building. But most everybody in New York is living in a walk-up. And so these are people who are hauling their laundry down 5 floors. 5 flights to walk across the street to come to the laundromat and then do the exact same thing in the reverse when they leave with their laundry. So, you know, Manhattan is a very different kind of market than, let’s say, anywhere else in the country because the whole city is vertical.

Anonymous Guest [00:09:09]:
And that’s why you have such a high concentration of people in the area. Whereas for many other people in other parts of the country, they’re dealing with, you know, how many laundromats are within a mile’s drive of their local area. So it is just, you know, where is the concentration of people? And people don’t drive to my laundromat. They walk or they take the bus or they take the train because that’s the nature of how people move around in Manhattan. So I have a fairly unique market situation. Also, the labor rates are much higher in Manhattan.

Jordan Berry [00:09:46]:
Mm-hmm.

Anonymous Guest [00:09:47]:
And that means that your prices are going to be higher in Manhattan. But we all just expect that that’s the way it is when you live in Manhattan. It’s one of the most expensive cities to live in, but there’s a reason people live in Manhattan. And, you know, it has a real draw for millions and millions of people and people who would never live anywhere else. And other people, they come there and it’s like, oh my God, I could never live there.

Jordan Berry [00:10:12]:
‘Cause definitely polarizing.

Anonymous Guest [00:10:14]:
Massive humanity. You know, you’re cramming like 10 million people into, You know, 5 miles, and that’s a lot of people.

Jordan Berry [00:10:23]:
A lot of people.

Anonymous Guest [00:10:24]:
Yeah. Well, that’s kind of where I’m at at this moment in time. And one thing you asked me before we came on is how I got into this. You know, for me, my story dates back to when I was a little kid and my dad, he had bought a, like, a Section 8 apartment building. It was an apartment building for low-income people that were receiving government vouchers. For their rent. And he had this washing machine and dryer in the basement. And on the weekends when I wasn’t in school, I would, I would go with him to the apartment building.

Anonymous Guest [00:10:58]:
He’d be doing maintenance work and stuff. And my job was he would take the coin boxes out of the washer and dryer and pour all the quarters onto the table. And my job was to count the quarters. And what was very interesting is he would always tell me to search through the quarters to find the quarter that had the letter M on it. And that was the quarter for the manager. And so the manager was given an allotment of quarters to use for their own laundry. So their— one of their perks of managing the building was they got free laundry in the building. And so I had to pull out the quarters to give back to the manager and then count the rest of the quarters.

Anonymous Guest [00:11:39]:
And seeing that pile of quarters, When I was probably like six years old, I just thought, “Oh my God!” I didn’t understand at the time what was happening. I just understood that that machine had quarters in it, and that those quarters were important. And so my entire life, I have thought, “I’m going to own a laundromat one day.” I’m I’m I want to I want quarters. I want to count quarters. I just want to see the money go in. And me take the money out, and so I spent my entire life thinking about I’m gonna have a laundromat someday. And I would talk to my friends, and they’d think it was the funniest story that I’ve been talking about a laundromat ever since I was a kid. And so I went through; I had corporate jobs.

Anonymous Guest [00:12:24]:
I had big corporate six-figure paying, you know, jobs. And and then when the economy crashed in 2008, I lost my job and I had to figure out something else to do. And so I invented a product that was completely unrelated to my corporate job or laundromats, and I brought the product to market and I had that business for probably 15 years. And then I exited the business and now I was like, what am I gonna do? And I thought, I’m gonna have a laundromat.

Jordan Berry [00:12:56]:
I’m finally gonna have a laundromat. Now’s the time. Yeah.

Anonymous Guest [00:12:59]:
And so I literally spent 4 years, I’d go back and forth. I was not living in New York at the time. I spent 4 years going to New York, going up and down the avenues and the numbered streets, going into laundromats all over the city. And I created relationships with the brokers who handled the sales of these laundromats, and I learned a ton just from talking to the brokers. Now, the brokers don’t— they’re not laundromat owners, but they represent the owners. They’ve seen the financials, they see the condition. They know kind of the the makeup of the people who own these places, and you know they know what sellers are looking for. They know the kind of questions that are being asked.

Anonymous Guest [00:13:44]:
So those people are a wealth of information. And so I would you know meet the broker. I’d go look at it, and I didn’t know anything about laundromats at that time. But by spending time going into them, looking around, looking at it from the perspective of a consumer, saying, “Is this a place I would want to wash my laundry?” You know, are the machines clean? Is the building clean? How are the people inside? Just from a customer perspective of, you know, is this a place customers would want to go, or is this kind of like a dump where you feel like, oh my God, my, my clothes are going to come out dirtier than they went in? And so it took me 4 years before I was able to buy my first store. And I bought a dry cleaning store, and I bought it because it had a book of business that had a very significant net operating income that was verified. And I thought, I’m just going to buy this for cash flow. I was never interested in buying a dry cleaning store, but I was very interested in the cash flow. And I didn’t know about, you know, like the owner said that he, he was working in the store, but he had a manager.

Anonymous Guest [00:14:51]:
So I didn’t understand what he was doing versus what the manager was doing because it’s a tiny little store. But they were doing a lot of business. And so I just, you know, looked at the numbers and said, okay, I’m just going to move to New York and I’m going to own this store. And so then I got the store up and running. I put all new dryers in. The, the washing machines are, are to this date very old Wascomats that are still running and doing a brilliant job. So why replace them? But the dryers were very problematic. They were old ADC dryers and we just couldn’t keep them running.

Anonymous Guest [00:15:28]:
And You know, we do probably out of that store, maybe 30% of the revenue comes from wash and fold and retail dry cleaning, and the rest of it comes from this other book of business that I wanted. And so I replaced all that equipment, and then it just, you know, there was stable, you know, there was a stable of employees that had been there for many years. And so I literally walked into a situation where I didn’t have to do Too much. In fact, I probably did way more and spent way more money in that first year than I ever needed to because the store was running perfectly fine. I just, I just burned through a lot of money because I thought that’s what I was supposed to do. You know, I told my manager at one point, I want it to look like a spa in here. So I went in and repainted the whole thing and, you know, put up nice little decorative things. And it was like, okay, this did not generate anything to my bottom line.

Anonymous Guest [00:16:21]:
And that was stupid. But it was just— What I thought was important in terms of the customer experience, but nobody cares, right? They really don’t care. So then about a year and a half into it, I— there was a laundromat about 3 blocks away from my dry cleaning store, and it had been vacant for months. And I had been eyeing this place for as long as I can remember. Really cool on the outside, but super tiny on the inside. Old junky machines inside, but it hadn’t been operating in months. And I couldn’t find the owner. Nobody could find the owner.

Anonymous Guest [00:16:53]:
Everybody was talking about they wanted to buy this laundromat, but nobody could find the owner. And then finally, someone I knew managed to find the guy that owned the laundromat, and we agreed to meet in front of the store. And this teeny little space, it had like 29 machines, 15 washers, 14 dryers upstairs, and another 6 and 6 washers and dryers in the basement, which is where all the wash and fold was being done upstairs, self-serve. And I met the guy outside and I just said to him, look, I’m not interested in having a negotiation here. I just want to buy this store from you. And I said, what’s your walkaway number? You’re not operating it. You’re not even in the business. And I need a place where I can start doing a bunch of wholesale laundry.

Anonymous Guest [00:17:41]:
And this is the perfect place. I’m going to put in all new machines. And, you know, I need this place. I want this place. And he gave me the number and I said, done. I basically stole it from him.

Jordan Berry [00:17:53]:
Yeah.

Anonymous Guest [00:17:54]:
And I think he thought that he was asking too much for it because he was kind of hemming and hawing around the number. But as soon as he gave— I didn’t actually care how much it was going to cost because I knew what I was going to do and I knew it was going to be successful because the next closest laundromat was 6 or 7 blocks away. And that’s a— I mean, that is a long way to be hauling laundry in Manhattan. Blocks are long. So we stood out there, we shook hands, and by that Friday I was in his lawyer’s office, handed him the money, he handed me the keys, and I now had a laundromat. And then I bought brand new equipment. It was financed through the, the company that is the distributor for that equipment. They financed it for me because I already had a relationship with them because they were one of the people that were helping me try to find a laundromat to buy.

Anonymous Guest [00:18:46]:
So that preexisting relationship really paid off for me because I otherwise had no option for where was I gonna get the money to, to buy these things, you know? And so we put in brand new equipment and I sat there the first 3 days. I couldn’t figure out what hours. And I sat there from 8 in the morning until 8 at night for 3 days in a row. Because I didn’t know, like, what hours should we offer? People haven’t seen this laundromat open in a very long time. They don’t even know it’s there. And so for the first 3 months, I was playing around with what hours, and then I had to find employees. And so over the span of about that first 3 months, I finally nailed down my employees. They’re all professionals.

Anonymous Guest [00:19:30]:
These are not people who ever worked in a laundromat before. They have advanced degrees. Some of them lost their job during the budget cuts when the administration changed, and They were just desperate to find a job and they didn’t care, care where they were going. And interestingly enough, all of the people who work for me are— they have come out of professional occupations. And the most interesting thing they’ve said to me is that it has been such a welcome break for them to get out of the rat race, the corporate rat race, and just come into this place where people come in, they do their laundry, they chat, they get a good customer experience, and there’s no stress. And so it’s been really interesting to have the kind of people that work for me working there because I just hired a new guy and he’s, I don’t know, some kind of engineer, like big shot kind of engineer. And he loves working at the laundromat. And when I started it, I just thought I wanted to own a laundromat.

Anonymous Guest [00:20:30]:
But what was most compelling to me is that a laundromat is a place where You probably can do the, the most detailed study of human behavior that you could do anywhere.

Jordan Berry [00:20:45]:
That’s true.

Anonymous Guest [00:20:45]:
Yeah. It’s all on display there. There’s no— no one’s wearing a uniform. No one’s wearing a mask. They come in and they are themselves. And you see it on full display week after week after week. And it’s, it’s just very interesting. I actually started writing an anonymous blog about my experience during that, that first 6 months where I was in the laundromat every single day, because the things that I was witnessing and, and the study of human behavior in New York City is probably different than anywhere else because the level of stress from living in a place that has so many people and the level of activity Constantly, it it’s really intense for the nervous system, and so it’s been a real interesting experience to see who are the people that come in and what’s going on in their lives.

Anonymous Guest [00:21:41]:
And they all have developed relationships with my employees, and I’m sure at some point we’ll talk about what I’m doing that’s different from probably any other laundromat owner, which has also translated into much greater sales for us. And more solid relationships between the customers and the people who work for me. So that’s kind of the story, my backstory and the story of right now. And there you have it.

Jordan Berry [00:22:11]:
Yeah. Well, so far, I got to say, this has been the easiest podcast interview I’ve ever done. I just said, hey, thanks for coming on. And I got a full, full episode here. That’s great. No, that, no, what a cool story. And it’s cool. I joke a lot with people who are like, how’d you get in this business? What, have you been dreaming about it since you were a kid? Just, haha, who dreams about buying a laundromat when they’re a kid? But it’s cool.

Jordan Berry [00:22:38]:
Every now and then I find somebody like you who really has been kind of thinking about it since they were a kid and then made the dream happen, right? So that’s pretty cool.

Anonymous Guest [00:22:47]:
Well, you know what, what’s very interesting is that in this business that I owned for probably 15 years, I had a business partner And, you know, when we were going through the recession and, you know, losing all the stores that we were selling to because those stores were going out of business and just, you know, this is before the internet became a place where it was all things the internet. You could buy anything on the internet. And I said to her at one point, I said, damn, we could have bought a coin laundry.

Jordan Berry [00:23:18]:
Yeah.

Anonymous Guest [00:23:18]:
You know, because it was like, because I said, you know, at least we would see the money going in and we’d be taking the money out. You’d just see it. It was So immediate, the transaction and then the money. Because we were just like waiting on accounts receivables forever. And it’s like, oh my God, we’re going to go broke waiting for these people to pay.

Jordan Berry [00:23:36]:
Yeah, it is one of the perks of this, right? It’s you get paid upfront and if you’re a self-serve laundry, you get paid upfront to let other people do the work for themselves, which is even better.

Anonymous Guest [00:23:49]:
Yeah, completely. And because my My dry cleaning business, you know, sometimes I think about giving up the retail side of the business because the book of business that I bought through that dry cleaning store, we do. We’re like we do probably 95% of the dry cleaning for a very specific industry in New York, and that’s something that’s been developing over the past 15 years, and it’s an industry you cannot get into. There’s no way you can break into it. You have to have the pre-existing relationships, and the thing is because. I have a lot of clients there, but they’re all on terms that, you know, I can be sitting on $100,000 in accounts receivables. They’re all current, but I’m still laying out all the money. And so the money that I get in from my retail side, my retail dry cleaning and the wash and fold that we’re doing out of that store, that pays all of my expenses for the entire month.

Anonymous Guest [00:24:44]:
So you really do have to have those multiple revenue streams to help offset any seasonal changes or seasonality in the business. Or like me, I’ve got a book of— a big book of business that, you know, they pay on time, you know, and I can’t go chasing after them because they’re big companies. They pay when they pay, but they pay. They always pay. But, you know, I’ll still be sitting where I’ve laid out $50,000 or $100,000 and I have to wait the time that it takes for them to pay. So it’s kind of like this rolling thing over time. But that daily stuff and the laundromat too, that is kicking into the kitty, so to speak, that keeps the whole operation running every single day. I never have to worry about my cash flow because it’s coming in the form of that self-serve laundry or all the full-service type of service that we offer in both stores.

Jordan Berry [00:25:42]:
Yeah. Well, and it can get tricky, right? When you have those accounts receivable and you’re waiting for stuff to come in, you’ve got expenses going out. If you’re not diligent about it, if you’re not planning your finances properly, it’s really, I mean, I think a lot of business owners, not as much in the laundromat industry, but in a lot of other industries, a lot of business owners end up losing their business because they didn’t plan well. Like you said, they had to put out $50K or whatever.

Anonymous Guest [00:26:12]:
Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:26:13]:
And they, they just didn’t have it, or they had to do it on credit and the payment didn’t come in on time and it just, you know, ate away at them. I mean, it’s so easy for that to happen.

Anonymous Guest [00:26:24]:
Absolutely. Yeah. If you’re not diligent about collecting those accounts receivables, I know when I bought the business, um, the guy had over $100,000 in outstanding accounts receivables, and it took months for all of that to be collected because A lot of the work that he was doing came to an end. The contracts ended, which it’s like rolling contracts with a lot of different companies. And those contracts ended and the businesses went away because of the nature of them. And I know that, you know, months later he still had over $10,000 in uncollected accounts receivables and there was no way he was ever going to collect that. And so now, having seen what he had done, we’re at a point where we now have These big companies, they’re paying within a week of us providing the services. And so we’re like, everything— I think I just looked at my receivables today.

Anonymous Guest [00:27:18]:
I don’t know, it’s probably around $50,000. That’s all from services that have been provided mostly in the last 2 weeks, and that will continue coming in. And so when it starts coming in faster, all of a sudden you’re starting to see your bank account growing, and it’s like, oh, wow, maybe you can take some money out of here.

Jordan Berry [00:27:36]:
Yeah. Get it out before I have to spend it again.

Anonymous Guest [00:27:39]:
Yeah, exactly.

Jordan Berry [00:27:41]:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I, I’m curious, uh, since you’re kind of in this unique position, I mean, it’s not that unique, but it’s, it’s pretty unique where you own both the dry cleaner and a laundromat. I mean, could you give us like a, you know, a quick like compare contrast, what you like about each business, what you don’t like about each? Uh, ’cause they’re pretty different, but they get lumped in together a lot. Yeah.

Anonymous Guest [00:28:05]:
Absolutely. Well, one thing I can tell you is that the dry cleaning stores are, in my opinion, infinitely more profitable. Why? Because if you’re not doing wash and fold, meaning no equipment in the building, you are just what’s called a dry cleaning drop store, where you just, you have a storefront and you put a sign out that says dry cleaners, and people walk in or they call you and ask you to come pick up their dry cleaning.

Jordan Berry [00:28:30]:
Mm-hmm.

Anonymous Guest [00:28:31]:
You do it and then it gets delivered back to them or they come in and pick it up. So what are your expenses? It’s your rent, your business, you know, insurance and all that kind of stuff, your phone, and then the people who are in there. And you could really get away with running a dry cleaning drop store with a full-time person and somebody who works your Saturdays. Like literally you could do that. And so, you know, if your rent isn’t very high, once you build up that business, the Net operating income on a dry cleaning store is ridiculous, which is why I’m always on the hunt to buy another dry cleaning store that, you know, you will take in wash and fold, but then you outsource it. And so, for example, there’s a dry cleaning drop store across the street from my laundromat. It’s like, and they don’t do wash and fold. They take it in, but they send it out to a factory.

Anonymous Guest [00:29:19]:
And I’m like, I could buy that dry cleaning store, buy that book of business, and then bring the bags across the street to the laundromat to do the wash and fold. So you have economies of scale there. So the dry cleaning drop stores are very appealing to me because, like, that’s, you know, if you have a good factory that’s delivering good quality work, then your customers get to know you. You have a relationship with them. You get to know them over the years. You meet their children as they’re born and they grow up and all that kind of stuff. It really is very much a family neighborhood kind of business.

Jordan Berry [00:29:52]:
Cool.

Anonymous Guest [00:29:52]:
With the laundromat, on the other hand, it’s I mean, it’s not labor-intensive, it’s machine-intensive. And so your challenges there are, you know, where do you get the money to buy brand new equipment? And how long does it take to pay off that equipment? When does the business really become profitable? And that, of course, is gonna be at the point that you’ve paid off all that equipment, ’cause you got a big note, you’re paying for the equipment month after month for a number of years, unless you’re able to buy it outright. You know, one thing I learned in the beginning is that for as much as I love that I bought brand new equipment, I probably could have gotten away with buying refurbished equipment or buying equipment from someone else, just understanding that what I was saving by buying that used equipment, I was likely going to spend on a repair guy. And if you don’t have a good solid repair guy, Why are you going to give yourself that kind of headache, especially if you have a new business? And because the machines that were in this zombie mat that I bought, they hadn’t been maintained in years and we had to replace the entire duct system because, number one, it was too small and the amount of lint that was throughout the entire building because it was being run absentee and there was nobody cleaning out the lint trays. And so then you have higher electrical bills because the machines are working that much harder to dry the clothes because the lint traps are filled. And so, you know, like I had to replace everything in that store and that costs a lot of money in the first year. But now I have almost no expensive expenses on that store except for the routine operating expenses, my people, and then the loans on the equipment.

Jordan Berry [00:31:49]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it’s funny that you can really, and a lot of people do almost operate their laundromats as a drop store for dry cleaning too, right? So that’s also a possibility to do that, especially if you have wash and fold or you have a pickup and delivery.

Anonymous Guest [00:32:10]:
Yeah, totally.

Jordan Berry [00:32:10]:
You can just take You know, the, the dry cleaning and, and then outsource it to a plant.

Anonymous Guest [00:32:15]:
Yeah, that’s exactly— and that’s what I do in my laundromat, is that, uh, you know, people who bring in their wash and fold, or even if they’re doing self-service, they will— even though there’s a dry cleaning store right across the street, they will bring in their dry cleaning to us, and then we take it over to the store 3 blocks away, and everything goes into the factory at the same time. So, you know, there’s always a way to generate additional revenue, and You know, my initial thought when I bought that laundromat was I was going to go after big wholesale accounts. And I spent 6 months chasing after a big spa, big, big spa, like 40,000 pounds a month of towels. And it wasn’t wash and fold. All we had to do was wash and dry them, shove them in the bag and drive them back. And so we did that for about 3 and a half months, and then I fired the client. Because, and I mean, that was $250,000 a year, easy, easy money account for us. But it was such a nightmare dealing with the client.

Anonymous Guest [00:33:17]:
They had OSHA violations inside their space. They didn’t have proper places to put their laundry bins. We were, you know, rolling laundry bins through the spa area where people were sitting in their towels and stuff. And it’s just like, I’m not, I’m not doing this. You are not. You are not. You did not set up this business when you designed and built it. into an existing building.

Anonymous Guest [00:33:42]:
You did not set this up so that you could move your laundry in and out, and there’s no loading dock.

Jordan Berry [00:33:47]:
Mm-hmm.

Anonymous Guest [00:33:48]:
And so we had this big, massive snowstorm at the beginning of the year in Manhattan, and, um, we got there and they had 65 bags of wet towels down 2 flights of stairs, and there was nobody there to bring the bags upstairs because I didn’t have insurance to cover my guys going down those stairs. And what are you supposed to do? They’re like, they have to have their towels. And so I was there that day and we hauled all those bags up 2 flights of stairs, went and did 60— that was 65 bags in the basement on top of the 35 bags that were on the main level. And so we took— we hauled 100 bags out and did that laundry in 6 hours and brought it all back, and that was it. And then the next week I fired them because, you know, I don’t care about the money enough to have my life be turned into a nightmare by one customer.

Jordan Berry [00:34:41]:
Yeah.

Anonymous Guest [00:34:42]:
It’s not— it’s just not worth it. Some, you know, you, you look at the big money coming in off some of these commercial accounts and you don’t realize as the owner what your life is about to become. Because in this case, they didn’t even close on holidays. They were open on Christmas, Thanksgiving, every holiday they were open, and they were open from like 6 in the morning until midnight. And so it just was— I just hated my life for that period. And I was like, never again. And I’ve had people call me and say, Arlene, you just did such a great job for so-and-so. And I’m like, do you have a loading dock? Nope.

Anonymous Guest [00:35:13]:
Sorry, not doing it. You know, where are your bags? You know, when can I pick them up? Oh, well, you’ll have to pick them up between this hour and this hour when our yoga classes are shifting. I’m like, nope, not interested. Oh, come on, we’ll pay you a premium. No, I don’t need your money that bad because I value my life. and my quality of life and my nervous system way more than your money. I can find that money somewhere else.

Jordan Berry [00:35:38]:
Yeah. Well, what I love about that is it, it’s really easy, especially when you get into it. It’s really easy to forget that, you know, the, the business is there obviously to serve the customers and provide a product and service and all that. But it’s, but it’s, you also, you know, we go into business so that we can build the lives that we want, right? Exactly. If we just need the money, Yeah. Go get a job and it’s a lot easier. You know what I mean? It’s like so much less stress. It’s so much less risk.

Jordan Berry [00:36:07]:
You know, there’s so much less pressure, especially early on until you get things kind of flowing. Mm-hmm. Uh, to just go get a job and work for somebody else, have them tell you what to do and just go do it. Like, it’s not, it’s not hard, but we go into it because we want to build the lives that we want to build and we want to, you know, we want to build something for ourselves and for our communities and all that. But it’s really easy to forget that once you get in the business and you start feeling the pressures of the business and you start seeing the dollar signs from the business.

Anonymous Guest [00:36:37]:
Yeah, totally.

Jordan Berry [00:36:37]:
And you lose it. You can’t, it’s easy to lose sight of, hey, this business is supposed to improve my life, not make it worse. Now it might make it harder for a little bit and there’s sometimes just no getting around that. Um, but, but the big picture.

Anonymous Guest [00:36:54]:
Yeah, for sure. Is that, you know, you want to build the life that you want to build. And the reality for me is that I spend very little time in Manhattan now. I literally am an absentee owner, but it took me years to— I mean, I had to spend literally every day in that laundromat for a year to get it running the way it needed to run. But I’m now in a position where I literally could— I could live anywhere in the country and not have to worry about my stores. And a lot of people will say, well, don’t you worry about people stealing from you? I have cameras, I have systems in place, and I have really good people. And the reality is— and I pay them well. And so, and I have relationships with each of them such that they, they really, they would feel like they were harming me personally if they started stealing from me.

Anonymous Guest [00:37:43]:
And, you know, again, people will say, yeah, but you know, it’s in human nature to steal and all this kind of stuff. And I just don’t believe that. And to what extent are people stealing from you if most of your customers are using credit cards to pay? What, so they let their friend come and use the laundromat to do their laundry? Yeah, okay, whatever. You treat it as, I guess, That’s like a little perk, whatever. I don’t worry about that kind of stuff. What I worry about more is, can I have the life that I wanna have, have the cash flow that I do have off my 2 stores? And, you know, I don’t have to be in New York. I mean, I find New York to be really overwhelming to live in, and it’s a very intense place. And I’ve lived in big cities my whole life, but New York is on a level that it’s indescribable.

Jordan Berry [00:38:27]:
Yeah, it’s another level for sure.

Anonymous Guest [00:38:28]:
And so, you know, I can be 3,000 miles away, and I mean, I can go for months at a time without ever walking back into my stores, but I’m still involved in them every single day. I’m checking in with everybody, taking care of payroll, all this kind of stuff, because I still am very hands-on with the backend operation. I’m just physically not in the store. And so some people really want to be in their stores, but I’ve run businesses long enough in my life that I know how to run them remotely. And be able to trust that everything is okay. And I think there’s kind of like a misconception around this idea of absentee ownership. Most people who don’t have experience will consider absentee ownership where they come in once a month and empty out the coin boxes.

Jordan Berry [00:39:19]:
Mm-hmm.

Anonymous Guest [00:39:20]:
They, they are money people. They are just coming in looking for the money. I consider absentee ownership to be Somebody who is actively involved in the business but is not physically present in the business. So I’m still working my business, I’m just physically not there because I don’t need to be there.

Jordan Berry [00:39:41]:
Well, yeah, and I mean, that’s a question I get asked all the time is like, can I run this remotely? Can I do this from somewhere else that the business is not? And I mean, I’d love to hear your take on that? I mean, obviously it’s possible you’re doing it, other people are doing it. It’s definitely possible. You gotta set it up right. But, you know, if you get asked that question, what’s your response to people?

Anonymous Guest [00:40:08]:
You have to plan to spend a year working, physically working in those businesses every day. You have to, because that is the only way you’re gonna understand sort of like the lifeblood and the heartbeat of the business. When people say, can I run this From a remote location, like they want to live in Costa Rica and own a laundromat. Okay, that is doable, but you’re going to spend the first year before you move to Costa Rica working in your laundromat. Because how do you how do you run something if you’re not there? If you’ve never done that business before, how do you even know what’s actually happening in the business? Who do you call when certain things happen? Like How are you going to run the business remotely if you’ve never run the business when you were actually there? Because you were never there. And so, like, I mean, and you have no relationships with the people who work for you, so they have no sense of loyalty to you as the owner of the business. And so what most people want is they want a laundromat because they feel like it’s passive income. That is completely false.

Anonymous Guest [00:41:17]:
It’s not passive income. I live many miles away from Manhattan, and I mean, I could literally go for a year without setting foot in my stores, but I’m still running my stores every day. I’m just not doing the hands-on work of the wash and fold or emptying the lint drawers or taking the credit card transactions from my customers. My employees are doing that. But the real work of running the business— there’s a difference between running the business and operating it. Operating it is you being you or someone being in the store from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m. or whatever your hours are.

Anonymous Guest [00:41:57]:
Running the business is negotiating with your business insurance provider to see if you can get your rates down. You know, negotiating with your bulk soap suppliers to see what you can do about rates. Harassing your factory who just raised the rates of your dry cleaning wholesale because of the tariffs, because now there are tariffs on the metal materials that are coming in. You know, so that’s not operating your business; that’s running your business. And so, for somebody who wants to be absentee, you the first question is: What’s your definition of absentee? Is that just collecting the money? Because everyone thinks that you know own a laundromat and collect money. Well, that’s the first thing that happens and the last thing that happens. Own the laundromat, collect the money. What all is happening in between those two points? That is the running of the business.

Anonymous Guest [00:42:54]:
It is not operating the business. Yes, that’s what your employees are there for. It’s all the rest of it. You know, figuring out what is the point at which you’re going to start raising your prices? What’s the impact of raising those prices? What’s the attrition rate once you do raise those prices? You know, what’s the impact of the raising of those prices? You know, how do you deal with summer seasonality where everybody goes on vacation and crap like that? So that’s absentee. I mean, you would be foolish to try and have a business, any business where you do not have active involvement in that business. How do you expect the business to grow or even continue operating if you don’t have your eyeballs on it every day?

Jordan Berry [00:43:41]:
I mean, I think that’s beautifully said because, I mean, I think the dream for a lot of people is to be You know, maybe I go in once a week, once a month, whatever, to collect the coins. But, you know, I mean, the reality of it is, is a business, right? And it’s a business that you deal with a lot of people and you deal with a lot of machines. Whenever you deal with people or machines, you’re going to have problems and somebody’s going to have to deal with those problems.

Anonymous Guest [00:44:04]:
Totally, completely.

Jordan Berry [00:44:05]:
You’re the last stop, you know?

Anonymous Guest [00:44:07]:
Yeah, exactly. Somebody has to make the decision. You know, it doesn’t matter how good your people are. At some point, there are decisions that have to be made that you as the owner have to make. They are not in a position to know how to answer that question or have the authority to make that decision.

Jordan Berry [00:44:26]:
Yeah. And I think you are describing something else that I think is really easy to forget, or some people maybe don’t even know. But when we talk about owning businesses, right? Some people, and there’s nothing wrong with any of this, right? Some people want to work in their store, they want to be in their store, they want to be the one cleaning the lint, and that’s totally fine. Sometimes you, the only way to get in the business is you’re in there cleaning the lint. I had to do that for a long time, you know, in my first business because it didn’t go well. And yeah, right. So nothing, again, nothing wrong with any of that at all. But, you know, for a lot of us, we get to a point where we’re not mopping floors, we’re not cleaning lint, but we’re still doing a lot of the stuff.

Anonymous Guest [00:45:13]:
Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:45:14]:
And we forget that the, you know, the, the progression of where we’re trying to get to is kind of where you’re sitting, right? Where we’re still running the business. Uh, we’re not operators necessarily in the business. We’re still running the business. But, uh, we, we’re, it’s kind of that whole working on the business versus working in the business, right?

Anonymous Guest [00:45:35]:
Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:45:35]:
You’re the one who’s calling the, the plant. You’re the one who’s negotiating marketing prices. You’re the one who’s, making the big decisions on the direction. You’re the one looking for the next deal, right? So that hierarchy is of roles. A lot of times we get stuck halfway up it where, yeah, we’re not mopping anymore, but we’re still in that business and that business is still dependent on us being there a couple times a week, which again, nothing wrong with that either. That’s totally fine too. But there are levels above that where, you know, you can achieve different levels of freedom and different roles and responsibilities and flex different skills and muscles that you have in running a business.

Anonymous Guest [00:46:21]:
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, where I’m at in my business right now is that I want to focus on acquisitions because, you know, the more locations I have, the more economies of scale. I can realize. And as I have my employees become more and more experienced in both the dry cleaning store and the laundromat, I can start moving them around so that I— so that the people I have to replace— or I should put it this way, I, I can move people around. Like, I could take someone who’s running my laundromat and have them run a dry cleaning store because the transition is not great because they’re already taking in dry cleaning at the laundromat anyways. So, you know, I have someone else who could step into that role right away because they’ve been cross-trained. So then who am I really replacing? I’m replacing more of an entry-level person at that point, as opposed to now I got to go and find a brand new person to run this dry cleaning store. So I’m like cultivating a crew of people that I can continually move up into the next level position, which makes them more money.

Anonymous Guest [00:47:33]:
They stay loyal. They want to stay. They’re treated well. And so I don’t have this continuous problem of turnover among employees or the need to replace key employees because I’m growing them into those positions while they’re working there. Like, for example, I have a couple of 8th graders. These boys came to me before their school— one of them came to me before school ended and he, you know, his mother brought him in. She’s a customer. And she says he’s looking for, you know, a part-time job for the summer.

Anonymous Guest [00:48:04]:
And I said to the kid, I said, well, how come you’re not asking for the job? How come your mom’s asking for it? You need to be asking. And so he said, I’m looking for a part-time job because, you know, he needs to know how to talk to people, right? But he’s 8th grade, he’s on his phone most of the time. Anyways, just before he started, he asked me if his friend could come work there. And I’m like, oh my God, I just have all these extra people. I’m running a charity here.

Jordan Berry [00:48:28]:
Yeah, yeah.

Anonymous Guest [00:48:30]:
So his little friend They split hours on a Monday, Friday, and Saturday because those are our busiest days. And one works from 8 to 4 and the other one works from 1 to 5 or something like that. And I’m telling you, my people say these kids hustle like they’ve never seen. Like they’re at home doing their video games and on their phone and stuff, but they have come in serious. 8th graders, they are serious as a heart attack about learning. And you know, they’re running the credit card machine, they’re using the computer, they’re taking, they’re doing intake. The only thing they don’t do is they don’t do pickup and delivery because we don’t want them— they’re kids, you know, we don’t want them to go up the 5-story walk-ups. You never know who’s going to open the door.

Jordan Berry [00:49:10]:
Wander in the neighborhood with somebody’s clothes.

Anonymous Guest [00:49:12]:
Yeah, no kidding. Not even so much about that. It’s more like who’s opening the door and somebody’s going to snatch a kid. And these boys are little. But anyway, so these boys, by next year, they will be in a position to come in and run shifts themselves and could potentially want to keep working there over a long period of time. And so, You know, when you’re growing a stable of employees like that so that, you know, you’ve got a feeder system that can then supply a new acquisition, like if I buy the dry cleaning store across the street, I don’t really have personnel issues. I just buy the store, put the people in, and the cash register rings. And so the key is when you combine the net operating income across all these businesses, your portfolio becomes way more attractive to somebody who wants to buy those assets.

Anonymous Guest [00:50:05]:
You know, it’s not just like one little store here, but you also have to have the cash flow to be able to support that business, um, and all of your businesses. And so now at this point, I have enough money coming in from the different sources that I can, I can consider an acquisition. But we’re talking an acquisition that’s probably like $300,000, not like $3 million. I’m not looking put that kind of money in. I want to pick up small locations, have an NOI on each location, a verifiable NOI of maybe $100 grand for each. And you put all that together and now you’re sitting pretty, man.

Jordan Berry [00:50:41]:
Adds up quick. Yeah. And especially, I mean, what’s nice about where you’re at now, and this is again another kind of argument for your method of like, get in there that first year, learn how to run the business, learn what all the nuances of it are. And then develop your employees and train them and make sure they’re empowered to run the business the way that you want the business to be run. And I like also, by the way, that you started a little minor league of your own. Oh yeah.

Anonymous Guest [00:51:13]:
Oh yeah. You got to have them. Plus, it’s great for the parents because the parents come in periodically and check with my employees and say, how are the boys doing? So in a way, we’re kind of like babysitting them even though they’re in the 8th going into 9th grade. But the parents You don’t have to worry about where they are or what they’re doing. And in all likelihood, as we all know, if you have children, the kids behave one way at home, they behave completely different when they’re out in the world.

Jordan Berry [00:51:38]:
Yeah.

Anonymous Guest [00:51:39]:
And they’re with professionals, they’re with other people. And I mean, these kids are just killing it. And it’s like, wow, I wish you didn’t have to go back to high school.

Jordan Berry [00:51:48]:
Yeah, you think about dropping out of school.

Anonymous Guest [00:51:50]:
But you know what, Jordan, I did want to mention one thing that I alluded to earlier is about something very different that I’m doing than most laundromat owners.

Jordan Berry [00:52:00]:
Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that. I wrote it down. I was not gonna let you forget.

Anonymous Guest [00:52:05]:
Um, you know, I, I think people think I’m crazy for doing this and, you know, have all kinds of reasons for why they couldn’t do it in their store and all this kind of stuff. Um, but I don’t use— I don’t have coin boxes on any of my machines. I don’t have those devices on the machines where people tap and or or have the kiosks in the store where you have to get the card and load it with money and then go over to the machine and all this kind of stuff. I don’t do any of that. I have a cash register, a real cash register at the back of the store, just like the bodegas or the delis where you go in and you buy your sandwich. Well, here in my laundromat, you go in, you load your washing machine, and you go to the back of the store. And you pay for your load. And our system is that you just pay for the washing machine.

Anonymous Guest [00:52:57]:
We provide all of the laundry supplies free, and the dryers are free.

Jordan Berry [00:53:02]:
Oh, nice.

Anonymous Guest [00:53:03]:
And we’re still— my net, my NOI on this store is 6 figures. And it’s a tiny little, probably 400 square feet, if that. So the size makes a difference. Because, you know, We’re in close contact with the customers, but it is— the reason I did that is because I wanted people to have an experience that wasn’t about a transaction.

Jordan Berry [00:53:28]:
Yeah.

Anonymous Guest [00:53:28]:
So think about the machines, not to mention the cost of having those devices and the kiosk and the cards and all that kind of stuff. The reality is, is that when people come into my laundromat, they are there to do their laundry, but they’re there for the experience of It’s like doing— it’s like going to the bodega for your laundry. You come in, you load the machine, you get it started, you walk to the back, you tap your credit card on our credit card machine, or you pay cash, and you leave. And then you do your drying, and then you go away. And it is remarkable the extent to which when I first opened and people were coming in with bags and bags of quarters— think about it, my, my 45-pound machine, which is the biggest machine that I have, It’s $12.50. So imagine the quarters.

Jordan Berry [00:54:15]:
That’s a lot of quarters.

Anonymous Guest [00:54:16]:
That’s a lot of quarters. And how long is it going to take them to put those quarters in the machine?

Jordan Berry [00:54:19]:
Quarters a lot. That’s right.

Anonymous Guest [00:54:21]:
And then, you know, having to put quarters in a dryer and all of the emptying because we have a lot of activity in that little store. And I wanted people to feel like they could come in and do their laundry like they were doing it at home, that this was not transaction-based where they didn’t have to go on the wall and buy yet another little container of Gain or Tide or fabric softener or all these other little additional revenue sources. It’s like I price my machines higher, but they get everything. Everything is included. And they love that because then they don’t have to think about, oh shit, I forgot my, my detergent. Now I got to go buy this and blah, blah, blah. Like, you just want to do your laundry like you’re doing it at home. And that’s the environment that I created.

Anonymous Guest [00:55:07]:
And in the entire time I’ve had that laundromat, not one single person has ever walked out and not paid. In fact, what happens is if they do walk out and haven’t paid, they come back so horrified that they left without paying that they’re like throwing money at us by apologizing that they had forgotten to pay. It doesn’t— it just doesn’t work that way. And so they load up their washing machine, they put their— they on the top of the washers, is the soap, the bleach, the fabric softener, the vinegar, the spray cleaner, the baking soda, you name it, we’ve got it up there. And we supply all of it. They load it up, they put all their stuff in, and then they start their laundry and they just come to the back, they pay, they have a little chit-chat with the person who’s personning the cash register, and then they leave. They sit outside on the bench or chairs that we have outside, or they go back home and then they come back and they put their stuff in the dryer and happy as clams. And they are as consistent as the day is long.

Anonymous Guest [00:56:16]:
They are back every single week. And, you know, even when we have high turnover during the summer because people are coming to the neighborhood and then they’re leaving, there’s this in, in and outflow of people. We always get the new people because they’ll ask people in the building, Where’s the closest laundromat? And in fact, the price of the apartments on our block have actually gone up because there’s a laundromat right there, because it’s so hard to find laundromats in Manhattan without having to walk a long distance. And so this whole thing of how we have done something completely different in that we just let people pay at the cash register, because my rationale for doing that was, if I’m offering full service, wash and fold. We do a wash and dry service where there’s no folding involved. We just do their laundry for them, but then we take everything out, we lay it on a table organized by the type of garment it is, and then roll it up like a burrito and stick it back in the bag. They love it. And it’s, it’s more expensive than self-serve, but not as expensive as wash and, wash and fold.

Anonymous Guest [00:57:23]:
And so, you know, 30% of our business is wash and dry, 30% is wash and fold. And the rest is self-serve. We converted a lot of our self-serve customers into wash and dry. And another reason that we offered that service was because the store aisleway is so narrow and the store is so small, we had to have a way of controlling the traffic in and out.

Jordan Berry [00:57:46]:
Mm-hmm.

Anonymous Guest [00:57:46]:
Because people are banging into each other and rolling the carts around, and there’s just no room for them to move. So if we give them a service that they only pay a little bit more for, we get ’em out of the aisleway. And then we control the use of the machines. We know how to use the machines in the way that customers generally don’t know how to use the machine, where they’ll pour a half a gallon of soap into the washing machine and still feel like, with a high-efficiency machine, they’ll still feel like they haven’t put enough soap in there. So this way, we keep our machines in better condition because we’re using them and not the average consumer. So that’s been like a home run for us. has resulted in, I don’t know, 50+ 5-star reviews for us in the first 6 months of operating. And we don’t do any advertising.

Anonymous Guest [00:58:34]:
We don’t do any pickup and delivery, and we’re still 6-figure NOI.

Jordan Berry [00:58:40]:
Yeah. Well, and I hear, I was just saying this, I think in last week’s episode, I was like, I hear over and over and over from successful owners who’ve come on the podcast or who I just have talked with.

Anonymous Guest [00:58:55]:
Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:58:56]:
Uh, their number one focus is not money, not machine efficiency, not any of that stuff. It’s customer service, right? Customer experience.

Anonymous Guest [00:59:06]:
Right.

Jordan Berry [00:59:07]:
You know, and, and that truly is a differentiator. I mean, you’re in the most competitive market, uh, in probably the world, or at least in the nation. And, yeah. Are doing well out of a tiny location.

Anonymous Guest [00:59:23]:
Yeah, tiny little space with 29 machines upstairs, 12 machines in the basement. And, you know, the reality is, is if you are going to have full service, you’ve got attendants there anyways, right? You’ve got people who are doing your wash and fold. They have to create the ticket, right? They don’t just take the bag and not put a ticket on it. They have, they have to use something to generate a ticket for that bag. And so if those people are there already and they’re not, they’re not folding all day, we already know there are hours of the day where they are not folding. They’re just, you know, not busy until the next load is done. If you’ve got other people coming in, why would you not put them to use?

Jordan Berry [01:00:04]:
Mm-hmm.

Anonymous Guest [01:00:04]:
And so everyone who works for me, they know how to do the wash and fold and they know how to run the cash register and they know how to run the credit card machines and they are always there helping customers. They’ll do tutorials for customers. Who are coming in for the first time so that they use the machines properly. Because all my machines are new, which means high efficiency, and you’re using basically a tablespoon of detergent. And these people are just pouring gallons and gallons. And so before we let them do anything in there, we give them a tutorial to show them the proper use of the machines. And one last thing that we do is We have Sharpie pens and Post-it notes on top of all of the washing machines. And before they come and pay at the cash register, they write their name on a Post-it note and attach it to this little magnet that’s on the machine, and it’s got their name on it.

Anonymous Guest [01:00:59]:
So the yellow Post-it notes always tell us that those machines are self-serve, and then our tickets for wash and fold are the ones that are put on the machine for the wash and fold people. But what it also does is when a person walks in, they can just eyeball all the machines to identify where there’s an empty machine. So people keep moving. And then when they move from washer to dryer, they take their Post-it note and they put it on their machine where their clothes are. So this way, no one ever loses their clothes. They always know, just look for where their name is, and that’s where their clothes are. So we’ve like really thought about everything to make the customer flow through the store and their customer experience as positive as possible. And the returns are quite stunning.

Jordan Berry [01:01:46]:
Yeah, well, that’s the thing, right, is when you provide a good service, you can charge for it, right? And people will pay it because the bar is so low in our industry. It’s so low.

Anonymous Guest [01:02:03]:
Yeah, that’s very true. But, you know, to your point earlier where you were saying that, you know, really successful owners, they’re not focused on the money. They are focused on what is the customer experience because the money flows from the customer experience. I mean, for heaven’s sakes, it’s the most basic thing in retail. It’s like you will make more money if your customers are happy. You know, we’re in the retail business. That’s what You know, it does. I mean, it’s just like selling widgets.

Anonymous Guest [01:02:34]:
We’re just selling time on our machines. And so, are you going to make it a good experience for them? What are all the ways that people actually experience doing laundry? You know, so it I just find it to be really easy to go about providing a great experience, which translates into no advertising needs to be spent because you’ve got all your Google reviews. I mean, the number of tourists. Who travel a significant distance to come and use our laundromat because of the reviews. Like, these are a lot of people who are coming in from Europe. They don’t have any sense of how far they’re traveling to get to our laundromat. And here they come rolling in 4 huge bags of laundry. And, you know, it happens all the time.

Anonymous Guest [01:03:21]:
They’re just looking for the reviews and they get into their Uber or their taxi and they come there. They don’t have any sense of how far anything is. They go to wherever you have the best reviews, and so we don’t have to spend any money on advertising. And so we’re just there. The reviews speak for themselves. People in the neighborhood give their personal review of the experience at the laundromat, constant referrals. And so you know we don’t have the cost of advertising. We don’t have the cost, the monthly cost of all those machines.

Anonymous Guest [01:03:53]:
We use a POS system that was probably created in the 1980s. We’re literally using. A Windows XP computer to run our POS system. And every cloud-based system that I have looked at doesn’t even compare to how well this system works, even as archaic as it is. And I use it both in my laundromat and in my dry cleaning store and would put it in any other store that I acquire because I don’t need all those bells and whistles. I need the easiest way to process that transaction. And that’s what this does. But it’s like really weird.

Anonymous Guest [01:04:29]:
People, like young people, they will look at the operating system and they’ll be like, well, how come this isn’t on the cloud? And it’s like, because it’s from the 1980s and it’s just that way and it’s never going to be any different. So long as there will still be a Windows XP, that’s what we’re going with. I mean, I, I was around when Windows XP was Invented, like the 8088 IBM computer back in the 1980s. And so that’s like what these things are running on, and they’re still running. So it’s like, why reinvent the wheel when you’ve got something that works so well? Just because there’s all these bells and whistles on all this new software, you’re paying for all that technology development. And what, what is it really doing for you? I don’t have to work very hard to make money in these businesses because I’ve simplified everything. That I think has been made more complicated and more costly because of the introduction of all of the technology. And I— trust me, I am all over AI and every other possible way that I can shorten the amount of time I have to spend doing everything.

Anonymous Guest [01:05:34]:
But when it comes to operating or running my businesses, I’m going as old school as possible because back in the day they figured out how to do this and how to make money. So why introduce all these extra expenses if there’s another way to do it?

Jordan Berry [01:05:48]:
Wow.

Anonymous Guest [01:05:48]:
It’s just going against the grain because the whole herd is traveling down the path of Clean Cloud and Sense and all these other things because they don’t know any different. They don’t know any other way of doing things. But, you know, it’s kind of like if you don’t know that these other ways exist, you wouldn’t even think that there was another way. But, you know, this is the advantage of knowing how to do a lot of things that you wouldn’t even think were remotely relevant. But for example, The other day my manager called and she said the keys are getting locked in the lint drawers. Every one of the lint drawers has a lock on it and the keys were getting stuck because, you know, they get gunked up with lint and all that kind of stuff. And so one of my, my wash and fold people, she decided to put Vaseline in there. And I’m like, oh my God, really? That is not how this works.

Anonymous Guest [01:06:38]:
But she said, oh, it worked really great. And I’m like, please don’t put petroleum products in the keyhole. And so I said to my manager, I’m going to send you something. And it was a little tube of graphite powder.

Jordan Berry [01:06:49]:
Yeah.

Anonymous Guest [01:06:50]:
Because that’s what you use to open your front door. Why wouldn’t you use that just like for your machine, right? Sure enough, opened right away. And she like pushed it into every single keyhole. And so like, there are all kinds of things that, you know, that are just like basic garden variety things from your daily life that can really benefit you in there if you don’t overcomplicate what it is that you’ve actually got going on in your store. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [01:07:17]:
Well, yeah. And it kind of, I feel like that’s a lesson that you learned with that dry cleaner because you were mentioning how you spent way more money than you needed to trying to realize this spa-like vision for it and then nobody cared. Right. And you’re like, well, actually, if I just keep it simple, it gives me a lot of freedom and It also allows me to run my business effectively.

Anonymous Guest [01:07:39]:
Yeah, I’d probably have an extra $200,000 in my pocket today if I hadn’t done everything I had done that first year. But I, you know, I didn’t have any experience in dry cleaning, and I had known enough about laundromats that, yeah, I mean, you spend a lifetime with this dream, you, you learn a lot even if you haven’t done it, right? But going into the dry cleaning store, I thought, oh well, we need this and we need that. My manager’s like, Arlene, leave it alone. It’s just fine. Like, no, we need to do this. We need to do that. And you know, this is the hazard of a new owner coming in. The employees know how it runs the best, and you come in and you got all your bright ideas and all this stuff, and all you do is piss away a whole bunch of money.

Anonymous Guest [01:08:19]:
It’s like, leave it alone for a year, see how it goes, really learn the business, and figure out if there is actually anything else you need to do. But as is the case with everyone who’s new, they they like have all these ideas and. And they think this is going to work and that’s going to work. And it’s like, leave it alone. That’s part of your excitement and the sexiness of being a new owner of something. But you know what? It’s really expensive to be sexy.

Jordan Berry [01:08:47]:
Yeah, I’ve learned that. I mean, if you look at— I’ve learned that this doesn’t come cheap over here.

Anonymous Guest [01:08:53]:
Yeah, you’re grooming that beard so nice.

Jordan Berry [01:09:00]:
Yeah. Well, and I mean, it is, it’s like, it’s boring, right? If you don’t, if you just kind of come in and let it be, right? You want to come in and, you know, you’re excited to build something and I get that. And there’s not anything wrong with that necessarily, but like your point now, like it, that can get costly and you’re going to do things that, you know, some things are maybe will help and a lot of things won’t help, uh, the business. And it’s also part of the learning process though, you know, like— It really is. You’re very confident here talking about your business because you’ve gone through it. You’ve made the $200,000 mistake with that dry cleaner by upgrading in too much, right? And you’ve learned that lesson. And, you know, and so it’s part of the process too. Uh, but, you know, this podcast exists so that, you know, some of us can learn lessons, uh, the easy way as opposed to the hard way.

Anonymous Guest [01:09:49]:
Yeah, for sure. And it, and it’s really funny that, I find this a lot, like, because I have people calling me every week. I’m sure everyone who owns a laundromat has people calling them every week asking if they want to sell. Oh yeah.

Jordan Berry [01:10:05]:
And do you, by the way?

Anonymous Guest [01:10:07]:
What, do I want to sell?

Jordan Berry [01:10:09]:
Do you want to sell? Yeah.

Anonymous Guest [01:10:10]:
No, I, I’ve had— I swear, I mean, you know, if you want to give me $10 million, that’s fine. And even then, I’m not sure I would sell it. Um, but you know, Like, it’s a very strange thing that people get fixated on this idea of buying this business, and they are so myopic in how they’re thinking about it that they are not open to hearing what people who have experience, including the current owner, can share with them.

Jordan Berry [01:10:42]:
Mm-hmm.

Anonymous Guest [01:10:43]:
They are not open to Hearing anything that might cause them to have to alter their view of things. Like, they have a fantasy of what this is going to be like, and they don’t want that fantasy disrupted. So they’re not really open to hearing, you know, the good, bad, and ugly and otherwise as it pertains to the business. They really do want to figure it out themselves.

Jordan Berry [01:11:08]:
Mm-hmm.

Anonymous Guest [01:11:08]:
And it’s such a bizarre thing because they’re trying to figure out something they have no experience with. And so why do you want to spend all that money learning all the mistakes that everyone else has spent all that money learning? Why do you want to piss away your money? It’s because people are really undisciplined around their fantasies.

Jordan Berry [01:11:29]:
Mm-hmm.

Anonymous Guest [01:11:30]:
And how I look at every potential acquisition now, and I was pretty pragmatic when I went into buying these businesses because I knew I was trying to buy a book of business That was going to yield a certain amount of income for me every year. I was basically, instead of going in and you know getting a job for somewhere making X number of dollars, I was buying a business that was going to provide me the job without having to go into an office six five six days a week. But like when I look at an acquisition, I don’t care what it is at this point anymore. I don’t fall in love with the idea of it. I have no fantasy around it. All I’m doing. is looking at numbers and whether it’s going to yield X amount. Because even in that X amount, you have to subtract a bunch because you never know what can happen during the year.

Anonymous Guest [01:12:18]:
And so it’s like, what’s the minimum net operating income I’m willing to accept if I invest X number of dollars? You know, and everything is just, you know, building that portfolio. And it takes years to build a solid portfolio like that. But it’s like, you know, where else are you going to make $500,000 a year? You— I mean, those jobs are not very plentiful in any industry, you know, unless you’re like the CEO, um, and there’s only one of them. And so you basically are building toward, um, an income that is like that without having to have that job. And so everything is, you know, It’s like different revenue streams in the laundromat where some people, they, you know, there’s the self-serve, then there’s wash and fold, then there’s the vending machine revenue, there’s the revenue off the ATM, there’s a revenue off of you’re going to go out and deliver Amazon packages when your guy’s not busy. All the different ways that laundromats can make money. It’s the same thing when you’re building a portfolio. Everything is about what is it all adding to the bottom line and how much work do I have to do in order to generate that bottom line.

Anonymous Guest [01:13:31]:
And so, you know, as I look at it, if I were buying a laundromat for the first time again now, I probably would look at it exactly the same way as I did in the beginning and even the first store. What is the bottom line number I’m looking at here? You know, I think everybody starts from, oh, I want to buy a laundromat because it’s absentee ownership and all this kind of stuff. It’s like, You know, get away from, I wanna buy a laundromat. It, it is, I’m gonna buy a business that’s going to generate this kind of income for me because that’s what I need to be able to have the life that I wanna have. And then you have to figure out, okay, buying that particular business, no matter what it is, what is it gonna actually require of me on a daily basis? You know, if you wanna go in as just the money person, Like, you can’t be just the money person unless you’re partnering with someone who’s doing all of the work. And doing all of the work is not cleaning the lint trays. That’s your operations people. Doing the work is figuring out, you know, how are you going to renegotiate an extension on your lease? You know, how are you going to deal with you— like, in New York, one of the things that happened to us in 2025 is they introduced something called congestion pricing.

Jordan Berry [01:14:47]:
Mm-hmm.

Anonymous Guest [01:14:47]:
And it was designed to reduce the number of vehicles coming into New York City because the traffic is so bad. We added 80,000 e-bikers, who are the couriers that carry food and packages around, 80,000 of them in this last year. And so we’ve got now the buses, we’ve got the commercial vehicles, we’ve got the Ubers, the taxis, and now the guys on the bikes. They are all in the streets. And so—

Jordan Berry [01:15:13]:
Mm-hmm.

Anonymous Guest [01:15:13]:
The state said, we’re going to okay introducing congestion pricing. So every time you come into Manhattan, it costs $9.25. If you’re on one side of the city or on the other side, the FDR Highway or the West Side Highway, if you enter the city, you have to pay $9.25, even if you are a resident of the city. And so in 2025, I added— we use these E-ZPass things, they have transponders and stuff. My E-ZPass bill went up close to $1,000 a month because my delivery drivers were in the city.

Jordan Berry [01:15:54]:
Hmm.

Anonymous Guest [01:15:54]:
And they were in what’s called the congestion zone, which is from the lower part of Manhattan all the way up to 60th Street. And I’m north of there, so my guy has to go in and out every day. I mean, I couldn’t even believe it. And then the gas prices went up. And so you as the owner of that absentee business, what are you doing in response to you are now paying an extra $1,500 a month that’s coming straight out of your NOI because it’s not coming from anywhere else? You just picked up a huge amount of expense with no way to offset it. So you as the absentee owner, what are you going to do? Like, yeah, no. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [01:16:33]:
You either eat it or you pass it on to the customer.

Anonymous Guest [01:16:36]:
That’s right. And can you pass it on? Without causing a negative impact to your business or to your customer base? Are they going to go somewhere else because other people are not charging that fee or passing on that fee?

Jordan Berry [01:16:52]:
Yeah, those are the kind of that working on the business. Those are the decisions that, you know, and it’s not just like it’s that one decision, right? It’s all of the little decisions and they all compound on each other.

Anonymous Guest [01:17:06]:
Every day.

Jordan Berry [01:17:07]:
And yeah, that’s right.

Anonymous Guest [01:17:08]:
And that’s the amazing thing. It’s every day.

Jordan Berry [01:17:11]:
Every day.

Anonymous Guest [01:17:12]:
Every day. Every day. You, you know what, the other day my, um, laundromat manager called me because this new guy that we just hired, um, he didn’t know how to handle a customer who was having a hissy fit because we had raised the price of the small washers from $6 to $6.25. And she was carrying on like nobody’s business, and he did not know what to do with her because the the the velocity at which she was coming at him and the ferocity, like she was literally out of control. She probably was not mentally quite all there because of how out of proportion it was. But it’s that sort of thing where now the manager is calling me saying, you know. What do we need to do in this situation? Like, what do I tell him? You know, she’s carrying on about this and that. And then another thing that happens is, how do you navigate when people put a 1-star review out on Google and it was completely not warranted? What’s the strategy to respond to that customer complaint so that then you don’t feel the ripple effects from people reading that review? And then now all of a sudden you have fewer customers coming in.

Anonymous Guest [01:18:31]:
And that’s a whole strategy around dealing with things like that. And like we were both saying, this stuff comes up every single day.

Jordan Berry [01:18:40]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and that’s what it means to run a business, right? Like that’s—

Anonymous Guest [01:18:44]:
Yeah. Retail.

Jordan Berry [01:18:46]:
That’s what it means. That’s what you’re doing.

Anonymous Guest [01:18:49]:
That’s exactly right.

Jordan Berry [01:18:50]:
Yeah. And, you know, especially early on, you’re doing all that stuff and sometimes you’re mopping the floors or cleaning the lint traps too, right?

Anonymous Guest [01:18:59]:
Absolutely.

Jordan Berry [01:18:59]:
And it gets super overwhelming. And that’s why, you know, especially early on, I think you have to work really hard and intentionally towards working your way out of that. Like if you have to, uh, you know, if you need to, or you, even if you just want to, to learn the business, if you’ve gotta be the one wiping down machines, Yeah. cleaning lint traps, mopping floors, you’ve gotta be very intentional about how do you hand that off? Because it is so hard to be in that depth of the business and have to make all those little decisions all the time.

Anonymous Guest [01:19:33]:
Yeah. And it’s very stressful. It is really stressful because at what point can you feel confident that you can hand things off? And it took me over a year with my laundromat where I would go in just for an hour a day because of For whatever reason I was there, probably my own discomfort around letting go of the reins. But I’ve gotten to a point where I sometimes forget I own a laundromat because it just literally is running itself. And the only way I know it is that money keeps showing up in the bank account every day from the credit card receipts.

Jordan Berry [01:20:11]:
Yeah.

Anonymous Guest [01:20:12]:
And the bills keep coming in.

Jordan Berry [01:20:14]:
Yeah, the bills will remind you. They won’t let you forget. Good old taxman will—

Anonymous Guest [01:20:20]:
Yeah, no kidding. That electric bill comes and it’s like, oh my God, really?

Jordan Berry [01:20:24]:
I know, I know. You’re like, how can so much electricity go through 400 square feet?

Anonymous Guest [01:20:29]:
That’s crazy. Exactly, exactly. And these are high-efficiency machines. What’s going on here?

Jordan Berry [01:20:35]:
Yeah, that’s right. Awesome. Okay, so I got one last question. I mean, you kind of addressed this, but I wanted to give you an opportunity to just address this. In case there’s anything else you wanted to add to it. But, you know, lots, like you mentioned this already, lots of people out there are looking to buy laundromats right now. You know, speak to those people for a second. Do you have any advice for them? Like, hey, I’m looking to buy my first laundromat.

Jordan Berry [01:21:01]:
What advice do you have for them getting into this business?

Anonymous Guest [01:21:05]:
Well, the first thing I would say is don’t say you’re looking to buy your first laundromat. Because you are in— like, for people who already own laundromats, you’re already disqualified. Because what you’re saying to those of us who have them is that you don’t have any experience. You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re just trying to learn. And, you know, all of us are willing to help. I mean, I don’t know anybody who’s not willing to have a conversation with someone.

Anonymous Guest [01:21:35]:
But don’t Don’t set us up where we already know that you’re coming in and you’re going to ask a million questions we’ve answered a thousand times already and people still keep asking. It’s like, don’t give it away. It’s not helpful to tell people you’re looking for your first laundromat. What you’re doing is you’re looking for a laundromat. You’re looking to buy a laundromat. Do not say that you need seller financing because what it says is that you want someone else to accept all the risk. You don’t want to put anything into it, or worse, you don’t have anything to put into it because you— like, if you need seller financing, you’re already behind the 8-ball because that suggests you don’t have money to operate the business while you’re growing it. You don’t have the money to cover all of the expenses while you’re waiting for the money to come in.

Anonymous Guest [01:22:32]:
And so it’s really not beneficial to disclose all of your— all of what makes you not a good buyer right from the start. You will say that you’re looking to buy a laundromat. Don’t ask open-ended questions like, what can you tell me? That tells me you don’t know anything about the questions to ask. And people will say, well, how can I know if I, if I don’t ask people these questions? It’s do your research. There’s enough on the internet, like asking a bunch of people who are busy, they’re busy working their businesses to answer basic questions that they haven’t had themselves for 25 years. Like you’re not bringing anything to the table to the person you’re asking this of. What do you have to offer here? If you’re looking for a laundromat, you don’t say, well, I’m looking to buy a laundromat. You haven’t identified where you are.

Anonymous Guest [01:23:33]:
You haven’t identified what your price range is. You haven’t identified how much money you’re bringing to the table. So if you can’t identify just those basic things, you are not considered serious and no one is going to take you seriously. No one is going to lend you money. Like if you say I’ve got $300,000 to invest in a laundromat, what that means is that laundromat probably has a net operating income of under $100,000 depending on where you are in the country. I’m— that’s just generally speaking. It’s different for everybody and everywhere. And so, you know, people, if you don’t say I’m looking for a laundromat that costs $300,000 or less, You’re asking people all across the country who own laundromats that might be selling for $2 million, like you’re wasting everybody’s time.

Anonymous Guest [01:24:29]:
Be as specific as possible about what it is that you’re looking for and know what it is that you’re looking for. Because just these generic questions, open-ended, trying to gather information tells me you don’t have enough information to be in a position to buy a laundromat. Or you’re going to lose all your money if you do. So that’s probably what I would say is don’t make it so obvious that you don’t know what you’re doing here.

Jordan Berry [01:25:00]:
Yeah, I think that’s great advice. And it’s interesting because we have a service where we help people source deals to buy laundromats and And obviously we do some consulting, help people kind of through that process. But the biggest thing that I see is kind of what you’re saying is people, and this is totally understandable, right? If it’s your first business you’re buying, which a lot of people, it’s their first business, they have a lot of questions and they want to have a lot of information about the business so that they can decide if the business is right for them.

Anonymous Guest [01:25:38]:
Yeah.

Jordan Berry [01:25:39]:
One of the things that we do is we say, hey, we need the answers to 4 questions basically. We need to know what’s the net income, how many years are left on the lease, how much is the rent and how old’s the equipment and what’s the address?

Anonymous Guest [01:25:55]:
Fair enough.

Jordan Berry [01:25:55]:
That’s pretty much it. So if we can get those 5 pieces of information, we can send you an offer on a deal, right? And what we tell customers is like, we get it. Or our clients is like, we get it. You want to know a lot of the details. You want to be very sure about it before, you know, you get in there. But it, for one, it’s just not the way that it works most times.

Anonymous Guest [01:26:17]:
Yeah.

Jordan Berry [01:26:18]:
And for two, the more work that you make a seller do upfront, yeah, the less excited they’re going to be to help you buy their business from them.

Anonymous Guest [01:26:28]:
You’re absolutely right. And you, and you know, Jordan, the, the kind of service that you offer people, Like, if I were to recommend anything, it’s connect yourself with the people who already do this work. And I connected myself with people who were in the business, the brokers, the laundry equipment suppliers, where you develop relationships with them because you’re out looking. I mean, these are the people who know the businesses that are for sale, right? And so you talk to them and you go see the, the stores with them and they educate you along the way. But having someone like you and what you have to offer, you’ve got somebody who’s going to hold your hand through this process, who is not going to allow you to make the kind of mistakes that you’re going to make on your own if you don’t have advice. And I know in the very beginning, and this is something I’ve done throughout my whole life, is when you’re dealing with people who are expert at something, you don’t ask them for information. What you do first is you say, can I buy an hour of your time? Because it tells that person you take them seriously. You are validating and valuing the fact that they’re an expert and you’re not asking for something for free.

Anonymous Guest [01:27:46]:
If you can’t afford to spend $250 to get an hour of somebody’s time, or in some cases it’s $1,500, it doesn’t matter what it is. That investment upfront is going to help save you hundreds of thousands of dollars in errors later on, because that is in fact what happens. And I know every time I want to talk to anybody, it doesn’t matter what business they’re in. If I have identified somebody who seems to know what they’re talking about, the very first thing I say is, like with you, Jordan, can I buy an hour of your time? I have some questions. And what you’re signaling is, You are serious. You’re willing to put up your money to get the information that you need. And I guarantee you, the person that you just bought that hour from is probably never going to charge you again unless you hire them for the services. But you’ve made that first overture that says, I value what you know and I’m going to pay you for it.

Anonymous Guest [01:28:42]:
That is just a complete game changer. And many times people will say, no, I don’t even need, need you to pay me. I mean, even in the private Facebook groups that exist, I’ve actually gone to people in the group. I posted, look, I, I have a particular problem. I need some advice. I’m happy to pay you for an hour of your time. And people just offer. It’s like, Arlene, just call me.

Anonymous Guest [01:29:04]:
I don’t need your money. But the very fact that I said I was willing to pay for their time shows that I’m serious. And that makes all the difference in the world. Plus, it puts you on par with that person. You’re a professional. They’re a professional. They know something that you don’t know that you want to know. But you’re approaching them as a professional, and that means show them the money.

Anonymous Guest [01:29:27]:
And if you can’t find your way to spending $250 or $500, I mean, I have paid someone $1,500 for 45 minutes of their time, and it was the best money I ever spent. And it was hard writing that check for that $1,500, but I knew this person knew exactly what I needed to do. And it probably ended up saving me $80,000 because I was about to go down a path that was going to cost me money I was never going to recover. So that’s why, you know, consultants that have been in the business, that have owned these businesses, you know, they don’t— I mean, anybody who owns one of these businesses is valuable because they have experienced it all on their own dime and they’re willing to make it available. You got to pay for it. You don’t go to the doctor and expect the doctor to give you services for free. You pay for it. That’s exactly what this is.

Anonymous Guest [01:30:16]:
You know, there’s no free lunch out there when it comes to wanting to know about a business that you know nothing about and expecting someone to give you that information for free. It doesn’t work that way, and it’s not valuable otherwise, because unless you pay for it, it’s— you’re not going to value it.

Jordan Berry [01:30:34]:
Yeah, man, that was a— I was just letting you stand on that soapbox there because, I mean, that’s a lesson that was a hard lesson for me to learn. Yeah. You know, you were talking earlier about, I mean, I think you were basically just calling me out without really realizing you were calling me out, but talking earlier about like people getting into the business and wanting to learn everything on their own. And that’s very much how I got into this business. And it cost me, cost me big.

Anonymous Guest [01:30:59]:
Yeah.

Jordan Berry [01:30:59]:
And I say all the time now, like, I, you know, if me back then could have had a 15-minute conversation with me today, it would’ve saved me multiple 6 figures. That’s a great example.

Anonymous Guest [01:31:09]:
I love that.

Jordan Berry [01:31:10]:
You know what I mean? Yeah. And everything you’re saying is true and it was a hard and slow lesson for me to learn, but I fully agree with that now. I spend multiple 5 figures every year to be in groups and be in rooms with people who know what they’re doing and who know things that I don’t know and who are connected in ways that I’m not connected because I just see the value of it now and I will never get into a new asset class again without, you know, finding somebody and saying, hey, let me, let me pay you to help me do it right the first time. Because yeah, I don’t need to be reinventing the wheel over here anymore.

Anonymous Guest [01:31:48]:
And, you know, the thing too is that, you know, in a lot of the Facebook groups that involve laundromats and stuff, you know, occasionally you’ll see somebody offering consulting services and there will be kind of like a piling on. Of those people from laundromat owners. And the reality is, is that if somebody like anybody who has the experience, they know more than the person who doesn’t have the experience. And so they could talk to 100 different people in a Facebook group and get different information. You know, I mean, some of it’s pretty basic from laundry to laundry. But, you know, I have a lot of respect for people who are, you know, hanging out their shingles saying I’m doing consulting. And, you know, a lot of laundry owners will be like, well, how’s he qualified to do that? It’s like, you know, dude, take your sour grapes somewhere else. This is what he’s hanging out his shingle and he’s offering these services and you can offer your services too, if that’s what you choose to do.

Anonymous Guest [01:32:46]:
There’s no harm in someone putting themselves out there. It’s not like they’re putting themselves out there as I’m the expert at how you go about buying a laundromat. It’s like what I’m expert at is what I know. And what I’ve experienced and what I have learned as a result of spending all my money in a certain way. And you may or may not have that experience, but it would be good for you to have some of the experience that I had because there are like common denominators out there across all laundromats. What do you have? How much is the lease? What’s the total revenue? How old are the machines? How long is the lease for? Like really basic things. And every one of those things It’s very complicated. You know, it’s not just simply how long is the lease? What are the implications of that?

Jordan Berry [01:33:35]:
Mm-hmm.

Anonymous Guest [01:33:36]:
You know, how many other stores are near you? Like, these are really basic business questions that aren’t specific to laundromats. They’re basic business questions. So, you know, plug in a retail store, plug in, you know, you’re an electrical supplier or an electrician or I don’t know, fill in the blank. You know, the businesses themselves are interchangeable. But, you know, people like you and others who are offering these types of services, like, have really unique niche experience. All of us do that have our businesses. Like, every one of us could be out there saying, you know, I’m going to offer these services, but I’m busy trying to acquire more stores. So I don’t want to spend my time talking to people, you know, helping them with their first acquisition.

Anonymous Guest [01:34:22]:
I appreciate the effort and You know, commitment to them one, and and the fantasy and the dream and the hope and the goal of being able to own one of these kind of businesses. But I’m like way out in front of all of that. I was already there, and I want to keep moving forward into how do I continue continue building my portfolio of assets so that I really am at a point financially where I never have to think about anything anymore. And so spending time with people, the thing is is I used to do that in the other business that I had for fifteen years. I spent a lot of time on panels. And talking to people. And, you know, people would pay, they’d hire me to do business consulting for them. And that was a moment in time.

Anonymous Guest [01:35:03]:
That’s not my moment in time right now. So, you know, kudos to you and your team for what you’re offering and anybody else who’s out there. You know, I know there’s that guy, the Laundromat Millionaire.

Jordan Berry [01:35:15]:
Yeah, Dave.

Anonymous Guest [01:35:16]:
Yeah, I think he was one of the people that I actually paid right in the beginning. I didn’t want to buy his services. But it was very early on, and I just sent him a Facebook message, and I said, can I just buy an hour of your time? And I asked him all the questions that I had. And, you know, I had the opportunity to go through his program, but it wasn’t right for me at that moment in time because I was still too early in the process. And I was a seasoned entrepreneur already. There were a lot of things that he was going to be covering that I already knew. I didn’t know it specific to laundries. I just knew it generally speaking in businesses, and he’s dealing with a lot of people who haven’t owned businesses before.

Anonymous Guest [01:35:56]:
So I give a lot of credit to people who are providing a service where you are experts in what you know and people can take advantage of that. And if people are bitching about the cost of those services, they have no business searching for these businesses because They’re not ready and they don’t have the money to do it.

Jordan Berry [01:36:18]:
Yeah. Well, I found a lot of the people who have a problem with that in general are people who’ve been in the industry a really long time and feel like, oh, this business is easy. And they don’t realize how much they know and how much knowledge they’ve acquired through their experience. And they don’t realize that. And the reason I know is because that was me when I got in and I didn’t have anybody to turn to and I couldn’t find anybody who would talk me through stuff and paid the price for it. Money and time and effort and energy. And so that’s what bore a lot of my resources. I was like, well, I learned these expensive lessons.

Jordan Berry [01:37:00]:
Let me try to share ’em with other people so they don’t have to learn ’em the hard way.

Anonymous Guest [01:37:03]:
Yep. That’s absolutely right. I completely agree with you. And every one of us who have gotten into these businesses, we blow through so much money, just learning. You know, the very first business that I started many decades ago, in fact, you know, I went through $400,000 and I had to treat that $400,000 as like a very expensive PhD or, you know, academic program where I was learning on the job, so to speak. But that learning was very, very costly and all of it could have been avoided had I had someone to talk to to help me through all of that. But one thing that does happen, and I’m very guilty of this, is that in the beginning, I got so excited about these businesses early, much earlier on, a few decades ago, and I wouldn’t listen to anyone because I thought I knew better than everyone else. And I was headstrong about it.

Anonymous Guest [01:37:58]:
And it was very, very expensive and painful.

Jordan Berry [01:38:01]:
Mm-hmm.

Anonymous Guest [01:38:02]:
Fortunately, it worked out financially, but that, that’s a really expensive lesson to learn. The thing is, is you don’t have to have that lesson. You don’t have to pay that cost if you can get your ego out of the way.

Jordan Berry [01:38:15]:
That’s right.

Anonymous Guest [01:38:15]:
Because it’s all ego. It’s just about, oh, you know, you’re so cocksure, so to speak, that you don’t think you can learn anything from anybody because you’ve done this, that, and the next thing. It’s like, wow, no, what you’ve learned doing this, that, and the next thing is just going to help you in what you’re about to do. But if you’re entering an industry or a sector that you have no experience in, you’re like in preschool. You’re not even in kindergarten yet. Why are you going to go in there acting like you know something?

Jordan Berry [01:38:44]:
Yeah, well, and we’re well over 250 episodes of this podcast now, and people ask me, like, why do you keep doing it? And it’s because I crave— well, first of all, I like meeting people like you who are doing cool things. Yeah, that’s cool. I’ll say that. But also, I just crave— the more I learn, about this business, about business in general, sales, marketing, all of it, operations, all of it, the more I realize I don’t know enough. Like I don’t know is—

Anonymous Guest [01:39:18]:
Yeah.

Jordan Berry [01:39:18]:
There’s so much more to know out there. And so getting to talk to you, like I’ve taken away so much good stuff just from talking to you and how it, seeing how you operate your business, how you think about your business. And to me, you The process never stops, right? The cycle of learning never stops.

Anonymous Guest [01:39:38]:
Totally agree.

Jordan Berry [01:39:39]:
And when it does, things decline, right? Your business declines, you decline mentally. Like things decline when you stop learning and growing. And so that’s, I think it’s just so, it’s so important. And if you have that posture where like, hey, I know everything, I can’t learn anything from anybody. It’s gonna cost you. There’s no getting around it. It’s gonna cost you in the long run.

Anonymous Guest [01:40:03]:
Yeah. And when you think you’ve done 250 episodes talking to people who have experience in this, there are different takeaways from every single episode.

Jordan Berry [01:40:11]:
Everyone.

Anonymous Guest [01:40:12]:
You’ve got a book sitting there with all of the takeaways that, that book’s probably 500 pages long if you’re an efficient writer. You know what I mean? Because every single person has different things happen in their business. They have different ways Approaching them, and they solve problems in different ways. Obviously, you know, if a machine breaks, you know, there are certain ways you go about fixing it. For me, I just call somebody. Not that I want to spend the money, but it’s like, I’m sorry, I just don’t want to get out another wrench. I just don’t want to do it. I don’t want to replace another washing machine hose.

Anonymous Guest [01:40:45]:
I’m done, you know. So now it’s like, I’m just— my guy comes back.

Jordan Berry [01:40:49]:
Paid your dues.

Anonymous Guest [01:40:49]:
Yeah, I’ve done it, and I just don’t want to do that anymore. I got other things I want to do. I’m trying to buy another store, you know what I mean?

Jordan Berry [01:40:56]:
Mm-hmm.

Anonymous Guest [01:40:56]:
So it, that’s the thing. But, you know, to your credit, hanging in there this long, the learning that you have that supports whatever you’re gonna do going forward, not to mention the relationships that you’ve developed with people. I mean, I know a lot of the owners of dry cleaning stores and, and laundromats in Manhattan now because, you know, we all know the same people now because as big as New York City is, it’s very small when it comes to the kind of businesses that we have. And we all have— Problems. Everybody right now is, you know, the big challenge is finding dry cleaning factories because their workers have just scattered to the wind. And, you know, that’s happening in other places as well, for obvious reasons. And, you know, we all are facing the same thing. So everybody’s looking for a referral for a new factory, or, you know, who have you used for this? Do you have any good wash and fold people? And those are your best sources of of information.

Anonymous Guest [01:41:50]:
They are tremendous resources, but you have to put the time in and developing those relationships with people. But once you have that network, I can— now I can just pick up the phone and call anybody because I know who to call about whatever the issue is. In the beginning, I had no idea. It was hit or miss. And boy, those misses were expensive.

Jordan Berry [01:42:09]:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, listen, we could probably do this all day long and talk about stories and lessons learned and all that. And, you know, maybe we need to do another one down the line here and keep the ball rolling. But I really appreciate you coming on. This was an incredible episode, just jam-packed full of very practical stuff. But also for me, and this is what I look at a lot now, is your mindset, the way that you look at business and the way that you, in particular, like your I, I, I’ll call it, you know, countercultural method of, you know, using the cash register. And, you know, I, I mean, just, I love hearing that and the reasoning behind that, right?

Anonymous Guest [01:43:02]:
Yeah.

Jordan Berry [01:43:02]:
And I think, you know, in a world that’s going towards less and less contact, less and less touch between, you know, people automating more, all that stuff, you’ve kind of held back and gone the other way and say, hey, come talk to our cash register. To, you know, our cashier to pay for your, you know, pay for your laundry. And, you know, well, you know, that way—

Anonymous Guest [01:43:25]:
And if I could just add one last thing to that particular thing is that, you know, there are almost 10 million people in New York City and everybody feels alone because the city is so overwhelming. And the level of loneliness among people because they can’t meet people and so forth And that’s another reason to do it, because you go to the laundry every week, you see the same people, you start to feel a little more relaxed about where you are and a little less lonely. And that was really important to me because, I mean, like I say, New York City is really overwhelming when you live there. And so having a place that people can go, they can count on, there’s a sort of a consistency that’s very calming because you walk in, you see the same people, you chitchat at the cash register. It’s, I won’t say it is so much about community as it is just about feeling a little less alone. And that was really important to me.

Jordan Berry [01:44:28]:
Yeah. And it’s one thing I like about this business. I say this all the time, but you have the ability when you own a laundromat, You know, it’s like one of the few places people still kind of come and gather together in the community.

Anonymous Guest [01:44:40]:
Yeah.

Jordan Berry [01:44:40]:
And you have the ability to make a, like a genuine impact in a community.

Anonymous Guest [01:44:46]:
Totally.

Jordan Berry [01:44:47]:
You don’t have to make an impact, and a lot of laundromats don’t. Yeah. But you, you have that opportunity there. And if that’s something that’s important to you, you know, whether it’s, you know, loneliness or, you know, just a, a feeling of camaraderie and, you know, that’s completely Like, there’s a lot of different ways that you can impact the community. And, you know, apart from it being, you know, a good business that brings in good returns and all that stuff.

Anonymous Guest [01:45:12]:
Yeah.

Jordan Berry [01:45:12]:
There’s sort of that altruistic side of it as well.

Anonymous Guest [01:45:15]:
Yeah, completely agree, Jordan. Well, I really, really appreciate this time with you. It’s been lovely to talk to you. I’m sorry I spent so much of the time talking.

Jordan Berry [01:45:23]:
That’s what it’s for. Nobody wants to hear me talk. Yeah, I’ve already learned that.

Anonymous Guest [01:45:28]:
It’s really, really been very lovely and I hope it’s helpful to people.

Jordan Berry [01:45:32]:
Oh, I know people are going to get a lot out of it. And I really, really appreciate you taking the time to, you know, to come and share your story and share your wisdom and share your hard-earned lessons and, you know, show people different ways of doing this business. It’s another kind of thing I’ve learned doing the podcast, right? It’s like this business is so simple and yet everybody I talk to runs their business a little bit differently. There’s lots of different ways to do this business.

Anonymous Guest [01:45:58]:
It’s really great.

Jordan Berry [01:46:00]:
Yeah. So it’s cool to hear about that. So I really appreciate you.

Anonymous Guest [01:46:03]:
It’s been my pleasure.

Jordan Berry [01:46:04]:
And like I said, we’ll have to do this again because that was a lot of fun.

Anonymous Guest [01:46:07]:
I would love to. Thank you, Jordan. All right. Thank you. Yep.

Jordan Berry [01:46:10]:
I hope you love that show with our anonymous, anonymous, anonymous, unanimous, anonymous guest, uh, today. I told you it was jam-packed full of information, a lot of wisdom in there, hard-earned experience wisdom. Uh, there. Now, here’s my challenge to you is pick something, at least one thing, put it into action today if possible. If not today, then this week. Those actions are what are going to help you achieve your goals. So whether you own a laundromat or multiple laundromats, there’s stuff in there for you. Pick something and implement it into your businesses.

Jordan Berry [01:46:44]:
If you’re trying to buy that first laundromat, there’s stuff in there for you as well. Implement it. Maybe it’s booking A free strategy call to talk about how we might be able to help you get in that first laundromat. Uh, or maybe it’s just something from this episode. Get it in there and make it happen. All right.

Anonymous Guest [01:47:00]:
All right.

Jordan Berry [01:47:00]:
We’ll see you next week after you have taken action on this week’s episode. Don’t let episodes go by without taking some sort of action. That’s my challenge to you. All right. We’ll see you.

Anonymous Guest [01:47:13]:
Peace. Peace.