Dominating a Competitive Market with Laundry Pick-up & Delivery with John Simerson

Jordan Berry [00:00:00]:
Hey. Hey. What’s up, guys? It’s Jordan with the laundromat Resource Podcast. This is show one ninety two, and I am pumped you’re here today because today, we have on the show John Simerson, who is dominating in the pickup and delivery, niche of our little business here. And he is in a mega competitive market, and he breaks down exactly what he’s doing to dominate in a competitive market. So tons of takeaways here. And not only that, if you’re not even doing pickup and delivery or you don’t have plans to do pickup and delivery, there’s just a lot of really good practical business tips in here for you. So a lot of good takeaways.

Jordan Berry [00:00:37]:
John’s an awesome guy. So much good stuff. I know you’re gonna get a ton out of that. Real quick, I want to remind you two things. Number one, if you want more information from any podcast episode, you can go to laundromatresource.com/show and then the episode number. So this is show one ninety two laundromat resource dot com slash show one 90 two. That’s true for every episode. You can go get more information.

Jordan Berry [00:01:01]:
If there’s links or anything that we talk about, that will all be over their contact information, all that. So all you gotta do is find out, what episode number you’re listening to with any guest. You can go to their show notes. LawnRentResource.com/show, and then the number of the show that they are. Okay? The second thing is this. I haven’t done this in a really long time, and somebody just reminded me and just said, hey, maybe you should do this. I I thought I’d throw it out there. If you’ve listened to this podcast before or if this is your first time listening, by the end of it, you’re like, this is killer.

Jordan Berry [00:01:33]:
Good stuff. And you really appreciate the content. If you could just leave a review on whatever platform you’re on, a rating and review. Or if you’re on YouTube watching it, maybe you can just drop a like or a comment or something like that. And one thing I really suggest doing this episode and any episode is if you appreciate what the guest is sharing, this this, this podcast is all about the guests. Right? And so if you appreciate what they’re sharing, maybe just drop a comment if you’re on YouTube and and let the guests know, John in in this episode. But let them know that you appreciate that they’re taking time out of their day to share hard earned lessons that they have learned, sometimes that have worked and that you can implement and sometimes that have not worked and you can learn from. So just drop a little comment, say thank you.

Jordan Berry [00:02:21]:
And again, if you’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, any of the other platforms, and you could just leave us a rating and review, that would be awesome. Awesome. Alright. Let’s jump into it, John, so you can get the secrets on how to dominate your market when it comes to pickup and delivery. John, thank you for coming on the show, man. How you doing?

John Simerson [00:02:40]:
Good. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Jordan Berry [00:02:42]:
No. Thank you, not man. Thank you for taking the time to come share some of your experiences, some of your wisdom. Listen, this is I’m just gonna call this one the episode in paradise because I’m in Hawaii right now. You’re in San Diego. This is, like, pretty much the dream right here.

John Simerson [00:02:59]:
I agree with that. Completely. Yeah. You’re doing a little better for me, but I’m with it.

Jordan Berry [00:03:06]:
Yeah. We’re just talking. There’s a right now, there’s a little gecko on top of my camera in my outdoor studio here. So it’s just this is fun. This is fun, man. Well, dude, why don’t you give us a little bit of background on you and who you are, and then we’ll just kinda jump into your story here.

John Simerson [00:03:22]:
Yeah. Absolutely. I, so my name is John. I own Tropmint Laundry Services here in San Diego. Lot of my background is in food and beverage. I actually did a lot of restaurant opening, did like some entrepreneurial stuff with restaurants. Laundry was kind of an interesting thing. I was director of food and beverage at a hotel And I was working late, you know, working a lot of hours and told my wife that I wanted to get back in the entrepreneurial space.

John Simerson [00:03:53]:
Had this kind of crazy idea in the middle of the night to put laundry on a nap. And this was this was ten years ago. So this was, kind of at the I think Washoe, if you’re familiar with them, like Washoe was around back then still. Jordan was doing this thing there. And then Rince, I think, had just came out. So this was kinda early laundry app pioneer days. And had the idea of putting laundry on an app and saved up some money, got some overseas development, and, quit my job, and here we are.

Jordan Berry [00:04:27]:
Dang. That’s crazy. That’s crazy. Because, you know, like, I think most people think stuff like that, and they’re like, oh, yeah. Like, I’m gonna, you know, I’m gonna create my own app and do a laundry business or whatever, but then never do it. So I I’m curious, like, how did you get over the hump of, like, you had this idea. How did you make this idea happen?

John Simerson [00:04:52]:
A lot I would say a lot of trial and error. One of the things I do a lot is I think of things all the way through. So I think of the process for, like when you’re in food and beverage, you have to think of the entire process, like, from hostess check-in to people getting the bill. The hotel that I worked at was the Del Coronado, which is pretty pretty well known. And, like, their experiences are, you know, they’re they’re five star. Everything is five star. And if you work there, you’re pretty good at what you do. So every single thing that, you know, I’ve ever done in restaurants, from opening my own restaurant to working for other people in restaurants, you have to think of the whole process.

John Simerson [00:05:31]:
And it’s it was kind of difficult because if you go to Barnes and Noble or, like, go online, there’s a million resources for opening a restaurant or like a lot of the ideas people have. But putting laundry on an app was kind of you had to really self educate and like really trial and error. And you’re kind of like writing the book yourself, so to speak, which is pretty cool because I get a lot of people that reach out. They’re like, hey. Like, I’m trying to do this. There’s no info on this, and you seem to have a lot of info. So, a lot of trial and error. A lot of trial and error with the app.

John Simerson [00:06:07]:
You know, sometimes we are a laundry company, but I kinda, like, tell people that we’re kind of a tech company instead of just laundry because there’s so much, involvement in the tech side that I kinda forget that we do laundry because we’re so invested in the tech as well. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:06:25]:
Yeah. Well, and especially being in or so early on, like, that that tech wasn’t there. There’s different softwares available now and, you know, that can do that. But that was that was real early on, where that stuff was just kind of being developed.

John Simerson [00:06:41]:
So very,

Jordan Berry [00:06:43]:
very cool. Did you what was that transition like from doing the food and beverage stuff and and hotel stuff to did you kinda start it on the side, or did you just jump in both feet, go for it, and made it happen?

John Simerson [00:06:58]:
It was kind of a mix of both. I, I had transitioned to another hotel in downtown, and, they needed help with their food menu and their wine menu. And so that’s kind of my individual specialty is wine menus. So they said, hey. We need a a good food menu, wine menu. We got a director of food and beverage position open. Can you come on? So they took me on and I was there for, like, six months. I had this idea, like, three months in.

John Simerson [00:07:27]:
And I just when I have an idea, I’m just, like, I’m up all night. Like, I’m very committed to, like, making sure it gets done. And put in my two week notice right before the app launched. We launched the app. It was very slow, like, as as expected. My wife had just had our firstborn son. So pretty pretty interesting time of, like, making sure you can provide and then, you know, kind of making this app thing work and stuff like that. So it was kinda, it had to work.

John Simerson [00:07:56]:
You know, I always told my wife that, like, this has to work. Like, we gotta make sure that this works. And, yeah. So the the transition period was about three months after my last stay at the hotel, to when we started seeing some, really good traction, I would say full blown kinda tech involved in, like, app, full features, everything like that was about a year. And year sounds like a long time, but when you’re kind of bootstrapping everything and doing a lot of things yourself and an app is very fast. Like, if you can put out an app with our features and stuff like that that fast using overseas resources, an app is in a year is tremendously fast without much support. So I would say it was it was about a good year of going back and forth and, getting getting everything going.

Jordan Berry [00:08:47]:
Yeah. No. That sounds very fast to me, to, you know, to get to get that thing up and running for sure. Just know I mean, just doing even simpler things that can take a year a year to do, on the tech side, especially back then. I mean, again, this was this was a while back now where stuff was still being developed. Okay. So you had this idea. You decided to take the leap and you did it.

Jordan Berry [00:09:18]:
How did you? Well, I’m just curious. This is not really laundry related, but since you’re sort of a tech company, too, I’m curious, like, how did you actually source your, your your developers and stuff to actually build the app for you?

John Simerson [00:09:33]:
So when I first had the idea, I, a new American technology was very expensive, and I was like, yeah, that I’m not making that kind of money. You know, like, that that would take some serious dough to and even today, like Yet. Exactly. Yet. And, I I always wanted to stay bootstrapped. I knew that a lot of restaurants that had, went kind of the funding route and stuff like that. I imagined that, like, it was the same scenario. And I was like, you know what? It’s not for me.

John Simerson [00:10:05]:
Like, I like being in control. I wanna be able to maneuver the business in my direction. And so hopped online, went on Fiverr, went on PeoplePerHour, made some good the people I ended up using, actually were not on there, but they connected me through relationships. And, right now, our tech team is completely overseas. We have a small office where we have about three employees, and they’re on salary in relation to how their country works. So they’re consistently updating things and, you know, making sure things are working and, you know, any little tasks that we need. Even things that are not tech related, but, like, maybe graphics or, like, stuff like that, they use. It was more of I feel like over overseas as well, you because the prices are much more approachable, it’s tech is kind of something it’s kind of like fashion.

John Simerson [00:11:03]:
Like it never ends. Right? Like you, you know, you can implement something and then you say, oh, well, this might be better. Like, this might be better. You could do, like, three changes in The States and could cost you 10 k, you know, rather than you kind of do you develop your idea, you know, off three things and overseas, it would be possibly a few hundred. So you have a lot more bandwidth to kind of expand your imagination.

Jordan Berry [00:11:27]:
Yeah. Yeah. No. That’s awesome. And the, you know, I guess the arbitrage play of using people overseas, is an awesome way to bootstrap because, you know, you can pay them a, you know, a good wage, for for where they are and help them have a good life, but also get really good quality work. And, it feels like a win win.

John Simerson [00:11:53]:
Yeah, for sure. I would completely. Awesome.

Jordan Berry [00:11:56]:
Yeah. Okay. So once you have this thing built, what was your process like of trying to build this business from scratch? I mean, because back then, I mean, not very many people even knew about the service. Did you focus on residential, commercial? How did you get customers? How’d you get people to download your app? Like, I have so many questions, here. But let’s just start with, like, how did what was the launch like?

John Simerson [00:12:23]:
So the launch was literally it was, wasn’t wasn’t as sexy as you might think. It, we literally uploaded it to the App Store. And Apple I’m gonna kinda I’m an Android guy, so I’m kinda kinda throwing shade at Apple a bit. But it is true. Apple uploading of apps, if you’ve ever done, like, your own your own lap, not not a white label app, but, like, a custom app, Apple’s difficult. Like, they have so many kinda ins and outs. And when you cross that finish line with Apple for the first time, it’s like winning the lottery. Like, when they approve it and you get, like, that like, your app is good to go live, it’s a it’s a good day.

John Simerson [00:13:02]:
You know, it’s like you take the rest of the day off. So when we upload it, I wish, you know, I wish I I had done kind of a bigger launch and kind of more PR and stuff like that. But I was still kind of in focus mode. Like, I’m very big on, improving the product. We don’t we can kind of discuss this later. It’s probably gonna be interesting to you, but we actually don’t do any marketing. We’re actually gonna start getting into marketing this year. All of our growth is organic.

John Simerson [00:13:27]:
It’s all word-of-mouth. It’s all reviews. It’s all testimonials. And this year, not that I don’t believe in marketing, but I am extremely kind of focused on the product and making sure the product is great. And it’s kind of a good testimonial that if you focus on the product and you make it a %, hundred and ten %, people will talk and people will say, you know, this is amazing. And it’s kind of it’s the best kind of marketing in my opinion. So this is actually the first year in about two months we’re gonna launch a pretty big marketing campaign. But we haven’t done any any prior to that.

John Simerson [00:14:01]:
So the launch was pretty subtle. Me me and my wife were just really just trying to get orders in, trying to get exposure. Remember, like, when we launched, we had no reviews on Yelp. We were the little guy. Like, we had no Google reviews. We didn’t have any traction. I wasn’t a laundry a lot of guys in the San Diego laundry space are like third generation, fourth generation. It’s a very kind of generational business.

John Simerson [00:14:26]:
Right? And I had no idea of anything of, you know, any of the tips and tricks and stuff like that and, didn’t really take on a mentor or anything like that. Just me and my wife just kinda winged it the whole time and freestyled it. So yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:14:44]:
And, you know, it’s like bootstrapping with bootstraps, like

John Simerson [00:14:48]:
All the way. Really? Really? I love it. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:14:51]:
Yeah. That’s awesome. Okay. So you guys just kinda sort of bootstrapped. So did you focus on residential? Did you go after small businesses? Both? Or, like, what did that look like?

John Simerson [00:15:04]:
So in the beginning, we, I actually took the first first weekends and, you know, Monday through Friday, I would work on the app and, like, work on the product. And then I would take I had one of the skills I figured out I had through this business was sales. And restaurants is kind of like sales. You know, like you’re kind of persuading people on the menu and like you’re persuading people to come to your restaurant and stuff like that. And you have to be fairly articulate and know how to talk to people. So I would take every Saturday and I would call, like I cold call from you know, 10AM whenever people were awake to 5PM. And I knew that Saturday was a great day because Monday through Friday, you know, business owners are busy and, you know, they have stuff to do. So I would call small businesses, nine to five, and I’d call skin care places, waxing places, kind of your small cosmetology, businesses.

John Simerson [00:16:02]:
In the beginning, I had no idea that, like, hotels were ran by these very frugal, rental linen companies. So that was, like, a culture shock where I was like, oh, you know, we could, you know, take on some hotels and, like, take on some restaurants. And then I find out that, in our in our in San Diego, there’s, like, Allsco and, like, Mission and like these guys that are at like I think back then they were doing crazy numbers like 9¢ a pound or something. But they were they were renting the linen and like, you know, you can’t compete with 9¢ a pound. So, kind of a kind of a culture shock for me, but I focused on smaller medium businesses that kind of had owner and shop, and I wanted to take laundry off their plate. And it worked. I probably got for the first I did that for, the first year and I nailed about one account a Saturday and about half of those accounts are still with us today, you know, nine, ten years later. So they, you know and a lot of them are friends at this point.

John Simerson [00:17:08]:
They’re growing their business. They’ve seen they’ve seen me go from like their personal driver picking up and delivering to, you know, now we kind of have a fleet. So they like seeing the growth. We love seeing their growth. But initially, that was that was the first focus. Obviously, the app, took care of residential customers. I noticed in laundry that a lot of laundry businesses are kinda one dimensional. Like, they focus on just residential, or they focus on, you know, just, hotels, or just like this kind of thing.

John Simerson [00:17:40]:
And I said, you know, that’s I could see that. Like I could see how that makes sense. Like you’re very you specialize in one thing. But I don’t think laundry I think that you can you can take care, you know, the whole pie, and you can kind of pick up everything that’s there. I don’t think that it’s really that serious. So that’s that’s the approach we’ve taken, and that’s the approach that’s that’s worked. We do hotels, motels, Airbnb co hosting companies, individual Airbnbs, government contracts, military contracts, confidential contracts. We do anything, you know, anything that needs cleaning.

John Simerson [00:18:13]:
You know, I I remind our our, our operators, like, we’re a cleaning company. You know, if they need it cleaned, you know, we can do it. So or we can we can figure out a way to do it. So in the early days, very much focused on local San Diego, businesses, hoping for the app to push more residential side. I had no idea back then how to get into contracts and, you know, kind of bigger stuff like that. And then what we kind of saw evolve, which was interesting, was, we actually morphed into kind of pre COVID. Post COVID, we’re getting back to it. But pre COVID, we, at one point, were predominantly an Airbnb cohosts laundry company.

John Simerson [00:18:56]:
Those numbers were insane pre COVID. Like, we were getting calls left and right because we had developed a system to take care of those people. So I would say we were we were kind of focused on the whole pie, so to speak.

Jordan Berry [00:19:08]:
Yeah. Yeah, man. Yeah. Sounds like you’ve you’re kind of all over. And doing doing everybody’s laundry, man. Just doing it all. I love it. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:19:17]:
And I want to get into Yeah, I want to get into some of that, too. How you kind of merge into some of these areas. But as you, as you were growing, I mean, like your your app had had to get out somehow. So, I mean, did you, like, did you start just by inviting friends and family or, like, how or just it being in the store, people stumbled upon it or, like, how and you said you didn’t do any marketing. I’m, like, so curious. Like, how did people hear about it and start downloading it? Because, obviously, I mean, like, that’s happened. So how I mean, if you can even remember back that far, like, how did that start? How did that happen?

John Simerson [00:20:01]:
So we, during, like I I call it the cowboy days. So, like, in the early days, like, the cowboy days, we, if you can picture it, my my wife’s cousin was around a lot. We had just had my oldest son, and, we we had a lot of family around and, they were very supportive of the idea. Always trying to help with whatever they could and, you know, they wanted to see the idea take off. And he was always just kind of around. And I said, hey. You know what? This was the, the big Pokemon. I don’t know if you remember when poke the Pokemon app thing was big and, like, people were out trying to catch them all and stuff like that.

John Simerson [00:20:38]:
So it was kinda good timing. I printed, like, I wanna say, like, 500 kinda rinky dink on paper, download the app, laundry, like, you know, type I don’t remember the code, but, like, use this code in the app and, like, you know, and we’ll give you a discount for first time use, stuff like that. And we literally went around to, like, these Pokemon gatherings and, just handed them out to people. Like, we would just I would drive up, he’d hop out, and, he would he would pass him out. And they the Pokemon people were out at night, so we would be doing this, like, super dark. And we have we have a lot of funny stories about, like, you know, he’d be running in the middle of the street, like, trying not to get hit by cars and stuff like that. And, but, yeah, that was kind of the most organic organic that we did. We started in the early early days.

John Simerson [00:21:28]:
We didn’t I knew Yelp and, kind of review platforms as a whole were important. But those you know, you need customers to leave reviews. Right? So getting getting the app out, I think, was the having an app and having a credible platform is probably one of the hardest things because especially if you don’t have, like, a brick and mortar shop. When people, you know, walk up to a shop, it kinda gives you credibility because they can go they can hold a location accountable. Right? But if you’re kind of this invisible business online, I think that we are used to, like, Uber and stuff like that, which is kind of an invisible business. But, for laundry, I remember I had spoken to a few people around town to do to do our dry cleaning because I I didn’t have a dry cleaning facility. So, you know, a lot of their their, responses were pretty negative. They’re like, laundry through an app, like it’s never gonna work.

John Simerson [00:22:23]:
Like it’s not, it’s, you know, and I’m like, guys are already doing it. Like this is where it’s gonna go. Like everything is on your phone now. And laundry will be on our phones as well, just like Amazon’s on our phone, Uber, you know, all these things. So with with, with laundry being kind of an old school industry, we we didn’t get much support from a lot of the local local dry cleaning people. So

Jordan Berry [00:22:48]:
Yeah. No. I can imagine. I mean, I mean, until, like, the last couple of years, there’s been a lot of pushback on anything new, in this business. So it’s, yeah, trying to trying to break in with something new, you know, ten years ago. Yeah. I you had your work cut out for you for sure, doing that. So, I I’m curious, too, about, you know, as you’re as you’re getting this thing, you know, up and running, where are where did you process the laundry? Did you go to do it at your house? Did you go to laundromats to do it? How did you actually do the laundry when you were getting started?

John Simerson [00:23:34]:
In the very beginning, one of the things that attracted me to it was I, we me and my wife had saved up a certain amount of money. And so, like I said, we had our oldest son and I was like, look, like we have to do something that is kind of low risk, and something that, you know, if it doesn’t work out for whatever reason, you know, we try our hardest, it doesn’t work, we don’t necessarily lose, you know, everything that we have. And so we installed the second washer dryer, and we literally did everything, in house. We did that for I wanna say we did that for about half a year. And it it got we we have a lot of cool pictures. Like, it it got pretty interesting real fast because the garage got pretty full. And we were like, okay. This is we gotta we gotta get a bigger space.

John Simerson [00:24:23]:
So, yeah, everything was done in the garage, installed the second washer dryer. And I would go out to the pickup and deliveries. My wife would stay at home with my son, and she’d do the orders. And we were just we were cranking in the beginning.

Jordan Berry [00:24:37]:
Yeah. That’s awesome. You have to try to dig up, one or two of those pictures and send them over. That’d be fun to see.

John Simerson [00:24:43]:
Oh, definitely. We got a lot of cool like the people churning

Jordan Berry [00:24:46]:
out the garage full. Yeah. Yeah, that’d be cool. Okay. So after like that six months or however long it was, what what did you do after that? Did you have to move to a different space or, like, where did you what was the evolution of that like before you were processing laundry?

John Simerson [00:25:04]:
We moved to, we had taken on this really big Airbnb co hosting company, and, they were like, hey. We have 50 properties throughout all of San Diego. Nobody will take us, nobody will take us with a solution for the problem that we have. We heard you you’re willing to do custom solutions and stuff like that. I said, yeah. You know, we’ve been doing it for a few of the smaller Airbnb owners and stuff like that. And you get, you know, in in laundry and probably any business, you get calls all the time and people are like, oh, you know, I got 50 properties. And you’re like, yeah.

John Simerson [00:25:41]:
It’s more like 25 or more like 30. Right? This company really had 50 properties. So, the garage at that point was kind of we couldn’t move. And I was like, Okay, this is great. And my wife was like, Hey, there’s not enough time in the day with the amount of washer dryers we have to get all this done. Like, we gotta figure something out. So we literally saved, saved, saved. A lot of the money we were making back then, we were, you know, again, bootstrapping and kind of recycling, investing in the product.

John Simerson [00:26:12]:
Everything’s custom. So like, we like from the beginning, we were a full fledged kind of branded laundry service. We had logo bags, which are expensive. We get we get them overseas. But logoed bags, you know, logoed plastic bags, logoed logoed everything. You know, it’s the full experience. And, so we kept investing in the product, investing in the product. So I said, look, we gotta kind of take a take a put investing in the product on the back burner and we got a safer place.

John Simerson [00:26:40]:
So there was luckily a business park, very close to where we lived and they were open to the idea of us installing these washers and dryers and getting going. And our our first shop, I wanna say we added six washers, six dryers, and that was sufficient for about a year, I think a year and a half. Yeah. Because we broke we we finished half of the lease, so we did a year and a half there. That was sufficient.

Jordan Berry [00:27:14]:
So, man, okay, so you basically kind of built your own pickup and delivery facility. Yeah. Relatively small one, after after the garage. And we’re kind of processing out of that. And then you say you outgrew that in about a year and a half?

John Simerson [00:27:33]:
About a year and a half. Yeah. Right before COVID, we got we got pretty lucky. There there was a lot of movement going on. And, year and a half, we put a deposit down on a bigger space and COVID happened. So shutdown happened. Right? Like business was on the up and up for us. We were we were hustling.

John Simerson [00:27:55]:
I was on the phone all the time. I was looking to get new people, consecutively building the business, building the business. Having having a business that’s just online is really hard. Because like I said, brick and mortar gives you a lot of immediate credibility. The app does give you credibility, but people have to find you. Right? So like, if you live in a local downtown neighborhood and you drive by, you say, oh, you know, I’m gonna try that dry cleaner. Like, very rarely do people go two towns over for a dry cleaner, right, or, like, a laundromat. Like, they usually stay pretty local.

John Simerson [00:28:25]:
So, we were really hustling and really trying to get numbers in and it was working. And then we get the shutdown order and we had just put the deposit down on our bigger space. We had started moving stuff in. Luckily, our investments weren’t too crazy. The leasing office and the people there were super cool. They were like, look, you know, we knew this happened. You’ve been a great tenant. I don’t know why they chose to give me my deposit back, but they gave me my deposit back, which was amazing, especially during COVID time.

Jordan Berry [00:29:00]:
So

John Simerson [00:29:01]:
I’ve always been a pretty defensive businessman with making sure we’re not putting money in the wrong places. And that added a lot more defense during COVID. But we could have never known. So we were doing the right thing and we stayed at our shop to kind of finish out the COVID era. And then during COVID, there was a lot of laundromats that, you know, they they went out of business and, you know, unfortunately, they they closed down. So there was a really great opportunity for us. And we purchased we purchased our LaunchER mat, which is pretty perfect size for us. We don’t have operations during the day.

John Simerson [00:29:41]:
We strictly run I’m sorry. We don’t we’re not open to the public during the day, but we do our operations twenty four hours there. So we picked up that laundromat and it kind of functions as like a warehouse, so to speak, just with, you know, laundromat history.

Jordan Berry [00:29:58]:
Yeah. So so you’ve got a laundromat. It’s just not open to the public for walk in or self serve laundry. You guys are just it’s your it’s your plant. It’s your pick and delivery plan.

John Simerson [00:30:08]:
It’s a plant. Exactly. Exactly.

Jordan Berry [00:30:11]:
Yeah. That’s awesome. Yeah. Okay. Wait. I want to go, I want to go back, just a little bit here. When okay. So you you made this jump, right? You were working in your in your job, you know, doing the food and beverage thing.

Jordan Berry [00:30:30]:
You’re a wine connoisseur, right, menu creator. And, I have this idea. You take the jump, you build this app, takes you a year, you make the leap. At what point in this journey were you like, yes, this was the right decision for for us

John Simerson [00:30:50]:
to do. Me and my wife went to breakfast one morning, and I told her, I said, aft you know, after taxes and expenses and everything, my biggest goal, like, immediate goal was what I was making before, I wanted to match that as fast as I could so that it wasn’t we didn’t feel anything as a family. Right? And, like, to me, that would make me feel good about the decision that, you know, obviously, what we had done matched what I was doing before. It’s kind of interesting because people, you know, this like, people think entrepreneurs have more time and, we actually, you know, we have less time, but we do tend to have more control of where we put that time. So that’s kinda that’s the value of it. Yeah. At the hotel, I was I was working I you know, they would offer me a room sometimes because hotels never close. So, like, they’d say, hey.

John Simerson [00:31:40]:
You know, you’re working sixteen hours. You gotta be back here in, you know, six hours. I’d be like, hey. Can I get a room? It’s not even worth driving home. So I knew that that wasn’t sustainable. And I was like, cool. Like, I get to work all day with my wife. I get to be around my son.

John Simerson [00:31:54]:
I get to be with family. You know, my wife’s family was there. Her cousin was there. So a lot of good family time, a lot of good family memories. And, when I when we started hitting what I was making at my previous job, which was a good job, I said, this is great. Like, you know, we did it. Like, we hit that and we hit that number pretty fast. We hit it, while we were still at, before we got our small warehouse.

John Simerson [00:32:18]:
So while we were still kind of doing everything organically, you know, we we hit that number and it I knew from there, you know, we could do this. We could double and then we started getting really aggressive and we said, okay, let’s double and then let’s double again. And, yeah, it’s just been on the up and up from there.

Jordan Berry [00:32:35]:
Yeah. That’s great. Do you remember how long it took you to get to sort of matching that salary?

John Simerson [00:32:43]:
It was definitely within the first year. Yeah. Definitely within the first year. Yeah. It’s we kinda have kind of an unorthodox story. I don’t I don’t want everyone to think that, like, that will happen for everyone. It’s it’s, I know there’s a lot of hard workers out there, but it was, you know, I had the phone glued to my to my ear. Like, it was very has to work, has to work, has to work.

John Simerson [00:33:08]:
You know, I think what a lot of what’s kind of under underplayed a bit about entrepreneurship is social media has kind of given it this, idea that it’s, you know, it’s jets and and fancy dinners. And, it is a tremendous amount of gristle and, you know, hours and hours and doing the same things over and over and over again. And, the cool thing is that that’s never been difficult for me. So it was it was fairly easy in that aspect. And I think that that’s why, when you start seeing momentum, you know, I always tell people this, like, when you start seeing momentum, that’s when people get comfortable. And that’s when they say, cool. You know, I can kind of hang out. And that’s when that’s the time where you gotta get the flywheel going faster.

John Simerson [00:33:53]:
Like, you can just get it going faster and faster and faster. So when we saw that coming, we we hopped on it and we just kept going. So within a year.

Jordan Berry [00:34:02]:
Yeah. Dude, that’s awesome. And congrats on that. And you’re right. I like the danger is to be like, okay. Now I’m making what I was making and I’m doing my own thing and I like doing this and I’ve spent the time with the family. You know, I’m good now. Let’s just kind of coast and let it do a thing, which, you know, it’s not necessarily anything wrong with that, if that’s what you want to do.

Jordan Berry [00:34:27]:
But, you know, one of the one of the huge benefits of entrepreneurship is that control over time. But it’s also that your income is uncapped, right? Like you can.

John Simerson [00:34:40]:
Exactly.

Jordan Berry [00:34:41]:
You can make as much money as you want to make, you know, as long as you’re doing the right things. And, and and once you you like you, I think ramp it up and get into like matching your income. That’s the that’s the hardest part because you’re doing it from like zero momentum. Right?

John Simerson [00:34:59]:
Super stressful. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:35:00]:
And you’ve got to just like like you said, you just got to have that phone glued to your ear. You’ve got to be trying all kinds of things. You got to be chasing down people playing Pokemon Go. You got like, you know, it’s just like you’re doing all the stuff and whatever you can think of trying to find things that work to try to get that momentum. And it’s so tempting to like, you know, you’ve been working so hard for so long and you finally hit that goal of like, I’ve reached in and you say, like, less than a year and that’s fast. That’s so fast. But I bet that that still felt like a really long time, like to.

John Simerson [00:35:35]:
Oh, yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:35:35]:
Yeah. It was just like grinding, you know, and just like going for it. So, you know, kudos to you for pushing through that because you’re right. It is very tempting. And, you know, I’ll even say, like, I’ve, I find myself falling into that, you know, and I’ve got to like snap myself out of it. And a big part of. Like why I’m in like mastermind groups and hanging out with, you know, other entrepreneurs and stuff is to keep myself from, you know, just kind of slipping into that lull where life can just kind of coast for a while. And, you know, and yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:36:07]:
Yeah. You got to keep pushing, if you want to do something great. Right?

John Simerson [00:36:11]:
Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:36:13]:
Okay. Cool. So let’s, let’s fast forward after this. You got this laundromat. I’m curious, you know, looking from the garage days to this little small facility to the laundromat. How, you know, did did your systems and processes, did those change at all or were you able to sort of transplant them? You know, and also, I mean, because throughout that whole process, you’re growing, right? And I think one of the difficulties of growing is that you do things a certain way and then you kinda outgrow them sometimes. So how do you how did that transition work of, like, okay, we’re growing. We’ve got to change.

Jordan Berry [00:36:57]:
What did that look like for you guys?

John Simerson [00:37:00]:
One thing about us is that’s a great question. One thing about us at Dropman is we get a lot of business because we’re willing to do custom solutions if it makes sense. So one of the things I found out about myself and, you know, opening your own business, you learn so much about yourself. But one thing I learned about myself is I’m good at figuring out how things work and how they can be successful. So when we moved to the new space and we transitioned, we were already seeing the things that were slowing us down or the potential problems. And laundry, as you know, is I use this saying and I mean it metaphorically and, you know, every way you can think of, but laundry is nuts and bolts. Right? You get the nuts and bolts from the from the machines that need replacing to the socks that, you know, you lose one sock and you lose trust on an entire customer. So it’s a very, very micro, business.

John Simerson [00:37:55]:
And I noticed that. And so I said, okay. Great. If we’re this answering your question also adds kind of a tech aspect. Right? I saw I spoke with Jordan from Washio, and I said, hey. You know, if you’re willing to, tell me about what you think you guys could have done better and, you know, tell me what worked for you and what didn’t work for you. And to kind of keep it in short, keep it compact, his biggest thing with what was difficult for them was he said, We spent a lot of money on tech. We spent a tremendous amount of the money that we received on tech.

John Simerson [00:38:32]:
And if you can, try to avoid that. He didn’t tell me how or like give any suggestion. He just said, you know, I would try to avoid that as much as possible. And I actually talked to him after I was utilizing overseas, and I was like, oh, okay. Great. Like, I’m kind of already doing that. Right? Like, I need tech, but, you know, it’s it’s at the most fairest price it can possibly be. So when we transitioned to the new spot, we already had a system built out, where we we utilize Excel a lot.

John Simerson [00:39:00]:
We utilize a lot of organization platforms like monday.com, Trilio, stuff like that. And I’ve become pretty savvy with, like, building, different dashboards and different order management systems, and stuff like that. So when we moved over, we pretty much brought that system with us, and we saw the issues, that were happening. And you again, you have a lot of aspects where when you’re building something through tech, you have to think in the future a lot of, I’m setting this in stone, and this is what my employees are gonna learn and my customers are going to get conditioned to. What if I run a discount? Right? How how do my billing person adapt to that? How do we make that if I’m doing a hundred discounts, I don’t want my my billing person to manually do a hundred discounts. Right? Like, so how do we build this platform to be as fast and efficient, as possible? How do we implement this? So the transition period was just about adapting to the new space and and the volume, really. And each account that we receive kinda has its own custom way of doing things.

Jordan Berry [00:40:15]:
That been difficult to maintain as you’ve grown? I mean, I can see how you can start out like that. Right? And, like, as you grow, it gets more and more difficult to accommodate custom orders or custom requests. How how have you guys handled that?

John Simerson [00:40:34]:
In the building side or kind of the entire thing?

Jordan Berry [00:40:39]:
More on the, like, processing side of things. But I mean, and building, I like all of it, right? Like, it adds a layer of complexity to, you know, to every aspect of doing running this business. Right? From accounting to, you know, communications and order processing, all of it.

John Simerson [00:41:02]:
We, we actually it’s kind of like it’s kind of like once once you get wet with it and you get used to it, it is difficult in the beginning. Like, I I don’t have a coding background. I don’t have any coding background or kind of tech background or anything. But now when I discuss with developers and stuff like

Jordan Berry [00:41:21]:
that, I can definitely hang in the conversation and, like, I can do these

John Simerson [00:41:21]:
kind of micro things and connect APIs and stuff like that, once you have kind of an understanding of how those things work, you can talk better with people that have the skills that you need. And you can say, hey. I need this to connect to this, to automate with this. And it’s really it’s it’s truly about looking at what the customer needs solved, what their problem is, and saying, okay. In laundry, it’s very pen and paper. Right? Like, that’s that’s the the origins of the end of the industry. And, like, there’s still shops today that will do, you know, a hundred orders, pen and paper. And Yeah.

John Simerson [00:42:00]:
For us, on our side, we process over 300 invoices in in less than twenty seconds with the click of a button because we we’ve automated it and built it that way. So, we have a military account, for example, where they called us and they said, hey, we’ve used, you know, so and so’s laundry service and so and so’s laundry service. They keep mixing our orders. Like, we got 200 people coming off the boat, and, I believe their orders were, like, 5 to £7 apiece. They were there were soldiers coming off the boat. And, our guys are getting it back and they’re getting other people’s clothes. And, like, we gotta be fast. We gotta hop on the boat, head to the next port.

John Simerson [00:42:41]:
We don’t have time to a lot of military contracts, people don’t know this, are very pricing focused. So they’re very focused on you being the most economical. It’s kind of bad to say, but they’re they’re not too worried about your reputation. They’re not really too worried about your quality. It’s more of like who came in at the lowest bid. And those have always been kind of hard for us because we have a very aggressive price. But you also have the people in the industry that are cutting a lot of corners. And so they’re allowed to offer more aggressive, you know? And, it got to the point where those people that were doing those prices, they were saying, hey, we’re willing to pay more in order for this to be to to go well.

John Simerson [00:43:22]:
So I went on base and I said, okay, you know, tell me a little bit about your system. Like, what’s going on? So they would get off at this time and they would do this and that. And, once you have a system built for a account like that and you say, okay, you know, they’re gonna check-in this way, and, we’re gonna have a pickup list this way, and my my audit team’s gonna audit this way, and we’re gonna input this way. It’s really easy to morph that into other it almost becomes its own, like, business niche where, we’re known in San Diego as being able to do custom solutions. So if the account makes sense to where it’s a few hundred thousand a year, we’re gonna come up with a solution for you. Like, we’re gonna figure out a way to make it to make it feasible for you. And 90% of the time 90% of the time, if they listen to our recommendations, it will make it even better for them, which usually they do. You know, we have kind of the referrals to say, hey, you know, they they know what they’re doing.

John Simerson [00:44:18]:
They’re gonna make this easy for us. Just kind of take the recommendation. So we’ve helped a lot of businesses, stay in business, and we’ve helped a lot of, even military contracts and stuff like that stay more fluid, based off kind of following the system. So our error rate is really, really good. Laundry has a lot of socks and stuff like that mixed. And it’s a very hard industry to keep every single thing going. But we, we’re we’ve grown to be pretty bulletproof, which has been nice. So once you get one system down, you it it you kinda have a nice foundation to morph it into what other people need.

John Simerson [00:44:54]:
So I would say if you can do it, if you have the time, it’s definitely worth it. It can be its own niche.

Jordan Berry [00:45:00]:
Yeah. Yeah. No. For sure. And and and, you know, like, it makes a lot of sense to, to sort of stack these. You know, there’s there’s only really there’s only so many ways people can customize.

John Simerson [00:45:13]:
Yeah,

Jordan Berry [00:45:14]:
stuff too. Right. So if you can sort of stack these systems, and just as you are growing, you’re saying, okay, here’s how we handle this kind of thing. Here’s how we handle this kind of thing. And you can sort of build on that Yeah. And train your team up on that. That is, that’s awesome to be able to offer some of these custom solutions and to be able to attract contracts and larger clients because of it, too, which can be that can be a game changer, you know, for your business, for sure. As we’re talking about, like military contracts and government contracts and stuff, how how did you get into that space and how did you find these government contracts? How does that work for you?

John Simerson [00:45:56]:
We actually got pretty lucky. Our first one, we today, we bid to go through the process, of what they need from us, kind of the legal process. But our first two, three contracts, we I mean, we had to send in a formal bid to kind of follow the bureaucracy, but we never really bid against anybody. It was more of, you know, you guys are the only ones that would offer this solution. And, we gave them a very fair price on, like, what we do. And they called us. They said, hey, we got some ships coming in. It’s got 200 soldiers.

John Simerson [00:46:33]:
You know, this is this is the kind of stuff that we need. Can you do it? And, you know, being in the kind of the solution side of laundry, we said, we can do it, but this is what it’s gonna cost for it to be done. And so 99% of the time they’d say, well, we need it done either way. So we would take them up on that. A lot of, I think the word-of-mouth has helped us tremendously. And I think the number one, you know, kind of as you go in stages of growing your business, right, there’s the stage where it’s like marketing. You know, you gotta market, you gotta advertise and stuff like that. And I’m not I’m not against marketing.

John Simerson [00:47:05]:
I’m I’m pro marketing for sure. But I always think of it in kind of restaurant terms, right? If you go to a restaurant that your first meal is bad, you’re going to be really reluctant to go back to that place. But if you just wait a year and then you go try that place and they have all their stuff together, you’re gonna be like, That place is great. So I want them to try us when we have our best product. Right? So now that we’ve really mastered the product, and everything is is near perfect, now, you know, when we do a marketing campaign, we get a lot of money back on the investment because people say, yeah, I know them. And, you know, there’s a lot of referrals. And, I think we’re up to 600 reviews online or something like that, five star reviews. So we just we just churn, churn, churn, churn, churn, churn, churn.

John Simerson [00:47:50]:
And, you know, as everybody knows, right, testimonials are way more powerful than marketing. So we’ve kind of banked on that, and that’s helped with, you’d be surprised. Like, you know, people know people. So they would say, hey, you know, John at Dropment, like, he can make us a solution. These guys take care of the military world and the contract world is super small. It’s a very small community. So they say, you know, they’ve helped us with this. And then you get a call the next day from like a third party vendor or third you know, they they do something else with the military.

John Simerson [00:48:21]:
And these people’s jobs is to find a solution. And one thing I wasn’t a fan of in laundry in the beginning that I was like, maybe I’ll learn my lesson later, but I still haven’t learned it, is a lot of my competitors and a lot of people in Laundry like to say no. They like to say, you know, we don’t do that. You know, we do this. Or, like, if we do that, then we gotta do it at this time or we gotta do that. And I’m like, we could just move a driver and, you know, we could take the, you know, very you know, we just make the shift, you know. As long as the money makes sense, you know, we can make the shift and and take care of them. So I think being open, finding the solution, having good reviews has all contributed to us in the beginning not not really having to bid and just being solidified those contracts.

John Simerson [00:49:07]:
Today we send in bids and today we we know, you know, if the bid is gonna go our way or if it’s not gonna go our way. Or sometimes we say, hey, you know, it’s not it’s not for us. You know, it’s not the kind of kind of stuff that we do. But

Jordan Berry [00:49:21]:
Yeah. Well, having that yes mentality. I mean, that’s what entrepreneurship is. Right? It’s like finding solutions to people’s problems and make a profit for it. Right? And, you know, there’s there’s nothing wrong, you know, with saying, hey, that’s not what we do or no, you know, like, there’s nothing wrong with that. But if you can find a solution that other people can’t find or won’t find a solution for, I mean, that can be very lucrative, for you. So kudos to you for, doing all that. You you brought up marketing again, and I just want to come back around to that.

Jordan Berry [00:49:58]:
Was there a was this like a conscious decision to not do, you know, or paid advertising, I guess, is what is what you’re saying that you haven’t done? Is it was that a conscious decision? And if so, why? Or did you just kinda hit the ground running and it is sort of been an afterthought and now you’re finally catching up to it? What’s that been like for you?

John Simerson [00:50:21]:
It’s kind of like I mean, technically, if you consider reviews, we do incentivize reviews. So if you wanna consider that marketing, then we have been doing marketing. When I say marketing to be more specific, I mean paid Google ads, paid, you know, Facebook and, you know, stuff like that. Definitely smart to do. Like, that’s where the world is going. That’s what you should do. I think that we have just I I wouldn’t confidently say this would apply to everybody, but I would say this applied to us. Is the app gave us a lot of credibility, gave us a lot of kind of virality in what people discussed.

John Simerson [00:51:00]:
Like, oh, there’s a laundry app in town. You know? So it it’s appealing to kinda hear off the bat. I always wanted to focus on reviews more than marketing, and the reviews have kind of done the marketing for us, so to speak. So I I never really felt like it would be that effective to market a company that had five reviews or, you know, had very little credibility. I feel like when we market now, a tremendous amount of people know us, and they would say, oh, you know, it’s just kinda that extra what’s that marketing saying? Like, you gotta see things 13 times or or something like that? I’m probably chopping that, but you know you know what I mean. Yeah. So this kinda adds to the one of 13 times. But we it’s it’s pretty cool because we’ll have family members saying, hey.

John Simerson [00:51:50]:
My Uber driver uses you, you know, or, like, you know, so and so uses you or, like, something like that. So, super good without without marketing. It’s a very viral topic, discussed a lot organically. So the marketing right now is, I guess if if someone wanted my advice, marketing shouldn’t be kind of the main course. It should it should kind of be the whipped cream on top. So for us, it definitely has been something that over time we put on the back burner, to your question. But it also has been a focus, and we wanted the investment on marketing and, what we put into it to be, you know, everybody does, to be 10 x, you know, what we put in. And you’re much more likely to get that when you’re kind of glowing, you know, with reviews and you’re glowing with credibility and, you know, a lot more people know you.

John Simerson [00:52:43]:
It’s kind of tough it’s kind of tough to beat us these days because when we come in and we discuss with accounts like, you know, we do the military and, you know, we do, you know, we do the homeless shelters and we do, you know, we’re so diverse and, like, we can do anything. We’re not just, you know, not throwing shade at like the pen and paper guys, but like it’s hard to choose them over us. You know, we have a better price. We’re faster. We have more credibility. We have the tech. We have insurance. Like it’s it’s difficult.

John Simerson [00:53:13]:
You know, when peep if people do go with someone else, which rarely happens, we say, we really wanna know why. Like, we’re we’re interested what what it was. And nine times out of 10, it’s something that we couldn’t control.

Jordan Berry [00:53:24]:
Yeah. Yeah. Well and that’s that’s where you wanna be as a business. Right? You wanna be tough tough to beat.

John Simerson [00:53:31]:
Exactly. You

Jordan Berry [00:53:31]:
know, if you can confidently say, hey. Listen. We’re it’s gonna be tough to beat us. Like, that’s a good spot to be. And I think that’s where we’re all sort of striving to be, in the business. And, you know, kind of going back to your sort of core there is like focusing on the product, making sure the experience is good for the customers, you know, both on the laundry side, but also on the tech side. Like, I think that hyper focus on that early on probably paid huge dividends, like ongoing.

John Simerson [00:53:59]:
Yeah, for sure.

Jordan Berry [00:54:00]:
Forever. Yeah, as long as the business goes, you’re just sort of piggybacking on that. I’m curious about the reviews. You you know, and you said you incentivize reviews. And so I mean, I think reviews are probably the lowest hanging fruit for most laundromat owners or laundry, service operators, that I think not enough of us are really focusing on. But how how did how did you focus on them? How did you incentivize the reviews? How did you get 600? Like, that’s a lot of reviews.

John Simerson [00:54:33]:
Yeah,

Jordan Berry [00:54:33]:
for a laundry company. So how did you get to that point? With the reviews?

John Simerson [00:54:38]:
So we have, we have a filtering system, and, we have we send out a survey. We’re big on surveys in hotels, which, you know, is my background is a lot of surveys. Surveys are a big deal. And, people don’t really think of it on a on a purposeful level. And what I mean by that is who’s more likely to leave a survey, a happy customer or mad customer? Mad customer. Right? So the mad customers are always super fast to leave surveys, and the happy customers very rarely leave surveys. It is the same when you look at most businesses’ Google profiles or Yelp profiles. Right? So how do you push the happy customers to kind of spread the gospel about your business, you know, where you where you want them to? And so the way that we do it is we get those surveys in.

John Simerson [00:55:31]:
And the ones that are not as great, we reach out personally. We have a virtual assistant that reaches out and we say, hey, what could we have done better for you? And we take those notes. And a lot of business owners, this is kind of one of my biggest things for anyone watching the interview, is your bad surveys are probably one of the most important things to do in your business. Those are the people that are really organic and they’re really gonna tell you what they didn’t like about your business. And you can kind of make a decision if it’s worth implementing, like if it pleases the masses or if it’s just a one off where it’s like, hey, you know, we’re kind of not built that way. Like, we apologize. We’ll refund you or like, you know, we’ll we’ll something to to make it better. But the people that leave the good surveys, we also reach out and we say, hey, we don’t do any marketing, especially after COVID.

John Simerson [00:56:21]:
And, it would be amazing for you if you left us a review online. And we can give you 5% off on your next order. Or every week we kind of do like something different. And it usually it works pretty well. I don’t think our incentives are not that aggressive. They’re more of kinda like thank you for your time. You know, we appreciate you taking the time. And when people are that happy with your product, they just need a little bit of a reminder and kinda like a little bit of like, hey.

John Simerson [00:56:54]:
It’d be really cool if you did this for us, because we don’t do any marketing. And they’re like, oh, wow. You don’t do any marketing. We’re like, no. We don’t we don’t really do any paid ads. They’re happy to kinda contribute to that. And, we do have an incentive for the worker as well. So if they mention the worker’s name, the the driver’s name, or, you know, anyone they spoke to, like one of the assistants was great, we have a really strong, customer support team.

John Simerson [00:57:17]:
And, if you mention their name, they also get an incentive. So, like, they’re very happy to, like, help the help the team member, and then also they get something. So if you make it kind of good for everybody, peep people are more than willing to do it. And then, you know, they’ll use you again and, you know, kind of go from there. So that system has worked tremendously well from us. It’s it’s a no loss system. We get the great feedback from the bad surveys, and then we get to know the people that, we’d love for them to kind of spread the gospel about us online.

Jordan Berry [00:57:48]:
Yeah. I mean, I love that you said that the I mean, those bad surveys are maybe the most valuable piece of information for your business, right?

John Simerson [00:57:57]:
Much agree.

Jordan Berry [00:57:57]:
You can you can figure out, you know, how people are experiencing your business. A lot of times they give you good feedback. You know, sometimes it’s, you know, just somebody’s event about something and the closest thing, there. And so you get reamed for no reason. And that’s true with any sort of reviewable business, whether that’s restaurants or Airbnbs or whatever. But, but a lot of times that feedback can be so valuable. And not only that, you have an opportunity to take, you know, to take control of a bad experience and to turn it into a good one, too, which is also super powerful. So you’re getting really great information.

Jordan Berry [00:58:38]:
And then you have the ability to turn somebody who had a bad experience into almost like a superfan, right? If you can’t handle that situation well, which again spreads out word-of-mouth there and builds a lot of trust in the community saying, Hey, look, you know, even if things do go wrong for whatever reason, they’re going to make sure that you’re taken care of. And that’s huge. Giving people confidence and trust in you with their with their business, in their their dirty laundry.

John Simerson [00:59:10]:
Exactly.

Jordan Berry [00:59:10]:
Their dirty underwear. Awesome. Another question. I mean, because you sort of casually mentioned earlier, and I’m curious about this, too, on the pricing side, you you sort of mentioned that you’re you’re on the top end there when it comes to pricing. How did you go about your pricing philosophy and deciding how much you’re pricing, your services at? How how did you make those decisions? And I think a lot of people are afraid to price high. And if there’s, you know, competitors, you know, what really struck me as funny is, you know, I think a lot of people are like, Oh, man, my nearest competitors at, you know, a dollar 50 for pickup and delivery. I don’t feel like I can be higher than that. But I also don’t know if I can make money at a dollar 50.

Jordan Berry [00:59:59]:
And you’re talking about competing with people at 9¢ a pound. Right. So so how did you decide your price point and, you know, and and run with that and make that successful as being one of the higher priced people?

John Simerson [01:00:13]:
We’re I I might have said that wrong. So we’re actually, we’re actually on the lower end of pricing. Okay.

Jordan Berry [01:00:19]:
Okay.

John Simerson [01:00:20]:
We are, definitely a more economical option compared to our competitors.

Jordan Berry [01:00:25]:
Okay.

John Simerson [01:00:25]:
I think to date, we actually just updated pricing. I wanna say some of my nearest competitors are at, like, $2.50 to $3 a pound. I’m sitting at a dollar 99 a pound if you go recurring. It’s a dollar $80.89. We offer no fold, which no fold is a dollar 49, dollar 39 if you go on recurring. So we are tremendously cheaper than Got it. A lot of our competitors. We do we did instate a pickup and delivery fee last year.

John Simerson [01:01:00]:
We do have a $40 minimum. So our minimum is lower than our competitors. Our pickup and delivery fee, I think some of them do it. Actually, I believe most of them do a pickup and delivery fee that’s higher. Our only more economical option than us is actually taking it into a laundromat, which we can’t really compete with because we pick up and deliver right. And even those pick up and deliver services from those laundromats, we beat their prices as well. So, the the philosophy that you asked for based on that is it’s you know, there’s a lot of things that people buy and, you know, they would pay more if it’s wrapped in gold. Right? They would say, oh, you know, I’d pay more for this if it was wrapped in gold.

John Simerson [01:01:45]:
Right? I I like good food. Like, if I were to order pizza or something like that, and someone said, hey, man, you know, for an extra $5, you can get the pizza box, you know, with a you know, wrapped in gold. I’d say, I don’t really care. It’s pizza. You know, I’m just ordering it for the pizza. Laundry is the same thing. And a lot of people say, you know, you gotta have you gotta have high prices. You know, it shows luxury.

John Simerson [01:02:06]:
It shows brand. Kind of. Like, certain industries, I did believe that. I did food is like that for certain. You know, like, if you have a five course menu that’s priced pretty economically, people kinda look at you a little weird. Laundry is not like that. Laundry is, one of those things where you get a lot of we get a lot of calls from our, like, rehabs and, you know, senior centers where, people have expressed that it should be very cheap. You know, like, oh, I can’t believe my bill is this much.

John Simerson [01:02:40]:
And we’re like, man, you know, in comparison to our competitors, it would be this much. And so they kind of look at the market and they say, oh, you guys are really fairly priced. Like, this is this is a super fair, experience. And we say, yeah. You know, and we kind of show them the breakdown. So laundry is one of those things that it’s really, really hard to make luxurious. And even if you did do luxury prices, people probably wouldn’t wouldn’t use you. You know, it’s it’s not it’s not one of those things they want.

John Simerson [01:03:06]:
We definitely overdo the package. Like, I think a lot of the things and that’s my fault. You know, like, I I don’t know if people would really care if, like, the plastic bag was low logoed. I don’t know, if they would care too much about, like, the thank you part. Maybe they would. But I think that laundromats for decades, you know, have gotten away with just simple, you know, wash and fold. You know, put it on the scale and you get a plastic bag and and that’s it. So we we kind of have the Amazon effect where we’re delivering a great product and it’s super fast and the price is very difficult to, compete with.

John Simerson [01:03:42]:
Like I said, if we lose any customers, we don’t lose them based off price. We lose them based off the fact that they’re willing to go into a laundromat now. And I can’t we can’t compete with that. That’s not our market. So, the decision, you know, and how we did that was I’m very big on it’s kind of a different philosophy than most business owners. I believe in paying the employees first versus, you know, having this beautiful warehouse and, you know, kind of like having marble, you know, in the laundromat space when you have customers walking in, you know, the people in that space have to make it look very presentable and have to make it look very nice. Our shop is very nice. It looks very nice, but it is very economical in a lot of the things that, you know, we instate.

John Simerson [01:04:28]:
A lot of the stuff that we use is custom built, or we have kind of implemented it on our own. So our our space is a good size. It’s not huge. It’s enough for us to, you know, complete our business and even expand with. We only use what we need. And the rest of it, our employees are paid very well. I think they’re from talking to my buddies in in the industry, they are the highest paid of of all of them. So we have the lowest prices and we pay our employees the most.

John Simerson [01:04:56]:
Our drivers are tipped. So it’s a very good paying job. We don’t have a lot of turnover. The drivers have the opportunity to gain rapport with a lot of the customers, kind of keep that small business feel even though we are on the up and up and growing at the same time. So we try to hit every pillar with fair price, great product, consistent team members, building that rapport, kind of everything that you’d want out of like the utopian company. We try really hard to hit. I think a lot of a lot of the guys in our industry, they got some crazy mortgages. Like they got like something like 35 we’re in San Diego, so they got like $30,000 mortgages.

John Simerson [01:05:36]:
And like, you know, I have a buddy that’s like at like $45,000 And I’m like, dude, that’s insane. Like, you know, it’s to come up with that much money a month is what stressed me. You know what I mean? So ours is nowhere nowhere near that, and we do more volume than them. So, when I first got our shop, everybody was like, this is too small. Like, you’re gonna, you know, you’re gonna outgrow. I said, no. You know, we’re gonna be logistical. And, you know, we do utilize a storage space as well.

John Simerson [01:06:02]:
But I would say to some some of my competitors, my lease and kind of stable expenses are a fraction of what they’re doing. And that’s helped us make sense of, make sense of the price. We also have, folding machines. So the folding machines help with labor as well. So we’re one of the only, wash and fold companies with overseas folding machines.

Jordan Berry [01:06:27]:
Yeah. Which is awesome. And, again, like, what what I love about this and and my apologies for, for mishearing. That was probably on me, not on you, earlier. But but I love thank you. First of all, I mean, for explaining all that and your philosophy behind the pricing, because I think pricing is like the big hot topic in the big unknown for a lot of lawnmower owners. And it’s a very Tricky topic to navigate for people and especially as like we’ve been seeing, you know, our costs go up all over the place. People don’t really it’s hard to navigate.

Jordan Berry [01:07:03]:
Like what do we do with pricing? And how do we determine where we sit within our market when it comes to pricing? And what I like what I’m hearing, about what you’re doing is that, like, kinda like you said, like, you’re trying to hit all the pillars here. And I think there’s a huge, I think probably if I was to sort of pinpoint one of your biggest points of success, I mean, it’s gonna be your focus on sort of the experience and all that stuff, but also on that philosophy of trying to pay your employees, high amount, which is, which is really difficult to do anywhere. And especially in a state like California where,

John Simerson [01:07:42]:
yeah, you

Jordan Berry [01:07:43]:
know, it, it’s already like the cheapest employees are already expensive to pay. And it can be really difficult to do that. However, I mean, one of the biggest struggles of a lot of people in this industry is finding good people and finding and retaining good employees. And if you’re able to pay them well, incentivize them well to stick around for a launch, like there’s just so much value there. And if you can get the right people in the right seat, I mean, it’s just gonna make everything better. Not only the experience of running the business, but the customer’s experience and the end product is going to be better, just kind of all the way around. So, you know, I love that you are sort of focused on that side of things and then looking to. You know, cut costs in other ways in order to accommodate that, which is huge, I think.

Jordan Berry [01:08:42]:
I mean, I think that’s a probably a big factor in in the success that you’re having, in the business. I am curious, like, how do you think. You’re I mean, you know, it sounds like volume wise, you’re doing really, really well. I’m just curious, like if you if you think of, cause I know other people are thinking this, like if you think of your competitors that are charging the $2.50 to $3 a pound, how do you think your business is stacking up to theirs, when it comes to, you know, net income, I guess?

John Simerson [01:09:22]:
They they do a lot of marketing. They I think they’re doing our numbers are definitely the the highest, and that’s because they’ve shared it with me. It’s because they’ve reached out and, like, asked for help and stuff like that. They’re I’ve told them this a lot of the time. You’re paying for churn. Right? Like, you’re paying for that churn. Like, someone uses you at $2.50 and you give them a $10 off coupon. So you got the hook.

John Simerson [01:09:52]:
Right? And they say, cool. $10 off. I’ll try them out at $2.50 to $33 a pound. Now they send, our average order is, like, 36 pounds. But let’s say you have a young professional. K. And he sends in, let’s say, 20 pounds. You’re charging $60 plus your pickup and delivery fee of theirs is probably $8.

John Simerson [01:10:14]:
So you’re paying $68. And then if you tipped, let’s say $72, 70 2 dollars for 30 pounds of laundry is pretty hefty these days. You know? And so let’s say you got the $10 off coupon, probably not you gotta kinda have the Groupon effect where, like, you use them once and you’re not gonna use them again. And on my side, I might get 40 to $50 out of them and you might get $70 but you’re only gonna get it one time. I’m gonna get it every time because they’re gonna keep coming back to me. So yeah, I don’t make the extra $20 30 dollars the first time, but my numbers are so good and so lean that I’m still in the same profit margins as you. And I’m gonna get them over and over and over again. And they don’t have to look for a coupon.

John Simerson [01:10:55]:
They don’t have to look for a discount. So that, I think, contributes to a lot of the success. I’m not I’m not big on getting customers based off of high prices and then giving them a coupon and then them trying you out and then them coming back because eventually they will say, they’ll say this is too expensive or like this isn’t, a lot of bad surveys. I have the different metrics, you know, lined up at the bottom between pricing, quality and logistics. What do you think is the biggest, the one I get hit on the most?

Jordan Berry [01:11:25]:
Probably pricing.

John Simerson [01:11:26]:
Pricing. Right? And that’s amazing because we have the most competitive pricing. We were, during COVID, we got the, I forgot the, the loan it was called, to pay your employees. And Yeah.

Jordan Berry [01:11:40]:
Like the PPP or whatever?

John Simerson [01:11:41]:
PPP. Exactly. I wanted to make sure that that money went to the employees and they had hours to do it. So I went 99¢ a pound, which in San Diego is like, right, like and I was like, we have to get orders. Right? And we did. Like, it was a lot of great publicity. It was a lot of great virality. The girls definitely had enough hours to make make us use that PPP funds.

John Simerson [01:12:06]:
But even at 99¢ a pound, you could guess we still had surveys coming in that were like, it’s too expensive. It’s too expensive. So it taught me that the, you know, the idea of it being expensive has to be related to the competitor and has to be what you want it to be. You can’t really trust. Now remember, in the beginning of our interview, I said they got people doing 9¢ a pound. Right? I promise you, if you sent a few of those businesses surveys, they’d say it was too expensive. Right? So it’s kinda one of those things where you can’t, you know, you can’t always make it’s impossible to make people happy with that. So we’re not we’re not hooking people based off the high price and the coupon.

John Simerson [01:12:45]:
We want a long term convenient local in the community solution. We don’t want to be Uber Eats where I use you when I get $20 off. You know, we want them to consistently use us. And I think that they’re heavily, investing in marketing, which does work. You know, they’re let’s say they lose, I would say they’re probably losing about 20% of their customer base. They probably gain with market marketing 20% of that. But now here’s my thing is, when that stops, right, I don’t do any marketing. Right? So when that stops and you’re not growing, you know, what do you do with that? You know, how does how does that go for you? So, I think I think it works for now.

John Simerson [01:13:27]:
But for me, I don’t I don’t like the, the worry of, you know, depending solely on marketing.

Jordan Berry [01:13:33]:
Yeah. Well, and you’re in a spot now where you’ve got a good foundation and a good system of kind of growing your business without the marketing that if you turn on and when you turn on that marketing, you know, faucet, you know, it’s just it’s only going to be growth, you know, for you, and you’re not going to necessarily be reliant on it. So it’s just, you know, cherry on top. Would you say whipped cream on top?

John Simerson [01:13:57]:
Exactly. Yep. You got it.

Jordan Berry [01:13:59]:
For the business. Yeah. So that’s I love it. I love it. You’re in a really good spot, for that. A couple of last questions for you. Number one, like, if somebody and I talk to people trying to do this all the time. Exactly what you’re doing is so somebody is trying to start a pickup and delivery from scratch.

Jordan Berry [01:14:18]:
Like, what’s your best advice for them?

John Simerson [01:14:25]:
Best advice would be, if you are doing it without any money and you’re bootstrapping, try to try to find a mentor and try to talk with someone that has done it in a similar fashion that can kind of help you avoid the speed bumps that are ahead. So I would say if if you can, you know, if it’s available to you, try to find a mentor to kind of help, you know, assist you in skipping those. The second thing is be willing to say yes more than no. In the beginning, you don’t you have a lot of time. You don’t have much to lose. You want to gain positive reputation kind of by any means. So you never know who you’re gonna come across. We’ve done, you know, we we’ve had situations where we’ve gotten last minute orders, and, it’s after the cutoff.

John Simerson [01:15:24]:
And I always tell my team, like, even though it is after the cutoff, if it makes sense, let’s try to add them and say yes. And, our biggest account actually today, our biggest coffee shop account today, Nespresso, they were a midnight pickup from the GM who just said, can you do me a solid? We had no idea who he was. And in a week, he said, hey, do you want all the Nespresso’s in San Diego? We said, of course. You know, definitely. And imagine if we would have said no. So, you never know who you’re gonna come across. So I would say the biggest thing is Mentor. And if you keep saying yes, obviously, you know, the next thing would be work hard.

John Simerson [01:16:02]:
And I think that, laundry for us in laundry and us doing pickup and delivery, I think it’s the best kind of business to start because it is a very nuts and bolts business and you have to be good at everything. You have to be good at tech. You have to be good at customer service. You have to be good at the micro. So my wife is actually starting a business of her own. And, it’s it’s pretty it’s not, you know, nothing’s easy, but it’s not as nuts as nuts and bolts as like what we do. And so we kind of have already everything built out, and it’s a very good prep for if you can be successful in our space, you can you can do anything, I believe.

Jordan Berry [01:16:40]:
Yeah. That’s awesome. Do you recommend people start, this way? Like if let’s say they, you know, can’t afford a laundromat right now or they can’t find one for sale or something like that? I mean, do you recommend that people get started with pickup and delivery without owning, space necessarily to process the laundry?

John Simerson [01:17:04]:
Yeah. I would I would say it’s not you know, if you if you have available to you, you know, two washers, two dryers, even like let’s say you have an apartment clubhouse or, like, anything like that and, you know, you’re on the hustle and you want to make something happen, I think, yeah, I think you can definitely do it. I think, you know, obviously, logistically, it’s gonna be harder. You know, it is easier to have a ramp to pull up to and unload and stuff like that. But in the beginning, you know, in the in the early days, those are the things you have, you know, you have to. Like, that’s kind of your, you know, your, what is it called? Like, your initiation, right, like, into into getting into all this stuff. So I would say, yeah. I don’t think I don’t think it’s impossible.

John Simerson [01:17:44]:
I do think it’s, in some of the other interviews I do, I kind of go more deeper into some of the stories and stuff like that. And like some of the people are like, dude, I would have quit. Like, that’s insane. Like, you know, x y z. And, I’m, you know, there’s a lot of people in our space that are hard workers and, they have went through it, went through the trials. So I would I would say, yeah, if you if you have thick skin, I’m very something about me personally, I’m big into stoicism. And I was into stoicism, before laundry. And I’m sure you know this, owning laundromats.

John Simerson [01:18:17]:
It definitely helps in laundry, to be pretty stoic about a lot of the things that happen. So I would say, don’t take anything personal. And, you know, if you keep getting up and going at it, I think you can definitely do it for sure.

Jordan Berry [01:18:31]:
Yeah. Yeah. Especially if you’re sending out surveys asking people what they think. A lot of times you’ll hear what they’re thinking. Exactly. Kind of having that sort of even keel, you know, mentality like it can be it can be very emotional, right? When you’re working with people and and people’s emotions and, you know, laundry can be very personal for people. And, you know, running a business is hard and it can be challenging. Like, Yeah, I’m sure we could swap stories, all day long, about crazy things, in the businesses.

Jordan Berry [01:19:01]:
But, Yeah, I love that. I think that’s really great advice to, for anybody who’s trying to get started this way. You know, so, you know, like one of the things that I, I heard somebody say I’ve mentioned this before, but, you know, when you’re talking about trying to find a mentor, and, you know, I’m, I’m a huge advocate, like, obviously, if you can get somebody to just kind of hang out with you and show you everything they’re doing, that’s awesome. But I’m also a huge advocate of, you know, if you got to pay for a mentor, Yeah. And, I heard I don’t remember who said it, but I heard somebody say it on a podcast or a book or something like that. But, they’re saying, hey, you know, pay for somebody else’s ten thousand hours, right? Yeah. You’ve put in the ten thousand hours over there building this business. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [01:19:50]:
Why would you not pay, you know, for in this this industry has been a little interesting for me to kind of watch, you know, as people have come into the business with with things to buy coaching, to buy and mentorship, to buy, programs to buy courses, to buy whatever. And it’s been interesting to hear people’s response. You know, some of the like the old timers responses to that is like, oh, you don’t need that. Or like, why would you do that? And yeah, you know, my, my take is sort of the opposite is, you know, why would you not do that? Like if somebody’s got a, you know, dollars 10,000 program, That’s going to show you step by step how to build your business. Like we’re talking about making hundreds of thousands of dollars here. Why would you not invest $10,000 into shortcutting that process? Cutting out all the difficult learning curve, like all the lessons that, you know, this person has learned, you know, I mean, you gotta do your due diligence on who you’re buying that from. But, man, like, the right person, it seems like a no brainer to me in that sense.

John Simerson [01:20:56]:
Oh, yeah.

Jordan Berry [01:20:56]:
You know?

John Simerson [01:20:57]:
I I would I would completely agree. There’s been so I do real estate on the side. And, the kind of interestingly, the guy that taught me real estate and kinda mentored me, I didn’t get mentored for laundry, which worked out, you know, like we talked about. Like, within the first year, we hit those numbers. I would say if I would have gotten a mentor, it it might have been beneficial. But at the same time, I don’t know who would have mentored me besides, like, maybe Jordan from Washoe because it was such a new concept. But yeah, in real estate, it’s been invaluable. We’re in the era now of research.

John Simerson [01:21:32]:
Right? Like we have YouTube and we have social media and we have all these things at our fingertips where you do have to filter. Right? Like you gotta be careful of some of the info out there. But you know, even there there’s always something to learn. And if you just kinda stay as a student to a lot of these things, it will definitely, definitely help in the long run. So I’m very big. Like, if I go into anything new, I I look at who’s doing it the way that I would want to do it and I offer the other thing is just like you said, you know, paying, maybe you don’t have $10,000 right, to, like, offer this person, but you you have to be you have to put yourself out there. One of the things that I’m very comfortable with, that I didn’t know my wife was the one that kind of exposed me. She’s like, You’re really comfortable with putting yourself out there.

John Simerson [01:22:20]:
And I thought everybody was. And so I’m the kind of guy, like I go into a room and I’m like, Hey, how are you? I’m John. What do you do? I do this. And sometimes people are put off guard by that. But it’s if I, like my boys play soccer and I do different activities and stuff like that, they’ll say, hey, I know this guy that does laundry. And there was a great book by I don’t know if you’re familiar with, Brandon Turner.

Jordan Berry [01:22:44]:
Oh, yeah.

John Simerson [01:22:44]:
Yeah. He does Bigger Pockets. And, the book was called Built to Win or something like that. And he has a really great chapter in there that’s called Getting Lucky. And, Getting Lucky, I always think about in the sense of it happens so much for me where like people will call me and they’ll say, Hey man, you were looking for a new washer and so and so is selling a washer. And it was because when I’m out talking to people, I tell them like, Oh, yeah. We’re looking for a washer. We’re looking for another full team member.

John Simerson [01:23:16]:
Something like that. And people think of networking, especially these days, is like going out and having a beer, or this like formal, like not formal, but like this like distinguished situation. And, you know, me and you, like us talking right now, like we kind of talked about before, you know, what we do, you might think of something that could help me, or I might think of something that could help you. So kind of keeping that network of, you know, what’s going on with yourself and, you know, what how people can add value to you and you add value to them, I think helps a lot and goes a long way.

Jordan Berry [01:23:50]:
Oh, huge, man. Huge. And I mean, I think that that’s an that’s another just like gold nugget. I really kinda hate that expression, but kind of a gold nugget on here too is like, you know, putting yourself out there is is massive and letting people know kind of what you’re up to and what you’re doing and what you need and, you know, like whether that’s a machine or an employee or whatever. I just feel like, man, that is a great way to to grow in ways that you can never even predict that you can grow, right? Like saying yes to, you know, the NEST cafe. Yeah. You probably never predicted that you were going to do the laundry for all the NEST cafes in San Diego, right?

John Simerson [01:24:30]:
I could never imagine. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [01:24:31]:
You know what I mean? Like,

John Simerson [01:24:32]:
put. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [01:24:33]:
Yeah. Yeah. Put yourself out there. And, you know, like you said, kind of this networking of just kind of letting people know what you’re doing and and saying yes to opportunities, especially early on, you know, later, maybe you need to guard your time a little bit more. But if you’re getting started, forget all of the, you know, the advice that’s like, you know, say say no to stuff. Guard your time. Forget that. Don’t guard your time.

Jordan Berry [01:24:58]:
Do everything you can, you know, even the you know, there’s just so much advice out there that’s really good. Once you’re down the line where you’ve your time becomes more valuable, you’ve got more systems and automation, like do things that don’t scale early on. Like, have be on the phone all the time, you know, like

John Simerson [01:25:17]:
Team culture team culture is huge. If you you know, just like you said in the early days, you have the time right to do it. What I do with my team now is you kind of like you kind of have to you have to motivate them to stay hungry. And like you have to, you know, it’s daunting, right? Like just like you said, you get some of the surveys that some of the surveys that are not real, you know, some of the surveys where it’s like, we get it all, we get the craziest surveys and like craziest emails. And I’m like, in the beginning, I’d be like, wow, really? Like, is that happening at the shop? Like, let’s let’s take care of this. And then over time, I’ve hired some some amazing people and then I have some family involved and I’m like, That that’s not happening. You just didn’t like the price. You know? Or like, you just, you know, the the price tickled you the wrong way.

John Simerson [01:26:02]:
So we still reach out and, like, we do, like, a, you know, a no, Like, we’re sorry. We’ll refund you or, like, something just to kinda ease the mood. The worst thing you want is a bad review, right, to kinda offset that. But, with you being the owner, I reinforce with my team, like, no matter how tedious it gets or, you know, frustrating or like anything, keep that yes culture. And if you’re not certain we can say yes, don’t say no. Just say, let me run it over with somebody. You know what I mean? Because they big contracts and big people, I think the big I actually have a YouTube video about it, about how saying yes and, you know, con consecutively saying yes to people as much as you can, helps a lot with gaining that business and keeping them. Everybody that answers the phone at my shop, they know that the, you know, can you guys do this? Can you do that? And if they know we can, they’ll say yes.

John Simerson [01:26:55]:
Or they’ll say, hey, let me run it by my boss. And, like, we can figure out, I would say 50% of our accounts today that are huge, hundreds of thousands a year, are built off of custom solutions. Now it’s kinda crazy to think because if we would have said no, right, like, we wouldn’t have been where we are. And I get it. Like, some of these guys wanna stay pen and paper. And with that, you know? But for me, it it just makes more sense to say yes.

Jordan Berry [01:27:23]:
Yeah. No. I love that. I love that. You know, I mean, I was gonna ask you, like, hey, what’s your best tip for somebody doing pickup and delivery? But I mean, I feel like some of the stuff that we’re talking about is dead on. I mean, I don’t know if you wanna add anything to that, but, like, such good

John Simerson [01:27:39]:
And biggest

Jordan Berry [01:27:39]:
such good stuff.

John Simerson [01:27:42]:
Biggest tip would be biggest tip for someone doing pickup and delivery would be listen probably listen to list oh, man. There’s so much. Right? Listen to the customer, I would say. I think as business owners, you get kind of this human effect where, you know, you think something is great. And it probably really is great. But when I first built my laundry app, I understood it. Right? Because I built it. Right? But when I had, some family use it who was not kind of involved so much with the thinking process and stuff like that, laundry on an app is very new, and they had a lot of feedback and a lot of questions.

John Simerson [01:28:28]:
And I was like, oh, man. This is not good. Like, it’s gotta be a very thoughtless process. It’s gotta be very ABC. It can’t be we were offering way too many options. And I thought by offering options, we were making it more convenient, but it was actually kind of confusing for people. So, you know, the way that you think of things is great and, you know, stick to your gut in a lot of the things. It is your business.

John Simerson [01:28:50]:
It’s your dime. But definitely take into consideration surveys and the experience people get because the people that you’re making money from are the general public, right? They’re not business owners. I mean, some of them are business owners, right? But for the most part, it’s your door to door people. It’s those people make you go viral. They discuss what you’ve experienced. And, we actually for a decade, we had what’s called our basket builder, built into our app. And our basket builder is you can add pounds and you can add different items to your basket to get an estimate. Because in the beginning, people are like, well, I don’t know how much my laundry is gonna be.

John Simerson [01:29:25]:
You kind of have like this consumer anxiety. Right? And, we are now, after ten years, gonna cut the basket builder because 90% of our customers use the instant order button. So it’s we actually get more questions now about the basket builder that are kind of detrimental versus so we’ve kind of created this culture of people know now. They know how to use it, and we put out videos and stuff like that. So you know, being open minded to times changing and listening to your customer, I think I would add on top of the, you know, different things that I’ve I’ve said.

Jordan Berry [01:29:59]:
Yeah. That I mean, that’s that’s super good. And, you know, getting you know, we we can get so focused on our business. We’re in the business every day. It’s like what we think about all the time. It’s so important to get we call it like in our loaner app playbook. Right. It’s like we call it the outside eyes audit.

Jordan Berry [01:30:17]:
Right. Like having somebody who’s not in the business every day and thinking about every day, give us feedback on the business. You know, we become like nose blind to our own things. Right. Like our our laundromat could smell like actually or metaphorically in certain ways that we don’t, you know, that we don’t notice because we’re just there. We’re just in it all the time. Right? So getting that feedback from customers or family and friends or other operators who aren’t your competitor necessarily or maybe your competitor, I don’t know. But getting the sort of the those that outside eyes audit on your operation and on your business and on the experience of it is is huge in, you know, refining your business as you go.

Jordan Berry [01:31:05]:
Can I

John Simerson [01:31:05]:
add one more thing?

Jordan Berry [01:31:07]:
Yeah. I’d love yeah. Please.

John Simerson [01:31:08]:
So the the last thing I would say is, this is this is probably the biggest thing. I should have said this earlier. Is never be too big for your own business. And what I mean by that is, I tell a lot of the people I talk to, you know, you could be crushing it. You could be a multimillion dollar laundry company. You could be crushing it. Don’t ever step away from the small experience. And what I mean by that is probably up to about a year ago, because now now I’m just kinda too busy, but I would go out every week and make sure I performed at least five pickups and five deliveries just to stay in tune with how the app worked and how things were going.

John Simerson [01:31:44]:
And I would do kind of, ghost orders to my team. They wouldn’t know it was like certain family members and stuff like that. Stay a lot of businesses get so big that they forget the micro experiences. Now having 605 star reviews, we do have a few one star reviews sprinkled in there. But I’m very happy to say that I know every single one of those reviews. I know every single one I know where they came from, if they could be, negated or not negated. So don’t ever get too far from your business to where, you I have some great people that work for me, but your vision has to be consistently reminded of, like, what we’re doing. We’re doing a great service, you know, fresh, clean, convenient.

John Simerson [01:32:27]:
So always audit, always be involved, be on the ground level as much as you can. You know, there are bigger fish to fry a lot of the time, but don’t get away from the small things, you know, the small experiences. Because you could walk into your shop. I’ve walked into my shop many times where I’ve said, like, when did we start doing that? You know, like, or when did we, you know, when did we do this? And it’s only been like a month or something. And it’s, oh, you know, so and so started doing it and we like it. And we’re like, no, like, you know, it was knots. One time where I went in and like the girls were doing like these crazy origami knots and I was like, guys, we take care of seniors. Like, you know, they got carpal tunnel and stuff.

John Simerson [01:33:00]:
Like, they’re not gonna be able to do this. So it’s the smallest thing. And lo and behold, we actually did get a few surveys about like, Hey, can we not have such crazy knots? So those little things, we want to stay very in touch with. I would say stay involved in your business as much as you can.

Jordan Berry [01:33:15]:
Yeah. That’s a really interesting, example because I mean, you see why they would get excited about something like that. So like, oh, this is like a little extra flare, a little extra touch. Yeah. But then practically, yeah. I mean, yeah, I love that. And I think that that’s huge. I wrote down like, you know, never never get too big for your own business.

Jordan Berry [01:33:33]:
Like, I think that’s amazing, amazing advice. That that right there was worth the cost of admission in my in my view, right?

John Simerson [01:33:42]:
Oh, nice dude. Very cool.

Jordan Berry [01:33:44]:
Yeah. No, dude, this has been incredible. Like, so cool to hear about your journey of like growing this business. And I mean, it’s obvious, like you have been in it to win it and you have learned the lessons. I’ve I feel like we’ve only, like, scratched the surface of, like, your experience and, like, the things that you’ve learned of running this business. So maybe we need to do this again sometime because this is a lot of fun and, like, so much just good practical stuff, for people who out there who either want to start a pickup and delivery business or who already have one. And just hearing from somebody who’s been doing it for a while, probably longer than most people, because you got in pretty, pretty dang early on this, this side of the business. So pretty cool.

Jordan Berry [01:34:34]:
Listen, if if any, you know, anybody wants to connect with you, network with you or anything like that, or or check out your YouTube channel or anything? What’s what’s the best place for them to go to find you or your business or wherever you wanna send them?

John Simerson [01:34:48]:
Yeah. For sure. So my email is, my first and last name at Gmail, john simerson at g mail. Or you guys can give me a follow, on my Instagram. I I believe it’s my name spelled the correct way. Let’s see. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [01:35:07]:
So We’ll have all these Yeah.

John Simerson [01:35:08]:
I’m sure you’ll have it linked up and stuff. So it’s John, j o a ten, underscore, Simerson. And I’m sure I’m sure you’ll have it linked as well. So, yeah, you guys, I do a lot of, do a lot of consulting and stuff like that. Anyone that needs help, I I love doing this. I love doing business and helping people. So anyone that needs help, reach out for sure.

Jordan Berry [01:35:28]:
Oh, careful. Careful there. You might you might get flooded over there. No worries. Whenever whenever somebody is doing something cool, you know, says something like that.

John Simerson [01:35:38]:
I’m up here.

Jordan Berry [01:35:39]:
We’re all we’re all coming after you now. We all want your knowledge. Listen, John, man, this has been awesome. Thank you again so much for taking the time to come on. And, you know, like I said, share your story, share your wisdom, and, appreciate you leaving the door open for people to connect with you also. And hopefully that pays off for them and will pay off for you in very unexpected and cool ways. Yeah. But

John Simerson [01:36:04]:
thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Jordan Berry [01:36:06]:
Yeah. Anytime you got an open invitation over here, you’re doing awesome stuff. I love it. And, next time I’m in San Diego, we’ll have to connect up.

John Simerson [01:36:13]:
Oh, definitely. Definitely. Anytime.

Jordan Berry [01:36:16]:
Alright. Appreciate it, man. Alright. I hope you loved that episode with John. Huge shout out, and thank you to him for coming on the show. Once again, so much good stuff. But listen, it can get overwhelming with all the things the guests talk about. So pick one thing, just one thing, put it into action today if you can.

Jordan Berry [01:36:34]:
If not today, then this week. Put it on the calendar, put it in your phone reminders, set an alarm, whatever you got to do. Put something into action from today’s episode today as we stack actions week after week. Listen, I think we’re gonna look back in no time at all and see how far we’ve come. So get after it, and we will see you again next week on the Laundromat Resource Podcast. Peace.