Jordan Berry [00:00:00]:

Hey. What’s up, guys? It’s Jordan with the Lautermade Resource podcast. This is show 114, and I can’t tell you how pumped I am. Probably more pumped about this episode than any other episode that I’ve ever had here. This episode is incredible, and I promise a guarantee that if you make it to the end of this episode, your mind will be blown. And whether you’re trying to buy your first laundromat, or whether you’re trying to grow your existing laundromats. I don’t care if you have one laundromat, 0 laundromats, 30 laundromats. It does not matter. This episode is incredible. Michael is incredible, but you’re gonna love what he has to say. You’re gonna love a story. But then at the end of this episode, we get into crazy detail about how he went from being homeless and sleeping in his laundromat to doing 40,000 plus a month. in his laundromat. So this episode and and it’s just detail detail detail. If you’ve ever needed to take notes in an episode, it’s this one. In fact, it’s so good. That’s really all I wanna say. I just want you to jump into this. Hang tough to the whole end because there’s so much good stuff. And I’m not even gonna come in on the back end because I just want you to marinate on what he talks about this whole entire episode. So enjoy this. No fat. Well, your fast lane tip today. Join the pro community. lawnmatresource.com/pro. Go check it out. Tons of great perks for being a part of the pro community. But without further ado, let’s jump into it with Michael and be ready to have your mind loan. Michael, thank you for coming on the show. How are you doing today, man?

Michael Jones [00:01:41]:

Doing great, Jordan. How are you doing?

Jordan Berry [00:01:44]:

I am doing excellent. Excellent. Excellent. I’m a little bit chilly over here. I gotta be honest. It’s, you know, in the probably the low sixties, and my hands, I can barely feel them. I don’t know.

Michael Jones [00:01:57]:

How are you doing? Same way we got it same way we got it over here on the other side of the country. Yeah. Where are you located? Daytona Beach, Florida.

Jordan Berry [00:02:07]:

Living the dream in Florida. I love it. I love it. I’m jealous. Yeah. Hey. I we kinda chatted a little bit, and I’m I’m really excited to talk to you about your experience with Lonne muscular. I think you have a really good story to tell. But before we get into your experience with Lonneumatic, why don’t you give us a little bit of background on who you are and then we’ll talk about how you got into this weird little industry that we’re in here.

Michael Jones [00:02:32]:

Oh, alright. First thing I’ll say here is for everybody watching and listening at home. Get out of pen and a paper. You’re gonna be writing down a lot of stuff here. because Jordan and I are committed to making this the very best episode of the laundromat resource ever. This is gonna be very content heavy. This is gonna be very practical advice heavy. This is one of those ones. You probably wanna be sitting down to watch this one.

Jordan Berry [00:03:00]:

Now what time? — with me here. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. I I just got excited right now because I did not know that you were gonna say that, and I did not know we were bringing it hard. So I’ll put my game face on, and we’re going for it. I love it. Alright. Get your get your notepads out, get your remarkables out. That’s what I use to take notes. and let’s get this thing going. Okay. So give us a background, and then we’re gonna get into it.

Michael Jones [00:03:22]:

Alright. So I I think it’s probably the part of my story where people care about. Yeah. Childhood all that. We skip past all that. I think the part of the story people are gonna be most interested in was What was I doing before I got into laundromats and what triggered the interest in it? Mhmm. So what I’ll tell you is it’s a story of, like, one of those guys that’s He had it all, but he lost it, and then got it all back. And that’s a message of hope for everybody watching. It is possible to do that. in today’s world. Hadd it all. Well, here’s what it is is that I was working for one of the most respectable companies in Financial Services, Fidelity Investments. Had a very respectable job title with them, an office with my name on the door. people coming to see me for appointments asking what to do with their money and everything. We cannot necessarily the corner office, but pretty close to bits. living in very nice apartments in Altamonte Springs, eating at fancy restaurants, and every weekend, is living that life that’s the single guy’s dream of going out partying at clubs dancing or pool parties. It was all fun and games for a long time, but I had a realization there that’s this is all great and everything. But in any second, it really can be taken from me. It can go away because I’m so heavily dependent on my employer If the wrong person above me or the wrong customer has a complaint, it can all end. And this lavish lifestyle that I’m used to living will disappear. And when you look at these fancy jobs under salaries and everything. There’s a hidden component that they don’t tell you about, and that’s the the salary is as high as it is. because the expenses and where you have to live to work that job are very high there too. If you’re making they say they’ve paid you a 100,000 a year, but the cost of living in that area is $90,000. Now you could see why that is because you got expensive apartments and high gasoline cost, car maintenance cost because of all the driving. You’re gonna have to do in Big City. And the groceries and clothes I mean, we we had to look very nice to be a financial adviser wearing the fancy suits and everything. So you spent through that salary pretty quickly. It was already spoken for by the time you got it. and it’s the hand that feeds that you’re so dependent on. And if you If one day maybe nothing bad happens, but one day you stop liking it, which you will. You will get sick of everything, and it loses its Nuance, it’s novelty. Then you’re gonna wake up one morning and be like, man, I really don’t wanna do this, but I’m stuck in this. And I had this the realization a couple of times was where the things that I would do for fun, they stopped being fun. I stopped with being able to enjoy them because I stopped enjoying my job, and dreaded going back into work because it was the same conversations over and over again trying to put people through these sales funnels to get them to do a certain thing and kind of looking at every person as just a number or something that you work this sales funnel template on or this scripted conversation on. instead of working with people 1 to 1 like an individual for their specific needs. It was a, bosses, you got this product. You gotta push. push it, do whatever you can, get the customer to see it your way, get it to see it company’s way. When you get tired of that, and had the realization one time doing something that’s I really enjoyed doing all the weekends was just going to the beach. Those days where you You go out, and you forget what time it is because you have such a good time playing volleyball with your friends or something, and you realize what time it is when the sun goes down. But one day, I wasn’t enjoying it because as each second passed, to it’s ticking and ticking closer to the day, and I gotta wake up Monday morning and clock back into this job that I can’t stand. And It’s just barely giving me enough to cover the bills that I have to pay in order to work the job. Yeah. They they say his salary is the drug that they give you to make you forget your dreams. And so, yeah, it really dawned on me just sitting in my car one day before at work, listening to that that metallica song, unforgiven. It the lyrics. I’ve never listened to them before. I heard this song a million times. I never really listened to the lyrics, but I know it’s that point where James Hatfield is singing about. Yeah. They dedicate their lives to run an old his. He tries to please them all, better man he is. And I was like, man, It’s incredible. Like, he’s described my life to a tee here that’s in this corporate America polished appearance matrix world that we’re living in. Everything we do is for other people, and we never really get to do anything that we want to do. And when we get the time to do what we wanna do, we don’t really enjoy because we’re dreading going back to work when the weekend is over. So I was looking for anything I could to get out of that, to get out of the matrix. And laundromats, it wasn’t anything special about it. It’s like you could have sold me business selling sweaters in the Sahara Deserts And if you had convinced me that it would get me out of corporate America, I would have bought it. That’s how unhappy I was at my job. And that’s really what led me into a laundromat system. You know, first, I wanted to get into the storage business, but the Real Estate Investment Trusts have bought up all these storage facilities and driven the price up so high that you gotta be a millionaire to buy it. but laundromats was something where it was still kind of a hidden gem at the time back in

Jordan Berry [00:09:18]:

2021

Michael Jones [00:09:19]:

when I bought it. it wasn’t as, like, sought after like it is now because a lot of people have the misconception. Like, oh, how can you get rich with quarters. You’re not thinking about the real stickiness of the business and long term relationships with customers, how those can benefit if you gather enough money. So didn’t really know much about laundromats. I did tune in to many episodes of your show and Dave Men’s and some others. But I was totally in, over my head, no idea what I was getting into. And that’s really the the lessons that we’re gonna learn today here. When I talked about, like, how I was kind of thrown into the deep end with sharks because I got 5 competitors within one mile of the store. I was doing this specifically to get away from corporate America when I was doing it, it just made me more dependent on it first until I finally got my head above water and realized what I was doing. And at one point, We got so destitute and so strained for money that, you know, spending money that, like, majority of my net worth was spend to acquire the business and fix up the laundromats that I bought. That’s a lot of future income. was getting spoken for already with credit cards and business loans. And it got so destitute to the point where I had to live inside my laundry when the lease on my apartment ended because the crazy rental and real estate prices that are going on right now I could not afford those back then. Couldn’t take on another lease obligation, especially for a place that I really wasn’t gonna be that much. I was either gonna day job, or I was gonna be at the laundromats fixing things and tidying up, making sure everything works, doing customer service. and bought hook line and sinker into the misconception that’s a laundromat can be passive income. It’s anything about the sorts unless you have a full staff of employees that are there 247, take care of everything. So I was just so desperate to get out of corporate America blinded by by hatreds for it that I bought into the laundromat business and went into the deep end way over my head, but learned a lot of lessons, and that’s why I’m here today. That’s what we’re gonna talk about today. Here’s everything that brought me to the point where I was good enough to get on Jordan’s show and talk to him.

Jordan Berry [00:11:49]:

Yeah. Well, I yeah. I’m I’m excited to dig into the store. I mean, we’ve talked, you know, before, and I I know kinda what you you’ve gone through, and you’ve set the stage well. I mean, I think so many people who listen to the show and so many people who should be listening to the show, but don’t. Yeah. I can can identify with that feeling of I am desperate to get out of my current situation. I don’t like my job. I don’t like my financial situation. I don’t like the feelings and the stress. I I mean, I’ve been there. I I just I know so many of us can relate with that in the desperation there. And, you know, kudos to you. I mean, I know you you jumped into the deep in in into the middle of a pool of sharks. And but kudos to you for for taking some action. Right? Not die in a slow death. You almost kinda put yourself in a situation where you’re gonna you’re gonna swim or you’re gonna die a quick death and then have to totally restart over. And you know, I I know a little bit about your story, and and we’re gonna get into it for sure. But kudos to you for getting into it. So take me back to, okay, you’re you’re desperate to get out. How how did Laundromats become the thing that you focused on there to to help you get out.

Michael Jones [00:13:20]:

Yeah. I was interested in the idea because I remember at one point when I moved into my first house I ended up selling this house later. But when I moved into my first house, there was plenty of time in the beginning where I didn’t have working equipment. for wash and cook wash and dryer. So I had to visit the laundromats. And you can just remember thinking, man, this must be a pretty good racket. because customers are coming in the door paying you to do their own work. And I was like, That must be a great business like car wash or storage facilities or anywhere else where it’s customer self serve. And I think that’s probably like where the first seed was planted that had me initially interested in it. I was looking for all sorts of businesses. So ironically, the laundromat business is nothing like this, but ironically, I was looking for businesses to get away for people. because people is what was causing all of the headaches and everything that I had back when I was a financial advisor at The great thing about businesses like parking lots or storage facilities and everything is that it’s like real estate investing, but not the biggest cause of all the problems in real estate, which is people.

Jordan Berry [00:14:36]:

And — I would say biggest cause of all the problems just in general

Michael Jones [00:14:41]:

in the world. Yeah. Exactly. Causing all problems on earth as people. So I’m just sitting here thinking, well, I’m still gonna be dealing with people, but I’ll have less interactions with them because they’re supposed to help themselves, the vending machine business. learning the hard way. That’s not the case with longer maths. But that was my trigger of interest into it. Was trying to minimize interactions between me and the customer.

Jordan Berry [00:15:09]:

Yeah. That I that is I mean, it is funny. I because it’s true. I mean, there are there are plenty of laundromat owners that don’t interact with customers very much. But You know, it it’s a people business. Like, it’s a community business by and large, and so that’s it’s a funny funny way to end up into the business by trying to get away from people when you’re, you know, jumping into a community business there. So okay. So I mean, we you were looking at all kinds of different businesses and just a particular laundromat jumped out? Or, like, how did that happen to where you finally were like, okay. I’m gonna buy this business.

Michael Jones [00:15:49]:

It was completely by accident that I got, the one that it did here because was living in Altamonte Springs, which is the Orlando area. So I was thinking I could stay in that area and still work my day job till The laundromat got busy enough for me to quit the job. And there was one for sale on the by the cell that was in Orlando, but it was already sold. They just had to take the listing down, but the barometer I talked to told me about one that he was about to list and hadn’t put it up yet. It was over in South Daytona, which is here, and that’s it was a great opportunity because this is them retooling and completely remodeling the store. But if once was the laundromats, the old owners didn’t keep up with it. The business failed, and the machines were all broken down so they had to get rid of all. They were gonna come in with all new speed clean machines. And they said, this is a good opportunity because you’re going to avoid a lot of the initial barriers to entry like those in those environmental impact fees. Mhmm. So this would be, like, the closest brand new turnkey lowest cost store that you could possibly get is how the broker sold it to me. And I’m thinking, in my head, when I hear the words turnkey, it’s just Oh, yeah. Open the doors, and the customers just got right in. Yeah. But I’ve had no idea, like, how much more work was gonna be involved in it. So I would tell people that it it was a brand new store because it had been out of business for a good year. before I got to take over. And those those are good opportunities to look for, by the way, is zombie mats that failed or laundromats or things that used to be laundromats that failed, and they just kinda look at them under why they had failed. And in this case, it’s just that the old owner didn’t keep up with the machines and the maintenance. And when you got 5 competitors within one mile at the store, you gotta be doing that stuff. You gotta stay ahead of the curve, and he didn’t. That’s why he failed. And it was a good low cost way for me to get in initially But the initial purchase price is not the only price that you pay at the beginning. You’re going to find all sorts of new costs later on, which we did. The all sorts of new things that needed to be fixed are in just putting in new machines and new drywall, flooring, and everything. So and over my head with that one too.

Jordan Berry [00:18:26]:

Yeah. Okay. So so when you when you talk to this broker, And he said, hey. I’ve got one that I’m listing. Was Was that when a did you purchase it, or did you purchase equipment? Like, how did that how did that kinda play out in terms of how you actually acquired the business?

Michael Jones [00:18:51]:

Okay. The commercial real estate is leased because it’s in a plaza, and we got a landlord over all the tenants in the plaza. So part of the purchasing the business was entering into a lease with that landlord. And it’s the distributor alliance state or state wide or alliance or it’s both. They’re the ones sold maybe Speed Queen Machines, the broker, he he did more than just selling me the machines and giving the financing for the was really involved in the retooling and remodeling of the store. He’s a good guy. And got the electrician’s plumbers, carpenters to come on out, make the place look nice and fancy, and had been kind of working with me one on one a lot kinda tell me, hey. This is what you’re gonna be paying for, and everything is what you’re getting into. Still, all I heard was good parts actively ignoring the bad parts just because I wanted to get out of corporate America so badly. But that’s that’s how it happened there. It was it’s one of those contracts that you get with the alliance to buy the equipments, and they get you a location They install everything and kinda really get you set to go. What you’re left with is you gotta open the doors. You gotta marketplace. You gotta operate the place. And that sounds like it’s small potatoes, but what you’re what they’re doing for you compared to what they’re handing off to you is incredibly disproportionately heavy on your side. Mhmm. But you gotta know that going in here that’s you never buy a turnkey LonderWatt. No such thing as a turnkey businesses in this business.

Jordan Berry [00:20:38]:

Yeah. Interesting. I like it. Okay. So Real quick. I mean, we’re gonna get into when when you first took over and what that was like and what your experience was like. But before we get into that, I think You know? And I’ve asked this to a couple people before, but I’m I’m curious on your take because you mentioned, hey. When you decided to buy this business, The majority of your net worth was going towards the acquisition of this business, and I talked to a lot of people on consulting calls and just kind of in general who are, like, overcome with fear to take that step to actually do and and and maybe the beginning of your story is not actually gonna help that in a lot of people. because of, you know, how things kinda went down a little bit. But I’m curious, like, do you for you, was it just like, straight like, the desperation that helped you overcome that fear of of investing that money or or How did you overcome that fear of of saying, okay. Here’s everything I have pretty much. I’m gonna I’m gonna go all in here with this business. How’d you how’d you take that step?

Michael Jones [00:21:52]:

Yeah. Well, to be honest with you, there’s a lot of arrogance in it too. because it was November of 2021 when I wrote the down payment check and added it to the broker. Now let’s wind the clocks back. What was going on in November of 2021? Particularly for us guys in financial services. The market was good, Ben. Majority of my net worth that added investments in the stock market crypto and Bitcoin. That was the Bitcoin top. It was November 2021. Yeah. So I was thinking, okay. Yeah. This thing is gonna continue for ever here. We’re eventually going to keep getting 20% returns in the stock market. Bitcoin’s gonna go to a 100,000 So, yeah, I’m in great shape here and everything. Write the check to the broker, and then that’s when the decline for both stocks and the crypto markets began. And a lot of that stuff it’s it’s not totally wiped out. It’s just it is down so bad here that that did help the situation either, particularly when I gotta be writing lots of checks for — Right. — new carpentry to come in, new flooring to be put in and everything. So what I would say to that person who is kind of paralyzed by fear I will say you need a lot more money than you think you do or then they tell you that you do. Whatever they quote you as a total price or a down price, I would multiply that by at least 3. And what you really want is to have that money out of investments and set aside safely in cash when you’re ready to buy or at the moment you shake hands on the deal, get it into cash there because you you’re gonna be spending a lot of it. I was Erogan made the mistake of thinking, oh, I know so much about investment. So, you know, I’m a financial adviser here. I can leave that money in because I’m a smart investor. But no matter how smart you are, a receding tide is going to put all the ships out there in peril. So you’re not too good or too smart or anything to not need money. You’re not too clever or too good at negotiation, but price down and everything to not need money. And that’s okay. What? Like, what’s true for For me, and I think true for a lot of people is that just how he feels better than spending money because what comes with it is options, what comes with it is freedom. So you want to have a good mattress of cash to lay your head on.

Jordan Berry [00:24:28]:

Well, I appreciate you, Sharon. I mean, that’s a that’s a very fulnerable thing to say to say, you know, I was just arrogant. Like, that’s that’s a an a tough thing to say. So I appreciate you sharing that. And you know, for me, like, I I’ve looked back in in my life, and I have I mean, I when I bought my first laundromat, I was scared, and I was nervous, and I wasn’t confident that I knew what I was doing, but I was very confident that Hey. Listen. I’ve read everybody succeeds in this business. It’s almost impossible to fail, and I I genuinely thought. You know? I am better than most people at most things, and so I’m golden. I’m gonna be great. Well, guess what? I lost a ton of money for a long time and did not know what to do and got humbled real quick there. with that first laundromat. And so but that’s a very hard thing to say and a hard thing to do. So I appreciate you sharing that Because I think that there’s lessons to be learned there for for all of us in, hey. You know? We we can’t we can only control what we can control and the things we can’t control, you know, we’re we’re at the a whim of, you know, the markets or the crypto market has been beat up real bad. You know? And so — Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate you sharing that. Okay. So when you when you said yes. Okay. I mean, I’m buying this business. It was not built out yet. Is that the case? or it was already built out?

Michael Jones [00:26:07]:

I mean, the old store structure was there. Right. But may I have a got I’ve got 5 pictures of it, but, like, some before picture before after pictures of it because it looked horrible. Absolutely horrible.

Jordan Berry [00:26:19]:

If you find those, by the way, send those over to me. I’ll I’ll put them up if people can see them on the show notes. Absolutely.

Michael Jones [00:26:26]:

Yeah. Absolutely. I will. It just was so outdated, and it can be completely gutted and redone. It No. It’s a thing to our last point here is that there there is a little bit of a bias that we fall into that hurts us in the acquisition phase of this is that you only visit successful laundromats if you’re a laundromat customer. And when you’re prospecting them to, you think of laundromats probably visited successful ones in your life, and so that was your impression of what the business is like. Like, hey. When I visited, it seemed packed. looked like it was turning a lot of business over, but you don’t visit the failures. You don’t go to the laundromat graveyard. and see the ones that are dying because it’s one that you would drive past because you wouldn’t wanna do business there or anything. So I think that a good thing for early education in this business is to find yourself a dying one, not not necessarily for the business opportunity of buying it, but just to learn. And I sit there and ask yourself why you’re looking at it or you go inside and say, why is this place family? What are all the things that they’re doing wrong here? And what could I do better if I either took over this store or opened up another store at Mike’s. And I think that you’ll lose a lot of that false impression and that bias that you get when you see one that’s struggling and you see that’s failure is possible because we’ve all seen the statistic. We got, like, a 96% success rate in laundromats.

Jordan Berry [00:28:12]:

Yeah. Okay. So I’m I’m trying to write down all these quotes that I mean, you’re just spitting out gyms already. So Yes. And I’m not very good at doing multiple things at once. Okay. So take me back to You have invested in this laundromat, and it is open for business for the first time now. What how were you feeling up at that time, and what was that experience like?

Michael Jones [00:28:41]:

Oh, man. It was at first, it was like, man. It feels too good to be true. Like, soon, I’m gonna be living my dream, sitting on the shores of Daytona Beach, but They mock Rita in one hands, and girlfriends on the other side of me playing in a hammocks. because the money is just rolling in from coins going into those machines. So that was what lasted probably the 1st 3 days of the place being open for business. Before that, you know, there was a lot of going in there and painting and cleaning and thinking about marketing and everything. A lot lot of labor beforehand, but 3 days into it. So I was like, oh, it’s coming soon, the wave of business and everything, but it slowly started to ticked down into despair, slowly started to, you know, the energy, the excitement was dying down and going away with each day that passed by where you’d see cars drive past the store. And, yeah, you’re looking through the windows, and you think there’s, like, all front face of the store is all windows. And I’m looking there, and I was like, is this a customer No. It drove past. And there’d be some days where I was the only person in there all day long. or there’d be other days where I just gave 1 or 2 customers to come in. And, of course, I gave him the most white glove treatment if possible could. And, like, can’t you please tell all your friends about me and everything? They’re like, oh, I will. I will. But, yeah, it really does does it ever come up in conversation with your friends? Hey. I went to a new laundromat today. Right. And on that note here, I’m gonna say that anybody that tells you that their primary source of marketing is word-of-mouth is a person that tells you, yeah, I don’t know how we get our customers because Word-of-mouth is not as prevalent as people think it is. There were so many days, like, where we would get 10 to 12 customers a day, and it was a struggle to get those. And working my day job still, and then I’m working all day around the clock at the launch of that trying to keep it clean and everything. The social life completely died. Completely was clearly erased and eradicated. Lost all my friends, in this process, old friends that I had at that time, got new friends now. So don’t feel too sorry for me. But, yeah, lost all friends, social life, nonexistent. It had been, like, living back in the 1800 where he woke up at the crack of dawn every day. and worked until it was too dark to continue working, and he did that 7 days a week. So there were some 22 hour days, but the average was 18 hours. And when I fell asleep when I was living in the laundromat sleeping on the floor, I slept well, not because it was comfortable, but because I was just so tired.

Jordan Berry [00:31:42]:

Yeah. So okay. Sorry that this happened to you. Like, I mean, we’ve talked about this, but Here’s the situation. Right? You’re so desperate to get out of your job. that you can’t stand anymore, that you go out and by a business to help you get out of that job and your working all day and all night even more now, and you’re sleeping on the floor at your business at your laundromat. Some days, no customers come in. Where what’s your mental you’re losing your friends? Like, what’s your mental state at this point in the story.

Michael Jones [00:32:36]:

Say it like the one good thing going for me. I mean, it was just spare color. There was one good thing going for me. always keep this in my ear. Mhmm. I’ve got a subscription into a YouTube premium, which allows you to just, like, listen to it. So I’m listening to YouTube premium the whole time that I’m working in that laundromat, the whole time that I’ve got to eat free time to clean or, like, there was one commercial customer that really kept the business alive, a vacation rental cleaner that would drop off a lot of sheets and towels and everything. It wouldn’t be enough to be profitable, but it was enough to kinda keep the business lights on. Still weren’t making a profit yet, though. Still losing money. But I’m listening to YouTube listening to your show. I’m listening to Wally Cope. and a little bit of Dave Manns, a little bit of some of the it was a guy I think it’s Ken Barrett. The laundromat out to was listening to him and everything. and just hoping that, like, man, maybe one day we’ll turn around and be like one of these guys. But, yeah, throughout when I didn’t have this going in my ear, it was totaled spare because you write checks for things that are breaking. There were still plumbing issues that came up later. That’s why you wanna have more cap set aside because so you will run into more problems, particularly when you’re taking over either a new store or a retooled store, or even if you bought a old one. They’re selling it because they don’t wanna deal with problems. You’re gonna inherit them. You do wanna have money set aside for that. I was running into a ton of those. And there’s just so much a despair when particularly when someone walks through the door, and they’re only in there to use the bathroom. or it’s a charity solicitor that comes in and is asking you for money. You know, we’re like, I’m the one that eats charity here. And you know, and, yeah, lose hope very fast. And it got to a point where the before I even contacted you, I contacted a business broker, not the one that sold me to place. I was too ashamed to, like, show my face to him thinking, like, yeah, I’m gonna be, like, his failure case here. He set me up with, like, the best thing possible, and I’m this complete moron loser that failed. And he’s gonna be like, dude, why can’t you make this work? So I contacted our business broker and say, I gotta get out of here. Help me get out of this. And, oh, and I told him, like, only cash flow I had for an entire month was $48100. He’s like, there’s no way I could market that.

Jordan Berry [00:35:16]:

And — That’s gross. Right? — broker. 48100 gross.

Michael Jones [00:35:19]:

Yeah. It was gross revenue. Yeah. nerve business broker contacted who said, well, you know, I might have this client that is interested in buying laundromats. Maybe I can get in to buy want he wants a laundromat for sure. And I’ll always thank the fact that this guy was a total neophytes for for not being able to sell my laundromat for me. I always think it’s not a lot for that success, everything. I didn’t lose it. But he had asked me to send pro form a over, and I was gonna send the exact same one that my broker said. And I did. I attached it to the email, but this guy was, like, such a neophyte, and really bad at technology. He had no idea how to open the attachment, never saw it. So his one customer that was interested in buying a lot from that never got the the pro form a or anything, so a deal never happens. thankfully, to the technological ignorance of this one broker guy here, I still have a business that became successful but I couldn’t remember the night before sleeping on the floor in that lodge or bads being so desperate to not being able to really sleep just constantly looking up at the ceiling. and thinking, man, I hope this guy can get me out of this because this is the biggest mistake of my life. But when that deal didn’t happen, I was like, okay. He’s gonna throw this out there. I’m gonna I’m gonna go contact Jordan. I’m sure he charges money or something here, but I’m gonna go contact him. I’ll pay whatever it is just to here if there’s hope or maybe he could tell me, yeah, get rid of this place. It’s a you got the, what they call, laundry milled. Anyway, they just keep turning it over and over to make a commission. But as of today, either one of being told either one of those things would’ve helped me at that point because then I’d have some clarity.

Jordan Berry [00:37:03]:

Yeah. Yeah, man. That’s a that’s a a tough spot. And and, you know, I I’m I can’t tell you how excited I am to be having this interview right now because when we first talked, I I didn’t know. Like, didn’t know if you were gonna make it or not because, you know, it was it was tough, man. You’re like, I’m sleeping in the laundromat. I I want out. Like, help help me get out. Okay. So we’ll get into that too. So well, let’s talk about that. Okay? So, I mean, you you mentioned Okay. So it’s not doing well at all. But you mentioned, hey. I’m glad I stuck with it because now it’s doing a lot better. So walk us through. Like, what changed from I’m desperate. I’m sleeping on the floor in my laundromat. I’m losing money to I actually feel good about owning a laundromat now.

Michael Jones [00:37:57]:

Mhmm. Okay. Good question. The broker that sold me a place encourage me, hey. Do a free wash. Do it. It’s worth doing. And I was afraid to do it. He goes, I’m thinking, can I even afford to do that? Imagine what the water people should be like. And I’d asked you, even our first coaching session, should I do that, if you say? And I did end up doing it. When I was able to gather from that, that gave me hope, was that there is a need out here for it that there is enough people to make the business work in this laundromat. That’s kind of where our hope came back here was when I ran that free wash week And then the next week, we did a half price week. And then the week after that, we continued to have prices as long as he had paid with the Pay Range app. trying to get people into established weekly habits of being a customer of mine because, yeah, you come here and get these promos. You gotta free wash this week and have prices next. Now you’ve come here three times in the last 3 weeks. It should be a habit by now. Hopefully, that they were addicted to the place and the free watch was also to get people out of competitive stores. I don’t know I don’t really think or know or believe that any of that really helps with the marketing of the store. Don’t think it necessarily did. but it did give me hope because I saw hey. People are coming here, and there’s people here that can use this place And when I look at the the people that came, it was, like, the demographic that you expect for a lot of hats to renters. Dean, working class families and everything. So that’s even I guess there is enough of them out here in sustained business. And I was charging for the drying and from, like, what I estimate for drying costs on an average load. It looked like we were doing 6 to 7 turns a day. during those promo weeks. Now after the those promo weeks ended, we kinda went back to the same the same bad place we were in before where very few people came in regularly, but it’s did kind of put us on the map in the sense of people know we exist now, and What it also had done was had gotten a a commercial customer again after that. And, you know, it’s funny saying it’s like Pat and Natwood. They probably the laundromat in the area that has most commercial customers. That’s something that we’ll talk in-depth about about how to get those But it was good enough to get me to believe in the place again and get out of that hole of despair of, man, I made the biggest mistake of my life. And now I can enjoy putting effort and energy into it. And one day in particular, where it really changed was. I was still working my day job, which was over in Orlando. That’s 40 minutes away from Daytona where the laundromat was. Had one of the worst days of work at my day job in Orlando, Adi. Bus, you you think that it’s it’s kinda like a joke or something, but that people do or an archetype just in movies and shows, but no. No. It’s real. There is such a thing as having a sadistic boss, and they just chewed me out, dressed me down, over results not being that great because, you know, I’ve got a lack of sleep, and I’m working too much. There’s, like, nothing happy happening in my life. So I’m not being a great salesman at the job either. So they chewed me up and ate me alive. And then one day, I’m driving back to do the laundromats going from Orlando to Daytona. And I get a call from a a business broker saying, hey. I got a a customer here who is gonna list their long patch with our firm. And That’s gonna take some time because, you know, we gotta find a buyer. We gotta retool everything and all, but he does have a commercial customer that needs service right now. It’s the Bethune Cookman University, they their football team needs their jerseys washed just about every day. and they’re willing to pay a $100 a day to do it. And I was like, absolutely. I’ll take that customer because I’m desperate for any business that I couldn’t get. But in that drive home, what I realized was yeah. I think I know where I need to be now. I think I know where all my efforts need to be. It’s in the laundromat working for myself instead of trying to save whatever pathetic career might be left at this job that I hate. And that’s where, like, I regained the hope where the story really turned around, and we had been all uphill ever since then. slowly. It was a slow struggle uphill, but it was still progress.

Jordan Berry [00:43:00]:

Yeah. Man, crazy crazy and wild. Okay. So did I mean, did you end up quitting your job at some point along the the way, or are you still working there? What’s the what’s the situation now?

Michael Jones [00:43:12]:

Yes. So that happens in October is when I had left Fidelity Investments because I had won over enough commercial customers to the point where it just wasn’t possible at all for me to be able to work the day job and get all the wash dry, full deep done for these commercial customers. A lot of property managers that are doing rentals out here at Dayton Beach, and they drop off lots of limits. Like, some that I got right now, they’re managing about 60 properties. So there’s a lot of lender in that. It just wasn’t physically possible to do the job and serve these customers. And I was like, I know which thing I’d rather be doing. I know where I belong where I’d rather be, so I’m gonna do that instead. And there was enough from those commercial customers to pay the bills and give me a little bit of money to have need to come myself as well. So that that was recently October 2022 when I was able to do that. And it was it was Terry, But it felt really great afterwards. So, like, you know, in corporate America, you you put on this facade where if you’re a funny person and you can’t really be funny because, you know, it might offend somebody’s not not necessarily like offensive jokes, but just like, you know, there’s somebody else that’s not having a good day, and they don’t like you being happy. or your opinions you have to suppress. You gotta put on this polished smiley appearance and put on these PR Grins for people. There are customers, and they’re insulting you to your face, and you just gotta stand there and take it and look happy and everything like it doesn’t bother you when it does. But it does something to you physically. That’s incredibly bad. Like and I don’t know if you can remember way back when you were a kid. The very first time you told him, lie. and you felt bad. Physically, you felt bad because you knew you did something wrong. I mean, your body has morality as well. And when you are immoral or when you’re just not being your authentic self, your body attacks you saying, you shouldn’t do that. And the whole time that you’re in corporate America putting on this fake appearance and everything being someone you’re not suppressed with we really are for the sake of a company image. Mhmm. That kind of has the exact same effect physically and some emotion. It’s really sucks your soul out if you have So being able to escape that was it was one of those liberating moments of my life.

Jordan Berry [00:45:48]:

Yeah. Well, hey. Good for you. Love it. Congratulations on being able to do that. Alright. So let’s talk about I mean, how did you you said you had a slow slow incline of business. So, I mean, what how did you do that? What did that look like? What are what are some of the practical things that you did to increase your business?

Michael Jones [00:46:06]:

Alright. After our promo weeks, we put up a promo for, like, almost each day to give people a reason to come on weekdays. See, weekend business, you’re always gonna have that. Always gonna be people who need to do laundry on weekends. By getting people in on the weekdays, that’s the trouble. So we did small promos there. We have Pay Range installed in the machines, which we get rid of and replacing with the SENSE card system that they’ve got. to talk about that later. But with Mondays, we call them money back Mondays where if you spend $10 on pay range, we’ll give you a $4 in app credit. And I’ll tell you what, a lot of people will think, well, man, that’s not nuts. You’re giving away, way too much here. How do you stay profitable? It’s not hurt us one bit as far as profitability because Pay range, and this is kind of why I’m getting rid of it. It’s it’s not too user friendly. It’s not that user friendly. Like, when you get a reward or a promo from it as a customer, you got you jumped through a lot of steps here. So not everybody got to then got the cashback reward ended up using it because I couldn’t figure out how to. even though the staff and I have tried to, like, proactively show people how to do it. Mhmm. But Tuesdays, We have free detergent, Tuesday. I just put out a bucket of detergent powder there. People can scoop from it. Wednesdays, we call that big wash Wednesday. And that’s where our biggest washers, the sixty pounders are discounted from 7.75 to $6. And then Thursdays, But get rid of this promo here because it was successful, but it was way too successful. It was a 30% Thursday where the drop off service is 30% off. So instead of a dollar 25 a pound, it was like 87¢ a pound.

Jordan Berry [00:47:51]:

Yeah. Woah. That yeah. But that’s hey, man.

Michael Jones [00:47:57]:

Getting them in. Getting them in. Yeah. So that encouraged a lot of business, got us a lot of new customers, another thing that really helps. was using dense point of sale software for the drop off service. As a lot of people think, well, all it does is it keeps you organized and notifies customs. I can do that. pen and paper, And I can call customers and let them know laundry’s done and everything. Yeah. You can. But there there’s a critical principle that you wanna adhere to as religiously as you can in this business, and that’s the principle of speed. You want to move as fast as you can. This is true for all businesses, not just laundromatops. Speed is absolutely critical. Anything you can do to save time is absolutely worth it. and having this the SENSE app that automatically notifies customer by text message when their laundry is done. It may only save you one minute from dialing up and calling that customer or send a text message yourself. But these minutes add up, and they are critical. Other things with speed is getting paid as soon as possible. You wanna collect money right away as quick as you can? because money does a lot more for you sitting in the bank in the company bank account than it does appearing on the accounts receivable side of your business balance sheet. You want that money in the bank because that money can be used right away to go market to other customers with Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and win you more business. You want to be nor, I say greedy or, you know, money hungry or anything or Penny mentioned. But do you do you wanna be taking those dollars in as fast as you can? And with drop offs, the speed is critically important as well. If you wanna do those drop offs right away, if possible, I’m not saying that you gotta advertise to the customer. Hey. I’ll get it done today. I’ll get it done 2 hours, but you wanna get it done as soon as possible so that they don’t stack up. That is when they stack up, we run into higher risks of running greater labor costs when your staff comes and do it or a greater risk of getting laundries mixed up. customer electronics mixed up or losing things. So you definitely wanna get them done as soon as possible compared to that principle of speed. as best as you can. Going back to your question and then get into the second principle to stick to religiously is a principle of stickiness You wanna be as sticky with the customers as possible. And our wash and fold business was able to do that because Let’s see. Gonna do this here. I’m gonna share my screen with you. Where we got it? Here we go.

Jordan Berry [00:50:44]:

While you’re pulling that up, in case you’re listening on the podcast and not watching on the video, I’m gonna post a link to just a section here. So in case you wanna see visually what he’s showing us, you can watch that part without having to watch the whole episode. So I’ll put a link in the show notes there for you to be able to check that out.

Michael Jones [00:51:03]:

Alright. You’re able to see this. Right? The — Yep. — browser and everything? Okay. This is a business card that’s all of my drop off customers got. And what we did here was we’d stamp it every time they used it. This was a way to go on this, so I do this here. We don’t do £30 of free up to 10 uses. What we do is now is this was the first one I was doing, but what we do now is We’ll give you £20 free after we’ve done £400 for you, which we can keep track of now through the census app. how many pounds we’ve done for that customer. And this is what’s made it sticky is customers are coming back to fill up that card and get their free use. You definitely wanna set those kind of limitations to it. Like, you don’t wanna say your 11th use of us is free. You’re gonna say, We’ll do £20 or so free for you after we’ve done £400 because that’s just a

Jordan Berry [00:51:54]:

5%

Michael Jones [00:51:56]:

of the business that you’ve already done with this customer. And a customer that brings you that much has brought £400 to you is a very profitable customer anyway, so you’re gonna wanna keep them. This is a good way to do it and make it sticky with them. Some other things that you could do besides like a loyalty rewards card like this is in your for self serve customers in your machines that’s if they’re able to accept cards, if you’re using Payrange, you can have loyalty rewards built into those I’ve got that where you spend $50, we will give you $5 back. There’s other kinds of, like, rewards discounts that frequent users of it are able to use. When we get the sense system installed on all the machines, those boxes where you can, like, swipe a card right on the machine. We’re able to do that. We’re gonna be able to do something like that as well, and that helps reinforce the habit of coming there. And that’s what you’re trying to do is reinforcing the habit. Anything that you can do to reinforce that is definitely worth doing here. I mean, if it for spending a $100 a day in Google Ads, don’t be put off by that or anything because As long as you see people coming into the store and their new faces, even if that $100 was 20% of the revenue you made that day. Those can be long term customers. You put a good impression on. if you win their loyalty as long as they enjoyed the the the visit to your laundromat when they came in. and found it superior to the competitors. So that $100 at that day was worth spending as long as you, you know, got enough customers to justify it. So any anything you can do. Laundromats are meant to be a sticky business. Anything you can do to reinforce that principle will help you, and that’s what had helped me. And then the big thing that it helped me was with my YouTube premium description. It wasn’t just listening to these laundromat podcasts, but also listening to digital’s social media marketing and Google Ads marketing. to just learn those ecosystems inside outs. And I tell you what, if you haven’t bought a laundromat yet, but you’re going to, you’re looking for it. First, study digital marketing, study Google, and those kind of ads, and study Facebook, and Instagram, because, you know, as evil as these social media companies are, they are the one thing that’s keeping a lot of small businesses in business. They can be your friend as a business owner when you understand how best to use them. So I I would definitely recommend even even if you’re already in because it’s worth taking the time to learn. And that’s what has led to a lot of our current success now was I just finally learned and understood how to market the business. Marketing will make or break your business. Are you are you marketing

Jordan Berry [00:55:06]:

for self serve customers, for drop off customers, for both? What do you Yeah. Both. Yeah. Both.

Michael Jones [00:55:13]:

And they there’s 2 different kinds of marketing. Like, the ad that I’m gonna show a drop off customer is different than the ad that I show a self serve customer because they’re 2 different kinds of people. Mhmm.

Jordan Berry [00:55:23]:

Yeah. And are you marketing for the for the drop off? Are you marketing both to commercial and residential, or are you focusing on 1 or the other in your marketing?

Michael Jones [00:55:34]:

I’ll show you exactly how to do it. see here. I’m gonna share the screen again. It’s something that you want to really know about inside outs, and that’s what’s called landing pages. Landing pages here. And this is just a a homepage of our website, and we’ve got this slider going on here that shows that this is what our laundromat looks like. Here’s a drop off service that we do. Pickup and delivery. We also got commercial services and everything. We got all of that. SB, if somebody just kinda, like, stumbled on our page of everything that we do here from a Google search or just typing in our name, Daytonalautermatt.com. But the ads that I run, specifically for drop off customers, they’re gonna come to this landing page, and it’s gonna be looking a lot different here. This is something that maybe we’re gonna get into the details of is that you’re selling the benefits before anything else. And the benefit here is We’re gonna give you back 6 hours of time in your week by you you delegating your laundry to us. I’m gonna use all sorts of media here. Like, this was a video that I had put together video I had put together just using stock footage from pixels. as just to say, I’m voting this year. You have a family for those reasons not to be doing all this laundry here and everything. Can I show people why — Mhmm. — use us. And then we come in with here’s what we do. Here’s how good we are for you. Anything going on about benefits, get directions, got those called actions and everything. Those are the kind of ads that show the drop off customer. It can also go through reasons and everything here. whereas a self serve customer must show them a different kind of ad. Let’s see. Do I have one I can show you here a thing to do? See if we go back to, like, yeah, there’s one. because you know who our customer is. Typically, it’s the ladies, and it’s the mother in the family or something, or maybe it’s college students or it’s someone that just has Lots of responsibilities that’s involved caring for other people. That’s really our main customer. It’s a person with those responsibilities. What do they care about the most? They care about clean. They care about safe. Mhmm. They care about having help on hands when they need it. and, like, help from an actual person, not just a phone number. I honestly think that in a few years, unattended laundromats will be a thing of the past. because people who need help, there’s just so much that can go wrong. And with competition getting as tight as this, if I can get help from a person on-site as opposed to calling up some phone number where maybe the guy can’t help me or not. I’m going with the bet where the guy has the keys to start machines for me. And that’s what I try to advertise in my ads to self serve customers. Yeah. I’m not trying to compete on price because that’s just a race to the bottom. What I am competing on is I’m clean because I have someone there to clean the place at all hours of the day. I’m safe. because somebody’s there in case anything ever got out of hand. And also safe in the sense that If anything went wrong, we’d be have somebody there to help you. Machine stopped working, refund your money, move you to another machine. We do what Walid Cook calls aggressive customer service where — Right. — customer is unhappy, and they’re asking for something. Just give them what they want because that’s better to It’s better to get gypped by a customer or grafted by one to shut them up and lose just a teeny bit of money there. Then for them to leave that place, very angry to the point where they’re gonna leave a nasty Google review or something that everybody else will see. So that’s kind of like my advertising differences between drop off and self serve customers.

Jordan Berry [01:00:03]:

Yeah. That was awesome. And thanks for sharing. Again, if you’re listening to this on the podcast, I’ll have a link to his landing pages and his ad that he just showed. That way, you can just go watch that little clip if you want to also. Yeah. Thanks for for sharing that. Okay. So what I mean, can you tell us a little bit about, like, what does your business look like today? versus — Yes. — that that very bleak and depressing and dark picture that you painted from what it looked like in the beginning? Alright.

Michael Jones [01:00:33]:

So I’ll start with numbers that people think matter, but don’t really matter, not getting numbers that really. We we did 48100 gross 1 month, month of October. We we got very close to doing 40,000 gross income. And that’s combining the washing fold, the pickup and delivery at the self serve customers altogether. pretty close to 40,000 that month, and we’re on track for another month like that this month of January.

Jordan Berry [01:01:04]:

Wait. Hold on a second. Let’s just rewind that a second. Okay. So you started out at 48100 ish gross a month. And you’re at you’re at a month of what now?

Michael Jones [01:01:16]:

Pretty close to 40,000. Just shy of it.

Jordan Berry [01:01:20]:

39,800

Michael Jones [01:01:21]:

something.

Jordan Berry [01:01:22]:

holy Guacamole. You almost 10 x your business?

Michael Jones [01:01:26]:

Zachary. We almost 10 x ed it, and we can attribute all of that to the principles of speed, sticky, and marketing.

Jordan Berry [01:01:37]:

Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. What are you, like, Grant Cardone over here? Like, what’s the Grant Cardone let’s just double you right now. The Grant Cardone of Laundromat, 10x, and the business. Man, that’s incredible. Yes. I I love to hear that because well, because number 1, like, nobody should have to go through what you went through. in the beginning. And number 2, I did not see that kind of growth coming when we first talked way back when that That’s incredible, dude. I love hearing that. And huge, huge, huge kudos to you for persevering and sticking with it and not losing hope. Like, I’ve talked before about how I I mean, I I don’t know if This is common or not with people, but I I suffer from the emotional roller coaster that is entrepreneurship. Right? I can in the same day, I can be at an all time high, and then later that day can be, like, one little thing that triggers me. And I’m at an all time low. Right? I’m on this roller coaster, and I’ve talked about how I have to brainwash myself by being very, very and you kind of had talked about this too, like, being very intentional about what I let into my head, who I listen to, who I watch, what books I read, all of that, who who I spend my time with even. You talk about that too with your friends and, man, to help me try to regulate the emotional roller coaster. But, man, kudos to you for for sticking with it. Brainwashing yourself, to success. That’s incredible. Incredible. Yeah.

Michael Jones [01:03:19]:

Thank you. Well, well, we gotta get to the number that really matters. because, you know, the 40,000 gross number, that sounds great. That’s what were my expenses. Yeah. because expenses can eat up a lot of that. And here’s here’s what it is. It’s like that month in particular, we just pocketed $10,000 of profit. and it’s a pretty common profit margin for us to be 30 to 40%. I am very aggressive with marketing because I want us to real I wanna really set us up as a place to go in this town, and I’m fighting 5 competitors. And another thing is I wanna pay my employees very well. I guess the thing that employees are gonna be an incredible resource. They’re gonna be, like, probably one of the greatest selling points of your business here to get people to come. So I’ve paid them very well. So, yeah, 40,000 sounds great. What you gotta be okay with, though, is spend 25 to 30,000 to make 40,000. Still, we’re in good prop margins here. I’m making more money than I did back when I was working my corporate job at Fidelity.

Jordan Berry [01:04:30]:

Well and you’re making a whole heck of a lot more money than you were those early months when you were losing money. Right? Like, that’s I mean, to me, that’s Dude, I I love that. Let me let me ask you this question, and I I generally don’t know the answer to it. Are you still sleeping at your laundromat?

Michael Jones [01:04:50]:

Sometimes. Yes. Sometimes because I’m just there so much. I guess that’s another thing here. It’s like, I don’t wanna paint it as, like, it’s all rosy and everything yet. because I’m still gonna be working around the clock. This time, though, I’m, like, having better days. It’s more enjoyable work and everything because I know we’re making money. I’m not worried about money flying out the door and everything. So I still work pretty long days, like, 10 hours or so, but that’s because I really want to not just beat the competition, but monopolize the area. That’s the position that I have instead of being able to monopolize and say, hey. because I know we’re we’re running a better operation. than everybody else in town. It is a competitive game of longevity. Just being able to be there the longest is gonna have you an enormous advantage. So that’s something that’s yeah. You gotta bear in mind to produce those kind of numbers. It will require a lot of involvement from you. and you gotta be a competitive person if you’re in a market like mine. because maybe if you’re in a different kind of markets, you might not have those kind of references like I do, like being having to spend 1000 dollars each month on marketing, having to bring in have a 3 shifts a day of employees or doing a lot of work there yourself, everything. Those that kind of effort, that kind of output is gonna be required in a very competitive market. And, yeah, I know understand now why Dave Fed says he stays away from them because, yeah, it’s a lot of work. But if you’re like me and you, wound up in this situation, not knowing anything, got in over your head. Or perhaps like the place you bought, competition moved in. Mhmm. Then you gotta be able to do these things. But I don’t believe that you would have to be doing these things forever. You just do it till either the competitors concede to you or when the customer base just has you permanently identified the customer base in the area has you permanently identified as the most valuable place in the area.

Jordan Berry [01:06:56]:

Yeah. Absolutely. And and and probably for you, your next iteration because I I I can tell. You’re still in the I mean, you you basically just said it. Like, you’re still in the building the business phase right now. Right? And, eventually, you’re gonna get to a point where you’re like, okay. We’ve built the business. We monopolized the area. I you know? The the next iteration of that is beginning to remove yourself from more of the day to day. and and inputting people to help you do even more of that. So, you know, the story is is not over for you yet, and there’s more iterations to come. And depending on which direction you wanna go and how big you wanna build your business, you’re gonna continue to evolve along the way. So that’s awesome. That’s awesome. Okay. So Man, net in 10,000, I mean, that’s incredible incredible stuff. Are you doing a lot of pickup in delivery? Are you doing a lot of wash dry fold? Where’s the majority kind of of this income coming from?

Michael Jones [01:08:09]:

Yeah. Lots of wash dry full, very little pickup in delivery. I was hoping that there’d be a lot of it out here because it’s a vacation town, and I was hoping that would save business. But I think happiness pulled out of the Daytona area because they were only bringing in, like, 15,000 gross revenue a year for pickup and delivery. Oh, wow. So Not too much of that out here. I think that it’s just not being marketed correctly. It it’s something that’s eventually, I wanna figure out how to market those things. But it’s not too much of an out here because people are happy to come drop off and see. I’ll show you this here. Just kinda like where we are on the map and everything that kinda shows, like and this is something that that would encourage every laundromat owner to do and to be able to understand this about their business, just kinda look at the the map Here’s what I can show you about my business here. It’s this. My store is right over here. this green dot. And just for everybody listening, I’m showing this on the screen. So I’ve come to our I’ve come to Jordan’s YouTube channel to see this. Mhmm. Here’s the beaches where all the vacation was going. There’s no laundromats or wash and folds in this entire strip of lambs. there was this place, Lowell Lottery, but Hurricane Ian took them out. And when I talked about, like, No. Well, let’s talk about it by 5 competitors here and everything. You can see here is 1, 2, 3, or, actually, this picture shows better here. see all these red. Those are all my competitors within the area. Mhmm. And then here’s where I saw, like, the opportunity is that in this big chunk of the city, there’s no washing vaults. So for about ten miles here, I mean, I’m right here in the corner, but for these ten miles, there’s no washable. So I was like, man, if I could market to that because there’s lots of people that would use wash fold in this area. If I could market those people specifically, learn how to do that, then I can find ways to stay in my business while the self serve side of the business starts building itself up. And that’s what really saved us there was being able to do that in the sense app really helped with it because it brought us back to the principal speed. But, yeah, not too much pickup and delivery out here. Probably will be in the future, though. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [01:10:36]:

Yeah. Yeah. I well and that’s that’s kind of a an encouraging thing, actually, that nobody’s really figured out how to tap into that pickup in the delivery market yet because there’s I mean, there’s gonna be business there. So It’s just a matter of figuring out the formula. Yeah. Yeah. So okay. Do do you know, like, ish, like, a breakdown? Like, how much residential versus commercial are you doing?

Michael Jones [01:11:03]:

Yes. Yes. May I can show you this here too. I mean, I’ve got the let’s see. 8. I believe it was 8. I make commercial customers that I got. Got to get up in here and go back to our website. because this is another thing you wanna do for your landing pages with commercial customers is show off the ones that you’re working with already. These aren’t the only ones, but these are the 8 biggest ones in the area that people would instantly wreck guys. We got probably half of the drop off business is done by commercial customers. and the other half is done by residential. And you can kind of expect that breakdown depending on, like, what kind of area that you live in because in commercial business. It’s more regular as probably larger drop offs coming in, whereas residential, it’s There’s there’s a drop off less laundry at a time. Probably there’s more time in between. It might be once a week or something or maybe even once a month that they drop off. Whereas, so my commercial customers is gonna be pretty much every day I get something from them or a couple times a week. And the laundry needs of these two customers are so different and everything. You can kind of expect it to be half and half if you’re in an area where there’s lots of businesses that could use laundry.

Jordan Berry [01:12:27]:

Yeah. And I’m like, writing as furiously as possible as you’re talking. It’s great stuff. There’s so much you’re alright, man. Hopefully, you guys are taking notes. And if you’re not, then and you’re still here, then you’re probably gonna need to go back and listen to this thing again and and start taking some notes. Okay. Alright. So you’ve got about half commercial, half residential. How how have you acquired your commercial customers.

Michael Jones [01:12:58]:

Good question. Good question. One thing I was really good at that came from financial services that’s has stuck with me is networking. If you’re not a good networking person, you wanna get to be a good networking person. You wanna learn how to do that. And networking is not going to these meetings like Chamber of Commerce or anything and handed out your business card because all it happens is they take it. and they stuff it away and never see it again. Networking is gonna be just going to the hotspots of business owners. And you don’t necessarily want to be this salesman to them or anything. What you wanna do is you want to find some kind of value you can provide to them upfront. And then later, you can tell them about your business. Right? So I suppose you were a person in my local area and you wanted to learn the laundromat business Worst thing I wanna hear is somebody come up and say, hey. I wanna pick your brain because what I what I hear when they say that is I wanna pick your pocket. or pick your time, waste your time. What’s would win my attention there is you say, hey. I I love the volunteer. at your shop, do some folding for you if you know, and maybe while I’m I’m doing that, you could spare a few minutes just kinda, like, tell me about the business and everything. I don’t think any one of us laundromat owners would say no to something like that. Mhmm. So you wanna do something similar with these with the networking that you do. What I did that really helped me out with club fitness is a gym that’s in the plaza with my locker mat. I went up to them and said, hey. You know, I think what could be a great thing to benefit your business and a benefit that you could use to sell more gym memberships is if my store gave an exclusive discount to your members, they walk in, show me the membership card, I’ll give them 20% off on the washer full tube just like a commercial customer. And they were like, yeah. That would be great because that’s something that plant fitness ain’t offering that. crunch fit in the same offering, something like that. They don’t have that. And you’re right around the corner, and all they gotta do is just walk a few feet down the plaza, drop off the laundry. Probably by the time they get done working out, they can pick it up. And that’s how both of our businesses. So with networking, start with the neighbors, see what you can do there. because I’ll tell you what, like, why is America the big superpower that it is Well, a big part of what’s not talked about is that we have friendly neighbors to the north and the south. Yeah. Canada and Mexico aren’t trying to go to war with us. They’re friendly neighbors, happy to trade with us and everything. But not the same thing. You want to see how you can benefit your neighbors in the Plaza that you’re in or the town center that you’re in or whatever businesses are close by. See what you can do to be a benefit to them, and that will help you stand out more than just giving them a business card. Some other things But the thing that we you wanna really be looking into is Facebook groups. Facebook groups is gonna be one of your biggest benefit of beneficial activities is going through Facebook groups. They have the local ones to your town, and particularly local ones to business owners and types of businesses. For me out here, it’s a lot of Airbnb property owners, property managers. I’m in all of their groups, and when I see them post something about needing clean linens or something like write offs, write on top of it. lot of networking can be done in Facebook groups.

Jordan Berry [01:16:39]:

Yeah. I think that is a very underutilized resource there. And, I mean, those could be used on the residential side too, you know, in in terms of, like, mom groups or all kinds of different local Facebook groups. Like, there’s a the town I have in or or town I live in has a Facebook group that’s the you know, the the city buzz. Right? And so, you know, getting in a group like that. And, again, leading with the you leading with offering something and and trying to meet people’s needs even sometimes for free just to kinda, you know, get an inroad in there and build some trust and build some familiarity and and make it so you’re not just trying to take, trying to get in people’s pocket pocketbooks, but you’re also contributing and helping there. So, yeah, I think that’s That’s huge, and those are good. Yeah. I love the offering exclusive members. discount to the the gym members of the of the neighboring gym there. I love that because it and it is a natural fit. Right? Like, I leave the gym. My clothes are are dirty. Like, they’re sweat soaked, and, yeah, they need to wash. And so it’s it’s just kind of a natural fit for them, natural fit for you. That’s a win win situation,

Michael Jones [01:18:03]:

and that’s where there’s good money to be made. So I love that. They they were happy for me to put up posters inside the gym, inside the locker rooms, and everything.

Jordan Berry [01:18:13]:

Yeah. That’s killer. That’s killer. Okay. We wanna talk a little bit about specifics about your business, but anything else that we need to chat about before we get into down to business?

Michael Jones [01:18:26]:

Let’s get down to business here because this is where we’re gonna get, like, some real juice.

Jordan Berry [01:18:32]:

Let’s get down to business. Alright now. Remind us again. When did you buy your your laundromat?

Michael Jones [01:18:42]:

official wrote the check November of 2021. Didn’t get to open the doors until May of 2022. took that long to build out.

Jordan Berry [01:18:53]:

And you got one laundromat right now. Do you got any plans for for more? What’s the what’s the game plan here? Do you know? Yeah. I hope Actually, there’s a vacant

Michael Jones [01:19:03]:

unit in the plaza next to us. The hope is that we’ll be able to expand out into that. Yeah. Become a laundry center instead of just a laundromat.

Jordan Berry [01:19:14]:

Like that. And what would you do with that space?

Michael Jones [01:19:17]:

Definitely need more storage storage for our drop off business. Yeah. But I put in a few more big machines because right now my biggest machine, I only got 4 of them. and that’s the most popular machine. Mhmm. And we get in some more dryers and everything, but just to have more space for folding and everything. That’s another thing to say is that when you’re looking for a laundromat to buy, you need a lot more space than you think you do. I don’t think too much about having too many machines think more about having the space, so that’s it’s not a claustrophobic feeling for customers.

Jordan Berry [01:19:51]:

Yeah. That is true. And especially if you’re going into a drop off or pickup and delivery, that is the That is a limiting factor for a lot of laundromats that wanna delve into, like, pickup and delivery, for example, is there’s just this struggle with finding the space I remember Mark Vaskamp at the fold. He’s been on a couple times. He’s been on some other YouTube stuff. He kills it. Pick a delivery shout out to Mark. And I’ll link to his episodes in case you missed them because they’re a killer too. But he sent me a video. He texted me a video one day of just This was before he got his location, and he had guys unloading the truck all out along the sidewalk out side. There were bags of laundry. He goes inside. All along the walls were bags of laundry, and all along the bulkheads were bags of laundry. There just wasn’t storage for him. Right? And this wasn’t even his laundromat as somebody else’s laundromat. So crazy craziness. But if you’re thinking about going into wash dry fold, drop off laundry service, or pick up in delivery, that storage piece is is critical. Yeah. For sure. Can you can you talk us through, like, what what is your what’s your staff look like? I mean, is it just you running all this laundry? Do you got people on board? How did you start? Where are you at now? Is it similar? How has that evolution taken place?

Michael Jones [01:21:17]:

Yeah. 5 employees, but first, it was just me doing everything. Eventually, I was able to hire a morning person so I could sleep in, so desperately needed. But and then I also hired a person to come do some late night cleaning. Still got those employees. Now I got one employee that specifically handles pickup and delivery for commercial customers because one of the vets that we work with wants that. and the nursery that we do laundry for wanted that as well. And I got another employee for some daytime coverage to take in drop offs. And then one that comes in at night to do everything that we couldn’t get done throughout the day. Kind of the way we handle drop off is we give them the expectation that It’ll take us 24 hours of one day to do it. You’ll get it back the next day. Unless you wanna pay an extra quarter per pound, we’ll do it for you right now and get it back to you the same day.

Jordan Berry [01:22:20]:

Nice. I like that. Alright. So you got 5 employees. I mean, that’s pretty that’s pretty incredible to be able to scale up. I mean, relatively quickly. I mean, you’re talking May 2022. Right now, we’re talking January 2023, and and you’re just scaled up to 5 employees. That’s pretty good, especially since you started off sleeping on the floor and losing money. So that’s that’s pretty impressive, man. Pretty impressive. Okay. So can we talk about how how much does it cost to do laundry at your location.

Michael Jones [01:22:55]:

Yeah. Probably gonna be raising these prices soon once I get the new scent system in. And what I’ll do is I’ll keep the old price if you pay with a card on the SENSE system. And if you pay with coins, I’ll raise the price because you’re making me do more work. But my biggest wash is 775 for the sixty pounders. That’s a regular cycle. I’ll upcharge you on a deluxe or an ultra cycle by a quarter each. and upcharge for warm water and hot water by a quarter each. And that’s true of all my machines. I got 4 of those, sixty pounders, got 4 of the 40 pounders at 5.50. I’ve got 5 of the 30 pounders. That’s $4. and I got 8 of the little £20 machines at $3, And my dryers got those stack dryers that the first quarter will buy you 5 minutes, but every quarter after that will buy you 4

Jordan Berry [01:23:57]:

Nice. Nice. Nice. Okay. I mean, that that sounds great. That sounds great. Do you have a sense of turns per day, like, what you’re doing these days. I know you had some days where you were doing 0 turns per day. So you have a sense of where you’re at now?

Michael Jones [01:24:16]:

Probably the best number I can give you, like, an average right now is 5.4to5.6 turns per day. Really pushing it as hard as it can. and to make it six turns a day. That’s, like, the whole here is to make it six turns a day. But here’s a a critical thing about this isn’t necessarily the golden ratio that everybody thinks it is. I mean, yeah, it’s it shows you that your marketing is working. That’s the good thing about it. It shows your marketing is working. But What really matters is how much money is coming in and how much of that money you keep, how much profit. So here’s one of the things that I did that was right is I never lowered my price And I would encourage everybody watching, don’t lower your prices if you’re trying to get business. It’s not a good thing that you think it is because you’ll be doing more work for less money. Your machines are gonna be enduring more wear and tear and giving you less money. and utility bills and everything will cost more because you’re using the machines more. And you took in less cash flow from those uses. So I think that a metric you really wanna look at is, I’m gonna say, profitability by machine, you know, and they can RAC, which machines are the most used, everything. And it’s like yeah. So kind of, like, too nitpicky of a metric to get into. But Just the the profitability, the the net profit overall is, I think, your most important metric more so than turns per day. because even if I’m doing 3 turns per day, I’m at the prices in the area that still get me that’s profit margin of 30 to 40%. I’m okay with that because it’s less wear and tear on my machines, probably less cleaning than my staff do too. Mhmm. And it is more money in your pocket.

Jordan Berry [01:26:09]:

Yeah. So you do sort of track turns per day, but you’re not going all in on turns per day. You’re looking at that net profit number.

Michael Jones [01:26:18]:

I’ll track it just to know about how good my marketing is working.

Jordan Berry [01:26:22]:

Yeah. That’s smart. I like that. Okay. So do you have are you fully attended? Do you have somebody there at all times when you’re open?

Michael Jones [01:26:32]:

Most of the time. Yes. It’ll be, like, a few hours a night where where there’s nobody there. stay open a little bit while or there’s nobody that can help you with machines and stuff and drop offs there. It’s just my cleaner. Mhmm. We figure while she’s in there, it may as well stay open. But, yeah, throughout the majority of the day, there’s somebody there to help you or somebody could drop laundry off to. and they know when the ins and outs store and everything. And I think that that will be the future going forward here is that won’t have many unattended launch paths just because of all the problems and liabilities you can run into and can be easily avoided by having an employee there. Mhmm.

Jordan Berry [01:27:09]:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t I mean, we’re definitely as an industry moving more towards service base. And I don’t necessarily mean wash dry folds or pick up a delivery, although I think we are moving more that direction too. But I think Yeah. For probably decades, service was not really a priority in self-service laundry because it was like, hey. Yeah. You do it yourself, and and deal with deal with it. You know? Like, that’s your that’s your thing. You’re just using my machines. Right? But I do think that service is becoming more and more important you know, to be able to compete and stay in business, especially as business gets a little more complicated because we’ve got things like higher interest rates and inflation and growing utility costs. And, you know, we’re we’re having to navigate all this stuff and and more technology coming into our industry. So there’s a lot to navigate there, and that service side of the business is just becoming more and more important. along with marketing. And I think you’re you’re dead on on that one too. So are you planning on staying high grid? I know you’re changing your your card payment system. Are you planning on staying hybrid?

Michael Jones [01:28:24]:

Yeah. Yeah. We want to be able to have people pay anyway that they’re willing to pay. Sometimes if I want to give you money, you don’t necessarily wanna care too much about what form they’ve given in. But there’s some little things you can do around a chart. There’s less for card payments and easier payments to accept and collect. And so we’ll stay hybrid until we get to a point where coins are obsolete

Jordan Berry [01:28:47]:

Yeah. And I I mean, I like the I mean, I think there’s something to be said for an all card system, especially if you’re gonna scale to multiple multiple laundromats. It gets more and more difficult to start collecting coins. But I I I’m a fan of the hybrid system, and I’m a fan of incentivizing the ways that you want your customers to pay. So if that’s the card, system that you’d prefer, incentivize that, and give them the option to pay. And that’s you know, I think that’s a similar tact that people take with top load machines. Right? Like, okay. If you wanna use the top load machine, that’s fine. But we’re gonna maybe even disincentivize using that and incentivize using the machines we want you to use because it’s gonna give you a better wash and yada yada yada. So I’m a I’m a fan of that. Alright. Last question for down to business that I have, I think, is And I you may have mentioned this already, actually. But do you have an an idea of, like, you were working 18 hour days early on. between your job and the laundromat and all that stuff. Do you have a sense of how much time you’re spending on the business now?

Michael Jones [01:30:00]:

I live and breathe my laundromats, and that’s That’s my life here. And it’s because I’m so determined. Like, if somebody were to trade lives with me, they don’t have to do it. They don’t have to do it like I do, but I’m just so determined to have a monopoly on the air area. That’s I am going to stop at nothing to make that happen. So living and breathing the laundromat right now, but that’s not to say that it has to be that way.

Jordan Berry [01:30:25]:

Yeah. Alright. I thought of another question that I wanna ask before we move on to secret sauce here. Okay. I mean, I I I think we all know the answer to this, but I just wanna give you an opportunity to to speak to it, which is you hated your corporate job, you made this move, to to change, you know, directions in your life. You’re still working like an animal. Are you glad you made the change or or no?

Michael Jones [01:30:58]:

Absolutely. When it comes to corporate America, I’m never going back. I’m never going to like, it it really is the matrix. It really is the matrix and everything. Like, now that you’ve experience freedom and what it’s like. It’s electrified. It’s a dick to be able to say what you really want to say and, yeah, even and just dress however you wanna dress too instead of always wearing the suit and tie and everything. I mean, that necktie is it’s the neck shackle, really. and being able to you know, even even though, I guess, you could say I spend more time on my business and everything. I am happy to be a slave to myself. than to corporate America.

Jordan Berry [01:31:43]:

Yeah. That’s that’s potent. I’m I’m glad I gave you the opportunity to say that because that that’s potent phrase right there. I like that. And and that’s that I think that sums up entrepreneurship. Right? It’s like, there’s all these memes I’ve seen. You know? It’s like, you give up work in the 10 hour days for someone else to work 18 hour days for yourself. Right? Like, you’re working harder but you’re enjoying it and you’re doing it for yourself. And, you know, I think putting it in the way of I’m I’m glad to be a slave to for myself much more than I am to be a slave for the corporate culture. I I mean, I think that was you said it way better than I just did. But, I mean, I think that’s just a very potent quote. So awesome. Alright. We have a segment of the show called Secret SaaS. And secret sauce is you know, we we’ve been talking about secret sauce this entire time here. So but, you know, do you if you had one piece of advice maybe or or maybe couple of quick things that you would give for someone who owns a laundromat currently to help them improve their business. We got for them.

Michael Jones [01:32:54]:

I got a lot of things. I don’t think they’re quick, though. Well, let’s just get this one then. Yeah. Here here’s the juice. Like, yeah, get your pen and paper ready here because here’s the juice thing I wanna say is print marketing. Don’t do it. Never do print marketing. It’s a dead form of marketing. It’s a waste of time. It’s a waste of money. Direct mail. flyers on people’s cars. But I tell you what, whenever a guy goes to any public places and someone hands me a flyer, I I think that what they should say that is they what they should be saying is, here, throw this away from me. That’s what that’s what I’m thinking the whole time. Mhmm. All those things is a total waste. You’re all your marketing and you wanna do. digitally because you have interruption marketing, which could be direct mail or telemarketing, not that we do that for laundromats, or handing out flyers, sticking things on people’s cars. That’s interruption marketing versus permission marketing is what you really wanna focus on. That’s where you’re making yourself available to the people who want your services and are seeking you out, like Google search, those are customers that want your services because they’re looking for it. You wanna focus more on that. What else I would say I’m not gonna wanna name any name, so I wanna badmouth any people, but I would never again hire a person to do digital marketing for me. They’re wasting your money than what they do and everything. And for what they charge, it’s just it’s not proportionate. And you’d be paying them a 1000 a month, and they put up a few posts a week for you on your Facebook page. It’s a waste of money there. It’s you’re better off taking the time to learn and understand the social media ecosystem yourself because you know what’s best for your business, you know what goes on in your community, you know who the best people who reach out what your customers are, not some third party that you hired to do before. Another thing, secret sauce. is the website where you wanna go back to the principal speed. You wanna get it up as fast as you can. Even before your laundromats even open, if Sorry. Get it up as fast as you can. That was a mistake on me that didn’t do that. I used to believe in WordPress that they were the best websites you could have, but something strange happened with WordPress where it’s just not easy to use anymore. I don’t know what happened there. So I use Wix now. Wix, I think, is very well worth the extra expense that it costs because it’s so easy to edit and do business on and everything. You wanna focus on fast loading times for your website because that helps you with your rank and search engine. Wix is very good at making it run fast. It’s easy to update. And the more you update your website, the more favorable Google looks at that in search engine results pages. And some people say, well, yeah, I’ve been told that I I should blog on my website for this, but what does a long about to have to talk about? Totally get that. So legitimate complaint or problem or something. Here’s some things I’ll show you. It’s like, if I’m doing it, what I’ll do is I don’t really call it a blog. I just call it news and promos. And there, all I’m doing is just putting up, like, hey. Here’s some promos, new services that I’ve introduced in or some new equipment and everything. And that’s what I post up on there. I’ll do a blog post on our website. I will also post it to Facebook, and Google my business, the more that you are posting on these things, they they all work together. They they they work together to kind of form like this in music terms. We call it a crescendo. Are it’s a mosaic of little pieces, the Legos that snap together to come up with something great. I’ll kinda try to show you exactly what that looks like here. landing pages for each service, you know, like, here’s my pickup and delivery 1. Just wanna make it very easy to do business with people, make it, like, one click. And very first thing you see here is schedule pickup scheduled pickup. It’s very easy to do business with us. and try to be as convincing as you can with getting people do business on these landing pages. So after those listening, I’m not showing this on the screen here. So definitely subscribe to Jordan’s YouTube channel. Now here’s the super secret sauce like this, oh, and me. Perhaps the most beneficial thing that I could tell somebody here, maybe make sure I got the screen for it. When it comes to that Google search engine results page, you don’t just wanna appear on it and you don’t just wanna appear on the top, you want to dominate If I were to type in to a search engine, just launch a mess. Here’s the first thing you see is my ad. My paid ad right here. Mhmm. On my paid ad, I’m utilizing everything possible. This is showing you the Google page, right, on the screen sharing. Right? Okay. Yep. k. Good. Make sure it’s showing the right thing. Here’s something that is new that Google is doing. These are called site link additions. And then here’s us another thing that they call I I forget what it’s called. It’s like something sticky, though. But you wanna utilize every single one of these. Now tell you what, if you’re somebody that doesn’t know how to do this or anything and you want somebody to walk you through write this, reach out to me. Be happy to get on a Zoom call with you. I just kinda show you how to do this. So first thing you’re gonna see is my ad. Take you to our Google My Business page. Then look at this. Here. We’ve got our website, our official website. It’s got up some services and everything down here.

Jordan Berry [01:38:28]:

Well, you skipped over too. You were the top one on the map.

Michael Jones [01:38:32]:

Up to love. — on that. Yep. Yep. Well, right here, yeah, because there’s my paid ad. Then here’s organic search. I’m number 1 there too. Mhmm. What’s next? Facebook — Mhmm. — brought up our Facebook is the next thing. Then we go down a little bit further. Here’s our Instagram. And there’s another ad further down the page. The reason you’re doing social media is not to just keep doing posts because It’s something that people say you should do, and it’s the any benefit mindset. Maybe somebody will see it. Maybe the wrong reason you’re doing it. is the more you update your social media, the more the Google search engine likes it, and the more it’s likely to put it on one of the earlier pages and search engine results, and now you have not 1, not 2, but possibly 4 properties that you can have on that search engine page, people might have to go out of their way to click on your competitors when there’s that much of you playing here. This is our YouTube channel. that we uploaded our ads to because we were gonna do some YouTube advertising. Here’s Manta. I don’t know if they’ll even use that directory anymore, but because it links to our main website, and our main website gets a ton of traffic from social media and search engines, Google thinks, hey. It’s a good thing to show. So you really got to intentionally click on a competitor on that first page of Google results. You wanna dominate the first page, 2 kinds of ads that you can run at the same time for the same kind of customer are ads that focus on maximizing clicks that puts you at the top, and then there’s another one that focuses on maximizing conversion that puts you later on in the page. But I think that when a person scrolls through that page, it’s because they’re just not finding what they’re looking for. Google is it’s it’s AI is intelligent enough to understand what that person is looking for and show it to them at the most opportune time. Another critical element to this is what I would say is robust keyword discipline. You’ve gotta police your keywords, and I’m gonna try to show you what I mean by that here because a lot of people think, well, I know the keywords, We wanna appear in the search for laundromat near me. You know what? That’s nice. Yeah. A lot of people search for that to be probably the most popular keyword. but there can be a lot of keywords that you don’t want to be ranking for. You don’t want to appear in the search score that. So every couple of weeks or every month go through this here, and I’d be happy to show somebody how to do this too if they need the help. and look at this here. This shows you what keywords did your ad appear for. And if you see anything that you don’t want to appear for, check it and then add it to a negative keyword theme set. What that means is these are things that you don’t wanna appear for. Like me, I don’t wanna appear for searches for cleaning because I don’t have a dry cleaning equipment. It’s a waste of time for someone to call me up and say, hey. Can you do dry cleaning? The one up here in any of those searches. I put it like a washer and full mirror because this is my self-service ad. I don’t want my self-service ad competing with my washer and full ad. Laundromack for sale I don’t wanna appear for that kind of search. I don’t want people calling me up asking me thinking about buying a business from me. Uh-uh. Ain’t letting go of this thing for for anything. And then there’s lots you’ll find lots of unrelated stuff here. When you kick out those bad keywords, your ads are becoming more efficient, They’ll be shown to the right people more often, and your cost per click, it will eventually go down. gonna start out pretty high, but it’ll eventually go down here because your ads are becoming more efficient. Mhmm. And noticing that you can also be doing is just looking at when these searches are being conducted and focus the majority of your budget on those times. If I could edit the times right here, Here, it doesn’t show me, like, when are they most popular? When you start out, run them all day and everything, and then you can see when are they when when does a laundromat like most searched for on Google in the local area, and then run your ads during those because those are the competitive hours that you really want went. And and see how I can show people where that is too. Yeah. It’s kind of over here in the search trends, interest, and everything. This is a lot to take in right here. You’re kind of, like, drinking from a fire hose or a fire hydrant right now here with all of this. But When you you take this is why you wanna take the time and learn this stuff ahead of time here because this is what’s gonna have you destroy your competitors. Start out with a wide net, great budget being spent on all hours of the day, and then refine it, bring it down. have these things connect to your landing pages. You wanna really understand what’s many YouTube videos on landing pages. Understand what works and what doesn’t work in landing page. and all that is. That’s just where do you go after we click on the link in the Google ad. More traffic, from those paid search ads can bring out better results in organic SEO as well. It was a tip I was debating on whether or not I should give out. And that’s when you’re looking for keywords to rank for, also look for misspelled versions of those keywords because not everybody spells laundromat the correct way. Some of us spell it with, like, a laundry m a t. And — Yes, ma’am. — what you’re looking for earlier with this?

Jordan Berry [01:44:14]:

Yeah. Exactly. Longer boys. Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Jones [01:44:17]:

There’s a tool that Google has here that shows you how often something is search on their engine, the the keyword planner tool. When you’re using that, make sure you localize it. You’re not looking for what is the entire US search. You’re looking for what to people in your area search, and they allow you to specified to certain ZIP codes. So definitely do that. If you wanna get your interaction rate above 10% and your cost per click below $2. Well, when you got that, then you’re you’re doing really good here. So this is practically 10%. compared to how often it appears, how often it’s clicked on, and it’s just under $2. That’s a successful Google campaign. We we got the time to really get into the ins and outs of Facebook and Instagram. I mean, it’s it’s interesting you got got time for that?

Jordan Berry [01:45:09]:

Yeah. Let’s just do it. Alright. And, again, if you are if you’re listening to this, I’ll have links to these videos so you can go back and actually see he’s sharing his screen right now, and you can actually see everything that he’s talking about. But, yeah, let’s talk about Let’s talk about Facebook ads.

Michael Jones [01:45:27]:

So a lot of people are thinking, yeah, they don’t even know where to begin with social media because What’s a laundromat gonna post about? What could people possibly wanna follow my laundromat’s page for? Well, I’ll tell you. There are three things you can do, and it’s not all promotional. A lot of people are thinking that’s promotions. People are gonna sick of seeing me promote my business over and over again, and they will. But you can do something very powerful here, and that’s make your promotion of your business the thing you do on your page the least, but you you may say, wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. That’s the purpose of me having social media here, and If I’m not promoting my business, what else would I be doing? The principle you want to adhere to is you’re making the Internet or whatever social media platform that you’re on, you’re making it a better place. And here’s how you do. It’s three things you can post about.

Jordan Berry [01:46:23]:

1,

Michael Jones [01:46:24]:

Post something funny. Everybody who enjoys a good laugh. Even if it’s a dad joke. Post something funny. Shane example here. This here. Think about the way you can do with lost socks, You see it’s silly and everything. Or this year, little laundry joke. Little star wars reference.

Jordan Berry [01:46:49]:

Mhmm.

Michael Jones [01:46:50]:

Everybody’s happy to see those, especially with just cute animals. So so post something funny? Another thing is post something helpful. something like maybe a laundry tip or a life hack related to laundry. Something I like to post about is I like to show people videos here of How do we fold people’s clothes during our wash and fold? because this is a way that we add value of our wash and fold as we focus on folds that specifically save space in the customer’s dresser. And we show them here. Here’s how we do it. Take your laundry here to us. We’re gonna fold it like this here. Even the complicated stuff like women’s underwear is probably very people don’t know where to begin on where to fold that or fitted sheets. pants, all sorts of things here. We got a video on just about every sort of article of clothing on how to fold it And that’s what we use for our educational and informative posts. One third of our time on social media is spent doing those posts, and then

Jordan Berry [01:47:54]:

we focus — Real quick on that one. — on 3rd. real quick on that one. That one has the the added benefit of showing it it actually is kind of a promotional video in disguise. Right? Describe is a helpful video because like you said, it’s showing the customers, hey. We know what we’re doing. Like, here’s how we do it. Here’s how you could do it better, but we We can do it for you. We know what we’re doing here, and it demonstrates that authority, which, consequently, Google also likes, which is probably why your Instagram ranks pretty high on, you know, laundromat in your area because you’re demonstrating that authority. Google’s all about the eat, right, expertise, authority, and whatever the t. I forget what the t is off top of my head. But yeah. So, anyways, sorry. I just wanna interject that because that’s a great little sneaky way to promote while actually being also helpful at the same time. Yeah. So go ahead. The tea is traffic.

Michael Jones [01:48:50]:

pumpounding effect. Like, the more traffic page gets, the more Google thinks it’s authoritative. Mhmm. So notice all of these are videos too. use videos as much as you can on the Instagram and Facebook because they wanna compete with TikTok so they favorite videos. Then I’m promotional. I do something like this here, or say, good reasons to wash your bedding. So this video here got a cute baby and a cute puppy all the bed or this year talking about our money back Mondays thing. Yeah. With some videos, great resources, the website pixels.com. You can get a lot of good footage that you can play around with, and you can make these videos and on canva.com because they specifically format them to fit for Instagram reels and Facebook reels. and they give you a whole bunch of our tools to make it very easy. You don’t have to be a world class editor or anything to make this stuff.

Jordan Berry [01:49:47]:

I’ll have links to both Canva and Pexel’s, by the way, in the show notes or if you’re on YouTube down below. Go ahead.

Michael Jones [01:49:53]:

Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Those are just our videos. But we also wanna take a look here at our regular picture posts. This is something I wanna do every single time I post something that’s not a video, something that’s just a picture. It’s a carousel. It’s multiple pictures at a time. Why am I doing this? Well, one, Do more than just tell the joke for our funny posts or give the tip for our helpful posts. throw in a little thing here that says, hey. Is this something we got going on today? It’s big wash Wednesday. That’s the promo. Or and then here is just, yeah, all of the information on our long term mat where it’s located and everything. It’s a carousel, and that means that when someone scrolls through and may go through those pictures like we just did, To the social media algorithm that counts as engagement. And that also counts with Google as something they favor as well. This is a well engaged post. Engagement is gonna be important later on when you’re doing ads. It also helps you in the natural algorithm for social media. Reels, what I’ve heard, the the rule is that he wants to be 7 seconds long. forgive the reason behind that. So, like, it’s like an attention span thing. Give it a good description. Don’t waste too much time on descriptions. your time is better served making more reels, more videos, more posts than trying to mine out as much goodness out of each one. Now here’s the problem we run into. Facebook, Instagram, Meta, and Jackal. They’re not your friends when it comes to showing what you post to your followers or the people that are already decided, hey, I wanna do business with them. I wanna follow them. Not your friend, so they’re not gonna show it to them all the time, but you can overcome this. One thing is that with Facebook, whenever I post on there, I’m doing it through the planner, the page planner and met a business suite. It will also allow you to post specifically to Facebook groups unless you do a post up to 3 at a time. Find yourself 3 good Facebook groups to post to, and they’ll let you do it. Those Facebook groups. What I like from the local area is ones that you’d mentioned earlier, it’s moms. of mom groups. And another one that I like is the college student groups, because we got 3 colleges here in Dayton. I try to get the my content into those groups as well. And I’m also just paying attention to what’s going on in those groups. because I wanna see what’s going on in the community. Maybe there’s something that our contraband can service or help with. So Facebooks is not your friends in doing it naturally on its own, but Facebook can be your friend. when you pay them when you pay for them to be at. And also with Facebook and Instagram stories, if you’re running daily promos like I do every weekday, Those make for good stories because that way you’re not doing a post of them every day. Just reminding people of stories that disappear when the day is over. But back to what I said, Facebook is your friend when you pay them? You wanna run 3 times now. — my friends, by the way. That’s how that’s how I get friends. Yeah. dish up the money. So know the struggle. Yep. Yeah. Yep. 3 kinds of ads you wanna do. First one, is an educational ad that just kinda tells people about your service, what benefit is of it, why they should use it and everything. I’ll show you the example of it here. Like, this is an example of that ad. Just talks about how much of your life spent doing laundry goes through it step by step here. And in conclusion, a person can waste about 1.6 years of their life doing laundry if you’re just doing one load a week, if your family is about 5 years of your life gone, yeah, doing 4 loads a week. If you wanna get that time back, our Washington Ford service will help with that. For that campaign, there’s getting, like, do it really deep in the weeds to wanna know more about this contact me. But for that campaign, you won’t have to be an awareness building same with a local radius. Here’s the the juiciest thing I’ve ever learned about Facebook. It’s a lot of people think they should specifically target certain kinds of people and demographics in Facebook. No. No. Don’t do that. Don’t do that. It’s really it’s really nice that it’s this easy, but Facebook and Instagram, what they want more than anything else is for people stay on. They’re apt to stay on the platform and keep scrolling. So they’re only gonna show your ads to the people they think would be most interested in it. They don’t wanna clog up the ads They don’t wanna clog up the the streams of people with apps and ads that are not relevant to. That will make them think, man, Facebook will show me too much garbage. I’m not and it may go somewhere else. It may go do something else. So don’t try to figure out who your audience is. Let Facebook do it for you. because they are much better at gathering data and sifting through that data than any person could be. Also, another critical thing here about ads is this thing here called the Pixel. I tell you what. For a lot of people, the best thing you can do, you can call up Meta. Get an appointment. It’s totally free. They will tell you how to set up these campaigns, how to install the pixel. Basically, what the pixel does is it tracks What do people do after seeing your ad? Do they go to your website, or do they click on their website? And it saves those people don’t actually ever know who they are, but Facebook saves who it is so you can run ads to them again later because you know how many times a person has to see something before they take action. They say sometimes seven times. I think it’s more like 3 or 4 times. So you wanna save that data, and you do that with a pixel. You call them data. They will show they will talk you through how’s I’ve set this up. here. I’ve had 3 phone calls with them. I haven’t paid a cent because I pay so much, and these Facebook ads, I run so many of them. So that’s add 1. that you run the pixel off of is an awareness building campaign, and the next one would be a traffic campaign where you want them to take a certain action like click a link and go to a certain landing page. And then the last one is what’s called a retargeting ad campaign where it’s using the data that it collected from the pixel like who took action and then remarketing to them as well. And this is all good because when you get people off Facebook to your website or off Instagram to your website, Those are traffic hits that Google pays attention to to help you rank higher. And they also take a look at where did that traffic come from. Came from your social media. They like that. better than if it came from somewhere else. And with the ads, what I use are carousel ads, carousel ads, which people have to kinda click through here to see. It’s kinda tiny here, but people click through, like, those carousel posts, and that counts as engagement, and they’ll move it up because a person would probably only look through those if they’re interested. And that’s also a customer that the Pixel will capture to retarget to later. Retargeting is important because it allows you to get a second chance with a customer that just hasn’t seen enough of your advertising yet to wanna try you or remind them that you exist after a maybe a bad experience with a competitor. With Facebook, you’ll have lower click through rates, but you’re also gonna pay less per click. You pay, like, maybe, a 50¢ a click. and that’s worth doing. And the reason for that is people don’t go to Facebook or go to Instagram specifically to look for a laundromat to be business with. That’s a critical thing you wanna know about your Google advertising, by the way. I kinda skipped over it. It was that what’s real critical to pay attention to is user intent. the user of the search engine, what is their intent with each keyword? Well, put yourself in those shoes and think from that perspective. But when someone types in this keyword, are they looking for a laundromat to do business with and spend money at? If the answer is no, that keyword is useless and you shouldn’t use it. But all these things you could see here working together are what’s gonna allow you to dominate the search engine results page of Google, beyond the first page, and allow you to win new customers. And I’ll tell you what, that more than anything else is how I want a bunch of my commercial customers because they call me. I didn’t go run around, knocking on doors, trying to get them to come to trying to get them to use my laundromat. A lot of them came to me and called me up, and It’s how you do it is by dominating the first page on Google.

Jordan Berry [01:58:56]:

I did not realize that we’re just gonna get a master class today when we jumped on this interview. We went from this, like, emotional story to, like, straight up laundromat marketing university. like, right here right now today. I love it. Incredible. And and, you know, just first of all, man, thank you. Appreciate just sharing all that level of detail showing the showing the screen shares. Once again, Links will be down below if you wanna go and you’re listening and you wanna go check out the the the actual screen chair that he was sharing. Or if you’re watching on YouTube and you wanna go back and reference just these little clips without having to scroll through and find them, go check those videos out. in the links there. But, man, super secret sauce is an understatement for what all the that you just talked through from from Google to Facebook and Instagram ads like holy cow, man. That’s great. And I’m just sitting here as you’re talking. I was just sitting over here thinking, Oh, well, man, no wonder you’re dominating right now and have come from where you were to where you are now is because you have obviously invested a lot of time and effort and money into learning how to dominate your market, and that is exactly what you’re doing both online and offline your well, on your way to doing that also. So, dude, huge kudos to you. I wanna make sure you hit everything you wanna hit. in the secret sauce because I don’t wanna move on until you’ve said everything you wanna say. So let me know if you got anything else. Otherwise, we’ll move on to pro tips.

Michael Jones [02:00:38]:

Give me one more little thing here. You wanna look into what’s called geo fencing. Mhmm. And Financial Services have people say, hey. Pay attention to what the smart bucket does. The hedge fund managers, the pension managers, the endowment managers. That’s the so called smart money because it’s 1,000,000,000 of dollars. What are they investing in it? In laundromats, we can do the same thing. If we look at what are the Willeford brothers? pay or spend a lot of money on, or what do they use for marketing? What does some of the other guys that own multiple mats and our agents’ success do? Well, I saw that they were spending a lot of money on geo fencing. And I wanted to know what is that and everything. The company I use, Kalari, Media, guy that runs it Ernesto Colara, he could do a much better job of explaining it than I could. Probably be a great guy to have as a guest on show sometime here. That’s they have a way of using satellites and cell phone data and foot traffic data to determine who’s visually your competitors? And let’s show them some ads while they browse the Internet so that if they have a bad experience at a competitor, they know there’s no longer maps that could might be nicer and is newer that they can go to. We’ve been doing them for about 2 months since. He has a way to show me specifically what kind of foot traffic I got from it, gotten some foot traffic, some successes. It generally does take probably about 2, 3 months to really start working and everything. But that’s another little gem I’ll give you there for secret sauce is it’s called Geo Fencing and Kalari Media. c u l l a r i is who you wanna check out.

Jordan Berry [02:02:16]:

Nice. Yeah. And, yeah, man, connect me up, and we’ll we’ll chat with him too. That’d be awesome. Alright. Holy cow. That was the most thorough in-depth secret sauce we have ever had by far and I I mean, you stated at the beginning, hey. The goal is to make this the best episode, and we’re well on our way here and and some. So awesome. Alright. Let’s talk about pro tips. Somebody who is maybe they’re desperate in there and they’re to get out of their job or maybe they’re just looking for a side investment or ever the case may be. They’re looking to buy their first laundromat. What advice can you give somebody in that situation? Pro tips.

Michael Jones [02:02:57]:

Alright. Start out with competitive analysis. find a failing laundromat asked yourself, why is it failing? You need to find a successful laundromat asked yourself, why is it so successful? What are they doing right? Study your competition as well. Just see what are their weak points, what are some things where you can add value. What I found that would help me get an easy win was just having automatic doors in my laundromat because no other laundromat in town has that. And a lot of customers have given a lot of positive feedback to that. Another thing you could be doing here is that you wanna get started on your digital marketing right away, get started on learning how to do it and everything. learn the Google ecosystem and the meta and the Facebook ecosystem, understand those things. Website construction, start that right away. Don’t wait until the the laundromat was open like I did because here’s my fear. It was that I put the little website up or put the Google business profile up, And people find it, and then they come to the laundromat and see it’s still under construction, and they’re jaded, and I lose that cusp. doesn’t doesn’t happen. What happens is they look forward to your opening. And they’re like, yeah. I can’t wait to check this place out because it’s closer than the one I normally go to or something like that. And also with Google My Business, I had this horrible thing happen to me early on where to verify that you own business. They send a postcard with a code to the location. Mhmm. And wait months before mine came. So for months that we were open, I wasn’t even on Google, and that definitely hurt us bad. It was a big black eye that we took early on. So that’s something that you should be doing from the start. It started on marketing right away. It’s at do that competitive analysis from the very beginning.

Jordan Berry [02:04:43]:

Just wanna store what I’d say is — Yep. So I was just gonna say real quick on the getting online as soon as possible. You’re absolutely right. They do physically mail you something that can take a long time. But also your website like, I I I hear a lot of people who are like, I don’t wanna put my website up because it’s not know, we’re not open, and maybe their fear is, you know, somebody’s gonna come and check it out, and it’s not gonna be open. But a lot of times what their fear is is like, hey. I don’t you know, the the laundromats not ready. Right? Maybe they’re doing renovations or whatever. It’s I don’t want people showing up or or or even even when they’re under contract. I’ll sometimes I’ll say, hey. This is looking like it’s gonna close. It’s looking good. Let’s get your website up ASAP because it also takes time for Google to index that site, basically, like, a seasoning period, right, before Google starts testing you to see where you’re gonna fit in the rankings. And, again, the the goal is to dominate that first page, but it it takes time to get there, and it doesn’t always happen right away. And so I’d say, hey, man. Get that stuff up. and get it going as soon as possible because it’s just gonna benefit you. And I love the way that you’re phrased in dominating the first page. Same with the social sites. You know? Put upcoming soon. Put up, hey. We’re getting new equipment. Hey. Whatever you’re doing and and get it up and go in ASAP. Yes. To communicate with the customers, but also more so to even season so you can start moving up the ranks in Google. So I just wanted to add that, but great tip. Yeah.

Michael Jones [02:06:14]:

And the last thing I’d say is don’t have a white floor. I had a white floor terrible.

Jordan Berry [02:06:18]:

They did the same mistake. Yeah. Yeah. I thought, hey, white floor, I just gotta keep it clean. It’s gonna look Nice all the time, and it’s gonna look good. It’s just impossible to keep it white. Mhmm. So no matter what I did, I could I just couldn’t keep it white. So That’s a that’s a good little pro tip actually. Never had that one on the show. That’s awesome. Alright. The final segment we have on the show is called recommended resources. We are laundromat resource. And so do you have any resources that you can recommend to help people grow personally or help them grow their business.

Michael Jones [02:06:58]:

Get coaching. I’d say, a coaching I think it’s expensive, but here’s the second. So it’s better to spend a $1000 on a coach. who can save you tens of 1000 stalls. So if you got the opportunity to get coaching from someone like a Jordan or a Wally Coke or something, go for it. because it’s worth the expense, because wise man pardon me, excuse me, a smart man learns from his own mistakes. wise man will learn from the mistakes of others. So that’s totally worth doing. Your neighbors we covered this earlier, like the gym in my plaza. get friendly with your neighbors. That’s why America is successful is because we don’t have hostile neighbors. No. Everything I’d say is that’s a next best resource would be Facebook groups, laundromat owners is one of them, and I think they’re long about owners’ ideas for success. Those are well worth doing. Yeah. And I’ll put links. Do I join them? Yep. Join them. You’ll see a host of tips. Yeah. I think you get more good information out of those Facebook groups than you would ever get from the Coin And Landry Association membership.

Jordan Berry [02:08:13]:

Alright. There you have it. I’m I’m not gonna argue with you. So okay. So, man, this has been incredible. I’ve been looking forward to this episode since we first talked way back when, but I have got I gotta say, man, it’s it’s blown me away. I am my expectations have been far, far, far exceeded, and You know? I know that in the middle of it all, it probably didn’t feel like it. But, you know, at this point, looking back, it it seems obvious to me, like, you were you were gonna dig yourself out of it. And, you know, sometimes you just have to go through stuff to get to a point where you can become the person you need to be to get to where you wanna go in life. and I think that that is something that we overlook a lot. And we want kind of the easy thing. And and and this industry kind of attracts that. Right? it attracts the, hey. An easy button. Hey. I’m just gonna have to come and collect, hey. It’s passive. Hey. You know? it attracts that sort of, like, easy button kind of personality butt or or just desire. But And sometimes in life, we just need to go through things, not because of anything about us, not because there’s anything wrong with us, not because we’re failures, not for any of those reasons, but it’s because we need to go through some of those things to develop in ourselves the skills, and the character and and the abilities that we need to become the person that we wanna be to have the life we wanna have. And now here you are, Not saying that you’ve made it to where you wanna go, not saying that everything’s perfect, not saying that you’re not gonna have, you know, struggles and trials going ahead. But you’re working for yourself now, and you’re building your own thing. You’re a slave to your own self, to your own desires, and not to somebody else’s. and you’re on your way going where you wanna go. And I just I loved your story and then just to kind of the 12 punch and followed up with just, man, incredible practical tips. This truly has been one of the best, if not the best, episode. So, man, I really appreciate you spending your time to come on here. I have one last question for you. have a feeling that your story and your knowledge is gonna be very compelling for people. It’s compelling for me. I think it’s gonna be compelling for a lot of people. So is there a good way that if somebody wants to reach out to you to just, you know, ask you any questions fill you out, maybe talk to you about some of the marketing stuff that you were talking about or just, you know, wants to tell you how awesome you are. Is there a good way that they can connect with you?

Michael Jones [02:11:05]:

Absolutely. because I’m happy to help people out, send the elevator back down, help people avoid the pain I had to let the painful lessons I had to learn partway. So if you wanna reach out to me, absolutely, well, maybe we can arrange for it to talk on the phone or get on a Zoom call. We could say just start with email [email protected]. I’m also fanatical about the Facebook Messenger. So you can always message the laundromats. It’s just facebook.com/davithonalundermatortinstagram.com. slash Daytona Laundromats. It all ends up in the same place. So we wanted to get some help that’s will save you from a lot of the problems I experienced and get to dominate the Google page in your local area. I’d be happy to take you through that. and just show you the kind of the ins now of it or at least point you to the resources of how I was able to do it there. because there’s a lot of free information, a lot of free resource out there that a lot of people just don’t know about. And, you know, I was starting to say to you, Jordan, thank you for having me on. It was, like, great that I was able to rebound from the the horrible place I was in to be able to be good enough to be on and share all these tips. I hope that we did give it the best episode ever. If not, always happy to come back and share some more of this juice here with the audience because I know a lot of these guys from the Facebook groups and everything. So they’re great audience out there.

Jordan Berry [02:12:37]:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, it will definitely have you back on. We’ll be doing some more stuff together, I’m sure, because your like I said, your story is not done yet. I can tell you’re you’re just revving up right now. So I’m excited to see where you go. And, again, thank you for coming on. So I’ll have his contact information. in the show notes, if you’re on YouTube, that’ll be down below. But reach out. Tell them how great he is. Thank them for coming on the show and sharing all this great stuff. Reach out with your questions. Michael, man. Incredible. Thank you again for coming on. Appreciate you. It’s my pleasure. Anytime. Alright. We’ll do some more stuff real soon. So stay tuned for that.