Yes, really - laundromats. Howdy from Oklahoma, everyone. Apparently I joined these forums back in 2013 when I first read The Millionaire Fastlane and haven't been back since, but reading Unscripted prompted me to make a return and participate. Thank you to everyone who has poured their heart out on these forums, and thank you to MJ DeMarco for creating this space in the first place.
I'm about a year and a half into a new business venture and am still kind of feeling it all out. MJ's book Unscripted landed at just the right time for me to analyze where I currently stand and take smart next steps.
Currently, I sell point of sale (POS) computer cash register systems to laundromats that offer drop-off laundry services. Pretty niche, right? I've been at it for a year and a half so far. There's an underserved market there and I passed the $100k mark in sales in less than a year. It's looking like I will most likely double that and hit $200k by the end of 2017. I've been able to leverage my reputation in the industry and pre-existing connections to help get things up and going, and now I'm faced with trying to decide my next steps.
A bit of background: My dad went into business for himself and built a fully attended self-service coin laundromat with a drop-off laundry service in my hometown in 2005. I was off at college working on a bachelor's degree in chemistry at the time and had no intention of going into the laundry business. However, I had no idea what I was going to do with a degree in chemistry. I had no plan. I was just there because I was fortunate enough to have received a full ride academic scholarship for tuition plus money towards room and board (thank you UCO!).
When I graduated in 2010, Dad was about to open his second store because the first had done so well. (By the way, I'm certain the way he did it all would make subscribers to the Fastlane method shudder and squirm because he cashed his IRA and sunk his life savings into buying some land and building a laundromat from the ground up for his first store. Thank God it's been successful because that could have gone badly.) My wife and I were ready to move back to our hometown after I graduated and Dad needed help getting the second store up and going, so I agreed to come on board as some kind of manager or operations manager for the company. Things rapidly progressed and in the space of five years we grew from a company of one store and a staff of 6 people grossing $290k per year to three locations with a staff of 20 grossing $1.3 million per year. Yeah!
About a year and a half ago, I realized that the point of sale system I helped develop for my family's business to track drop-off laundry orders and build our customer database and manage our team would probably be of great use to other laundromat owners. It's a largely mom-and-pop shop type of industry with 74% of all laundromats owned by single-store owners in the US. I knew from having to create my own solutions that there was not really anyone serving this B2B need, or those that kind of were already were primarily aimed at dry cleaners and not really targeting laundromats. I quickly put together a supply chain for software, hardware, and order fulfillment and started taking orders. I've participated quite a bit in online forums for laundromat owners and have been a repeat guest speaker at national conventions for the industry and written articles for coin laundry trade magazines, so I was able to leverage those connections to get the word out that I had a solution available to start making sales.
It's been fascinating growing two businesses in the same vertical that are completely different from each other. The laundromats are inherently local brick-and-mortar affairs that employ a lot of workers in entry-level positions and involves quite a bit of cash handling and physical work such as equipment repairs and store upkeep. The sales transactions are numerous, mostly B2C although with some B2B, and consist of mostly small tickets.
The POS business, on the other hand, is entirely online and nation-wide, and consists of large multi-thousand-dollar B2B sales. My farthest away sale was to a new laundromat built in Fairbanks, Alaska! Picking up the phone and learning how to do direct sales and hearing the stories and pain points of hundreds of laundromat owners has been absolutely invaluable to me. I've never had a direct sales job before and yet I find that I've enjoyed it so far because it's mine. I'm so grateful to get to see these two completely opposite yet wonderfully congruent business models first-hand.
Anyway, that's the brief version of it all. I'm almost finished with my first read-through of Unscripted so I'm sure I'll have plenty of questions in the near future but for now I'm analyzing where I currently stand and where to go next with all this. The laundromats are still owned by my folks and they're not going to be scaling up anytime soon while they're still the owners (I'm thinking Dad's pretty happy with sticking to just 3 stores for a good long while), so that's my main motivation for branching out on my own with a business that has some room to grow. Now it's time to see if it has legs!
I'm about a year and a half into a new business venture and am still kind of feeling it all out. MJ's book Unscripted landed at just the right time for me to analyze where I currently stand and take smart next steps.
Currently, I sell point of sale (POS) computer cash register systems to laundromats that offer drop-off laundry services. Pretty niche, right? I've been at it for a year and a half so far. There's an underserved market there and I passed the $100k mark in sales in less than a year. It's looking like I will most likely double that and hit $200k by the end of 2017. I've been able to leverage my reputation in the industry and pre-existing connections to help get things up and going, and now I'm faced with trying to decide my next steps.
A bit of background: My dad went into business for himself and built a fully attended self-service coin laundromat with a drop-off laundry service in my hometown in 2005. I was off at college working on a bachelor's degree in chemistry at the time and had no intention of going into the laundry business. However, I had no idea what I was going to do with a degree in chemistry. I had no plan. I was just there because I was fortunate enough to have received a full ride academic scholarship for tuition plus money towards room and board (thank you UCO!).
When I graduated in 2010, Dad was about to open his second store because the first had done so well. (By the way, I'm certain the way he did it all would make subscribers to the Fastlane method shudder and squirm because he cashed his IRA and sunk his life savings into buying some land and building a laundromat from the ground up for his first store. Thank God it's been successful because that could have gone badly.) My wife and I were ready to move back to our hometown after I graduated and Dad needed help getting the second store up and going, so I agreed to come on board as some kind of manager or operations manager for the company. Things rapidly progressed and in the space of five years we grew from a company of one store and a staff of 6 people grossing $290k per year to three locations with a staff of 20 grossing $1.3 million per year. Yeah!
About a year and a half ago, I realized that the point of sale system I helped develop for my family's business to track drop-off laundry orders and build our customer database and manage our team would probably be of great use to other laundromat owners. It's a largely mom-and-pop shop type of industry with 74% of all laundromats owned by single-store owners in the US. I knew from having to create my own solutions that there was not really anyone serving this B2B need, or those that kind of were already were primarily aimed at dry cleaners and not really targeting laundromats. I quickly put together a supply chain for software, hardware, and order fulfillment and started taking orders. I've participated quite a bit in online forums for laundromat owners and have been a repeat guest speaker at national conventions for the industry and written articles for coin laundry trade magazines, so I was able to leverage those connections to get the word out that I had a solution available to start making sales.
It's been fascinating growing two businesses in the same vertical that are completely different from each other. The laundromats are inherently local brick-and-mortar affairs that employ a lot of workers in entry-level positions and involves quite a bit of cash handling and physical work such as equipment repairs and store upkeep. The sales transactions are numerous, mostly B2C although with some B2B, and consist of mostly small tickets.
The POS business, on the other hand, is entirely online and nation-wide, and consists of large multi-thousand-dollar B2B sales. My farthest away sale was to a new laundromat built in Fairbanks, Alaska! Picking up the phone and learning how to do direct sales and hearing the stories and pain points of hundreds of laundromat owners has been absolutely invaluable to me. I've never had a direct sales job before and yet I find that I've enjoyed it so far because it's mine. I'm so grateful to get to see these two completely opposite yet wonderfully congruent business models first-hand.
Anyway, that's the brief version of it all. I'm almost finished with my first read-through of Unscripted so I'm sure I'll have plenty of questions in the near future but for now I'm analyzing where I currently stand and where to go next with all this. The laundromats are still owned by my folks and they're not going to be scaling up anytime soon while they're still the owners (I'm thinking Dad's pretty happy with sticking to just 3 stores for a good long while), so that's my main motivation for branching out on my own with a business that has some room to grow. Now it's time to see if it has legs!
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