The Most Overlooked $1M Business Every Town Needs Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:00 And would you believe this one machine makes over  $30,000 a year. We did 1 million25,000 last year. Wow. I would never drive by a laundromat and think  that place makes a million bucks a day. Yeah, I know. It It blew my mind. The bar is so  low. It's like you can go in and own that city. Everything can be done remote. Yeah. Our  our sales during co through the roof.

00:13 Even all these horrible times still like laundromats  got to wash your clothes. People got to wear clothes. So recession resistant certainly  AI resistant. How can people finance these if they don't have much cash? So, a couple  years ago, I met a guy on the internet that claimed to own laundromats that profited over  400,000 a year. And I didn't believe him.

00:28 So, he said, "Come see for yourself." Here I am,  Cincinnati, Ohio. Flew here from Dallas just to see how do you open a million-doll laundry map  and how do you find the perfect location? Today, we're going to learn all that and  more. So, let's go meet Tyler. This is Hamilton. This is our newest store. This  was built in 2022. bought the building during COVID 2020.

00:54 We had two tenants in here. There was  a liberty tax and like a check cashing place. So, we had to wait till they got out. That's why we  didn't open up till 2022. But you bought this with the intent to turn it into this 1,000%. You just  had to let the leases expire. Exactly. Yeah. We couldn't just boot them out, you know. So, yeah.  So, we gutted the whole thing on the outside, the ephus, everything is brand new.

01:15 It was down to  the studs in here. Saw cut the floor for the the drains and the plumbing and the bulkheads. And as  you can see, if you're looking out of the store, it's kind of a mirror image of each other. Most  people don't have the space, to be honest. I mean, most laundry mats are two, maybe 3,000 square  ft. This is 8,000. Wow. How many square feet is just like the consumer fac?

01:35 This is  around 5,000. Okay. This area out here, and then we got about 3,000 between back of house,  office, utility room, and stuff, which we'll we'll get to later. Okay. My father-in-law,  David, who is the OGO laundry, you know, started the first laundry mat in 2006. He likes  to say there are a handful of sexy things in this laundromat. Our new equipment is one of them.

01:55 So,  we'll walk over here. We'll check it out. We are the only laundry mat in the United States that's  not a manufacturer that has their own washer. The only one. It's super cool. Kind of goes from small  to large over here. Most laundry mats, the biggest they have is this 80 lb is what we call. We go  by pounds. Also, you can go by baskets. You know, this could fit eight small baskets of laundry.

02:17 This 130 is something that barely any laundry mats in the US will have. This is a monster  machine. Look how much you can fit. And the nice thing about these machines is you can fill  it all the way to the top. Most people think, "Oh, you can only put this much in here. It's not going  to get my clothes clean." No, as long as there's like a hand that you can put at the top.

02:33 But  the cool thing is this equipment we can do auto dossing or direct soap injection on. We can do  custom cycles on here. So with this equipment, we can modify how fast it spins, how much water goes  in, how long it runs, you know, extra pre-wash, extra rinse or whatever. We can modify that all on  the back end from the cloud. We don't even have to be here to do that.

02:56 We can do that from our our  laptops. We've gotten amazing reviews so far. I think this week alone, we have 50 fivestar reviews  just about this equipment cuz we just put this in last week. And it's it's getting good usage.  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And what did this cost you? List price for this machine would be about 55,000.  Okay. We'll get it and our franchise will get it.

03:15 Franchises will get it in the 30s. Okay. You know,  and how long will list take to pay off this bad boy? We're hoping in the first year. Wow. Yeah. On  average, you know, we run about six, seven turns a day. That's a laundromat term. You know, how many  times is this specific washer started per day? So, 130 bucks a day, give or take. Yeah. At $22. And  that's base price on this machine.

03:32 And then we can get to even more adders. Hey, do you want an extra  pre-wash? Do you want an extended wash? Do you want extra rinse? Sure, let's do an extended wash.  You go here. And now, as you can see, 2425. Swipe your card. Start the machine. What would you say  your gross margin is on on that 25 bucks for your detergent, your water, and your electricity?

03:52 So,  our utilities run under 10%. Revenue. Yeah. So, that's insane. And that's because this equipment,  it will weigh the clothing, put the exact amount of water it needs in there. It's very efficient.  And that's a benefit of newer, nicer equipment. For a lot of laundry mats who have been around  for a long time and they have equipment that's 20 years old, their utilities may be 20, 25, even  up to 30%.

04:12 Yeah. So that gives us an edge because people think, "Oh, you guys are more expensive  than all the other laundry mats in the era." We're really not. Yeah. Because when you consider  that, not when you consider how efficient we are, we're able to price the same. And so, oh, that's  a compelling argument. Customer walks in here, sees this, you know, they're not more expensive  than where I was.

04:31 I'm never going back. Now, I know this machine is an outlier. This is  your biggest machine, right? There's a lot of machine that I'm just thinking from my like  lizard brain here, this will make you like 28 to $30,000 of profit every year, right? And  of guessing this will last you 30 years, right? Like, so it absolutely could. Yeah. If you  maintain it and everything, it's just like to me, I'm just like, okay, we're in Hamilton, Ohio, a  city I've never heard of, and this machine could gross or net you a million

04:58 dollars over its life  or 500,000 or 30,000 a year. Like no matter how you slice and dice it, that's that's impressive  cuz there's a lot of machines in here. I know. It's funny. You know, everybody's like, you know,  our numbers are great obviously and we'll talk about that later. But I'm like, we're in Hamilton,  Ohio, people. We're not even in Cincinnati proper or like Dallas.

05:15 What is the population? Hamilton  I think is 60,000 somewhere around there. There's thousands of cities. I I know 60,000 people. So  yeah, for for the franchises, we're talking with people who are interested. We're looking at  cities, you know, in Alabama. Yeah. That are similar to a Hamilton, Ohio, where like roll tide.  The the competition, the bar is so low.

05:31 Yeah. It's like you can go in and own that city with three  laundry spots, no problem. And so it's it's funny. I love looking at the different cities as  we're talking to prospects. On an average city of 60,000 with similar demographics to this, how many  laundromats total could it support, give or take? So for laundry spot, I would say probably two.

05:52 Two  laundry spots. Now, how did you know that there was demand for a machine this big here? Our data,  I mean, we can run data. Anything you could think of? How do you get that data? Like, are you asking  people or No. So, our we know every quarter, we know every cycle. We know every single piece  of data that comes through this machine on the back end.

06:12 So, we can search it in our database,  run reports on anything we want to know, see what machine is turning the most, where it at the  store, does it matter? You know, larger, smaller. But our data suggests our old 80 pounders, which  was the biggest before we had this, did one turn per day more than on average than our other  equipment. You know, it's anecdotally when we talk to customers, they want big equipment, but we  also see it in the data.

06:31 It's plain and clear. All the other equipment is sitting right here on turns  per day and the 80 pounders up here. Yeah. So, we expect, you know, the the 130 and the 100 to  do even even more turns. So, well, I like that it shows 13 loads because to me it's like, what does  130 lbs mean? Exactly. Exact. So this is what we call the bulkhead. So this is where the drains  are.

06:51 This is where all the water connections come in here. So this is something that we do.  We manufacture this generally in laundry mats that our older you can barely even squeeze back  there. Mhm. Imagine it looks crummy and dirty. Oh, it smells. I mean, looks disgusting. If you have  a a problem with a washer, how you going to get back there and fix it?

07:15 Some people have to pull  the equipment out to fix it. We can just walk right back in here and come on in. I want to take  you back back in the bulkhead. Yeah. You can see we got some lights in here. Everything. One of  our team members who helped us create, you know, this and the and the dosing system, he's got a  saying. He calls it trucks to bucks.

07:28 And what that means is how quickly can we get something  off of the truck to making money. So everything drains out here. Everything drains down. Yep. So  it'll go down to this end where we walked in. So, as you can see right here, the water comes down  here, fills up in this trap here to make sure, hey, this is where everything gets caught.  And you probably got, I don't know, $5 a change in there right now.

07:51 This is what  we call our money wall. At all laundry spots, you can pay by quarter, you can pay by our loyalty  card, you can pay debit, credit card, Apple Pay, Tap to Pay, whatever. We we don't discriminate on  how you want to pay. We prefer customers use our loyalty card. One, they get discounts. So, when  you use our loyalty card right now, you get free dry credits every time you wash.

08:11 customer adds  money to their loyalty card. They come over here, swipe, start a machine. Is there much of a margin  difference between drying and washing? Yeah, you make a lot of your money, most of your money  on washing. I mean, it's not even close. I think our split is somewhere dryers end up being 10  to 15% of washer revenue. And our washers are so awesome that people don't have to dry very long.

08:30 Yeah. And a lot of older mats, dryer revenue may be higher cuz they have to dry for an hour. Yeah.  You can pay however you want. 28% of our customers still use quarters. Wow. Do you want to mess  with that and maybe not bring those customers in? Yeah. You got to remove all the friction of  receiving money. Exactly. And what's weird is the laundromat industry has been very inward-looking.

08:48 What's easy for me as owner? Sure. Oh, I don't want to collect quarters. You know, I don't want  to have to load quarters to the bank, not well, what does the customer want? And so, we're all  about what does a customer want? And so, you can pay however you want when you come to a laundry  spot. So, that's something that's an industry, you know, back and forth, a lot of headbutting on.

09:05 So, we're the bathroom. Okay. cuz you know they say any you can tell how any good business is ran  by how clean or let's go chat in the bathroom. So yeah, we have two unisex bathrooms. You know, we  try to keep them nice. Again, customer experience, you eat off the floor. Try to keep them clean. We  can cook something in here later if you want some breakfast.

09:23 You know, changing tables. Again,  a lot of kids come through here, family. So, want to make it easy for them. But yeah, you know,  everybody likes a a nice bathroom wherever they're hanging out. So, how many employees do you have  here on average at any given time? At any given time, this store will go up to maybe six at a  time, which is probably high for a laundromat.

09:42 Very I mean, very volume. very high cuz we're  doing a volume of the commercial which you'll see in a second. What about just on this floor?  There's one store that we don't even do commercial at. And so most of the time we'll have one  attendant kind of helping. Yeah. Helping, cleaning, doing some drop off cuz we'll still  do people will come in and drop it off.

09:53 So we still do a small amount of that. Weekends  usually two just cuz 50% of the self-service revenue is done on Saturday and Sunday. Oh wow.  Yeah. Out of the week. Yeah. 50% the other five days. Yeah. Exactly. Wow. You come in here on  a Wednesday, which is our slowest day of the week. You'd be like, "Man, how are these guys  making money?" How are these guys making money on this?

10:16 What's the busy time of day? It's  usually, you know, midm morning evenings, the fluctuations. Even the months of the year,  summer's very slow. You know, less clothing, smaller clothing. Spring and fall, our revenue  is higher than summer. And then holiday season, people are saving money for Christmas and  all those things. Once back to school hits, that's where it kind of starts ramping up  until about November.

10:33 Okay? Believe it or not, just because you're watching this doesn't mean  you're subscribed to my channel. YouTube's going to show you stuff even if you're not subscribed  to it. Over half of people that watch my videos are not subscribed. It would mean the world to  me if you just hit subscribe. Thank you so much. I think we have 40ome cameras in this store.

10:50 So,  more than your local bank, and I'll show you those when we get into the the office back there. This  is kind of our commercial processing area. So, as you can see, tons of laundry in here. Most  of this right here is a a hotel. This location does about 21% revenue in commercial. Wow. It's  our largest commercial laundromat. And how does it rank on consumer on all your locations?

11:12 It's  our second highest self-s serve, but it's going to be the first here soon. This is our newest  store. This is our flagship. This is the only store that has even some of our new equipment in  that all franchises will have going forward. So, it's your newest and your best. Really? By far.  Yeah. By far. Well, that's encouraging. Yeah. Do you have to fold it as well?

11:30 Yeah. All this is  washed, folded, stain removed. Now, you know, we upcharge if there's we call it, you know,  extra soil or stained. So, we up charge for those things. But, yeah, we move 30 lbs a month through  here. We have a new commercial account this month that will add probably another 20,000. So, we'll  be doing maybe 50,000 lbs in August out of here, which is just insane.

11:50 A month. Yeah. In a month.  In August. What does that equal in revenue? Uh, it depends. Commercial pricing is all over  the board depending on what we're washing, how much of it we're washing, but anywhere from  dollar a pound up to 250, $3 a pound depending on the account. I mean, you'll be closing in on  100,000 a month just in commercial from this one location.

12:06 Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Are you intentional  about finding these commercial accounts? Like, do you have a salesperson? Are you doing outreach  or are they coming to you? So, our GM does a lot of that. So, we do get some inbound. Our GM is  big in the community. It's it's joining your local chambers. It's talking to the business  owners. You know, when we opened this store, we had a VIP red carpet grand opening, catered  food, open bar, music at a laundromat, you know, like something crazy.

12:29 But we got business owners  in the community to come here for that. I think we had 50, 60 people here for that party. And  so, wow, get the word out, you know, meet other business owners who have a laundry need, all those  things. So, it's a lot of boots on the ground type of stuff, you know, calling referrals. So, this  store was the first time we did two weekends in a row free laundry cuz it worked so well.

12:48 My thought  is, okay, when we did one free laundry weekend, like, okay, people found it, they maybe told some  people Saturday, like, hey, come tomorrow. Well, I'm like, well, if we gave everybody a whole  week to tell everybody they knew, like the second weekend was probably they post about it online and  then it gives them it gives them a whole week.

13:04 So, we did two here and it was just absolute chaos.  But our theory is we just need to get people in the door. Yeah. Literally, if we just get people  in the door, they're not going back to the other line. How long have you you've been open here?  November will be our fourth full year. Okay. Well, so this was the first location where you did  two free weekends.

13:21 This is about to be your best location. Yeah, exactly. They're habit driven,  I'm sure. So once they fall in love with this, there's no better, nicer laundromat in the area.  They're customers for life. So like for instance, in Hamilton, we are the number one laundromat,  but there's still a handful of other smaller ones still hanging around. We've put out 11 mats with  our four over the years.

13:38 Put like Yeah. Out of business. You've opened four. Yeah. and 11 have  gone out of business in our wild. What percent higher are your prices than the guy down the road?  We're actually underpriced on some of our machines compared to some people in Hamilton, which is  crazy to think about. That's what we do when we go into a market. We look at the pricing cuz we  don't want to be more expensive.

13:58 We want to go in, give the customer a better experience, and then  be like, "Oh, this is the same price." Like, how's that possible? What reason would they have  to go back to their other laundry mat? There is none. Sweet. So, what's over here? Well, let's go  through this door. I want to show you. And this is this is the sexiest thing that you'll see today.

14:14 A soap injection machine that we've been working on. Oh, the DSI for sure. So, there she is. What  percentage of laundromats around the United States has direct soap injections? It's not even a  percentage. I think there's like 15. Wow. And it's not even as many options as ours. So, ours  we can put up to eight different options. So, right now we have three detergents, three  softeners, one bleach.

14:36 We could add one more. I don't even think any systems out there right  now have that many options. Most of them are one, maybe a couple. Like you can detergent in  a softener or just a detergent. This is a a key key differentiator for us as laundry spot. You  can see huge water lines. I mean, we need a lot of water coming in here. We've got our ozone systems  there.

14:54 So, what is an ozone system? Yeah. So, ozone ozone is like natural sanitization. It's 03.  We use it for mold restoration, fire restoration. And customers can select an ozone cycle on the  washers. You got dirty football, stinky football, gym equipment, whatever. Totally gets the scent  out. I mean, literally wipes out any scent outside of just a fresh, clean smell.

15:16 I didn't know that  was a thing. Yeah. So, customers love it. Also a reason why our store smells so good. I was going  to mention that actually. It's not the first thing I noticed. It's not a detergent. It's just,  wow, this store smells clean and fresh. Everyone loves the smell of fresh line, right? Quick word  about today's sponsor, Beehive. They just launched something called Community and it does something  that I've never seen on any other platform.

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16:18 Get more juice from everything you produce. The links in the description below. moving around  here. Another thing that we added was dry cleaning because we had so many customers say, "Hey, I'm  dropping my clothes off here. Can I drop my dry cleaning off?" Went out. It's not a business we  want to be in, but if we're getting all these customers asking it, and they're loyal laundry  spot customers.

16:36 Why not? So, we went out. We wholesale uh dry cleaning. You'll see some there.  We do fire departments, police departments. Again, part of our local community. Like, we want to be  embedded there. Do good work for them. You know, be a good referral source. So, so for something  like this, what do you charge and what do you pay for like one shirt? So, yeah, shirts are like  $7, I think, and we we get 50% of the the top line.

17:01 You charge seven and you pay 350, give  or take. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. For shirt. This is our garage. This is how we get the laundry  around. This is Betsy. She hauls all of our uh laundry. As you can see, there's more more  laundry in here. We love the Ford Transits. Big fans. We have two of them. This is a 250 Transit  high roof so you can stand up in there and then also long wheelbase.

17:22 So this is as big as they  make them. So how did the first year or first month of that first location go that you guys  went in on together? It went really well. That was our Fairfield location. We did the weekend grand  opening. You know within I think it was 6 months that was our best performing self-service monthly  run rate. Like we were already the best performing self-service store.

17:43 So that's kind of when we  found like we were on to something. You know, that location's 4,400 ft². That is our only leased  location. Okay. What is your lease there? Yeah. So our lease there it's uh $14 a square foot. 4,400  ft². But we have the original lease was 10 years with five 5year options after that. Okay. So 35  years if we want. And that's we want long-term leases.

18:06 You got a lot of money in here. Got a lot  of money in it. You don't want the landlord to be able to just kick you out and be like, "Oh, I'll  run a laundry mat out of here." Per month. What does that shake out to? 14 bucks a foot. It's  like 4600 bucks a month or something. Okay, that's not bad. Yeah. Let's talk startup costs on  the Fairfield location.

18:16 Yeah. What did it cost? So, I got to speak FDDD numbers. The range is kind  of wide again depending on size of store. But, you know, our FDD says startup costs anywhere between  1.2 million all in to 2.2 million all in. Again, how big is your store? How much equipment is in  there? And that's not including real estate. Not including real estate. Assuming white, you're  leasing and first last month.

18:38 Exactly. Part of that. Yep. That's just, hey, here's a white box.  We got to turn it into a laundromat. You know, obviously we have to fix the plumbing, update  plumbing, electrical a lot of the times and do all that. The two biggest pieces are obviously  the equipment. You know, you're going to spend upwards of possibly depending on the size,  you know, $1.1 million in equipment.

18:55 Um, the nice thing is that's bonus depreciation's  back. You know, you can you can take all that year one if you want. It's a nice business for other  business owners because you can offset some of that other income. Turning it into a laundromat,  like all the utility updates and everything, that's the other big cost. Those are going to  be the two big line items that make up most of it.

19:15 Now, would you ever buy a laundromat and give  it a facelift? No. So, there's a story on that, too. Back when I first teamed up with Dave and my  father-in-law, we thought like, hey, let's go buy a bunch of them, turn them into laundry spots  so we can have a bunch at the same time. So, we were close to buying a pack of four and doing  all of our due diligence, you know, sale price, all the cost of us updating it to be what we want  as a laundry spot.

19:35 And, you know, all of a sudden, I'm just like, why would we buy this, put all this  money to fix it up when I could just go across the street the same way he did with his other two  stores and just put it out of business? And again, that just solidified our mindset of like, hey, no,  we're going to do it the way from the beginning that we want. Yeah.

19:54 So, let's say with a store  like Fairfield, you spend a million and a half to open it. If things go well, 5 years later,  what could you sell it for? I'm trying to like compare and contrast buy versus build. Yeah.  So, our laundry mats we could sell five to 6x probably 5 years later 89 million. This store  does 421 last year bottom line. Well, let's say Fairfield something something more along the lines  of average as opposed to outlier.

20:17 Yeah. I mean, Fairfield could go for around 2 million. Okay.  Yeah. Yeah. And then what would something like Fairfield cash flow every year? Uh Fairfield does  high threes net. So and what did you pay to open Fairfield specifically? Fairfield was 1.1 million.  But again that was 2019. So Right. Right. So 1.1 you run it for for 5 years and let's say you cash  flow, you know, 1.3 along the way.

20:38 So you get your money back in three or four years. Is that the  payback is usually back to zero. Right now you've got an asset that's is paid off basically. And  on year five you can sell it for 2 million. Yeah, give or take. Okay. So you basically and then  you profit along the way. So you're going to make like 2.5 million profit in 5 years from that  location.

21:00 Do you think buying one a smaller one could be a good option to get your feet wet in  the industry? So there's a lot of influencer stuff going on right now with laundromats, right?  Like the the hype is great. I love laundromats. I love the industry. But a lot of people don't  handle their books like we do and track every single quarter that goes through.

21:17 So verifying  income and expenses is almost impossible in an old crappy laundromat. Most people overpay for  them. Uh they quickly realize like, oh, this isn't passive at all. If you have older equipment,  stuff is breaking all the time. You're constantly fixing equipment. Unfortunately, a lot of people  who fall into that trap find themselves that they just bought themselves a job, like a lowpaying  job.

21:34 You're you're netting 50,000 on a laundromat, and you're working it like full-time. Like that's  not fun. That's my gripe with like a lot of the Oh, laundromats, passive income. Buy an old one  and throw a new floor and some paint up on it, you're going to make millions." I have a gripe  with basically anything that's ever called passive. Yeah. Yeah.

21:52 I mean, I hate that word.  I'm still looking for passive. Yeah. I I hate that. I That's my least favorite word, I think,  out there because nothing is passive. I mean, we have a GM and an AGM and still not passive,  you know? Yes, it it makes our job a lot easier, but it's work regardless. Like, you still need to  make sure the operation is running smoothly and doing what you want.

22:10 Guys, tkowners.com. That's my  community where people are building businesses. I do AMAs, Q&As's every week live. You can ask me  anything you want. You can have accountability partners. It's about a thousand people in there  building, starting, growing businesses. Check out TKO as in the current office. TK owners.com. Okay.  So, Fairfield 1.1 to open.

22:24 What did the 5year ramp look like? What was year 1, year 2, year three  as far as net profit is concerned? Yeah. So, with Fairfield, we we ramp pretty quickly, which is  nice. So, just for instance, for this store, after our grand open, second grade opening weekend,  that first quarter we were opened after that, we uh were at $100,000 in self-s serve revenue.

22:46 Quarter a month. A quarter. Yeah. Wow. Okay. So, you know, $400,000 track and run rate. Yeah.  At the end of the fourth quarter of that year, we were at 155,000. Wow. So, tracking for 620,000.  Fairfield was very similar, you know, ramped up uh pretty quickly. What you'll find is self-service  matures at like year two or three for for a laundromat because again there's only so much  pie in our one two three mile radius and you kind of hit that at about year 2 or three.

23:17 Yeah. What  does a mature location look like? Like year five, year 8 like do you still see growth? Yeah. So  you'll see for instance this store this November will be our fourth year. We did topline 1,25,000  last year and bottom line 420. Wow. Yeah, there's there's a few things. New customers are still  trickling in. Obviously, commercial is growing.

23:40 We raise prices like any business. There's that  as well. I would never drive by a laundromat and think that place makes a million bucks a year  or that place profits $400,000 a year. I know it it blew my mind. And they don't like most  don't, right? Yeah. I mean, yeah. You're we're kind of at a different level than what what's out  there, but that's our goal going forward.

23:54 Like, we want million-dollar every We want laundry  spots to be million-dollar stores. Yeah. What' you spend to build this one? And then what are  the numbers like today? So this one it's it's uh a little unique because we built during co you  know it was a little over budget on what we spent. Still made a lot of sense for us. If I remember  correctly it was right around the 2 million $2 million mark.

24:16 Okay. A lot of supplies were  higher because of COVID and all that stuff. Again topline does a million25. What did it do the first  year in profit in revenue? I think we did mid700s first year. Yeah. First year open. All right. Give  me give me like the the secrets of site selection. big thing we look at is like what laundromats  are in an area. You know, if we see three, four, five, you know, in a nice little area, we're like,  okay, there's a laundromat market there.

24:38 For us, we love to see laundromats. That's just been a  successful formula for us. How much research do you do at how busy those three or four laundromats  are? A lot. You go hang out there. So, yeah. So, I'll just say I've uh I've got a lot of water  readings in my day on competitors. But, yeah, we do a lot of research. Obviously, you know,  we start by, okay, what's in the area?

24:57 Google reviews. We go there, spend a day there, do our  laundry there, read the meter. Yeah. Check and see divided by this. Exactly. What's the pricing?  We know these machines use this much water. Okay. We kind of get a gauge on the revenue. Take notes.  What's good about it? What's bad about it? I mean, yeah, we definitely want to know everything about  our competitors before we go in there.

25:16 Then, hey, let's look at the demographics. Let's see  where they match up. Let's see exactly where the demographic pockets are. So, could we be a  little closer than that block to who we really serve? Then let's try to do that. You know, a lot  of people be like, "Oh, there's a new apartment complex coming down the road from me. Like,  could be perfect there."

25:32 I'm like, "Probably not. We don't want new. We want the apartment. We  want the 1990s apartment." Yeah. You know, that probably has shared laundry in the basement and  the owner doesn't take care of it at all and these people need to go to a laundromat. So, we talked  about secrets of sight selection. What about the secrets of the grand opening? Cuz it seems like  you guys are doing something different.

25:48 Yeah. So, grand opening, usually we start 3 months out.  We start to do like a coming soon. You know, we do mailers. We start getting in the chambers,  building some buzz. We get in publications. We do every door direct mail. Y is that what you're  doing? Yep. Yep. Yep. We just mail out flyers. Hey, grand opening coming soon. Here we held the  VIP grand opening, you know, about a month out.

26:12 That went great. So, red carpet. Red carpet. We  had a guy playing guitar in the corner. We had open bar, catered food, door prizes. So, that was  amazing. What do you spend on that? The VIP event. It wasn't I mean, it wasn't bad. A couple thousand  bucks. Yeah, a few thousand bucks. So, we do that. About a month out is when we start hitting grand  opening.

26:26 Free laundry weekends coming. We have the the weekends on there. Blast that out. Two weeks.  We do it again. Free laundry weekend, you know, only on the weekend. Yep. Only on the weekend.  Coming soon. You know, here are the dates. And then we get to the free laundry weekends. And  you know, there's 20 people waiting outside our doors. Everybody is here.

26:47 Every employee we have,  all the owners, you know, we're we're here. We're getting the Google reviews. That's another huge  thing is like how many fivestar reviews can we get as quickly as possible? Get a five star review.  They're not paying. Exactly. Easiest time to get a to get a review. And so it's exhausting, but  it's amazing. Again, I've cried with customers.

27:06 People who haven't been able to wash clothes for 6  months because they've had to buy food instead of wash their clothes. And they come in here, they  wash 6 months worth of clothes. They're like, "Thank you so much." Like, I mean, there's a lot  of great stories that come out. So, you're not even charging more. Yeah. Exact. Exactly. You  don't have to price them.

27:18 It's We're not price gouging them. We're like, "Hey, we're here. We're  giving you a better experience. You deserve it." Yeah. You don't need some subhuman experience  just because you don't have a bunch of money. Yeah. What is the story of Laundry Spot? So, um,  let's see. I started doing this about 10 years ago. It's a family business. So, my father-in-law  had two laundry mats.

27:36 First one started in 2006. It's kind of a funny story how he got into the  laundromat business. So, I'll start there. He's super entrepreneurial guy. Has done all sorts of  things in his career. Super smart guy. knows what he's doing. He wanted to open up a car wash.  Bought some land, was like, you know, going around looking at different car washes, talking  to different people, you trying to figure out what type of car wash he wanted to build.

27:58 Someone  said, "Hey, go check out this guy up uh north near Cleveland. See what you like." He has a great car  wash. He has a laundromat attached to it, too. So, it's a pretty cool unique thing. So, he goes  up there, you know, he's looking at everything, talking to the owner, and the owner is like,  "Don't get into the car wash business." you. He's got a nice, beautiful tunnel, but he's like, "When  a part goes down in here, the whole thing's down."

28:22 Yeah. No, I'm not making any money until it's  back up and running. He said, "With my laundry mats over here, I can have 1 2 3 five machines  down, I'm still making money." And I and something clicked in his head, and he was like, "All right,  laundry mats are the way I'm going." So, he bought some different land right next to the best laundry  mat in town.

28:37 And that was on purpose. That was on purpose. He's He's the nicest guy ever, but he's  a businessman killer. Confidence. Yeah, it is. So, built the laundry mat, the first laundry mat  from scratch. It was called Express Laundry at that point. Built that one up, put that guy out  of business. 2008 comes around. He wants another one. Goes a mile and a half down the road, goes  to the second best performing laundry mat in the city and gets What?

29:04 Sorry, what city was this?  Middletown. So, this is our North Stores. Yeah, our two North stores are in Middletown. Okay. He  was right across the street at this point. Um the first one was right next to it. This one was right  across the street. Built that building from the ground up and that was called Coin Laundry. So  again, you know, back then there wasn't really branding for laundry mat.

29:22 So you know what's funny  about that? And we touched on this earlier, Card versus Coin. First store was card only. Second  store was coin only. Yeah. He literally had an AB test. And so it wasn't just the name, it was how  he exactly how he accepted payment. And the coin store performed better. Yeah. So eventually turned  it to hybrid, you know, accepting both and all that, but testing from store one to store two to  store three to store four.

29:41 We're always testing, you know, and seeing what makes the most sense,  what works the best. So he got those two stores open. Amazing business. Me and my wife get married  about 10 years ago. He comes to us and he's like, "Hey, I think this laundromat thing is is a good  business. Like, do you guys want to team up and open up more of these things?" I'm a finance guy.

30:00 I'm a numbers guy. You know, that's my career. And I didn't really know anything about laund  laundry mats, you know, I used one in college, crappy. Like I'm like, this isn't this can't be a  good business. And I was like, well, can you show me the books? Like, does this thing make money?  You know, do these things make money? And he, you know, slid it over.

30:17 I took a look and I was  like, whoa. You know, I'm I'm in. I'm sold. What are your employee costs? Like what do you pay  for like the lowest level up to a GM? So labor costs are actually our biggest cost. Yeah. As a  as a chunk of revenue, they're around 20% of our revenue overall. We started about 15 bucks an  hour. Wow. For the lowest level. Lowest level.

30:38 Yeah. Brand new attendant coming in. Just someone  helping people and cleaning, helping, folding. So, anyone, you know, can come apply, get in at that  rate. We have attendants/managers who we've give a little bit more responsibility making up to $22 an  hour. How many competitors did you say have gone out of business? 11. I'd be curious to see the net  job gain from all that cuz they probably weren't employing very many people at all.

30:58 Mostly none.  Mostly they weren't employing any. Let's say you it's a net loss of seven employees. Your four  locations open and each one has on average how many? 10 12 part-time employees each. Each. Yeah.  Yeah. Wow. So you're bringing 4050 jobs. Yeah. 40 50 parttime jobs to the area that lost seven jobs  because of you maybe. Probably not even that many, right?

31:19 It's a net job gain to a large degree. For  sure. Yeah. Yeah. And we pay them well, too. It's not like we pay him 750, which is minimum wage in  Ohio, right? Wow. Okay. Now, let's talk utilities, water, and electric. What does that look like?  They're a little uh utilities overall are a little under uh 10%. So like right around 9 and a half.  The reason is very efficient equipment on all fronts.

31:38 Insurance I'm sure is minimal. Insurance  not bad. No, not I mean negligible on on the grand scheme of things. What are the costs are there?  Property taxes not bad. Yeah, minimal. Anything else that we're missing? Maintenance for pans.  Those are new machines. So Exactly. Yeah. Most of our, you know, our oldest machines right now are  at the first store when we first redid it.

31:51 They are 8 years old. So those are our oldest machines.  Yeah. At any store right now. Yeah. What does the future look like for you? Yeah. So we have what  does growth look like? Yeah. The franchise is live. Started in January. We've sold 36 units.  Wow. Across the US so far. 36 territories. Yeah. 36 territories. Across how many markets? There's  some in Florida.

32:12 Uh some more in Ohio, Kentucky, Alabama. I brought I like an element of surprise  when we come to a market. So I'm not going to tell you what city, but uh that will be a laundry  spot will be coming to Alabama soon. Indianapolis, talking to people, you know, all over the place.  36 units in 8 months. That's incredible. How many laundromats are there in the US?

32:33 So, the the the  number that everybody likes to say is 30,000, but that's like what you can find. A lot of  laundromats are out there and don't have a Google business page, don't have websites. Yeah.  So, most people think there's like 40,000. I mean, that's still a huge market. 40,000 laundromats out  there. So, I mean, there could be well over a,000 laundry spots.

32:51 Yeah. Like that would be our goals,  you Well, if people want to learn more, where should they go? Yeah, just go to our website.  I Yeah, you have our link, you know, throw it in the comments. Uh, just reach out. I think this  video was very educational and this is the first video or anything public that we've given someone  a full behindthe-scenes tour. So, right here. So, you got it, man. Okay. So, thank you, Tyler.  Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. same thing.