Talk me out of buying a laundromat

[Tracy S.]

Happy 4th of July to everyone. Jordan, love what you are doing here with the website, podcast, and value that you are bringing. From what I can tell there isn’t a lot of people doing this for laundromat owners so it’s an awesome idea.

From research it seems laundromats have a fairly decent cash flow for not too much time invested. I live in a 3rd tier type market with a lot of smaller 4th tier markets all around. From what I can tell there are a lot of coin laundromats (self serve) here and not too many operators taking the business seriously.

I work a full time rotating shift job so I’d love to hear from some owners on how time consuming running these things can be each week?

I pretty much look at it like this, if I could buy about 10 of these things and net in the 10k range a month then it would make it a strong case for me to go down this path.

Are those numbers far fetched?

[Dave “Laundromat Millionaire” Menz]

Hi Tracy, the answer to your question is it depends… What do you mean by 3rd tier market? If you’re in a smaller town, you’ll struggle to get near the $10K number, but if you’re in the suburbs, then likely not.

The fact that your immediate competitors are asleep (Very common!) is a great sign that there’s a need and an untapped market that you could capitalize on. Ultimately, there’s a much deeper conversation in here that needs to be had in order to really answer your question.
Typical margins in this business range from 15-40% depending on efficiencies and operations. Earning $10K a month net on a suburban market is possible but but not likely unless you are focused on and investing regularly in your businesses.

I’ve always believed in looking for pent up demand in a market, and meeting that need with a great enthusiasm for service. In my experience the money will follow. If you’re looking to buy 10 mats, casually approach the business, run self serve only, and make $100K a month net, you’ll likely be very disappointed. Best wishes to you in your journey! 😃

[Robert Anderson]

My example requires about 10 hours per week. But the first year was more like 30 per week in getting the place fixed up and remodeled. You only want to hire techs for the hard to do jobs. You should be able to fix a clogged washer drain yourself. Does getting down on your hands and knees for a good hour, getting wet with all the stuff that accumulates in a washer drain, often with a crowd of people asking you to help them with something else, sound like fun? Then you find out the bolts are rusted out and you can’t put it back together until you go to home depot?

Getting called to the store for an emergency? Kicking sleeping vagrants out. Vagrants refusing to leave the restroom. Vagrants taking all of your paper towels? Vagrants using up all the hand soap you provide for customers.

It’s a numbers game. If you have 60 washers and dryers, and they break once per year, that means you are fixing at least one per week. Even if you have newer machines stuff still goes wrong. I have a competitor with new machines and he still has at least 2 or 3 out of service at any given time.

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