THE FEATURE

I talk to laundromat owners every single week. Owners with good locations. Good equipment. Decent traffic. And almost all of them are leaving money on the table.

Not because their stores are broken. Because their prices are.

Here's what I see over and over again: an owner opens up, looks at what the laundromat down the street is charging, sets their prices a quarter lower, and never touches them again. Three years go by. Utility costs go up. Labor costs go up. Supply costs go up. But the price on that 40-pound washer hasn't moved a dime.

And then they wonder why margins are tight.

Let me be direct with you. You are probably undercharging. Not because you're lazy or because you don't care. But because you've been thinking about pricing the wrong way.

Most owners set prices based on competition. "The guy down the road charges $4.50, so I'll charge $4.25." That's not a pricing strategy. That's a race to the bottom. And the only person who wins a race to the bottom is the owner with the most machines and the least overhead. That's probably not you. It's definitely not where you want to compete.

Top-performing owners set prices based on three things:

1. The value they deliver. If your store is clean, well-lit, staffed, safe, and has working machines, you are delivering more value than the dark, unattended store down the street. Your price should reflect that. Customers don't just pay for the wash cycle. They pay for the experience. They pay for the environment. They pay for the peace of mind that their clothes aren't getting stolen out of a dryer while nobody's watching.

2. Their actual cost structure. When was the last time you sat down and calculated your true cost per wash cycle? Not just water and gas. Everything. Utilities, lease, labor, insurance, supplies, maintenance, payment processing fees, your time. If you don't know your real cost per cycle, you don't know if you're making money or subsidizing your customers' laundry.

3. Where they want their business to go. Pricing isn't just about today. It's about what you're building toward. If you want to hire an attendant, you need the margin to support that. If you want to add wash and fold, you need the revenue to fund the buildout. If you want to open a second location, you need the cash flow to get there. Your prices today are either funding your future or starving it.

Here's what I know from experience: when you raise your prices with intention and communicate value, most customers don't leave. Some of them don't even notice. And the ones who do notice? Most of them stay because your store is better than the alternative.

I've raised prices at Wash Bar multiple times. I'll tell you what happened in the next section. But the short version is this: revenue went up, customer count stayed flat, and my margins finally gave me room to invest in the things that made the store even better.

The $100K gap isn't magic. It's the difference between an owner who prices based on fear and an owner who prices based on value. Between an owner who looks at the store down the street for permission and an owner who looks at their own P&L for the truth.

This is a four-part series. Over the next three weeks, I'm going to walk you through the other three levers that separate a $200K store from a $300K one: secondary revenue streams, optimization, and how to stack all three into a 90-day sprint.

But none of it works if your pricing foundation is broken.

So before you read another word of this newsletter, I need you to answer one question honestly:

When was the last time you raised your prices?

If you have to think about it, it's been too long!

FROM THE FLOOR

The Day I Raised Prices at Wash Bar

I remember the week I decided to raise vend prices for the first time. I'm not going to pretend I was confident about it. I wasn't.

I had the same fears you probably have right now. What if customers leave? What if there are complaints? What if the Google reviews tank? What if I price myself out of the neighborhood?

Here's what I did. I pulled 90 days of revenue data. I looked at my cost per cycle. I looked at my utility bills. I looked at what I was paying my team. And I realized something uncomfortable: at my current prices, I wasn't building a business. I was maintaining a building.

So I raised prices. Across the board. Every washer, every dryer. Based on machine size, cycle type, and what I knew the market would bear. And then I made a decision that changed everything: I committed to raising self-serve prices by 25 cents per washer and dryer every single January 1. No debate. No committee meeting. No staring at a spreadsheet for three months hoping someone else goes first. January 1, prices go up. Period.

And here's what happened:

Week one? A couple of comments. One handwritten note slid to an attendant. That was it. No exodus. No angry mob. No wave of one-star reviews.

Week two? Revenue was up. Not by a little. Noticeably.

Month one? Customer count was within 2% of where it was before the increase. Revenue was up four digits.

The lesson wasn't just about the money, although the money mattered. The lesson was that I had been letting fear set my prices instead of data. I was so worried about losing a customer that I was willing to lose margin on every single load, every single day, for years.

That's not a pricing strategy. That's avoidance.

I've raised prices every year since then. Every time, same pattern. A few comments. Revenue goes up. Customer count stays flat. And the store gets better because now I have the margin to actually invest in it.

If you're scared to raise your prices, I get it. I was too. But fear is a terrible business advisor.

STEAL THIS

Your One Move This Week

Here's what I want you to do before next Tuesday.

Walk into your store(s). Go to your five highest-volume machines. The ones that are running all day. The ones with lines on Sunday afternoon. Pull the revenue data on those machines for the last 30 days.

Now calculate revenue per hour for each one.

Not revenue per day. Revenue per hour. How much is that machine generating for every hour your store is open?

Now go find your lowest-performing machine. The one that barely moves. Do the same math.

Look at the gap between those two numbers.

That gap is telling you something. It might be telling you that your pricing on the high-demand machines is too low. It might be telling you that a low-performing machine is taking up floor space that could be better used. It might be telling you that your turn times are off and you could be generating more cycles per day on your best equipment.

Whatever it tells you, write it down. Because next week, in Part 2 of The $100K Gap, we're going to talk about the revenue streams you're not even collecting yet. And this data is going to matter.

One machine. One calculation. Before next Tuesday.

That's your homework.

THE GAP

What Laundry Advisors Members Get That You Don't (Yet)

Everything I shared in this issue? That's the surface.

Inside Laundry Advisors, our members are working through The $20K Playbook, a full course on maximizing self-serve revenue. It covers pricing strategy, vend price audits, competitor analysis frameworks, turn time optimization, and the exact process I used to raise prices at Wash Bar without losing customers.

They also get access to The Revenue Per Machine Calculator, a spreadsheet tool that does the math I just asked you to do manually, but across your entire fleet, with benchmarks so you can see where you stack up.

Laundry Advisors isn't open enrollment. It's application-only, and here's why: we protect our members. If you're accepted, we will not allow your direct competitors to join and gain access to the same tools, strategies, and frameworks that give you an edge in your market. What you get inside stays yours.

There is a waitlist. But as a Max Capacity subscriber, your application gets pushed to the front of the line for our team to review.

If you're serious, join the waitlist here.