The Year I Didn't Know

We sold our forever home, moved two hours to a town where we knew nobody, had a baby, and bought a laundromat, all in about six weeks. Then winter taught me what I didn't know.

Last week I told you about my grandfather and the farmers who lost everything because of one good year. This week I want to tell you about my first year, because I nearly made every mistake he warned me about, plus a few he never saw coming.

Start with what we bet. In the fall of 2020, Hannah and I sold our custom newly built, forever home across from the golf course in Edmond, OK. We moved two hours away to a town where we did not know one single person. That was two weeks before Thanksgiving. The first week of December, our second son was born. And on December 30th, we sat at a closing table, masks on, Hannah holding our three week old baby, and signed the paperwork on our first laundromat.

We went from almost 3,000 square feet of custom home to a 1,100 square foot rental duplex. New town. New baby. No family nearby. Everything we had was riding on a business I had never run, on a calendar I had never seen.

Day one, we had zero employees. The previous owner had never hired anyone outside his own family, and none of them stayed. So it was me.

January mornings were cold and slow. I polished machines because I had time to polish machines. I sat in an empty store sketching ideas to get Wash and Fold moving, trying to figure out how to get anybody through the door.

And here's the part almost nobody knew. I still owned my insurance agency back home. Every Friday I got up at 5:00 in the morning and drove to our district meeting with all 55 agents in my district. The rest of the week I managed my insurance team, audited policies, signed commission checks and sold home and auto policies over the phone between loads of laundry. For the first couple of years, not one agent outside my office knew I owned a laundromat. Only my office manager knew, and she kept it quiet.

Then the middle of January came, and Wash and Fold dried up.

I know now exactly what that was. You read about it last week. Christmas bills land, families cut back, and the dip runs 10%-20% until about March. It happens every single year, almost to the same week. But I didn't know that then. I thought once you had a customer, you had them forever. So when the store went quiet, I didn't see a season. I saw the end.

Fear makes you want to do something. Anything. Here's what I almost did.

I came within an hour or two of slashing prices. That would have gone against everything I learned in insurance. In that business, we never wanted price shoppers. We wanted customers who valued the service, because price shoppers leave the moment somebody else is a nickel cheaper. I knew all that. But sitting in an empty store with a new baby at home, I about threw the training out and went straight to competing on price. What stopped me was instinct and training taking back over. I made myself work off of facts, not feelings. Knee jerk reactions will ruin a business.

What I did do cost me real money. I figured marketing professionals knew better than me, so I asked in the big laundromat Facebook groups. One name came back over and over as the best in the business. We got on a call. She had a $1,500 a month minimum, plus ad spend, to run our ads. After 90 days we could not attribute one single new customer to any of it. She asked for another 90 days, and I gave it to her.

I still remember sitting in the laundromat parking lot at the end of those six months, doing the math on my phone, in my car. Between the fees and the ad spend, I was somewhere between $16K and $18K poorer, and we could not trace one new customer to a single dollar of it.

I've since learned that a lot of what calls itself laundromat marketing is people experimenting with your money. I'm not saying real professionals don't exist. As I write this, I just started with a large company I have real hope for, and I'll report back honestly in a few months. But across six years, I have wasted tens of thousands of dollars on so called specialists with zero results to show for it. Nobody warned me. So I'm warning you.

And that first year kept handing me things nobody warns you about. We even had a dryer fire in our opening days, a story I told in full in an earlier issue if you want to go back for it. The scorch outline is still on the floor in front of dryer 1A six years later.

So when did it turn? Rounding out my second year.

The data did it. I check my point of sale and my card system regularly, and by the end of year two I could finally lay one year on top of the other. And there it was. The dip wasn't random. It had dates. It showed up the same time it showed up the year before, and it left on schedule too. The thing that scared me to death in year one was just the calendar. A season, not a sentence.

Two things I now tell every newer owner from that experience.

First, in your first year, judge your numbers by the month, not by the week. Weekly numbers will make you crazy, because a family that was tight on money in week one comes back and runs two or three washers in week four. No matter what, people are still wearing their laundry. Slow weeks even out. Months tell the truth.

Second, get to year over year as fast as your history allows. I track every week and every month against the same week and month the year before, at every store. It is amazing what that does for your sense of security. In six years, we have seen growth in almost every single month, with only one or two flat months in all that time. But the number I lean on is never this week versus last week. It's this month versus this month last year.

And the insurance office? I sold it to a fellow agent about three years in. Store one alone could not pay me enough to live on. Store two got closer. It was store three that finally out-earned my agency of several thousand customers. From there, each store has paid for the next one. That second income wasn't a backup plan I was embarrassed about. It was the bridge that carried my family across the year I didn't know.

Next week I'll show you the system that replaced the fear. The numbers we track every single week, who prepares them, and how they tell me what's coming before it gets here.

Our second week open, I was outside working on our water vending machine. The tap water in this town is bad, so we sell gallons of filtered water out front. A man rode up on an old school chopper, music blaring, dressed head to toe in leathers on a cold day. I had never seen him in my life. He already knew who I was.

He got to the point. He wanted to be paid to protect my laundromat. Keep the local trouble away. I gathered he had a number in mind somewhere between $500 and $1,000 a month.

I'd seen this in movies. I didn't think it was real. My natural instinct kicked in and I gave him a half laugh, like he'd told a joke, said thanks for welcoming me to the neighborhood, and walked away. In hindsight, I think it shocked him. He never came back around. I saw him ride by once a couple of years later on a different chopper, and last I heard, he's in jail now.

I tell that story because your first year will hand you things no book, no course, and no Facebook group will prepare you for. Diesel soaked jeans in a dryer. A protection pitch at the water machine. People walking off with your laundry bags. Hustlers trying to take advantage of your customers when you're not watching. You cannot plan for all of it. You can only decide ahead of time that you're the kind of owner who doesn't panic.

If you're in your first two years, steal these three rules from my expensive education. Judge your business by months, not weeks, until you have enough history to compare year over year. Never touch your prices out of fear, because you learned last week what season the fear arrives in, and it passes. And before you hand any marketer a dollar, agree in writing on how new customers will be tracked back to their work, run 90 days, and let the tracking make the call on day 91. Not their charm. Not their promises. The tracking.

One more that's bigger than laundry: if you have a second income when you start, don't be in a hurry to drop it. Mine bought me the one thing a first year owner needs most, which is time to be wrong without losing the farm.

Everything that went wrong in this issue traces back to the same root: I had nobody to ask. No mentor. Just open Facebook groups where the loudest voices, I later learned, weren't running successful stores at all. Most of them aren't even in the industry anymore. The room I needed that first winter didn't exist, so years later we built it.

Laundry Advisors is a community for operators who want to grow and scale, with trainings, weekly video calls, and resources covering the things that sink first year owners and stall veteran ones: staffing and HR, marketing, SOPs, equipment mix, customer retention, and expanding to additional locations.

If this issue hit close to home, the one resource I'd point you to first is our 180 Day Domination Blueprint. It walks you from 90 days before you open to 90 days after, so a new store is set up for profitability right out of the gate instead of learning the calendar the way I did. And if the marketing part of my story stung, our Facebook Ads and Google Ads courses teach you to run and track that money yourself, so nobody is ever experimenting with it but you.

Every store's next hurdle is different, which is why we start with a conversation instead of a pitch. Schedule a complimentary call with our team, tell us where you are and where you're headed, and we'll point you to the tools that fit.