#008: Now It's Your Turn

Three weeks ago I told you about a woman with a red wagon.

I told you about a cattle rancher who needed someone to wash his wife's dresses before he buried her.

I told you about a young woman who lost both of her parents before she had the chance to figure out who she was.

I told you about a man who bragged about stealing money from people who had nowhere else to go.

Every single one of those stories came from the same place.

A laundromat.

Your laundromat has stories like these happening inside it right now. The question is whether you are built to receive them.

THE FEATURE

Simon Sinek does not just ask you to find your why. He gives you a method for finding it.

It starts with your past, not your future.

Sinek argues that your why already exists inside you. It is not something you create or decide. It is something you uncover. And the way you uncover it is by going back through the moments in your life that moved you. The experiences that filled you with something you could not fully explain at the time. Pride. Grief. Purpose. The feeling that you were exactly where you were supposed to be.

You look for the common thread running through those moments.

Not what happened. Why it mattered.

Then you put it into words. Sinek's framework for expressing a why is simple: To _____ so that _____.

A contribution. And the impact of that contribution on the people around you.

Mine took shape the morning a woman pulled a red wagon through my front door and ended up exchanging phone numbers with a woman who arrived in a white Escalade. I did not have the words for it then. But I felt it. I knew something had just happened inside my laundromat that could not have happened anywhere else on earth.

That feeling did not leave. It got louder every time I showed up.

It was there when I loaded a grieving rancher's washer and spent an hour making sure Marjorie's dresses were perfect.

It was there when Hannah and I looked at each other after a young woman who had lost everything opened up on a shift and we made a quiet decision to pour into her the way her parents would have.

It was there the day I drove past a store full of walkers... people with no cars, no choices, and no one looking out for them, and felt something harden inside me that has not softened since.

That feeling is a why trying to get your attention.

Most laundromat owners never stop long enough to hear it.

FROM THE FLOOR

I want to be honest with you about something.

I did not walk into my first store with a mission statement. I did not open on day one with a clear articulation of purpose. I had a gut feeling that I wanted to help people. A ministry mindset, as Hannah and I call it. But it was unformed. It was a direction, not a destination.

The why got clearer every time I showed up.

Every time I stayed later than I needed to. Every time I paid for someone's wash without them asking. Every time Hannah covered a shift and came home and told me something that happened that night that neither of us expected.

The why revealed itself through the doing.

That is what I want you to understand as we close this series. You do not have to have it figured out before you start. You just have to be present enough to recognize it when it shows up in front of you. And it will show up. It already has. You just may not have been looking for it yet.

I think about the rancher almost as often as I think about the woman with the red wagon. I never learned his name. I never will. But he came back to find me before he left town for good because something happened inside my laundromat that was worth coming back for.

That is not a marketing strategy. That is not a customer retention tactic.

That is a why, alive and walking around in the world.

"I have cried with strangers in my laundromat more times than I can count. And every single time, I have walked away more certain of why I built this thing than I was when I walked in. The laundromat did not give me my purpose. It just kept showing it back to me until I finally understood what I was looking at."

STEAL THIS

Here is Sinek's process, distilled into something you can do this week.

Sit down somewhere quiet. No phone. No spreadsheet. No employee problem to solve.

Write down three to five moments from your life. Inside your store or outside of it, when you felt completely in your element. When something happened and you thought, even briefly, this is exactly where I am supposed to be.

They do not have to be dramatic. The small ones are often the most honest.

Look at what those moments have in common. Not the setting. Not the circumstances. The feeling underneath them.

Then try to finish this sentence: I exist to _____ so that _____.

You may not get it right the first time. That is fine. Write it anyway. Let it be imperfect. The act of trying to put it into words is the beginning of everything.

Because once you know why you are in that building, everything else changes. How you hire. How you train. How you walk the floor at 9pm. How you respond when someone walks in pulling a wagon with everything they own inside it.

The why does not make the work easier.

It makes the work matter.

THE GAP

Everything we have built inside Laundry Advisors starts from this place.

Wash With Purpose, our 14-module, 3-phase hospitality course, is built on the belief that a laundromat run with purpose operates differently at every level. How your attendants greet customers. How your store feels at 7am versus 7pm. How your team carries your why into the building even when you are not there.

It is inside the GROWTH Mastermind for a reason. Because purpose without a room full of people who understand it is just a feeling. The Mastermind makes it a system.

If your market is open, the application is waiting. Max Capacity subscribers move to the front of the line.

Your direct competitors are not in this room. That is by design.

Learn More About Growth Mastermind

This is the final issue of The Wall Comes Down. Thank you for spending four weeks inside this story with me. It is the most personal thing I have ever put into writing. Next week, we start something new.

Max Capacity is published every Tuesday, exclusively for subscribers.