#006: What It Costs You To Never Ask

He told me, with a straight face and a proud smile, that he walked his laundromat every night and removed the "out of order" signs his own customers had left on broken machines.

So the next person would put money in anyway.

That conversation changed what I was willing to build.

THE FEATURE

Last week I introduced Simon Sinek's central question: Why do you do what you do?

This week I want to show you what happens when an operator never asks it.

Sinek argues that most organizations work from the outside in. They start with what they do, maybe get to how they do it, and almost never reach why. The result is a business that functions, machines run, money comes in, lights stay on... but has no center. No belief driving it forward.

In our industry, we have a name for that result.

We call it a Zombie Mat.

You know the one. You have probably driven past it. Maybe you have walked into one. The flickering fluorescent lights that nobody replaced. The dryer that has been "out of order" for months. The vending machine with dust on the candy bars. The owner who shows up once a day, counts the coins and leaves.

It is easy to look at a store like that and blame neglect. But neglect is a symptom. The disease underneath it is the absence of purpose.

When you do not know why you are in this business, your store will eventually tell you. And it will not be kind about it.

I know a store in a town where I now operate. Every single washing machine has thick black mold in the door seals. Not new mold. Years of mold. When I first walked in over three years ago, it turned my stomach. I tracked down the owner and brought it to his attention. The mold, the broken dryers, the vending machine stocked with food expired by two years.

He gave me a pompous chuckle.

He told me he knew exactly what his store was. Then he told me about the signs... how customers would tape notes on broken machines to warn other customers, and how he would remove them every night so the next person would put money in and lose it anyway.

He bragged about making hundreds of dollars a month off machines that did not work.

I drove past that store throughout the week and watched what was actually happening. A dozen people inside. No cars in the lot. Walkers. People with no transportation, no alternative, no choice but to use the only laundromat within reach, which happened to be owned by a man who saw them as a problem to be monetized, not a community to be served.

That disgust is what pushed me to build in that town. A community that was being failed deserved something better.

And within the next year, I intend to buy that store too.

FROM THE FLOOR

The "why" does not just show up in how you treat your customers. It shows up in how you treat your people.

We hired a young woman last year. Early twenties, college graduate, smart and capable. We did not know her story when she came on board. A few months in, she opened up to Hannah during a shift they were working together.

She had lost her father to Covid. Then her mother passed away unexpectedly a couple of years later. She was now living alone in her deceased parents' home, in a town with no family, at an age when most young people are still leaning on their parents to help them figure out who they are and what they are capable of.

Instead of building on a foundation, she had spent those years burying the people who were supposed to help her lay one.

Hannah and I made a decision. We were going to pour into her the way her parents would have.

We put her in leadership situations with her coworkers that made her uncomfortable on purpose. We pushed her to make decisions, to grow a backbone, to stop coasting. A year ago she was a thermometer, reading the room and adjusting to whatever temperature she walked into. We are turning her into a thermostat. Someone who sets the temperature instead.

She is a college graduate working as a laundromat attendant. That is not a permanent destination. That is a launchpad.

"Boss Josh would love someone of her caliber at Wash Bar forever. But friend and father Josh wants more for her than she currently wants for herself. And I am willing to do whatever it takes to help her reach beyond what she thinks is possible."

The owner removing signs from broken machines and the young woman finding her footing inside one of our stores, those two things are happening in this industry at the same time, every single day.

The difference between them is a why.

STEAL THIS

Think about your own team for a moment.

Are you a thermometer or a thermostat as an owner? Are you reading the environment your employees create, or are you setting it?

Your "why" does not stop at your customers. It either extends to the people who work for you, or it does not exist at all. The operators who understand that build teams that stay, grow, and carry the culture forward even when the owner is not in the building.

Ask yourself this week: What is the best thing that could happen to my best employee, and am I willing to help make it happen, even if it means losing them?

Your answer will tell you something important about where your why actually lives.

THE GAP

Inside Laundry Advisors, we talk about this directly. How you hire, how you invest in your people, how you build a culture that runs without you, these are not soft topics. They are the difference between a business that compounds and one that slowly hollows out.

The operators in this room are not running zombie mats. They are building something that means something.

Take advantage of our dozens of free laundromat resources at LaundryAdvisors.com, and share them with others who need to find their Why.