The Most Overlooked $1M Business Every Town Needs - Ep. #334

Tyler Purcell (0:00)

We did $1,025,000 last year.

Chris Koerner (0:02)

Wow, I would never drive by a laundromat and think, that place makes a million bucks a year.

Tyler Purcell (0:05)

I know, it blew my mind. He comes to us and he's like, hey, I think this laundromat thing is a good business. I didn't really know anything about laundromats. I used one in college, crappy. I'm like, this can't be a good business.

And I was like, well, can you show me the books? Does this thing make money? And he slid it over, I took a look, and I was like, whoa, I'm in, I'm sold. One location was doing 250K. Yeah, yeah. Our sales during COVID through the roof. Even all these horrible times, still like laundromats, got to wash your clothes, people got to wear clothes.

Chris Koerner (0:33)

So recession resistant, certainly AI resistant, certainly automation resistant. How can people finance these if they don't have much cash? So a couple of years ago, I met a guy on the internet that claimed to own laundromats that profited over 400,000 a year, and I didn't believe him. So he said, come see for yourself. Here I am, Cincinnati, Ohio, flew here from Dallas, just to see how do you open a million dollar laundromat, and how do you find the perfect location. Today, we're going to learn all that and more. And would you believe one machine makes over $30,000 a year. So let's go meet Tyler.

Tyler Purcell (1:07)

Laundry Spot, this is Hamilton. This is our newest store. We had two tenants in here. There was a Liberty Tax and a check cashing place. So we had to wait till they got out. That's why we didn't open up till 2022

Chris Koerner (1:19)

But you bought this with the intent to turn it into this.

Tyler Purcell (1:22)

Yeah, a thousand percent.

Chris Koerner (1:23)

We just had to let the leases expire.

Tyler Purcell (1:24)

Exactly. We couldn't just boot them out.

We gutted the whole thing on the outside. The ethos, everything is brand new. It was down to the studs in here. We salt cut the floor for the drains and the plumbing and the bulkheads. If you're looking out at the store, it's kind of a mirror image of each other. The reason we did that is obviously the commercial, which we'll talk about later. We can block half of the store off.

Chris Koerner (1:48)

That's cool.

Tyler Purcell (1:48)

Yeah.

Slowest days of the week for laundry mats, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, middle of the week. That's when we block this off and process a lot of the commercial, a lot of the pickup and delivery. This just gives us nice quick access for the attendants to make sure, hey, customers aren't coming over here while we're processing laundry. That's why we have it as a mirror image. We're able to do that. Everything that the customer needs is over on this side. We got obviously what we call the money wall back there, where they get their cards, customer service is still accessible. There was a lot of thought that went into this one on the commercial side because I see that as a huge growing piece of laundromat revenue going forward.

Chris Koerner (2:24)

The commercial?

Tyler Purcell (2:24)

Yeah, the commercial. Most people don't have the space, to be honest. I mean, most laundromats are two, maybe 3,000 square feet. This is 8,000. My father-in-law, David, who is the OG Laundry, started the first laundromat in 2006 He likes to say there are a handful of sexy things in this laundromat. Our new equipment is one of them. So we are the only laundromat in the United States that's not a manufacturer that has their own washer.

The only one. So it's super cool. Most laundromats, the biggest they have is this 80-pounders, what we call, we go by pounds. Also, you can go by baskets. This could fit eight small baskets of laundry. This 130 is something that barely any laundromat in the US will have. This is a monster machine. If you want to take a peek in here, look how much you can fit.

The nice thing about these machines is you can fill it all the way to the top. Most people think, you can only put this much in here, it's not going to get my clothes clean. No, as long as there's a hand that you can put at the top, you can stuff it full.

Chris Koerner (3:19)

How much bigger do they get than these?

Tyler Purcell (3:21)

So for laundromats, they don't really get bigger than this. You start to get in bigger equipment when you get into commercial, like Las Vegas commercial hotel processing plants. They'll have 500 pound machines, they'll have tunnel washers, which are million dollar washers that are 40 feet long that just go nonstop. So laundry comes in, one end goes out the other clean. It's pretty amazing. So maybe someday we'll have a tunnel washer one of the laundry spots. But the cool thing is, this equipment, we can do auto dosing or direct soap injection on. We can do custom cycles on here.