$10M in Revenue after 10 Years of Serving Laundromats

Starting a laundromat business does not have to begin with a pile of investor cash. In this episode, Ian Gollahon and Brian Henderson tell the origin story of Wash-Dry-Fold POS and Liberty Laundry: a company founded on a single $100 deposit, profitable from day one, that never took a dollar of outside capital. A decade later, the two partners’ businesses have done over $10 million in revenue and $5 million in profit, sold more than 1,200 POS systems nationwide, and grown Liberty Laundry past $2.5 million a year.

Starting a Laundromat Business with $100 and No Outside Capital

Most people convince themselves that starting a laundromat business requires raising money first. Brian Henderson’s story is the counterargument. The only money he ever put into Wash-Dry-Fold POS was the $100 needed to open a business checking account, and he paid himself back from the company’s own revenue. From there, the business grew entirely on its own merits, profitable from day one, fueled by the revenue it generated rather than by any outside investment.

The partnership itself started on a tennis court. Ian and Brian met at an entrepreneurship conference, hit it off talking about sales and marketing, and started playing tennis together. The shared goal back then was modest: if each of them could make an extra $20,000 a year on top of their day jobs, that would change their lives. When Brian needed help selling his point-of-sale systems and running a trade show, Ian stepped in, and they have been building companies together ever since.

Ian is blunt about why the lean start mattered: it is not a coincidence that they began with no money and succeeded, while plenty of well-funded competitors have struggled. In his view, a big pile of capital can be a weakness. Refusing outside money kept both of them focused on one thing, serving laundromat owners, which is the entire niche.

You Don’t Have a Business Until You Collect Your First Dollar

Brian’s founding philosophy is one of the most useful ideas in this conversation for anyone starting a business: until you have collected your first dollar, you do not have a business. Until someone actually pays you for what you sell, it is a hobby. He even dates the company to that first check in February rather than the months of work that came before, because that is when it earned its first couple thousand dollars.

That framing cuts against the most common excuse Ian hears. People constantly tell him they need to assemble capital before they can begin. Brian’s experience flips the order: prove someone will pay you, then let the revenue fund the growth. It is the difference between building something the market has already validated and gambling borrowed money on a hunch.

Why Brian Started a Laundromat POS Business

The software did not start as a product idea. It started as Brian’s own pain running his family’s stores. He worked as a laundry attendant at Liberty Laundry through college, then came on as a manager when his dad opened a second location in 2010. Managing more than one store exposed the core problem: what got the business from one store to two would not get it from two to three. He fell in love with the laundry industry through the creative work of building the systems to manage that growth.

Two moments stuck with him. The first was a longtime regular, a cowboy-type fellow in a red pickup, who Brian asked for his name and special instructions. The man’s reply, “I’m here every week, don’t you know me?” was a dagger, because the drop-off service was serving hundreds of customers and no attendant could hold every preference in their head. Brian had considered a Rolodex of index cards but knew it would fail the moment someone dropped the box or had bad handwriting. He needed customer notes that could be pulled up instantly, which is the exact problem modern order tracking solves by attaching instructions to every order from drop-off to pickup.

The second was Sue, a sweet team member in her 60s who once charged a customer $350 on the card terminal for a $35 order because she missed a zero, and the customer did not catch it until the next day. The gap between the register and the terminal, and the lack of any check on it, was a recipe for errors. Running consistent pricing and clean numbers across multiple locations is where purpose-built reporting earns its place. Brian was also frustrated that the dry-cleaning software some laundromats used could not even produce a report on how many pounds of laundry they had sold, the one number that matters most.

A laundromat point-of-sale system is software built specifically to run a laundromat’s counter operations, drop-off and wash-dry-fold orders, pricing, payments, and reporting, rather than generic retail or dry-cleaning software adapted to fit. That gap, no one-stop solution built for laundromats, is the void Brian set out to fill.

The 2015 Clean Show: A Hungry, Underserved Market

Brian kept finding himself on laundromat owner forums and at events explaining, over and over, how he had pieced together a solution from separate tools. He could watch owners’ eyes glaze over as they realized there was no single product they could buy. At the time, the options were dry-cleaning software that threw laundromats a bone or generic retail and restaurant systems, none of which solved the whole problem.

The proof of demand came at the 2015 Clean Show in Atlanta, the event Brian calls the Super Bowl of the laundry and textile-care industry. He was a guest speaker presenting on the high-tech laundromat, walking through the free tools they used at the time: Google Calendar, Google Forms, the free version of Dropbox, and QuickBooks Online for bookkeeping from any location. The organizers set out a couple hundred chairs; roughly 450 people packed in, standing room only. Ian points out how distant that sounds today, but a decade ago Google Drive was not even out yet and Dropbox was a novelty in laundromat circles. Liberty Laundry was likely among the first laundromats in Oklahoma on QuickBooks Online. That hungry, overflowing room proved there was a real market for technology aimed squarely at laundromats. Soon after, Planet Laundry magazine, the Coin Laundry Association trade publication now being renamed Full Cycle, asked Brian to write a buyer’s guide for laundromat point-of-sale systems.

Customer Number One

The first sale walked right up and asked for it. Marty Mullican, a methodical former air-traffic controller who opened the Owasso Express Laundry Center about 30 to 40 minutes from Liberty Laundry, told Brian he had found everything he needed at the 2015 Clean Show, washers, dryers, ozone systems, every provider, except one. There was no point-of-sale system. Standing in Brian’s newest store, looking at the POS at the service counter, Marty said that if Brian would sell him a system just like that one, he would be customer number one. Brian collected the check, and then had to put in his own money to open the bank account so he could deposit it.

What Brian sold was more than software. He had a proprietary training manual on how to run a profitable drop-off laundry service using the system, plus his own advice on managing attendants. Ian draws a line back to a remote-control car Brian had built in college that fired a Nerf gun from the controller, an early sign of someone who combined hardware and software into things people instinctively wanted. The pattern held: Brian built something genuinely useful, and customers came asking to buy it.

Leaving a Family Business to Build Real Upside

Brian was already managing successful stores. According to the CLA’s annual industry survey, his family’s laundromats ranked in the top 5% in the country. But as operations manager he had hit the ceiling his dad was willing to pay, and he was young, newly married, and wanted to build a house and start a family. Every revenue idea he tested and made the case for was often met with a no. It was never a fight, but it was a recurring source of friction, creating value without getting to share in the upside.

That is what pushed Brian toward a business where the upside is limited only by how hard you work and how much value you create. Years later, the companies took retained earnings from Wash-Dry-Fold POS and used them to buy all three Liberty Laundry stores from Brian’s dad, John, in 2023. John was ready to retire and enjoy his lake house; handing the asset to someone in his thirties who would own it for decades meant a more energetic owner. Despite the business being roughly 20 years old, it has grown about 25% in the years since the acquisition, which Ian credits to the systems the two of them put in place. Brian’s evolution of the original drop-off model now extends into pickup and delivery for the stores.

Advice for Anyone Starting a Laundromat Business

The throughline of this episode is a practical playbook for starting a laundromat business or any business without outside money. Set a goal small enough to actually hit; Brian’s “just $20,000 more a year” was attainable, and they cleared it in the first year, then many multiples beyond. Build something people want so badly they ask to buy it, rather than making a product and hoping to market it into existence.

Brian also reframes why he did it at all. Profit comes when you create value. Writing articles, speaking at events, and giving away advice was not actually solving owners’ problems; building a business that solved them was. Over 1,200 systems later, what drives him is the impact, millions of customers and attendants have touched the system, and the freedom it created lets both partners think in terms of how many families they employ rather than how much extra they personally earn. The companies now run with operations managers, store managers, a facilities team, attendants, a real tech-support team, and a sales team, so the businesses run without the founders having to be there.

If you take one thing from this origin story, take Brian’s first principle: stop waiting on capital and go collect your first dollar. That single sale tells you whether you have a business or a hobby, and from there the revenue can build the rest. The conversation continues in Part 2, where Ian and Brian get into the scariest moments of the past decade and how fiscal discipline kept both businesses standing.

Ian Gollahon

CEO & Co-Founder, Wash-Dry-Fold POS®

Ian Gollahon is co-founder of Wash-Dry-Fold POS, a laundromat point-of-sale system built by laundromat owners, and co-owner of Liberty Laundry in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His commentary here draws on more than a decade of operator and customer conversations about laundry POS systems, pickup and delivery, attendant training, payment workflows, and theft-prevention tools. Brian Henderson, the guest in this episode, is co-founder and CTO of Wash-Dry-Fold POS and Ian’s business partner in both Wash-Dry-Fold POS and Liberty Laundry in Tulsa, Oklahoma.