Brian Henderson on 10 Years of Laundromat Business Lessons

The most durable laundromat business lessons rarely come from the wins. In this episode, Ian Gollahon and Brian Henderson look back on a decade of building Liberty Laundry and Wash-Dry-Fold POS together, and the through-line is clear: dryer fires, break-ins, a lost software vendor, a global lockdown, and a competitor with $70 million in venture capital all became turning points because both businesses were built on low debt, retained earnings, and a refusal to get out over their skis.

A Decade of Laundromat Business Lessons

Some of the best laundromat business lessons start with a moment of self-actualization, not a spreadsheet. For Brian Henderson, it was a flight to the 2017 Clean Show in Las Vegas, traveling as an exhibitor on his own dime to sell his own product. He had attended industry events for years on his parents’ tab, speaking as if he were an owner because he felt ownership of the family laundromats. Going on his own power was the first real step into building something himself.

Ian’s path ran parallel. He left a corporate sales job because, in his words, working for an S&P; 500 company was a safer bet but came with a ceiling. Building a laundromat business and a software company together did not. The pattern both men keep returning to is one they have heard repeated by hundreds of operators: a corporate job that drained them, a realization that an employee never gets where they want to go, and an industry with low inventory, minimal staffing for self-serve, and a community that was underserved.

Fast forward to 2023, and Ian and Brian bought all three Liberty Laundry stores from Brian’s parents in one swoop. The resources to do that came from how well Wash-Dry-Fold POS had grown. That cycle, building the software, using its success to buy the stores, then bringing both under one roof, frames every lesson that follows. If you missed how it all began, Part 1 covers starting the company with $100 and landing customer number one.

The Scariest Calls: Dryer Fires and Break-Ins

Ask any operator about the worst part of laundromat ownership and the answer is usually the phone call. For Brian, it was store manager Kathy calling with a shaky voice: “Brian, there’s a fire, I can’t get it to go out.” That dryer fire came in the first year of owning the stores. In Liberty Laundry’s case, there were three dryer fires within 12 months of the 2023 purchase.

What kept those incidents from becoming catastrophes is the part worth copying. Each time, the damage was limited to a single machine. Twice, the dryer was back in service the next day after cleanup, and most of that cleanup was fire-extinguisher exhaust rather than fire damage. Since then, Liberty Laundry has been aggressive about replacing dryers and running preventative maintenance, and they have not had a fire since. Tracking that maintenance matters, which is exactly what their washer and dryer repair tracking tools are built for, logging each repair from start to finish so nothing slips.

Break-ins were the other recurring fear. Liberty Laundry has had several over the years, always after hours, never with anyone hurt. The scariest version was arriving an hour before opening to find a broken window, with the alarm system having failed to trigger, and not knowing whether someone was still inside. The vandal who shattered windows and banged up kiosks and change machines, without getting any money, did several thousand dollars of damage. He was eventually prosecuted because he targeted multiple locations, leaving enough of a trail.

Brian’s mindset on the truly uncontrollable, a fire that levels the building, a tornado in Oklahoma, is one of the steadier laundromat business lessons in the episode: control what you can, then carry a genuinely good insurance policy for the rest. Worst case, you rebuild and keep doing what you know how to do.

Losing the Software Vendor and Building POS In-House

The scariest moment for the software side of the laundromat business did not look scary at first. For years, Wash-Dry-Fold POS was a reseller of an existing point-of-sale platform, focused entirely on laundromats, with proprietary settings, bag-labeling tools, and text-messaging features layered on top. Then it came to light that the underlying vendor had not been collecting subscription payments properly, for a long time, from anyone.

Brian and Ian had already been building their own cloud-based software in-house for years, shaped by feedback from hundreds of laundromat owners. It was close to ready. The vendor situation made the decision for them: switch to their own product now. That meant a stretch with nothing to sell. Ian remembers telling buyers, “I can sell it to you next month,” because he had stopped selling someone else’s product and the new one was not quite shipping yet.

In retrospect, that gap is when the company took off. The in-house product was so much better that it became easier to sell, and it unlocked features that did not exist in the reseller days, most notably order tracking, which is now the core of Wash-Dry-Fold POS, following each order through the whole process. The same platform later enabled pickup and delivery and the integrations the company is known for today.

Surviving COVID and Supply-Chain Risk

The COVID lockdowns hit in March 2020, and several deals that were about to close fell flat as buyers decided to wait. That slowdown became another reason to keep driving on the in-house software, because owning the technology kept costs manageable. The team spent the summer of 2020 building, then launched their own platform at the tail end of the year, right as the prior vendor relationship collapsed.

Ian frames it as a supply-chain lesson that took years to fully register. COVID exposed vulnerabilities in supply lines across nearly every industry, the single points where, if one link failed, the whole machine stopped. For Wash-Dry-Fold POS, it forced redundancy on everything and brought core functions in-house. The pressure built resilience they might not have created if business had simply kept rolling along.

Competing Against $70 Million in Venture Capital

One of the more unsettling chapters in these laundromat business lessons arrived from out of left field: a new competitor raised round after round, eventually landing roughly $70 million to go after the exact market Wash-Dry-Fold POS had bootstrapped for five or six years. Brian’s first reaction was validation. After starting out unsure whether anyone would even buy this kind of product, watching that much capital pour in confirmed there was a real market.

The outcome is the instructive part. Even with all that capital deployed against them, 2025 was Wash-Dry-Fold POS’s best year. Ian credits part of that to being pushed to self-improve faster because the competitor was so aggressive. Brian’s framing is blunt: an investor who puts in $70 million is not trying to get $70 million back, they want 10x or 100x, and that money ultimately gets extracted from customers. A company built profitably on solid foundations does not have that pressure.

The numbers behind the stability are specific to Wash-Dry-Fold POS. Churn is extremely low, effectively negative, because expansion revenue from successful owners adding stores and subscriptions outpaces cancellations. Brian treats that as an obligation rather than a trophy: owners build their operations around the software and depend on it, so taking big swings funded by outside capital would put their businesses at risk.

Solving for Peace: The Fiscal Lessons

Brian’s phrase for the financial discipline behind both businesses is “solving for peace”: design your operations so that if the worst comes, you are fine because your bases are covered. For Wash-Dry-Fold POS, that meant being profitable from day one, collecting payment upfront, then fulfilling the order and getting hardware to the customer.

For the laundromats, it means watching the ratio of debt to income. Equipment is capital-intensive, and commercial debt is common, but Brian’s questions are simple: How big is your note? What is the debt service? If you are in over your head with atrocious rent and you ignored the fundamentals, the first stiff breeze knocks you out. Keeping debt low, holding a healthy dose of retained earnings, and reinvesting capital gradually rather than all at once is what lets a business operate indefinitely when cash flow slows. Watching that cash flow closely is where purpose-built reporting earns its keep.

Brian also points to layers of stability. Liberty Laundry runs three locations, so a problem at one still leaves revenue from two. Laundromats are recession resistant, not recession proof, and relatively steady year-round, with mild seasonal peaks. Wash-Dry-Fold POS serves laundromats in all 50 states, adding another layer. He sums up the company’s identity plainly: “We’re not building a rocket ship. We’re building a utility truck that can get you from here to there and is reliable for the long haul.”

Advice for New Owners: Laundromat Business Lessons From 10 Years

For anyone looking to start a laundromat or any business, Brian’s biggest piece of advice is to take the first step. Do your research, learn from others, and buy the book that captures someone’s 10,000 hours, money well spent. But don’t let a lack of knowing every piece stop you from getting started. Pick any starting point and get going, because that will inform your next steps.

Both partners agree there is a counterintuitive twist in these laundromat business lessons: too much foreknowledge can be a hindrance. Not knowing in advance that their vendor would mishandle collections, or that a new CEO would take that company in a direction they disagreed with, let them grind, learn, and build the better product. Selling the original software taught them what to improve.

On failure, Brian’s definition is liberating: so long as you are profitable and still playing the game, you have not failed. You may have found ways that don’t work and things to avoid, but if you didn’t get too upside down, you get to keep playing. Or as Ian puts it, your batting average only improves by staying in the game, building on the wins and treating the mistakes as lessons.

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.