Operations · High-volume wash-dry-fold
Stephen Gramaglia on Scaling Mega Laundromats in Manhattan
Four large, fully attended stores moving roughly 12,000 to 13,000 pounds of wash-dry-fold a week, run by a man who spent 21 years financing laundromats before he owned one.
- ●Stephen Gramaglia runs high-volume wash-dry-fold across four fully attended CleanFresh Laundromat stores in the NYC area, moving up to about 6,000 pounds a week in his busiest location.
- ●His 21 years at Eastern Funding taught him that undercapitalization, not location or equipment, is the number one reason new laundromat owners fail.
- ●At scale, systems are non-negotiable: one attendant owns each order from sort to bag, every step is timestamped, and orders are weighed in and out to catch mistakes.
- ●Commercial POS hardware beats a cheap big-box laptop; underpowered hardware bottlenecks transactions and burns owner time as volume grows.
- ●Tracking machine starts as a ratio of the wash-dry-fold volume actually processed is how he keeps employee theft in check.
Stephen Gramaglia built CleanFresh Laundromat into four large, fully attended stores in the New York City area, running high-volume wash-dry-fold that moves up to roughly 6,000 pounds a week in his busiest location, all run on Wash-Dry-Fold POS. This article breaks down his playbook: why undercapitalization sinks new owners, how he holds attendants accountable, the dashboard numbers he tracks, and how he uses machine start data to catch employee theft.
This article is based on an episode
Scaling Mega Laundromats in Manhattan, Eastern Funding Lending and Employee Theft Prevention
Laundromat Ownership · Episode 18 · with Stephen Gramaglia, CleanFresh Laundromat
From Eastern Funding to high-volume wash-dry-fold in Manhattan
Most operators learn the laundry business one store at a time. Stephen Gramaglia learned it from the lender’s side of the table first. He spent 21 years at Eastern Funding, joining as the fifth employee and staying until 2020, financing laundromats across the USA and watching thousands of them succeed and fail. When he finally opened his own store, he already knew the equipment, the leases, the insurance and the financials cold.
What he built is unusual. CleanFresh Laundromat is four large, fully attended stores in the New York City area, three in upper Manhattan and one in Yonkers, ranging from 3,500 to 6,000 square feet. Stephen opened the first in May 2020, in the middle of the COVID shutdown, and deliberately went against the industry’s reputation for small, dark, unattended spaces. He built big, spotless, fully staffed locations and positioned them as a premium full-service experience, what he and his customers call “bougie” laundromats.
The scale is real. Three of the four stores run high-volume wash-dry-fold, and the busiest does close to 6,000 pounds a week, entirely residential drop-off with no commercial accounts. His second-busiest does around 5,000 pounds, and across the three high-volume wash-dry-fold stores he moves roughly 12,000 to 13,000 pounds a week. Stephen charges a premium per-pound rate, above his market, and backs it with a consistently high-quality product. He is also a longtime Wash-Dry-Fold POS customer who has helped shape the product over the years.
Why undercapitalization sinks new laundromat owners
From the lending seat, Stephen’s first question on any deal was simple: what chance of success does this operator have, and will we get paid back? The collateral and the location came second. And the single most common thread among borrowers who got into trouble was that they were undercapitalized.
Laundromats are a capital-intensive business, and the costs that break people are the ones they never budgeted for. Stephen’s example: your boiler dies, you have no hot water, and the repair person tells you it needs replacing. That is a $10,000 to $15,000 expense you have no choice but to cover. The same goes for HVAC in the summer, heat in the winter, roof issues and plumbing. Ian shared Liberty Laundry’s version of the same story: in their first three years of ownership they replaced boilers, including two at once in their Delaware store for around $20,000, fixed leaks that shut a store down for two weeks, and dealt with multiple fires. As Ian put it, that is just owning a laundromat, and you had better have the cash to deal with it.
Both of them pushed back hard on the social-media framing of laundromats as passive income or an easy side hustle. Stephen sees people in Facebook groups asking how to buy or build a store with no money and “creative financing,” and he just shakes his head. Ian’s rule of thumb is a go/no-go threshold: for Oklahoma, a six-figure number around $200,000, scaled to the size and market of the store. If you do not have a significant down payment plus a cushion for everything that will break, the business is not for you.
🔑 Insider Key
Price out the disasters before you buy, not just the purchase. Stephen’s lending experience says the operators who survive a downturn are the ones whose personal capital could carry rent and debt through a shutdown with zero revenue. Build the store from revenue-zero assumptions and keep a cushion for the boiler, the roof and the leak you cannot predict.
The systems behind high-volume wash-dry-fold at scale
Running high-volume wash-dry-fold at Stephen’s level is impossible on paper. His first requirement, even for a single location, is a system that tracks what is happening: your employees, your bags, your orders, what is in process, what is done, and what still needs to go out. A lot of operators try to save money by writing tickets on paper and taking only cash. That is fine at a hundred pounds a day. At 20 or 30 orders a day it is impossible, and it leads to lost bags, alienated customers and theft.
With a system in place, Stephen can pull up his phone, laptop or desktop and see the operation live: the orders that need to get done, how many pounds and pieces, what each employee is working on, and how many orders sit in wash, in the dryer, in folding, and done. The wash-dry-fold order tracking in Wash-Dry-Fold POS is what makes that visibility possible across multiple stores at once.
Stephen also runs a specific accountability model. Rather than assembly-line stations, each attendant takes an order from start to finish: sort, wash, dry, fold, and bag. That one attendant owns the order. He is careful to say there is no right or wrong here, it is simply the procedure he chose, because it means that when something goes wrong later, nobody is pointing fingers. There is one person accountable for that order, and because Wash-Dry-Fold POS timestamps every step, he can see exactly who sorted, washed and folded it and when, then pull the matching camera footage and check which specific washers and dryers were used.
🔑 Insider Key
One-attendant-per-order is Stephen’s choice, not a universal rule. The reason it works for him is accountability: single ownership plus timestamps removes the “I only washed it, I didn’t fold it” finger-pointing that makes problems impossible to trace in a busy store.
Weighing every order in and out
The first line of defense in Stephen’s stores is the scale. Every order gets weighed on the way in, which is how it is priced, and weighed again when it is finished. If the finished weight is off by more than a pound or two, the attendant already knows something is wrong. Nine times out of ten, in Stephen’s experience, they left an item in one of the washers or dryers, and the timestamps tell them exactly which machines to check. Without a system, none of that is possible.
The same tracking closes off the small games that creep into a busy high-volume wash-dry-fold operation. Stephen has seen attendants cherry-pick certain bags because those customers tip well, or skip customers they find annoying, like the ones with piles of baby clothes. His answer is a hard rule: orders get done in the order they come in, no skipping, and the system enforces the queue. He also pools all tips and distributes them by hours worked, after per-order tipping turned into a nightmare, and the system tracks the tips for him except for cash. On top of that, he sets pound-per-shift quotas so he can measure each attendant’s output.
- 01Weigh and price the order at intake, on a scale the system reads directly.
- 02Assign one attendant to own the order from sort through bag.
- 03Weigh the finished order again and investigate any gap over a pound or two.
- 04Enforce first-in, first-out in the system so no bag gets cherry-picked.
Why commercial POS hardware beats a cheap laptop
Stephen was one of the early operators who pushed Wash-Dry-Fold POS toward better hardware, and it is a decision he feels strongly about. His philosophy is that you get what you pay for, and cheating on hardware costs you far more over time. Ian’s sales team has a version of this conversation almost daily: an owner wants to grab a cheap big-box-store laptop, throw the software on it, and call it done.
At low volume that seems fine. At scale it falls apart. As Stephen’s stores grew and transaction counts climbed, older, underpowered hardware became a bottleneck. Every sale is a chain of work, the processor talking to the card reader, then printing a ticket, and cheap hardware chokes on that chain when the orders stack up. Spread over three or four years of ownership, the few hundred dollars saved works out to pennies a day, while the time lost fighting the machine, and the fact that a third-party laptop is not something the POS company can support, costs real money.
That feedback is a big reason Wash-Dry-Fold POS now only sells its 16 GB commercial units. Ian’s math: with roughly 1,300 systems in the field, selling cheaper hardware to even a fraction of them would mean a flood of tech support and, worse, hundreds of owners losing time to hardware problems instead of growing their stores. They chose to stop selling the slower, cheaper equipment even though it costs a few sales, because they can stand behind hardware they know will scale.
🔑 Insider Key
If you plan to scale, buy the commercial hardware once. The cheap laptop looks like a saving until a transaction bottleneck slows every attendant during your busiest hours, and nobody can support a machine you bought at a big-box store.
The dashboard that runs a high-volume wash-dry-fold operation
When Wash-Dry-Fold POS moved to the cloud and integrated the Laundroworks card reader in the 2020 update, Stephen started asking for the reporting a real operator needs to run a high-volume wash-dry-fold business. He wanted the dashboard to tell him, at a glance, how many pounds of laundry were pending, how many orders, how many comforters, how much was sitting in the wash, and how many pounds each attendant had done that day.
Those numbers are not vanity metrics; they drive staffing and supplies. If Stephen sees 500 or 600 pounds due today, he knows exactly how to staff the shift. Ian remembers the design conversation with Brian: instead of just showing the number of orders, they show pounds, because a single order might be 500 pounds. If one person is on shift and a thousand pounds is waiting, that is an actionable signal that someone needs help before the store falls behind. The laundromat reporting in Wash-Dry-Fold POS grew directly out of operator requests like Stephen’s, and the integrated scale removed the human error of an attendant misreading a weight.
See intake, order tracking and reporting running
The demo videos walk the counter workflow end to end, on the real system, with every feature included.
Employee theft and the machine start ratio
Employee theft is the issue laundromat owners least want to talk about, but Ian says it is often the real reason an owner finally shops for a new POS: they found out a manager was stealing. In the cases he has heard about, the amounts have run from around $10,000 up to $50,000, and the method is usually the same. The employee has money loaded on a management card to start wash-dry-fold orders, and they quietly use that same card to start self-service machines, sometimes to run a little side business, that have nothing to do with a paying order.
The way to catch it is a ratio. The machine start ratio is the share of an employee’s self-service machine starts measured against the wash-dry-fold volume they actually process. When the starts climb but the processed orders do not, that gap is the signal to investigate. Ian’s frustration is that many owners never track it, so they never see the number creep up month after month while orders stay flat. This is anecdotal, drawn from his customer conversations, but the pattern is consistent enough that Wash-Dry-Fold POS builds employee theft prevention tooling around exactly this kind of machine-start-to-order-value reporting.
Stephen runs his own version of this discipline. He still uses Laundroworks laundry cards rather than switching to the WashLynx app, partly because he has many long-term employees. Each month he pulls management card usage, the gross dollars his attendants spend at the machines, and measures it as a percentage of that store’s high-volume wash-dry-fold revenue. The number is remarkably consistent; when it once jumped four or five percent, he knew to dig in. Because the cards are registered to each attendant, he can drill down when one looks out of control, and he staffs two attendants per shift, which he feels keeps everyone a little more honest than a solo attendant would be. His card system runs on the Laundroworks integration, and Wash-Dry-Fold POS supports the same machine-start tracking through other card systems like the SpyderWash integration from CCI.
Ian’s take on the WashLynx app is that it strengthens the same idea by tying machine starts to an attendant’s own phone instead of a card that can be handed off or stolen, but that operators who diligently track their card usage are already getting most of the benefit.
There is no perfect way to eliminate employee theft. The biggest lever is simply paying attention to the business.
🔑 Insider Key
Watch the ratio, not just the raw number. Machine starts naturally rise as volume grows, so the meaningful signal is machine starts against wash-dry-fold pounds processed. If starts climb while processed orders stay flat, that is your cue to review card usage and camera footage.
Building a multi-generational family business
Stephen’s operation is a genuine family business. His two sons, 22 and 24 and recent college graduates, work full time; they handle collections, run the vending machines the family owns in every store, and do spot repairs alongside a full-time on-staff handyman. Stephen still visits all the stores every Sunday, but having his sons in the business has freed him to work on the business instead of in it. His wife, a former accountant, has kept the books since they opened.
He also sees it as part of a broader trend. At the Laundry Excellence show in Hilton Head he watched his son meet a wave of second- and third-generation operators and vendors in their twenties, from the families behind CCI and SpyderWash to Brian at Wash-Dry-Fold POS, who took the company on from his father. The younger generation is more comfortable with technology and brings different viewpoints, and Stephen welcomes it: when his sons tell him there is a better, more efficient way to do something, he is all for it.
What to do this week
- 01Price out your worst month. Add up rent, debt and payroll with zero revenue coming in, and check whether your cash on hand covers it.
- 02Weigh ten finished orders again. Any that come back more than a pound or two off point at a machine somebody did not empty.
- 03Pull last month’s management card usage. Divide it by that store’s wash-dry-fold revenue and write the percentage down so you have a baseline to compare against.
- 04Check who owns each order. If more than one attendant touched an order and nobody is accountable for it, decide this week which model you are running.
- 05Look at your counter hardware. If attendants are waiting on the machine during your busiest hour, that is a cost, not a saving.
Questions owners ask
How much money do you need to open a laundromat?
Enough to cover a significant down payment plus a cushion for the unexpected costs that break undercapitalized owners. From 21 years at Eastern Funding, Stephen Gramaglia found undercapitalization, not location or equipment, was the number one reason new owners failed, because laundromats are capital-intensive and things like boilers, HVAC, roofs, and plumbing fail without warning. Ian Gollahon’s rule of thumb for Oklahoma is a go/no-go threshold around $200,000, scaled to the size and market of the store. The number varies by market, but the principle is that you should be able to carry rent and debt through a downturn with your own working capital.
What makes high-volume wash-dry-fold possible at scale?
Systems. Stephen Gramaglia runs high-volume wash-dry-fold across multiple stores and says it is impossible on paper once you are past a hundred pounds a day. A point of sale system like Wash-Dry-Fold POS tracks orders, bags, employees, and stages, so you can see live how many pounds are pending and what sits in wash, dry, fold, and done. Without that, operators lose bags, alienate customers, and expose themselves to theft. Paper tickets and spreadsheets simply cannot keep up at 20 to 30 orders a day.
How does Stephen Gramaglia hold laundromat attendants accountable?
Each attendant takes an order from start to finish, sort, wash, dry, fold, and bag, so one person owns that order and there is no finger-pointing when something goes wrong. Stephen notes this is his chosen procedure rather than a universal rule. Every step is timestamped in Wash-Dry-Fold POS, so he can see who handled an order and when, pull matching camera footage, and check which machines were used. He also sets pound-per-shift quotas and pools tips by hours worked.
What is the machine start ratio and how does it catch employee theft?
The machine start ratio is the share of an employee’s self-service machine starts measured against the wash-dry-fold volume they actually process. When starts climb but processed orders stay flat, that gap is the signal to investigate. In cases Ian Gollahon has heard about, theft ran from about $10,000 to $50,000, usually an employee using a management card meant for wash-dry-fold to start self-service machines instead. Stephen Gramaglia tracks his attendants’ management card usage each month as a percentage of wash-dry-fold revenue and drills down when the number jumps. Wash-Dry-Fold POS supports this with machine-start-to-order-value reporting for every employee. This is anecdotal, based on operator conversations, but the pattern is consistent.
Do you need commercial POS hardware or will a cheap laptop work?
For a store that plans to scale, commercial hardware is worth it. Stephen Gramaglia’s view is that you get what you pay for; a cheap big-box laptop looks like a saving but becomes a bottleneck as transaction volume grows, because each sale chains the processor to the card reader and the ticket printer. Wash-Dry-Fold POS now sells only its 16 GB commercial units, in part because underpowered third-party hardware creates support problems the POS company cannot fix and costs owners time they should spend growing the business.
What dashboard numbers should a wash-dry-fold operator track?
Stephen Gramaglia asked for pounds pending, number of orders, comforters, pounds sitting in the wash, and pounds completed per attendant. Those numbers drive staffing and supplies. Ian Gollahon points out that showing pounds matters more than showing order count, because a single order might be 500 pounds; if one attendant is on shift and a thousand pounds is waiting, that is an actionable signal to add help. The integrated scale also removes the human error of an attendant misreading a weight.
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 from the operating experience of 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, high-volume wash-dry-fold operations, attendant accountability, payment and card-system integrations and theft-prevention tools.
Full episode transcript
Stephen Gramaglia 00:00
We have four rather large locations.
We have three locations in Manhattan.
In our busiest store, we do almost six thousand pounds a week, and that is
Ian Gollahon 00:11
Wow, okay.
Stephen Gramaglia 00:12
Fully residential.
No commercial business. It's drop-off only.
Ian Gollahon 00:17
Not really that many Laundromat owners doing that at such scale in the US, to be honest.
Stephen Gramaglia 00:21
We have quotas for our employees, how many pounds per shift they need to do.
We don't have employees pointing their fingers at each other. We just established our system in a way that there's accountability and having the system like Wash-Dry-Fold POS where there's timestamps for everything.
That allows us to go in and say, Okay, Mary Smith's order, there's a problem with it, she's missing this, this, this, and that. Let's go to the system.
They will immediately go into the system, they will check which washers they used, which dryers they used, they will check those machines, and nine times out of ten, they left something in one of those washers or dryers. But the only way you would know that is if you had a system.
Ian Gollahon 01:10
Hello and welcome to the Laundromat Ownership Podcast. I'm your host, Ian Gollahon and today I have Laundromat owner Steven Gremaglia. Did I get it right the second time?
Stephen Gramaglia 01:22
Yeah, second time, yep.
Ian Gollahon 01:23
Steven Gremaglia on with us today.
Stephen Gramaglia 01:25
There we go.
Ian Gollahon 01:26
Steven, thanks so much for joining us. And I'd love to just hear just a little bit about your laundromat and the scale of your laundromat before we or laundromats before we get going too much further.
Stephen Gramaglia 01:39
Sure. Yep. So we currently own four laundromats. We started our laundry ownership journey in 2020, right when COVID was raging. We have four rather large locations. Our smallest location is 3,500 square feet.
Our largest is six thousand. So we've got two very large stores and we've got a couple of big stores.
Ian Gollahon 02:06
Wow. That's incredible. Do you feel like the larger laundromats are hitting the revenue numbers that you expect them to with the larger footprints? Or do you feel like it's a little bit of diminished returns after a certain square footage? Or what are your thoughts on that? I'm just curious.
Stephen Gramaglia 02:22
We l we like a larger location. We're we're in very, very densely populated areas. So we have three locations in Manhattan. We have one location in Yonkers, New York, which is just north of New York City. There is competition, but lack of large, clean, fully attended, well run
we've positioned ourselves to be, you know, a higher end full service. We call it bougie. We call our laundromats
laundromats. In fact our customers call it that as well. So we've created a niche where we just want to provide the best service that we can provide. And we've we did a lot of research and
my background, which I think we'll talk about a little bit more, but I we were just used to seeing a lot of small, unattended, dark, you know, all the bad stuff that that our industry has been known for so many years. We
Ian Gollahon 03:15
Yeah.
Stephen Gramaglia 03:16
Pivoted and went the opposite way. And we wanted to build big, large, modern locations, all the amenities and
Ian Gollahon 03:23
Yeah.
Stephen Gramaglia 03:24
You know, we've been pretty successful in doing that. But to answer your question, no. We feel that larger location, more equipment, more turns, more revenue, more space, people like to spread out.
Ian Gollahon 03:35
We've experienced the same thing, even though I think our markets are just so different than yours. The larger laundromat just does better. It feels like there's more room to grow, and you feel like you can breathe in it and it's nice and it's open. And you know, you talk about the industry being known for these kind of hole-in-the-wall laundromats, these little kind of dark places. And I think that's especially true for.
The New York City area.
And so to have laundromats of that scale in that particular location really is a little bit against the grain. And you've been a customer of ours for a while and we've just seen you really succeed and continue to
expand and grow. It's been really exciting. But your history before actually buying the laundromats. You worked at Eastern Funding for a while, right?
Stephen Gramaglia 04:27
I did. I worked at Eastern Funding from nineteen ninety nine. I believe I was the fifth employee that was by
the company and I stayed there for twenty one years, which coincides with
entering the ownership side of the laundromat But I worked there for twenty one years and we grew the company. Like I said, I was the fifth employee and when I left in twenty I think we had seventy something employees.
Still very close with the people that that still work there. And in fact they're my funding source. I do get financing from Eastern Funding. So it's it's really come full circle. But it gave me the opportunity to in all those years, in twenty one years, you know, I saw a lot of laundromats in those years. A lot. All over the country. And I met
Ian Gollahon 05:14
Mm-hmm.
Stephen Gramaglia 05:15
And spoke with distributors, manufacturers, end users, all the ancillary vendors, every sort of product, we financed all of it. And,
Ian Gollahon 05:26
Yeah.
Stephen Gramaglia 05:27
You know, that gave me a lot of contacts, which in this business is invaluable. And it gave me, you know, just the ability to see and make a determination, what would I how would I build a laundromat? And I put a lot of time into that leading up to
my first location, what did I see in all those years and what would I do differently? And a lot of what I saw I copied and a lot of things I didn't it did not completely prepare me for the ownership of a laundromat.
That and well I say ownership operation of a laundromat because even though I knew the equipment, I knew financials, I knew leasing, I knew, you know, the leases, what leases should look like and I knew an insurance and all that stuff,
Ian Gollahon 06:12
Yeah.
Stephen Gramaglia 06:13
Until you actually have the keys and are responsible for the employees, the maintenance, the ordering, you're not really prepared and you know
That was there was a little bit of a learning curve. And then of course we opened in May of twenty, which if you recall, like the whole country was shut down. It was it was a rough time. We wanted to
Ian Gollahon 06:33
I gonna say that was a pretty rough time to open.
Stephen Gramaglia 06:36
Open prior to that, but we ran into all sorts of problems
in February, March when COVID shut everything down, we you know, we kinda just said we gotta wait. We were fortunate that we did open and we opened a brand new fifty five hundred square foot, beautiful facility, spotless, and we got the word out and we were very, very successful from pretty much when we opened. You know, we just fit a
a need of the community for a large, spacious, clean store, and it just really didn't exist.
Ian Gollahon 07:11
When you think about starting a business what do you have that your competitors don't? And I think 21 years of background in the laundromat industry is a pretty strong competitive advantage there, especially if you've you've seen what stores succeed and what stores don't. And
Clearly you've been able to leverage that into creating a real, I mean, just for those listening at home that might be thinking, I also can start five laundromats in the most expensive place in the world and be extremely successful in five years. That is really an exceptional business that you've built in a very small amount of time. I mean, that is really impressive,
before we move on back to the current day, when you were serving at Eastern funding, I'm sure we've got listeners that, you know, apply for a loan and they're told no. Is there something that
They got declined for the loan and you know exactly why, but you just can't say it to them as far as I'm not talking about anything legal. I'm just saying like as far as being polite and like is it the credit score? Is that what keeps most people from getting the loan they want? Is there anything that people should kind of look out for and really think about if they're gonna go apply for a loan today?
Stephen Gramaglia 08:33
Basically what we were concerned with was the ability to repay the loan. And that's that's kind of like lending one. The ability to repay, are we gonna get paid back? Forget about the collateral and the location and all that stuff. Our first thing was what w what chance of success does this operator have? And then we would dig in from there. And typically, you know, the deals that
Well, let's start with the deals that went bad, because I think that's a good place to start the biggest problems that we saw amongst borrowers were them being undercapitalized. And the issue that a lot of laundromat operators have and people coming into the business that don't fully understand what they're getting themselves into is that it's a capital-intensive business, and there are going to be things that go wrong and that break and
require money that you'll never think about leading up to it.
Ian Gollahon 09:30
Mm-hmm.
Stephen Gramaglia 09:31
So for example, your boiler breaks down, you have no hot water, you get a repair person to come and look at it, and they're gonna say, you need a new boiler.
That's a 10,000 to 15,000 or more
Ian Gollahon 09:46
Yeah.
Stephen Gramaglia 09:47
Investment that you have no choice. You have to make it. And the same thing goes with your HVAC, the air conditioning breaks in the summer, the heat breaks in the winter, you have to get an emergency, you have roof issues, you know, there's there's a lot of things that you have to be prepared for.
And a lot of people think that getting into this business, all right, I'm gonna buy a store, it's in existence, the equipment is pretty good, I'm gonna put down my 30%, 35%, and off we go. And unfortunately, if you that's not the only investment that you need.
So one of the biggest problems that we saw amongst people that were struggling to make their loan payments was they were just undercapitalized. That
Ian Gollahon 10:26
Yeah.
Stephen Gramaglia 10:27
And the fact that they didn't know what they were doing, they didn't do the proper due diligence, and they got talked into doing something that really didn't make sense.
Unfortunately now I see that more than ever because of how popular laundromats have become. Social media and other things have promoted this business as a passive income, as a side hustle, as a this, as of that.
The common denominator of people that struggled was their personal financial capital was just not enough to support a downturn and that downturn can be for any reason. What happens if I get shut down whether it's a regulatory issue or a utility issue or whatever. When you shut down
All of your expenses continue to accrue. You still have to pay rent. Can you survive that downturn with your savings and your working capital? And that's that's kind of one of the biggest things.
Ian Gollahon 11:22
Well, you're not doing them a favor if you approve a deal that's gonna go bad for them or that has a high risk of going bad, right? And to your point, Brian and I, you know, we bought these laundromats from his parents. We've only owned them about well, I guess it's little more than three years now that that they've been in our ownership. And as you started listing the things that go wrong, the boilers breaking, the AC going down, leaks in the plumbing, you have to shut down the store to
You know, dig up the cement and fix the leak, and then it's still not fixed, and you have to dig it up again. You have to shut down the store the next week. All of that has happened on top of like three fires, right? Fires that that, you know, we had to shut down the store to clean. Luckily that none of them burned down the buildings or anything. But all of that has happened to us in the first like honestly, it happens every year. We were just shut down a few weeks ago to fix some big leak
and they thought they'd fix it and they had to shut it down again. And so that store was down for like two weeks, you know, and the boilers in our Delaware store we had to replace this time we went with two of them. And that was I think a $20,000 investment. And yeah, it's not like, I mean, this was a family transaction. It's not like they were
sabotaging us or anything like that, but you would almost
Stephen Gramaglia 12:42
No.
Ian Gollahon 12:42
You would almost think so, like, my God, everything broke right away and there was a fire. It's just like, yep, that's owning a laundromat and you better make sure you got the cash to deal with it.
Stephen Gramaglia 12:52
That happens on new locations as well, not even on you know older acquisition stores on brand new locations. You have you can have all those issues as well.
I'm I'm on the so I'm on social media, I'm on the Facebook, you know, there's a couple of Facebook groups. I see a lot of people. You know, how do I get into the business? I've I've got no money. I see that all the time. I wanna buy or build a launch map,
Ian Gollahon 13:12
Right.
Stephen Gramaglia 13:12
But I have no money. I need creative financing. And
Ian Gollahon 13:15
Yeah.
Stephen Gramaglia 13:15
I just I just shake my head. It's just
Ian Gollahon 13:19
I've I've often said and you know, this is one of those things that I guess the point of this podcast, one of the points of it is to go over inconvenient truths in the industry. But I've often, you know, made the point and two hundred thousand dollars is my number for Oklahoma or whatever. I'm sure it's a totally different number in other states and depends on the size of the laundromat that you want to buy. But I've always thought there's a flow chart of like, do you want to start a laundromat? Yes. Okay. Do you have two hundred thousand?
If yes, then continue to the next. If no, then don't start a laundromat. Like if you don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars, don't do it because you're gonna need a significant amount down. And then you're gonna need a significant cushion for all the things that are gonna break right away.
But yeah, yeah.
Stephen Gramaglia 14:02
Yeah, I mean it's just not for everybody. Unfortunately
everybody thinks it's for everybody because they believe, you know, what they see on social media, but it's just the business not for everybody.
Ian Gollahon 14:12
So remind me and for those maybe that aren't familiar with your stores, are you offering wash dry fold at every store? Tell us a little bit about your kind of your revenue mix and just kind of I mean, they're clean, which would lead me to think they're fully attended, which would lead me to think you're doing wash dry fold to pay for the attendance. But tell us your thought process there.
Stephen Gramaglia 14:35
Yeah, we're we're fully attended on all four we have four stores. All four stores fully attended. Three of those stores we do the wash dry fold out of those stores. One store we now have started doing pickup and delivery using wash dry fold point of sale, using the third party driver system, which in New is only in your in our New York City stores, works great. We've had
Very little you know I know a lot of people third-party delivery uber driver ubers and DoorDash, it can be a little dicey. Knock on wood, we've we've had some good success for it, with it. We have three stores fully attended, wash dry fold, no dry cleaning.
But in our locations where we do run the wash dry fold, it's a pretty significant piece of our business. It's in our busiest store, we do almost six thousand pounds a week, and that is
Ian Gollahon 15:34
Wow, okay.
Stephen Gramaglia 15:35
Fully residential.
No commercial business. It's drop-off only. We ch we charge a dollar eighty five per pound, which in our markets is high, but we provide a very, very high quality product, the way it looks, the way it smells, the way it's presented, very professional.
And again, it's a bougie, you know, high quality experience that we want to give. So in our busiest location, we do about six thousand pounds a week. In our second busiest, we do about five thousand pounds a week. And then we have a newer location that we built in New York City that is a newer location. It's less than two years old. It's still ramping. We do wash dry fold there, but we recently put in drop delivery and pickup there.
And that has added some nice revenue because again, we have the staff. We're just trying to build that location up and it takes a while. You know, it's it's again, ramping these stores is a ti it takes time.
Ian Gollahon 16:36
Yeah.
Stephen Gramaglia 16:37
It and it every store is different. And that goes back to our prior
Discussion about being capitalized. If you're building a location from scratch, you're starting at zero revenue and a lot of expenses. And
Ian Gollahon 16:53
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Stephen Gramaglia 16:54
If this is where that capitalization comes in. If you're not prepared to support that store from revenue zero to revenue X that breaks you even, it pays your debt, pays your expenses, you're gonna be in a lot of trouble. So again, back to capitalization, it's it's a big thing in this business.
Ian Gollahon 17:12
Well, and that's probably a good segue when you're talking about going from because a lot of our listeners maybe have a laundromat that's a coin laundromat, or maybe they got a card system in and they want to go into where you're at, where you're doing, you know, six thousand pounds a week. Like they're they're thinking, holy cow, how do I get there? What are some of the issues that you see along the way? And has Wash-Dry-Fold POS kind of helped you?
Address some of those because I know with us it was like, the little sticky notes are always falling off the bags, or, you know, whatever it is that before you get the systems in place. And can you talk a little bit about operating at scale There's not really that many Laundromat owners doing that at such scale in the US, to be honest.
Stephen Gramaglia 18:00
It's it gets easier. It's it starts tough and it does get easier. I mean the first thing you have to have is you have to have systems and operations in place and have it be uniform. Now again, multiple locations, but even if you have one location, you really need to have a system in place to help you track what's going on, track your employees, track the bags.
You know, make sure that you're not missing or skipping an order and
Have a really good sense of what we've got to do, what's in process, what's done. It allows us to communicate with our customers very well. In fact, you know, that's one of the biggest things is the communication with the customers, whether it's can you, you know, please come pick up your bags. We can't store them forever, or if there's any issues, you know, things like that. But the biggest thing is having a system and again, when you start in business, you want
you wanna save money, you wanna not spend a fortune on certain things. And a lot of operators just go with paper. They write tickets of my paper, they take cash, they don't take credit cards. And that's fine if you're doing, you know, a hundred pounds a day or, you know, some nominal amount. But
Ian Gollahon 19:28
That's right.
Stephen Gramaglia 19:29
If you're if you're getting twenty thirty orders a day
You can't keep track of that on paper in a spreadsheet. It's just impossible. And
Ian Gollahon 19:39
Mm-hmm.
Stephen Gramaglia 19:40
You're gonna wind up not servicing your customers. You're gonna wind up alienating them. You're gonna wind up losing bags. Your employees are gonna steal from you. You're gonna have all sorts of issues. And not that those things can't happen even with a great system like Wash-Dry-Fold Point of Sale, but it's a lot harder.
And again, if you're an operator and you're actively managing the business, having a tool like Wash Dry Fold Point of Sale is essential. I can pull up my phone, my laptop, my desktop, and I can see right this second the orders I need to get done, how many pounds, how many pieces, what that looks like. I can see what my employees are working on, how many orders are in the wash, how many orders are in the dryer, how many orders are being folded, and how many orders are done.
It also gives you metrics. We have quotas for our employees, how many pounds per shift they need to do. We do things a little bit differently than some operators. Our attendants take an order from start to finish, from sort to wash, to dry, to fold, to bag. That's their order. It's
Ian Gollahon 20:49
Mm-hmm.
Stephen Gramaglia 20:50
Not, you know, I know, and again, there's no right or wrong. That's just the way we established a procedure where we want an attendant to have ownership over that order.
So that down the line, if there's a problem, we don't have employees pointing their fingers at each other. Well, I didn't wash that order, I only folded it. And then, well, I don't fold, I only wash, so there's no accountability for if there's an issue. So, you know, we just established our system in a way that cre has there's accountability and having the system like Wash-Dry-Fold POS where there's timestamps for everything.
When we do have issues, and it's not if we have issues, it's when we have issues. We have a tracking system that allows us to go in and say, Okay, Mary Smith's order, there's a problem with it, she's missing this, this, this, and that. Let's go to the system. The system will say, Okay, Rosa is the attendant. She did the sorting, the wash dry fold. I know exactly when she sorted it. I can go to the camera and put in that time.
I can see her sorting it. I can see the time she washed it. I can see all that stuff. And with those timestamps, it makes it very, very easy. I can also see which washers and dryers she used so that I can take a look at those washers, those dryers. And usually what happens is with our system, the orders get weighed when they come in, obviously, because that's how you price it. We weigh the orders when they're done.
And that's the first line of defense for our attendants. They wait in the beginning, they wait at the end. If there's more than a pound or two different, they already know there's a problem. They will immediately go into the system, they will check which washers they used, which dryers they used, they will check those machines, and nine times out of ten, they left something in one of those washers or dryers. But the only way you would know that is if you had a system.
Ian Gollahon 22:51
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Stephen Gramaglia 22:52
So, you know, that typically stops most of the issues right there. Sometimes there's issues afterwards. I have to go to the camera, you know, and deal with things. But it's so much easier having a system. If you're on pen and paper, there's no way you can do any of that stuff. It's just impossible. So it's the tracking, it's it's making sure that the orders are getting done in the in the order in which they come in, because that was another issue that that we saw in the industry. Certain attendants will take certain bags because they know certain customers tip.
Or they don't like certain customers because they have a lot of baby clothes. Like there's a million things. And we put an end to that. You go in the order that it says, the order that they come in, no skipping orders. And we pool all our tips. So we eliminated the tip issue. When we first started, we were tipping out who did what order and it became a nightmare. So we did away with that whole situation. We pool all our tips and
Depending on the number of hours that you worked, you get X percent of those tips. So, you know, again, the sis and again, the system tells you the tips. So it's it's really easy, you know, unless it's cash tips. But anyway, that's it's a different story. But
Ian Gollahon 23:58
Yeah.
Stephen Gramaglia 24:03
The system, without the system, there's no possible way that we could do, you know, we do between the three stores that do wash, dry, fold, we do, you know, about thirteen thousand, twelve to thirteen thousand.
Pounds a week.
So there's no way we could do that kind of volume in a positive way, with me having any sort of life outside of laundry without having that system in place.
Ian Gollahon 24:39
You know, listening to you talk about this, it's it's really clear to me why when you tell us something, Brian really takes it to heart and really takes it seriously. I mean, you're one of those top operators.
But I think one of the things he mentioned that you really helped us decide on was the hardware and
hearing you talk about it, it's much more clear to me. I have this conversation or someone on our sales team probably has this conversation once a day where they say, Well, I've got a laptop. I'm just going to throw the software on that or I've got, I'll just go down to Office Depot and, you know, there's I can get a HP laptop for $300. I'm going to bring that to the laundromat and that's going to work just fine.
And we kind of have this conversation with them around, you really do need the right system. It's not just, hey, we'll sell cloud-based software, but you really do need the whole point of sale system. And, you know, we only sell the 16 gig units now. And I think you were a big part of.
Helping us decide, you know, we're not gonna could we sell more of the cheaper stuff? Yes. But then if you ever scale, is a cheaper piece of hardware going to be worth all of the problems and interruptions that you have with your staff on a daily basis? Of course not. You need you need a commercial piece of equipment. And can you kind of
remind me kind of how that happened because
Stephen Gramaglia 26:15
I mean I think we were one of the first people on that. I remember having conversations with Brian and you know, I d I don't love being a guinea pig, but it was important to us to get it right. And I and I remember back in those early days making a lot of suggestions and things like that, but I
I'm I'm of the mindset where you get what you pay for in life.
Ian Gollahon 26:38
Yeah.
Stephen Gramaglia 26:39
And typically when you cheap out, it costs you way more money over time. And I think part of that is your time,
Ian Gollahon 26:50
Yeah.
Stephen Gramaglia 26:51
My time, your time, our time is valuable. And you know, some of the hardware problems that we had is as we grew and as we were doing more transactions.
We were we really were kind of at a bottleneck because that older hardware was just not capable of keeping up with all right, I'm making a credit card payment, so the hardware has to talk the CPU has to talk to the credit card reader and then you know once that's done you gotta print out a ticket, so that's another process and a lot of these things just get slowed down, you know, if you don't have the proper hardware.
And again, I like to have the best hardware, software, whatever it is, I like to have it be robust enough to handle not just what I'm doing, but as we grow over time. And I think a lot of people make a that mistake where they look at two different things. Okay, so okay, let's say your system costs X, but they can, like you just said, they can go down to Best Buy.
And buy cheaper hardware and save what? A few hundred dollars, even a thousand dollars, a lot of money. That's a lot of money. But if you look at that over time, that's pennies per day. You're gonna have that hardware for three or four years, let's say, before it becomes obsolete, you
Ian Gollahon 28:15
Yeah.
Stephen Gramaglia 28:20
Have to upgrade, whatever it is. Even if it's three years, it's pennies per day. The time and energy that you're gonna spend.
Trying to fix it or trying to deal with it or it doesn't work right and now you guys can't fix it because it's not your hardware. So you're gonna run into that roadblock. So you're yeah, you're
Ian Gollahon 28:37
That's right. Yeah. Yeah.
Stephen Gramaglia 28:40
Gonna save a little bit of money, but it's gonna cost you more money over time. So I've never been a proponent of going the cheapest route. I just have always found that when you take the cheapest route, you will pay way more over time. You know,
Ian Gollahon 28:56
Yep. Yep.
Stephen Gramaglia 28:58
So
It's just one of these things. You have to have the right hardware to have the right experience. It's just you just gotta do it.
Ian Gollahon 29:06
You know, that's exactly our experience. And what's interesting is when you see that at scale, if you sell, like, for example, if we sold, you know, some of our competitors sell like kind of cheaper lower gig Android units, and we could sell those, and we have sold cheaper hardware in the past. And then what happens is if that hardware starts having issues, then we spend lots of time with that customer.
To fix those issues. And when you see that around, you know, we've sold about 1300 of these now. So imagine you sold 300 people hardware that's gonna break all the time. Well, then your tech support, you know, requirements are just through the roof. But not only that, but that's 300 laundromat owners that are wasting their time with tech support and trying to fix that hardware instead of growing and scaling their business. And the
You know, that's what we love to do is help people grow and scale and succeed. And you're a perfect example of if you help them succeed in one store, you'll help them succeed in five stores, you've played a big part in helping us make a lot of decisions, but that was one of those decisions where, you know, we really decided to stop selling the slower stuff.
Maybe we make a few less sales because of it, but at the end of the day, at least we feel confident about the product that we are selling that we know it's capable of scaling and lasting a long time with that laundromat owner But one of the questions I had, you know, talking about like how you've helped us kind of focus on different things over the years.
Was there any specific I know when we when we switched to 2020, that was the big update, right? Because it all became cloud based and it all became Laundriworks integrated. Was there any other little specific thing that we've done over the year that you thought that one little thing made a huge difference on day to day? And it's okay if there's not one, but just curious.
Stephen Gramaglia 31:06
Yeah, I mean one of the biggest things that that I had discussions with Brian about in the early days was the dashboard. And I there were certain things on that dashboard that I really, really wanted to see, and they just were not there. And that's because you guys were focused on just trying to get the product to work and getting LaunterWorks card reader integrated, which is an amazing thing. And it's not just LaunterWorks, I know you guys are integrated with
other products. I just happen to use Laundriworks, but having the you know the card reader integrated, having the scale integrated, so you don't have that you know, you know, human error of the bag weighed sixteen point nine pounds, but no the bag weighed nineteen point six pounds. So you know working on all those integrations and I knew all that stuff was essential. Once you guys got all that the big ticket stuff
Then I started to give some suggest like, all right, Brian, I want the dashboard to say I've got four hundred and sixty-two pounds of laundry pending. I have 20 orders, I have eight comforters, I've got this many pending, you know, in the wash. My attendant did this many pounds today, so I can hold them accountable. So a lot of the reporting and the dashboard stuff was vital in helping me run the business in terms of staffing. How many? All right, I've got.
I've got 500 pounds that has to get done today. I gotta deal with staffing. And I got five hundred for tomorrow or six hundred, whatever it is, you know, in terms of staffing, in terms of supplies. I mean, it's it's vital to have that dashboard with the data that that we as operators need to make those everyday decisions. So a lot of the early day suggestions were just what as an as an operator I want to see to help me run the business.
Ian Gollahon 32:56
You know, I remember that update and that conversation with Brian. And I remember even just saying, Well, why don't we just show how many orders there are to do that day? And he's like, Well, what if one of the orders is 500 pounds? It's like, that's why, you know. And I think to especially as these new tools that people are using can build software so much quicker. It's actually important to know what to build, not just
the technical capacity of can you build a software that does these things. But also do you have the communication lines open with the laundromat owners to where you actually know what needs to be built and what do they really need to see? Because if you've only got one person on shift and there's a thousand pounds of laundry, then that is actually, you know, an actionable item that you could be like, wow, okay, this person needs some help. And, you know, we're gonna get overwhelmed if we don't.
You know adjust accordingly. The integration I know we've kind of added on to it. And like you've mentioned we've done SpyderWash and we've done CCI
but are you using the WashLynx app now as well? Or do you just use the cards? How do you do it?
Stephen Gramaglia 34:06
Yeah, we didn't switch over to the WashLynx. Various reasons. I mean honestly I didn't even know it was there for a while. I don't know when it came out. I know it's kinda recent, but I kinda missed the whole functionality of it. And I have so many long term employees that, you know, we just stuck with the laundry cards. You know, and
I have the way I track it is I track the management usage of those laundry cards. I've been doing this now for six years. The business is kind of steady, except for again, I have a store that's kind of ramping. So I know every month when I run my monthly numbers, one of my monthly numbers is management card usage. So gross dollars that my attendants in that store, whichever store, gross dollars that my attendants spend at the machines.
And so that's one number. And then I take that number as a percentage of our wash dry fold revenue.
And that number is consistent every single month. A couple months I had an outlier, like I had, you know, the percentage went from whatever it was, it went up by four or five percent. I know there's something that happened. I gotta dig into that. Now it's slightly challenging to figure that out, but you know, that's part of my job. And it doesn't happen often. But we manage we manage that in a way
just by looking at the numbers and percentages. And, you know, so yes, the answer is we're still our attendants use laundry management cards. We track those cards. Those cards are registered to each attendant. So if I get a card that looks like it's out of control spending, I can drill down and see what's going on there. The other thing that we do is we have two attendants for every shift. And I feel like that
kind of keeps the attendants a little bit more honest. I think if an attendant is working solo, they are could be a little bit more tempted to start a machine for a customer for $5 or whatever it is. I mean there's there's definitely there's no perfect solution and I do know operators that use the washlynx They rave about it. We just haven't gotten there yet.
Ian Gollahon 36:37
Well, I think though, to your credit, I talk to a lot of laundromat owners and a lot of times people will reach out to us because they're having some issue. And a lot of times the hardest issue to get is employee theft out of They don't want to talk about it, but if you dig hard enough, you know, they're really looking at a at a new point of sale system because they found out their manager was stealing.
And if it's a 10,000, 20,000, I mean, I've heard up to 50,000 now, that amount, it's always stolen the same way. And it's they've got the money on the card, they're using the card, sure, to start the wash-dry fold orders, but they're using it to start self-serve orders. They're using it to start a little business they're running on the side. And so if you're not just doing that, it's just one thing you do, you could do it once a month.
Once a week, however long, you know, it doesn't matter. But as long as you're actually on staying on top of as a ratio, how much of those machine starts are they using as a ratio of the amount that they're processing? And like you said, if they're all of a sudden using double the amount of machine starts, but they don't have double the amount of orders they're processing, you gotta look into that. And unfortunately, I've I've talked to so many laundromat owners.
Who just aren't tracking that. And so they don't even see as it steadily climbs and climbs and climbs, but the orders aren't climbing with it, right? And so you know, all of a sudden they're looking back on their records and this person, you know, they catch them on camera or another employee tells on them and they realize that this person's been using thousand dollars of card starts per week for the past two years, you know, on stuff that's not wash dry fold orders. And so
I think it's really good that you're doing that. The WashLynx app, all that does is if you wanted to ever tie it instead of like a card that moves around the store, if you ever wanted to tie it to like, you know, their actual face or their PIN on their phone, and then force them to start the washers and dryers with their phone through the WashLynx app, then that will now you can actually start the washers and dryers with the WashLynx app. And then you still get that same data reporting and
You know, the one thing that I think is kind of stronger with it is you can't just hand your laundry works card off or it doesn't get stolen or anything like that because it's actually tied to their personal phone. So it strengthens the functionality, but honestly, you're getting 90% of the benefit, right? The extra WashLynx app would just add a little tiny extra little piece. And if you ever wanted to do that, it's you know, it's included, so it's no big deal. I think you do have to pay.
Laundroworks for the WashLynx app though. So that's that's the other that's the real cost.
Stephen Gramaglia 39:26
It is a it
is an additional monthly fee. I don't know what it is, but I but I know it's an additional monthly fee. I mean look, there's no perfect solution to prove to eliminate employee theft. Imp reducing it, there's a lot of ways to reduce it, and one of the biggest ways to reduce it is to pay attention to the business.
Ian Gollahon 39:44
Brian mentioned that you're kind of getting your son into the industry. Tell us a little bit about that. And what are you what are you teaching him?
Stephen Gramaglia 39:51
We I have two sons in the business, twenty-two and twenty-four years old, recent college graduates. They wanted to be in the business. I wanted them to go do other stuff, but they wanna be in the business. So yeah, I've got them both working full time. They do a lot of things, you know, they go to the stores probably more than I do now.
They do collections. They do they fill we own all of the vending machines in all of our stores soap and snacks. So they're responsible for ordering, procuring, and filling the vending machines.
They do some minor repairs. You know, we're we're very fortunate. I have a full-time on staff repair slash handyman who does amazing things. So we're fortunate that we don't have to do a lot of repairs. We do spot repairs. He doesn't work Sunday. So, you know, I go to all the stores on Sunday religiously. That's my day. But I will go to a store and I'll see a machine out of order and I will
I will fix it or at least make every effort to fix it. So they're they're doing a little bit of that, not as much because again, it's just not a big need with within our organization at this time. But yeah, they're doing a lot of stuff and it's it's freed me up to be more strategic, look for additional opportunities, whatever they may be, work on
sorta as they say, work on the business rather than in the business. And also really just to have a little bit more free time.
Ian Gollahon 41:41
Yeah. No, I that makes a lot of sense. And there is just things that family can do, especially if they have the card, like buy the things, you know, there's certain things that having family on board to kind of take some things off your plate really helps. But I think they're gonna be have a serious leg up on everyone else once if they ever wanna go and do their own laundromats or maybe they just take over yours. I don't know what the plans are there, but
I think they're learning from the best. So that's that's pretty cool that it's becoming a family business for you.
Stephen Gramaglia 42:16
It
is. It's it's fun. And it was th it's their idea. I it not only did I not put pressure on them, I actually tried to persuade them to do something else just so that they had a different perspective on and they could bring something different. But they both really wanted to be in the business and you know, I think they enjoy doing it and I think they enjoy the benefits of being a laundromat owner is you make your own schedule for the most part. I mean obviously they're
Ian Gollahon 42:43
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Stephen Gramaglia 42:45
Things that happen that you gotta you know, happen and you gotta deal with right away. But as far as their schedule and when they go and collect and when they do things, you know, that's you know, really one of the great benefits of being in this industry is something like that.
Ian Gollahon 43:02
It's interesting. We've seen a lot more multi-generational people in the business just recently. If you look at Steve and Max at CCI, and then of course SypderWash is Michael and Greg, and then even Brian is took it over from his dad, and then we'll probably pass it on, or certainly the plan is to pass it on to one of his boys, and
Maybe his girl too, I don't know. If she wants it. But yeah, it is it's kinda cool how
Stephen Gramaglia 43:30
Yeah, I think it's it's
Ian Gollahon 43:31
It can be like that.
Stephen Gramaglia 43:32
Yeah, we met, so we were down at the Laundry Excellence show down in Hilton Head of whenever that was, May, April ish.
Ian Gollahon 43:40
Yeah, yeah.
Stephen Gramaglia 43:43
And I brought one of one of my sons, I brought down with me and he met quite a number of people his age in their early to mid twenties that are second or third generation and it's between
Ian Gollahon 43:58
Wow.
Stephen Gramaglia 43:59
Like you said, vendors, like you know, the C CI and Spiderwash but also operators that have entered into the business as well. And I and I think it's great that
There's a n there's a new blood and new generation and they come with different experience and they come with different viewpoints and they're better at technology. I mean, I we thought our generation was good at technology. They're they're even better. And so they've brought some things to my sons in specifically have brought some things and do things differently than I would have done them. And
I think it's great. I just think it's a it's an amazing thing and you know, family business can be tough because, you know, it's it's your family and how do you hold them accountable and how do you deal with issues and we've we've seemed to make it work and in fact in our house it's my wife and my two sons and I were all in the business. My wife is our bookkeeper, she was an accountant,
prior to having kids, so when we s open up the laundromat, she jumped right in and has done our books since the beginning. So we're truly like everyone the four people in my house are laundry people. At sometimes at dinner we're like, okay, we gotta talk about something else. Just laundry constantly, nonstop. So, you know, that's the joke in our houses.
Ian Gollahon 45:28
Mm.
Stephen Gramaglia 45:31
But no, it's great. It's it's I love it and I love the fact that they bring different viewpoints and
They'll go, Dad, you know, we could do this in a better way and more efficient and I'm I'm all for it.
Ian Gollahon 45:42
That's that's really cool. So what one thing I try to always ask every podcast guest is the number one craziest thing that they've seen in their stores or in the laundromats, in the industry maybe. What's that thing for you that you is just always stood out to you as just like this is not what I thought I was getting into? Or maybe you I guess you nuke because you had
21, you know, years of experience already, but is there anything that surprised you even still?
Stephen Gramaglia 46:15
Yeah, that there's a few things. Some I probably can't say on this. Yeah, y there's a lot of there's a lot of crazy people in the world and they like to do laundry. And you've gotta be able to handle a lot of different situations. We had a customer
Come in, go into the store, into the aisle where the washers were, and they took off all their clothes and put
Ian Gollahon 46:45
Yes.
Stephen Gramaglia 46:45
Them in the washing machine. And I'm sure, I know for sure that's I'm not the first person that that's happened to. I'm sure there's whoever's gonna watch this video, there's gonna be people going, Yep, that's happened. I've s I've seen it. You like you, yeah. And
Ian Gollahon 46:56
Yeah, we've had it too. Yep. Yep.
Stephen Gramaglia 47:00
And I again, I know it happens. It's just when it happens and you're and I was there and you're watching it.
It's it's shocking and I and I almost I didn't really know how to handle it. So yeah that that happened. Fortunately, you know, a couple of the other things that really surprised me were the amount of clothes that people leave in a laundromat every single day. It is
Ian Gollahon 47:30
Mm.
Stephen Gramaglia 47:31
A shocking amount.
And it and it's all of my stores. It's not one store, it's all of my stores. It's a shocking amount of clothes that people leave in a washer, leave in a dryer, leave in a laundry cart, leave on the floor, leave wherever.
Ian Gollahon 47:46
Mm-hmm.
Stephen Gramaglia 47:46
And seventy-five to eighty percent of them never come back for it. And I'm talking about a lot of stuff. I mean, we have you know fifty pound dryers, and people I mean, there's full washers and dryers.
Full of it's not one thing, it's not a sock. Like
somebody's whole wardrobe, and they never come back for it. It's it and that shocks me, especially the cost of these clothes. Another thing that really, really surprised me and still surprises me to this day: the amount of lint inside these laundromats. It is a staggering amount.
But yeah, I mean just crazy customers yelling, screaming or fights that break out or
Like I said, the guy who got naked and then was just like no he didn't think it was a big deal. So going
Ian Gollahon 48:33
Right. What's the big deal?
Stephen Gramaglia 48:35
Back to we have a lot of clothes left over. So I went and got him pants and shirt and you know, and we got him we got him clothed while his clothes were being washed.
Ian Gollahon 48:45
I
was gonna ask. I was curious, but I d I like I said, I didn't know if
Stephen Gramaglia 48:47
Yeah.
Ian Gollahon 48:48
You were allowed to tell me what happened with this guy, but
Stephen Gramaglia 48:51
We
we hook we hooked him up with some something to cover himself up with and he was he was grateful for that. But yeah it's it's an it's an adventure and a lot of times I'll just say I think I've seen it all and then something happens that you just can't you just can't expect. It's it's it's wild.
Ian Gollahon 49:11
Yeah. It's it's definitely not a I mean it sounds boring and predictable. It's laundromat, people come in and do their clothes every week and in and in and in the good ways it is. You know, it's it's a little recession resistant and you're not having to it's not like AI or some crazy thing where the whole game changes every week, but
Then in other ways there's always some new problem that you've never seen before, and new challenge and new thing that breaks that's gotta be fixed. And so
Stephen Gramaglia 49:45
Yep, yep, and dealing with landlords and dealing with utilities and inspections and you know, we had a surprise inspection recently at one location.
We've had other inspections in New York City where we've had some s some things we had to fix and deal with. But yeah, you just can't you don't know what to day to day I don't know what to expect. It's a it's a fairly
Ian Gollahon 50:09
Right.
Stephen Gramaglia 50:10
Boring
Fairly consistent business, but again there's just things that happen you just can't expect, you just c you can't predict.
Ian Gollahon 50:20
There's always something new to learn and I feel like you've really probably helped a lot of our listeners learn a thing or two today. And I really appreciate you sharing all of your experience with us and your wisdom. And we're just always really proud to have you as our customer at Wash-Dry-Fold POS. And I wanted to thank you for all that you've contributed over the years to helping us build a better product for you and for everyone. So thank you for that.
Stephen Gramaglia 50:49
You're welcome. It's it's been it's been a great partnership and you know, one of the things that I really like about both you and Brian and your whole team is that you are receptive to if I make a suggestion or if there's some something, you know, not working or whatever it is, you guys are always open to listening to it and i implementing it if at all possible and it's been a great partnership. You guys have helped me tremendously grow my business and
You guys are always responsive. We have very little issues. And whenever there is an issue, you guys jump right on it. So I thank you as well.
Ian Gollahon 51:26
Thanks. Well, I really appreciate that. And I don't think we're gonna top that. So I'm ending it there. I really appreciate it.
Stephen Gramaglia 51:33
Thank you very much. This was a lot of fun. I appreciate it.
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