Operations · Multi-store chains
Carmen Cardiel on Running 55+ Laundromat Locations with Coinless Laundry
Fifty-five stores across two states, three commercial processing plants and almost 200 employees, run by the operations lead who made Wash-Dry-Fold POS change how it handles repair tickets.
- ●Carmen Cardiel runs operations for Coinless Laundry, 55 stores across Arizona and Southern California, and her experience is a working case study in how multi-store laundromat operations actually get run.
- ●Every store reports machine outages, POS issues and internet issues twice a day, on the AM and PM shifts, with separate on-call rotations for maintenance and for systems.
- ●Carmen asked for a plain “is this machine operational, yes or no” field on repair tickets, and that request changed how Wash-Dry-Fold POS handles repair tracking.
- ●Coinless ran Cents and Wash-Dry-Fold POS side by side, then consolidated onto one system on two grounds: what her staff could learn at the counter, and the long-term math on subscriptions and card processing across every location.
- ●She runs true Windows PCs at the counter rather than Android tablets, because one commercial account requires her staff to log into an outside portal and upload photos into someone else’s database.
Carmen Cardiel has spent 12 years at Coinless Laundry and now runs operations across 55 stores in two states, 14 wash and fold locations and three commercial processing plants, with almost 200 employees. That is about as clear a picture of multi-store laundromat operations as the industry offers. This article breaks down how Coinless documents machine outages twice a day, why they consolidated two point of sale systems into one, what card processing costs at scale, and why the counter runs a Windows PC instead of a tablet.
This article is based on an episode
55+ Locations with Coinless Laundry and Systems That Scale
Laundromat Ownership · Episode 19 · with Carmen Cardiel, Coinless Laundry
Fifty-five stores, two states, two offices
Carmen Cardiel answered an ad 12 years ago. She came in with service industry experience, time at a large janitorial company and a stint as director of operations for a construction company, and she now runs operations for one of the larger laundromat chains in the USA.
Coinless Laundry operates 55 stores between Arizona and Southern California, split across two offices. The corporate office in Arizona manages 33 stores. A satellite office in Santa Ana, California, manages the Southern California side. The chain belongs to the Phillips family, and owner Sterling Phillips was a Dexter distributor for well over 30 years before he moved into ownership, starting in California and expanding into Arizona about a decade later.
Fourteen of the 55 locations offer wash and fold, and three processing plants handle commercial and high-volume bulk work: one in Tucson and two in the Phoenix metro area. Coinless has also started offering ironing. Almost 200 employees keep it running, and Carmen says they are still buying stores.
Coinless stores are deliberately built around big machines. Every location carries a minimum of four 100-pound washers plus 80-pound and 60-pound machines, and most stores average around 3,000 square feet, with the newer and wash-and-fold locations running closer to double that so the self-service floor does not get squeezed.
Training almost 200 employees on one procedure
Ask Carmen for the single hardest part of the job and she does not name a machine or a market. It is teaching almost 200 people across two states to do the job the same way, every time.
The obvious version of the problem is easy to underestimate. You train the core staff at each store and you are done. Then somebody calls in sick, somebody covers a store they have not worked in, and a commercial customer’s specifications get missed. So Coinless got very disciplined about standard operating procedures: things in writing, paycheck memos to keep staff informed, photos, reference material and a habit of revisiting the procedure every time something goes wrong.
Carmen is direct about the workforce reality behind that. The industry has a lot of genuinely hard-working people who have never used a cash register or a point of sale system and have never handled money on the job. Training them to be diverse across all of those aspects is the work, and as she puts it, you have to write procedures as though nobody has common sense and account for every if, and or but.
That is also why the counter software carries so much weight for her. Wash-Dry-Fold POS lets her coordinate colors, program buttons and name those buttons whatever her staff already calls the service, which is the whole point of the easy to use, easy to train design. When a new hire is standing in front of a customer and feeling overwhelmed, the question that matters is which screen they can click through and explain.
🔑 Insider Key
At 55 stores, the training question is not “can our best attendant learn this.” It is “can the person covering a store they have never worked, on a Saturday, get a commercial order right from the screen alone.” Carmen’s deciding factor was the second one.
What multi-store laundromat operations have to track
Ian’s summary of Liberty Laundry’s two biggest challenges at three stores is staff communication and machine reliability. Carmen’s answer at 55 is the same two, run through a much heavier process.
Coinless keeps an in-house maintenance crew and what Carmen calls a strenuous reporting program. Twice a day, on the AM and PM shifts, every store reports how many machines are out of service and any issues with the POS or the internet. All the key components get documented twice daily so the office knows what is happening before a customer complains. There are two separate on-call rotations, one for maintenance and one for systems and internet, so the right person gets dispatched. Arizona adds its own pressure: monsoons come in fast and heat does not leave, so some fixes are a deliberate band-aid now and a real repair later.
That daily reporting habit is what produced one of the more useful feature requests Wash-Dry-Fold POS has had. Carmen wanted repair tickets to answer one plain question: is this machine operational, yes or no? It is now a required field on every ticket. At 55 stores and thousands of machines, “this washer squeaks” and “this washer earns nothing” are two completely different problems, and without a filter they land in the same list. Ian is straightforward that they would not have found that on their own. It took an operator at Carmen’s scale to point it out, and it is now part of washer and dryer repair tracking.
For Carmen the filter is a production tool, not just a maintenance one. Coinless runs huge self-service floors, and at the 14 locations where wash and fold shares machines with the self-service customers, a machine going down means either taking capacity from customers or missing a production target. Knowing which machines are actually dead is how she adjusts the day.
Sorting a squeaky washer from a dead one matters differently at 55 stores than it does at three.
What a laundromat processing plant actually is
A laundromat processing plant is a dedicated, non-retail space built solely to process commercial and high-volume bulk orders, kept separate from the self-service store floor. Coinless has three, and no self-service customer sets foot in them.
Inside, the equipment is different from a store. Several 100-pound washers, an ironer, an automatic towel folder, shrink wrap and packaging equipment, machine labeling and tagging for inventory, plus separate staging areas for clean and dirty so two or three production shifts can run without anything getting mixed up. In some cases the plant started as a laundromat and Coinless sectioned off around 2,000 square feet of it.
Ian’s point is that this is a natural end state, not a starting point. Multiple Wash-Dry-Fold POS customers have built one, and they all independently landed on the same name for it. The reason it works is arithmetic: a self-service laundromat handles one family’s load at a time, while a hotel or campground account might be a thousand identical white bath towels, which is 20 machines and an angry store full of customers. Once you have enough of those accounts, across enough locations, it makes sense to move the overflow into its own building with bigger machines. Across his multi-store customers with plants, the ratio of stores to plants often runs 15 or 20 to one, which matches Coinless at 55 and three.
Going the other way around has not worked in what Ian has seen. One customer bought the system to open a commercial processing plant as their only business, with no laundromats behind it, and closed within about a year. Carmen agrees, and adds the operator’s reason: the plant still carries the same utilities, the same overhead and the same trained labor whether the work shows up or not. A store can backfill with walk-in service. A plant with one or two commercial accounts cannot, and it gets strenuous fast.
Coinless got there the slow way. They started wash and fold in Tucson on paper tickets, moved to Wash-Dry-Fold POS, took small steps, sat at each level for a while, then grew when the industry asked for more. Carmen credits the Phillips family for being willing to invest at each step, and is blunt that somebody brand new to the industry would have a very hard time making the same jump. Once those accounts exist, the invoicing and billing side runs on commercial accounts in the POS rather than a spreadsheet.
🔑 Insider Key
Get the commercial accounts first, then build the plant to hold the overflow. The plant’s costs are fixed and its revenue is concentrated in a handful of customers, so it is the wrong place to start and a reasonable place to end up.
Choosing one POS for multi-store laundromat operations
Wash-Dry-Fold POS was the first system Coinless used. Later, looking at where growth was going, they brought in Cents and ran the two side by side, keeping Wash-Dry-Fold POS in stores and putting Cents into the processing plants to get at some of the newer technology. Carmen’s assessment of Cents is fair and worth quoting accurately: it is a good system with a lot of great features.
They consolidated onto Wash-Dry-Fold POS anyway, and her reasons are operational before they are anything else. Running two systems meant training on two systems, coverage for two systems, two sets of procedures to update and different paperwork titles depending on which store you were in. It was actively confusing her staff. So the question became simple: when you sit a new hire down and walk them through the good, the bad and the troubleshooting, which one makes the most sense to them?
Ian is upfront about his bias as an owner of the company, and about the trade-off underneath the decision. Cents is consistently at the cutting edge; if there is a new feature, they have built it or they are building it. Wash-Dry-Fold POS optimizes for what is happening at the counter today. Feature count and ease of use pull in opposite directions, and a chain has to decide which one its operation actually needs. He also names the other two systems worth researching: Curbside Laundries is excellent at delivery, and CleanCloud has by far the strongest dry cleaning tooling. Every system has a niche, and the honest advice is to learn all of them before choosing.
What Carmen valued on top of the software was the feedback loop. She sends an issue or an idea and the conversation starts the same day, and often the feature is already in progress. That is how the repair ticket filter happened, and it is the argument for treating the software behind multi-store laundromat operations as a working relationship rather than a purchase.
See the counter workflow on the real system
The demo videos walk intake, order tracking, repair tickets and multi-store reporting end to end.
Why card processing scales into a major cost for a multi-store chain
The second half of Carmen’s decision was math. She and her team went through what they were paying in monthly subscriptions and what they were paying to process credit cards, across every location, and she says plainly that she did not make it easy on Ian during those conversations. The goal was sustainability, not a better month.
Ian’s framing is useful for any operator comparing systems. At lower revenue, card processing barely registers and the software subscription is the number you focus on. At high revenue, and especially across many locations, processing becomes a sizable line item on its own. Because Liberty Laundry operates at scale too, Wash-Dry-Fold POS was deliberately built to price itself well as a chain grows, which is why the comparison flips as you add stores.
Carmen adds a factor a lot of buyers never model: seasonality. Arizona laundromat revenue drops substantially in summer and comes back in winter. Any system a chain commits to has to still make sense in the soft months, not just the good ones, and that is what pushed Coinless toward the leaner long-term option.
Multi-store reporting is the other half of running at scale
None of the above works without numbers you can pull by location. Carmen’s twice-daily outage reports, her production targets at the wash and fold stores and her monthly cost review all depend on reporting that rolls up across stores instead of forcing somebody to open 55 of them one at a time.
Why Coinless runs Windows PCs, not Android tablets
Hardware was not an afterthought in the decision. Carmen specifically wanted a true Windows PC at the counter, and the reason is a real commercial account rather than a preference.
One customer Coinless processes for handles their own logistics. They send an order with their own order numbers, and Coinless staff have to pull up that customer’s portal, upload photos from the store computer into the customer’s database and work inside their system. On a Windows machine the attendant can do that, open email, look something up and use the same computer for internal training material. On a device built to run one application, they cannot.
This is the thinking Brian Henderson and Ian brought from their own laundromats: the counter computer is the brain of the store, and the brain has to do more than ring up orders. You may need to log into your card system’s website, handle email, do a little word processing or use a government or commercial account’s portal. Wash-Dry-Fold POS is cloud based, but it ships on Windows hardware for exactly this reason, plus the peripherals. The integrated weight scale, the bag label printer and the receipt printer all hang off that machine.
There is a genuine trade-off, and Ian names it. Android devices are cheaper, and selling a Windows PC costs more, so a lower-cost single-purpose device is a sensible way to sell a lower-cost system. It just does less. First-time owners rarely anticipate how often a laundromat has to log into somebody else’s software, and a Clover, a Square or a tablet-only POS will not do it.
🔑 Insider Key
Ask what your counter device has to do besides sell. If a single commercial or government account requires you to work inside their portal, a tablet-only system rules that account out before you ever quote it.
The strangest thing 12 years and 55 stores turns up
Carmen has seen the usual range, including people showering in a store and, once, someone who moved onto the roof of a building and lived there for a while. The one that stuck was different.
An attendant flagged a customer who spent all day moving the same clothes from washer to dryer and back. He was paying, so nothing was technically wrong, but the behavior was odd enough that the team made notes and kept an eye on him. What he was actually doing was using the store Wi-Fi, back when free Wi-Fi was still a draw, to distribute illegal pornography, and not locally. The FBI traced the IP address to the store and reached out.
Coinless could help because of records. The attendant’s notes, the camera coverage inside the stores and the parking lots, and the fact that the man had registered his card in the CCI system, together let them identify which stores he bounced between and hand real information to the authorities. Carmen’s takeaway was about protecting the store’s IP address and paying closer attention to who is in the building, and she is glad it ended the way it did. Coinless runs the SpyderWash integration from CCI, which is where that registered card record lived.
The general lesson she draws from 12 years is smaller and more useful than the story: not every customer is meant to be your customer. Ian’s version is that as you scale you learn it is fine to say no, because you cannot be everything to everyone.
What to do this week
- 01Add a yes-or-no operational field to your repair tickets. If you cannot filter dead machines from noisy ones, you cannot tell which outages are costing you revenue today.
- 02Set a fixed outage report time. Coinless does AM and PM. Pick a cadence, name who reports and put machines, POS and internet on the same form.
- 03Split your on-call rotation. Machine problems and system problems need different people. One rotation for both means one person who is wrong for half the calls.
- 04Total your card processing across every location. Then compare it to your software subscription. At scale the ranking usually flips, and most owners have never run the number.
- 05Write down what your counter computer has to do besides sell. Portals, email, card system websites, label printers, scales. That list decides your hardware.
- 06Count your systems. If two stores run two different POS systems, you are paying for it twice in training, coverage and paperwork.
Questions owners ask
What do multi-store laundromat operations need from a POS?
It has to be learnable by staff who cover unfamiliar stores, and it has to let the office see across every location instead of one at a time. Carmen Cardiel runs 55 Coinless Laundry stores across Arizona and Southern California, and her deciding factors were what her staff could click through and explain at the counter, reporting that rolls up across stores, repair tickets she can filter by whether a machine is operational and the long-term cost of subscriptions and credit card processing across every location.
What is a laundromat processing plant?
A laundromat processing plant is a dedicated, non-retail space built solely to process commercial and high-volume bulk orders, kept separate from the self-service store floor. Coinless Laundry runs three of them, with several 100-pound washers, an ironer, an automatic towel folder, shrink wrap and packaging equipment and separate staging areas for clean and dirty so multiple production shifts do not get mixed up. No self-service customers are allowed in.
Can you open a commercial laundry processing plant as your first business?
In Ian Gollahon’s experience it does not work. A plant carries the same utilities, overhead and trained labor whether the work shows up or not, and unlike a store it cannot backfill with walk-in service. One Wash-Dry-Fold POS customer bought the system to run a processing plant as their only business and closed within about a year. The pattern that does work is building laundromats, winning commercial accounts, then moving the overflow into a dedicated plant. Across Ian’s multi-store customers with plants, the ratio often runs 15 or 20 stores to one plant.
Why did Coinless Laundry consolidate from two POS systems to one?
Running Cents in the processing plants and Wash-Dry-Fold POS in the stores meant training on two systems, coverage for two systems, two sets of procedures to keep updated and different paperwork titles depending on the store. Carmen Cardiel says Cents is a good system with a lot of great features, but Coinless needed one system its staff could learn and use consistently, plus long-term costs that stayed sustainable across every location. They consolidated onto Wash-Dry-Fold POS.
Does credit card processing matter when choosing a laundromat POS?
It matters much more as a chain grows. At lower revenue the software subscription is the number most owners focus on and processing barely registers. At high revenue across many locations, card processing becomes a sizable line item on its own. Carmen Cardiel’s team totaled subscriptions and processing across all of Coinless Laundry’s locations before deciding, and also factored in seasonality, because Arizona laundromat revenue drops substantially in summer.
Should a laundromat POS run on a Windows PC or an Android tablet?
It depends on what the counter has to do besides sell. Coinless Laundry runs true Windows PCs because one commercial customer requires staff to log into that customer’s portal and upload photos into their database, and staff also use the machine for email, lookups and internal training. Wash-Dry-Fold POS is cloud based but ships on Windows hardware for that flexibility and for peripherals like the integrated weight scale, bag label printer and receipt printer. Android devices are cheaper and are a reasonable fit for a lower-cost, single-purpose system, but they cannot work inside another company’s software.
How does a 55-store laundromat chain track machine repairs?
Coinless Laundry has every store report twice a day, on the AM and PM shifts, how many machines are out of service plus any POS or internet issues, and keeps separate on-call rotations for maintenance and for systems. Carmen Cardiel asked Wash-Dry-Fold POS to add a required yes-or-no field on every repair ticket for whether the machine is operational, so a squeaky washer can be filtered from one that is earning nothing. At 55 stores that filter is a production planning tool as much as a maintenance one.
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 multi-store laundromat operations, commercial accounts and processing plants, machine repair tracking, credit card processing at scale and laundromat POS hardware.
Full episode transcript
Ian Gollahon 00:05
Hello and welcome to the Laundromat Ownership Podcast. I'm your host, Ian Gollahon. Me and my business partner Brian Henderson own three laundromats in the Tulsa, Oklahoma area. Last year they did about $2.5 million in top-line revenue. And we're also the original founders of Wash-Dry-Fold POS, a company that we still own and operate today. It's the original point of sale system for laundromats.
But today I have a very special guest with me, Carmen from Coinless Laundry. Really have been excited to have her on the show. So Carmen, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and about Coinless?
Carmen Cardiel 00:42
Sure, thank you so much. I've been with Coinless now for 12 years. I started off just answering an ad like people usually do. I had experience working in the service industry, working in a large janitorial company and director of operations for a construction company.
We have 55 stores between Arizona and Southern California. We have it divided into two offices. Our corporate office is here in Arizona where we manage 33 stores, and then we have a satellite location office in Santa Ana, California, where they manage all the Southern California stores. If you ask our owner, we start off in California in Oceanside on the side of a river with a washboard. That's what he'll tell you.
Ian Gollahon 01:24
Ha ha.
Carmen Cardiel 01:25
It's interesting to hear the story because Sterling actually was a distributor for Dexter for many years, the owner of the company, Sterling Phillips. And then I think it just seemed kind of natural that he started his ownership. So we started in California for 10 years and then he moved into Arizona and we blossomed quite a bit between both states.
Ian Gollahon 01:44
Yeah, I mean, that's a lot of stores and it's a really cool story. We do hear a lot of people on the podcast that kind of start in the industry or adjacent to the industry and then end up owning the laundromats. It does really seem to give you an edge, if you kind of understand the industry, a competitive edge over maybe the other laundromat owners in the space that don't. So that makes a lot of sense.
55, you said, right?
Carmen Cardiel 02:12
Yes, 55 and counting.
Ian Gollahon 02:14
I think that's the most laundromats of someone who does wash dry fold in laundromats that I've talked to. How many do wash dry fold? And what are some of the unique challenges of 55 stores as opposed to five stores?
Carmen Cardiel 02:31
We currently have 13 locations that offer wash and fold in the state of Arizona and three processing plants. We have one in Tucson and two in the Phoenix metro area. So the processing plants are more focused on our commercial, high-volume bulk orders. And we also started offering ironing. So it has been interesting seeing the needs of the industry and seeing the customer base and what it is that they're looking to do and how they're looking to grow. So we've had to adjust quite a bit in the surrounding services we provide.
We're definitely going to be expanding into more stores. Actually I think we're at 14 now because we bought a store with Superstition. So we're actually at 14 locations that offer wash and fold and we are looking to expand still more as we grow.
Yeah. One of the more unique things is between the two states and between the different industries is being able to account for training our staff, being able to understand what our customer needs as far as a commercial customer, their specifications, and making sure the staff knows how to handle that particular client's needs.
Ian Gollahon 03:43
Mm-hmm.
Carmen Cardiel 03:44
When you have almost 200 staff between two locations and then you have the core staff in the store, you think it's easy, we'll just train them, no big deal. But then you go, well what about coverage when somebody has to cover that store, when somebody's sick. So we have gotten really, really good about our standard operating procedures.
Having things in writing, sending out paycheck memos to keep our staff informed. We take a lot of pictures, we put a lot of things in writing, a lot of references, and we learn. You know, whenever there's a challenge, we take that into account. We say, how do we do better? And we learn. But that's probably the biggest challenge is cohesively teaching all of our staff to do the job consistently and understanding what the customer needs. In our industry, we have a lot of really great workers. I mean hard, honest to goodness workers that might not always be in tune with technology, that might have not
Ian Gollahon 04:40
Yeah.
Carmen Cardiel 04:41
had you know first-hand register or POS system experience, or they might have not dealt with working with money. So that's definitely honing our staff to be diverse in all those different aspects is a challenge.
Accounting for common sense sometimes is not easy. So we have to pretend that nobody has common sense and think of all the ifs, ands or buts. And teaching those can be a challenge, but that's been the biggest challenge probably overall.
Ian Gollahon 05:15
Yeah, I think if I had to talk about the largest challenges for Liberty Laundry, even though it's just three stores, I would say two largest challenges, if I had to sum them up, would be managing the staff, communications with the staff, making sure everyone's on the same page, especially if you introduce something new. Man, you know, it's like if something can go wrong, it will go wrong. If something can get misconstrued or miscommunicated, it will. And then two, reliability of all the machinery. And I'm talking the washers, the dryers, the doors, the vending machines, the point of sale. Everything has to work all the time. Or you're on the phone all the time or you're at the store all the time.
Carmen Cardiel 06:01
Yeah, I think that's one of the things that really sets us apart as a company because we are such large scale. We have a very awesome in-house maintenance crew. We are religious about our maintenance to our machines, whether it's basic maintenance, our repairs. We have a very strenuous reporting program where our staff is letting us know on a daily, twice a day, our AM shift and our PM shift are reporting how many machines are out of service, any issues with the POS, with the internet. So all the key components are actually documented twice a day to make sure that we know what's going on. We're able to dispatch staff as we need. We have a great on-call cycle with our staff and understanding of who's gonna be responding to what. We have an on-call staff for maintenance, and then we have an on-call staff for system and internet. So we've really had to learn to have the staff readily available to tackle the different aspects within our industry, like you mentioned, whether it's the machines, whether it's the POS.
Whether it's the building itself, I mean, here in Arizona, we have monsoons and we get rain. It comes in quick. We get heat. That comes in heavy and that doesn't leave us. So of course there's a lot of challenges that come here in Arizona with the weather very suddenly, very drastically. And just having the right staff in place to be able to tackle those challenges, get past it. And you know, sometimes it's a quick band-aid and then we come back and fix it. Sometimes it's no, let's get it done. We need to fix it right now, make sure that you know business is moving on. But we definitely have a great system in place for keeping our machines maintained, for keeping our machines repaired, and a procedure for what happens if and or whatever the you know end scenario is.
Ian Gollahon 07:45
I had forgotten all about this, but I'm so glad you said this because I think you actually inspired us to add the filter by is the machine in order, yes or no? And so that's now required. If any employee does a ticket, they have to answer: is the machine operational? Yes or no.
And the reason for that is if you have 55 stores, right? And so you've got so many machines, you need to be able to sort and say, okay, what machines are out of order, because that's a lot different than what washers are making a squeaky noise, or you know, what
Carmen Cardiel 08:21
Right.
Ian Gollahon 08:22
what smells kind of funky. That's different than like this machine isn't making money. It's totally out of commission. And so the ability to filter, I thought was just such a good insight. And honestly, I don't think we would have ever figured that out on our own. It took an operator like yourself to come to us and say, hey, yeah, we have a lot of machines. We use the point of sale system in all the stores to manage all the repair tickets. But with that many stores and that many repair tickets, there's no way to sort it with is the machine working, yes or no?
Carmen Cardiel 08:54
I know that we had some pendings on our part on how we wanted to convey that because of course then we're talking about productivity. We are huge self-service laundromats, so we have to account for you know not having that production, not having the machines available for our customers, but on my part, when we have wash and fold locations that share machines with our service, then we have to make sure that production wise, we're either taking machines from our customers now or not able to meet our production requirements. It's not as big of a challenge in our processing plant because lucky enough those are just for
Ian Gollahon 09:26
I
Carmen Cardiel 09:27
our internal use. That's not open to the public. But being able to account for what machines are down so that we make sure that production is accounted for, adjusted accordingly is definitely important. Yeah.
Ian Gollahon 09:41
Another thing, people at home they're hearing these three processing plants and they're probably wondering, well, I know what a laundromat is. I've been in a laundromat, and what's this processing plant? And maybe they're thinking of like some, you know, dry cleaning facility where you've got a semi truck sized machine and you're, you know. But could you tell us, my understanding is they're more like commercial for your larger commercial accounts, but
Carmen Cardiel 10:07
It is.
Ian Gollahon 10:08
I want to hear your thoughts on it, yeah.
Carmen Cardiel 10:09
Yeah, we call it a processing plant because it's meant just to process commercial orders. We don't allow our self-service to come over there. So it is separated from our general footprint from our store. We have large, all of our machines. There are probably 100-pound machines. That's one thing that Coinless has done over the years is make sure that our self-service laundromats have large machines available. All of our stores have a minimum of three to four. Actually, I think a minimum of four 100-pound machines, then we have 80- and 60-pound, but in our warehouses, we have several 100-pound machines.
Ian Gollahon 10:44
Right.
Carmen Cardiel 10:44
Plus, we also have an ironer, we have a towel folder, an automatic towel folder. We have different equipment that helps us to package customers, a shrink wrap, you know. So we have different equipment within it. We are able to label machines and tag them and to help with inventory. So those processing plants are specifically for commercial customers, specifically for high volume. We have our staging area for clean, staging area for dirty. I mean, those were set up for us to be able to do two, three shifts in multiple production and not cause confusion, not get things mixed up. In some of our plants, it was that whole store, that whole laundromat was self-service, and then we sectioned off you know 2,000 square feet of it. But most of our Coinless stores average a minimum of about 3,000 feet. We try to keep that, but we've actually started growing. Some of our larger stores are actually you know double in size because that's what we've done and especially where we've added wash and fold we've expanded our footprint to not affect our self-service customers ability to use our store comfortably.
Ian Gollahon 11:55
And that's really important just for those who maybe aren't quite at this scale yet. But we actually have multiple customers like yourself that have a commercial processing plant and they all call it the processing. It's like the processing facility. It's like somehow they all agreed that this is what it's gonna be called. But it does make a lot of sense because in a laundromat, you're typically doing like a family's load of laundry at a time.
And it's really important to keep all of those separate so that you're not mixing up other people's. And so it makes sense to have a lot of washers and dryers, and you're serving those self-serve customers. But when you are doing these giant accounts, maybe like a large hotel or a campground or you know, it's typically towels, sheets, linens, these kind of things. You might have a thousand bath towels, they're all white, right? And
Carmen Cardiel 12:46
Absolutely, yeah.
Ian Gollahon 12:49
that's actually not great for a laundromat because that's going to be like 20 machines. And then who else is going to be able to use the machines? No one. And you don't want to make your self-serve customers angry. And so as you scale, I don't even think it's a 10 to one ratio because like I'm thinking of my other customers that also have processing facilities. And look, maybe for some people it's a five to one ratio, but what I've seen is it's maybe even like 15, 20 to one, because you said you got 55 stores and three processing plants, that's pretty consistent with my other multi-store chains that also have processing plants.
You actually do need to get those accounts first and then move them to the, you don't want to open the processing. Well, and I say that because, you know, most people that buy our system, our point of sale system, they buy it and they own it for 10 years and they have it, you know, they have us to be their point of sale system for 10 years. That's our average time of someone being our customer. But we did have someone buy their, like I'm gonna do a commercial processing plant. It's like, great, okay, we've got quite a few of those. Is that like one of many laundromats? Like, no, that's it. I'm just gonna do that. It's like, ooh. Yeah, they closed in like a year. It didn't work. That's not
Carmen Cardiel 14:03
That's brazen. Yeah. It's very ambitious, yeah.
Ian Gollahon 14:10
not a real business model. A real business model is a laundromat, and as you get enough accounts, you will eventually get these large commercial accounts.
And then you'll be like, you know what? I need a place that's just its own spot with bigger machines. So it's not creating panic and confusion. And we're having to time it, you know, off of our off-peak hours. And then it takes all the overflow, it sucks up all the overflow of those commercial accounts from maybe 10 different locations, becomes a commercial processing facility. And a lot of people just don't understand how that becomes what it is. And that's the only way that I've seen it be successful. I'm not saying you can't do that, but I have seen it tried once and it failed once. So that's
Carmen Cardiel 14:53
Yeah, I mean when we got into the wash and fold originally, we started in our Tucson location because we have three Tucson stores. So we started there many years ago and we had the paper tickets. You know, that's how everybody started and then eventually we ended up getting the Wash-Dry-Fold POS. But you know, I am very fortunate that I work for the Phillips family who has been very good about wanting growth, about they've been keen on saving money and preparing for the next steps. And one thing I'll tell you when it comes to my boss, the owner Sterling Phillips, he's ready. He wants to grow, he wants, he gets very excited about the possibilities. So he's the kind of person that can project the growth, sees the growth, and work towards it. And we're lucky enough that he's built the business enough to be able to take those kinds of investments to the next step. But I think somebody just starting in the industry would definitely have a really hard time because I mean Sterling's been in the game for well over 30 years.
It wasn't something that even coming into the wash and fold business, we took some small steps and stayed there for a little bit, and then it was okay. The industry required more and we grew as we needed. So it was a big challenge in growth. And we've had great resources and tools like the Wash-Dry-Fold POS and you know your guys' expertise to help us kind of grow and understand a little bit more about that part of the industry. But it is a lot of work to build enough clientele to justify that facility being used just for commercial accounts because you can make up some of your money with your walk-in folks, you know, walk-in services. But when you're just saying this is a committed and the only way you're generating money is commercial accounts, and you have one or two that will become strenuous really quick. Because it still
Ian Gollahon 16:41
Yeah.
Carmen Cardiel 16:41
costs the same, you're still having to pay a lot of the same utilities, a lot of the same overhead is there. You have to have a lot of the same labor readily available and trained. And I mean that is a lot, and a lot.
Ian Gollahon 16:58
I know you said you've benefited from us, but we've also really benefited from you and we've been really proud to have you as our customer and you've helped us kind of understand what it means to service and you know, because you guys have slightly different needs than maybe a three-store operator or one-store operator. And so it's really been a great opportunity for us to improve our company and our operations. But it wasn't always necessarily this way, right? You had tried some other point of sale systems. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Carmen Cardiel 17:32
We did. I know when we started, our history with Wash-Dry-Fold POS, actually that was the first system we tried and it was great and you know going into wanting to see what the next thing is where the growth was going we did try working with Cents. We were actually working side by side using Wash-Dry-Fold POS in some of our stores and then we incorporated Cents into our processing plants because we were saying we wanted to grow and we wanted to have some of those technologies readily available and it's a good system, it has a lot of great features. Ultimately, for us, what was really important is it being user friendly for our staff.
Ian Gollahon 18:13
Yeah.
Carmen Cardiel 18:14
The way that the Wash-Dry-Fold POS system is set up with being able to coordinate colors, being able to program buttons, being able to make the buttons and call it what you want really helped us a lot. It was really easy for our staff to follow some of those steps, and ultimately, a big deciding factor was what does our company need? What is the, where are we today? What do we need to be functional and have available to get into those next steps? And you know for us Cents was good. It just wasn't, we needed something a little more cost effective. We needed
Ian Gollahon 18:52
Yeah.
Carmen Cardiel 18:52
something that was tailored more to our needs. So that's what we went with. We decided to scale back and just solely use Wash-Dry-Fold because of course another challenge that we presented now is training on two systems, coverage for two systems, making sure that
Ian Gollahon 19:10
Yeah.
Carmen Cardiel 19:10
we weren't confusing our staff and we would say one thing and then having to update procedures and processes for the two different systems, making sure that titles on paperwork when we were dealing with different stores that were different POS systems. So ultimately we said we had to come together and go, when we're teaching our staff and we're showing them the system and we're going over the good, the bad and the challenges and troubleshooting, what makes the most sense to them?
Ian Gollahon 19:37
Yeah.
Carmen Cardiel 19:38
Who, when they're in front of the customer and they're feeling a little overwhelmed, who when they have to give us a call and say, hey, I need assistance, what is easier for them to click through and explain? That's just more practical. And of course, on the business aspect of it, you know, we did the math, we had to see what we were paying, our monthly subscriptions, we had to see what we're paying for processing our credit cards, and you know, I didn't make it easy on you, Ian, when we're going through all of those talks, because ultimately we wanted it to be sustainable. And we
Ian Gollahon 20:10
Yeah.
Carmen Cardiel 20:11
found that working with Wash-Dry-Fold our long-term goals, and even if sales were to drop and production wasn't quite there because that's another challenge that maybe a lot of people don't consider. Cash flow in Arizona, I don't know if everywhere else, but is seasonal. Our business drops substantially during the summer because that's just what the industry is in Arizona. And then we blossom in winter. Of course,
Ian Gollahon 20:35
Yeah.
Carmen Cardiel 20:36
we've had a lot of the industry. I don't know if it's just us, but well actually I know it's not just us. I know the industry has shifted quite a bit with the economy. There's been a lot of things that have challenged our industry and our workforce. And with that in mind, we need it to be as lean and as prepared, and our software and our everything just needed to be on point when it came to sustainability long term. And we found that this was just the better fit for us long term.
Ian Gollahon 21:03
Yeah.
I really love, I was trying to structure it all in my mind as you were saying it so I could come back and say so there was like three or four points you hit on there that I think are just so important. And it's hard for me as obviously I'm one of the owners of the company, so I'm very biased. But I try and present things in a way that it's not like okay, this software in this company is just better at every single thing than this other company. That's usually not the case. And in fact, usually you are dealing with a trade-off. And like you said, Cents is actually really good at, they're always the cutting edge of technology, right? Whatever the next latest,
Carmen Cardiel 21:45
Absolutely.
Ian Gollahon 21:47
greatest feature is, they've already built it or they're building it. And then if you look at the counter, we're always for where people are at today. So we're always trying to perfect, like, well, yeah, maybe in five years we'll all be on hovercrafts or whatever. But like what's going on in the laundromats today and what technology is needed today? And so I do think that was one side by side. The scalability with the credit card processing I think is very important because if you're doing lower amounts of revenue, credit card processing is maybe not quite as important. Maybe you're more focused on the software subscription, which I think is important as well. But at high revenue, as you scale, especially if you have a lot of locations, it's a sizable amount. And you know, I know
Carmen Cardiel 22:37
Yeah.
Ian Gollahon 22:38
I remember we really looked through all of the costs and the savings. And at scale, because our laundromats are also at scale, we've tried to build the product to price itself really well at scale. And so that's another thing to kind of look at when you're comparing the two. And then again, with amount of features, I think Cents has always had the edge on us there, or they have for quite some time where if there's a feature, they've got it, you know? But then ease of use is almost, these two things are almost opposite things. Is it going to be simple to train? Is it going to be simple to teach? Is it going to be simple to use? Simple to maintain.
And that's what we've really focused on. And honestly, part of it's because we don't have the $220 million in venture capital to go build 50 features that someone might use someday. We really are focused on, well, we've got the ladies in our laundromat, and we know what they've had struggles with, and we know what buttons worked for them, and we know what workflows worked for them. And so I thought your kind of experience with both systems was a really great kind of outside perspective of, you know, what are we looking for? And honestly, not every laundromat is gonna have a clear decision on which system to go with. They almost kinda have to weigh each of those individual subjects and figure out what's going to work best with their operation or in your case scale best with a very large operation. So I really appreciate you sharing that.
And there's also two other big competitors, right? Curbside Laundries and CleanCloud. Curbside's
Carmen Cardiel 24:26
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Ian Gollahon 24:29
excellent at delivery. CleanCloud has by far the best dry cleaning stuff. And so every system kind of has its niche and it's worth learning about all of them so that you can make the best decision for you know for your ops.
Carmen Cardiel 24:43
Absolutely.
But again, our biggest goal is what do we need right now? What do we do to sustain? And then the one thing that I've loved about working with Wash-Dry-Fold POS is I call you guys or I send you guys an issue or a concern or an idea, and before I know it, the dialogue is there, the conversation is there, whether it's happening today, maybe it's something to program in the future, a lot of the times you guys are already kind of working on a feature or working on something to better. So I think that's another real positive. You get to experience what other people get to offer and sometimes it feels like okay well maybe I absolutely knew that but then you go well how would I implement that? How would I make
Ian Gollahon 25:26
Hmm.
Carmen Cardiel 25:27
it work? Again not having staff that's very tech savvy makes it where you need to have things that are just better for the workforce at hand at the store level. But yeah I mean so far we've had a lot of luck. I mean working with Cents and working with Wash-Dry-Fold POS has been a great experience. We've learned a lot from both of the point of sale systems
Ian Gollahon 25:54
Mm-hmm.
Carmen Cardiel 25:54
but when it all came down to it for us it was just being able to teach at the store level just outweighed a lot and of course again long-term sustainability when it came to the cost for sure.
Ian Gollahon 26:05
What about the equipment? I know there's quite a bit of a difference in the equipment we use versus the equipment Cents uses. Was that any part of the deciding factor or is the equipment more of an afterthought for you?
Carmen Cardiel 26:20
No, the equipment was relevant. I have enjoyed having a true Windows type of PC system. I think that that really has given us benefits because, for example, we work with some commercial customers where they handle the logistics and we're processing for them. So being able to have that flexibility, helped.
Ian Gollahon 26:40
And it actually comes down to the way that Brian and I always thought about this in his laundromats before we started selling them is that this is the brain of the laundromat. And the brain has to be able to do more than just the point of sale system. You actually need to be like, what if you need to see your email? What if you need to do word processing? What if you need to get on the website for your card system and manage something there? And so to have a Windows computer, it's more expensive for us to sell it. You know what I mean? But it's actually a lot more functional than an Android device that is just solely made for one function. Now there's trade offs there because the Android devices are cheaper, but they don't do as much.
Carmen Cardiel 27:25
No, no, and I'm sorry, that's what I was gonna say is with this company that we process their orders, they send us an order where we have to pull up a portal and they provide us order numbers. We're able to upload pictures from our current system or our current computer, if you will, into their database. We're able to do other features, open emails, get information. We have so much communication and other abilities to do right at our fingertips there because it is a Windows product, so that has helped quite a bit in other aspects of our industry, sometimes not even related to the Wash-Dry-Fold POS itself. It's just
Ian Gollahon 28:04
Right.
Carmen Cardiel 28:04
giving accessibility to tools right at the store level and being able to use it for other capacities that benefit our self-service or for internal purposes and teaching purposes for sure. That's been a huge help. Yeah.
Ian Gollahon 28:18
And a lot of people get confused with that because it's a cloud-based software, but we sell Windows devices. And why is that? Well, because you need that to manage all the peripherals. You've got the integrated weight scale, you've got the bag label printer, you've got the receipt printer. There's a lot of things that connect to it. And so if you're gonna have a brain of your laundromat, it's good to have a big brain, you know, versus if it only does the one thing, that is fine. And that is probably a smart way to sell a lower cost system. So I definitely understand the strategy there. However, a lot of maybe first-time laundromat owners won't realize how common it is if you, you know, especially if you have like a government account or something like that. They
Carmen Cardiel 29:04
Well yeah.
Ian Gollahon 29:05
might have a different software that you need to log into and do stuff with. And if you've got an Android device or like even, you know, not to pick on Cents the whole time where I could even say like Clover or Square. Like if it's just a random, this is a point of sale system and that's all it is, it's not going to be able to do those extra things that actually a lot of times you do need to do in a laundromat. And we experienced the same things at our laundromats. And that's why we thought, you know, it really does make sense to have this be the thing that brings everything together.
Part of our thought process around communicating with our customers is when you've got an operator like yourself, you've run 55 stores, right? And for, what did you say, 12 years?
Carmen Cardiel 29:54
I've been with the company for 12 years, yeah.
Ian Gollahon 29:55
12 years, 55 stores, that's someone who knows what they're doing, you know? And you need to listen to that person when
Carmen Cardiel 30:00
I have great mentors.
Ian Gollahon 30:02
they talk, you listen. And so when you say something to us, we really listen and we really appreciate every moment you take with us and we use it as a learning opportunity. This is someone that knows what they're talking about. And so we really have a very high amount of respect for you and your team.
The next question is kind of an oddball question, but it's everyone's favorite, which is what is the craziest thing you've ever seen in any Coinless laundromat?
Carmen Cardiel 30:33
You know, we have had everything from homeless showering, you know, with a little towel holding a towel to themselves while they're waiting for their laundry to be done. We've
Ian Gollahon 30:43
shhh na
Carmen Cardiel 30:45
had them, you know, starting their houses in the back of our buildings and on the roof of our buildings. But I think the most notable in my 12 years.
Ian Gollahon 30:51
Wow. So they tried to move in?
Carmen Cardiel 30:54
Yeah, they found a space in the roof. You know, they're living up on the roof, having a good old time. you probably won't be the last.
Ian Gollahon 30:56
Okay. Okay. That's the first time I've heard that one. Homeless person moved into the laundromat. That's a good one. Okay.
Carmen Cardiel 31:05
But our biggest what the heck moment, I guess, was we are very keen on making sure our attendants know which customers are kind of coming and going. And we had an attendant that reported, man, there's this guy, he seems to be putting his clothes from the washer to the dryer, the dryer to the washer. He's been here all day back and forth, and we go, well, that's a little strange. What is he doing? Nothing. He's just on his computer doing his thing, but he's paying, he's a paying customer. And I said, well, he's paying, but she noted it's the exact same clothes back and forth, which was really odd. Well, let's keep an eye on him. We made our notes. We kind of recorded it because it was just odd behavior. And again, he was just on his computer consistently. Come to find out that what he was actually doing was very nefarious in our store. This is when Wi-Fi was, you know, the latest and greatest, and people wanted to use it, and not everybody had unlimited internet use, so they would connect to our Wi-Fi quite a bit to stream videos and whatever else. So he started using it, but he was actually using it for pornography. Yes. In
Ian Gollahon 32:02
My goodness, in the laundromat?
Carmen Cardiel 32:04
the laundromat. So what happened is the FBI actually contacted us because they found out that that was the IP address that they were using and they were distributing that like worldwide. It wasn't just a local incident, it was a big-scale thing. And because of all the records we had, and because he had registered his card in the CCI system, go figure, right? Because of the different records, we were actually able to work with the FBI to locate this gentleman because he would bounce around to a couple of our stores using our internet for that reason. And we actually worked with the FBI and they took down. I mean, this was I don't know, I want to say maybe like six or seven years ago, maybe actually longer, eight years ago. So that was one of those really crazy, like you just don't expect to have those things happen at your store. It taught us a lot about protecting our IPs and being more aware of who's in our store and you know, paying more attention to what they're doing.
So, lucky for us, our staff did see that. Our staff did report that. And even though he was a paying customer, we kind of kept an eye on him and were able to give information to the authorities that led to them being able to see. And we have cameras everywhere in our stores and in our parking lots, being able to see where they were driving, being able to follow with license plates. So, out of all the wild experiences, I think that one was the most bizarre because I hope it never happens again, you know, that we were able, that we were involved in something like that. But I guess it was a positive feeling knowing that we were able to help shut it down, that we contributed to that.
Ian Gollahon 33:31
Well yeah. I mean especially with the whole, the fact that he had actually registered the card, you had all of his info and you're like, this is the guy. That is wild. That's a good story. Honestly,
Carmen Cardiel 33:37
It was bizarre. Yeah. Yeah. That was why
Ian Gollahon 33:44
it's very good.
Carmen Cardiel 33:44
That was wild, yeah. But you know, you never know when you go out in the field what you're gonna come across. We have a lot of really amazing customers. Like we are very lucky to have long term customers that have been loyal to us that go to different stores and they don't stick to one store. They love moving around within our stores. So we get very lucky to have that. But you know, every once in a while you gotta, not every customer is meant to be your customer, I guess. If you know, it may be an easy way of saying it. Yeah.
Ian Gollahon 34:09
So as you scale, you definitely learn it's okay to say no. You
Carmen Cardiel 34:12
Everyone w
Ian Gollahon 34:13
you can't be everything to everyone.
Carmen Cardiel 34:15
Yeah.
Ian Gollahon 34:17
Carmen, you've just been such a joy to have on the show. You
Carmen Cardiel 34:20
Thank you.
Ian Gollahon 34:20
really are just a wonderful person and a wonderful customer. And we're just so happy that you've decided to do business with us and so happy that you came on the show to share with so many other people all your insights and your experience. So I really appreciate your time.
Carmen Cardiel 34:37
Thank you so much. We've loved working with you. I, like I said, working with you and Sean and being able to do our onboarding with Chelsea has been amazing. You have a great team. I probably call her randomly and send her messages, my God, help me. Because I'm not always the best at technology. And lucky for me, you guys are always literally a phone call away. I have been very spoiled. So I am very thrilled to be doing business with you and I hope that that continues for many, many years for sure. I appreciate everything you guys do.
Yeah.
Ian Gollahon 35:08
Well, likewise, I really appreciate you.
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Wash-Dry-Fold POS runs single stores and 55-store chains on the same software, with reporting that rolls up across locations and a counter screen a new hire can learn. If you want to talk through what that looks like in your stores, the call is with a laundromat industry expert.