Ownership · Semi-passive

Semi-Passive Laundromat Ownership with Liberty Laundry and Wash-Dry-Fold POS

A recast of the October 2025 Laundromat Millionaire conversation: what it actually took to get three Tulsa stores to a few hours of owner time a week.

By Ian Gollahon, CEO & Co-Founder Updated August 23, 2026 13 min read All episodes

The short version

●Semi-passive laundromat ownership is an end state built out of systems and staff, not a feature of the asset class.
●Removing coins took out a large share of the non-semi-passive work, emptying hoppers and coin boxes, and revenue went up rather than down.
●Outdoor signage at an acquired store was not designed to sell anything, and redesigning it was one of the cheaper revenue moves available.
●Order tracking and machine start integrations are what let the office see what happened at the counter without being at the counter.
●The practical lesson: buy the store, then spend the first stretch building the systems. The passive part is what those systems buy you later.

Semi-passive laundromat ownership is possible, and it is not where anybody starts. This recast of the October 2025 Laundromat Millionaire episode walks through how Liberty Laundry got three stores to a few hours of Ian’s time per week: going coinless, rebuilding signage to actually sell, fixing the equipment nobody had maintained, and putting enough systems in place that the stores run without him standing in them.

This article is based on an episode

Semi-Passive Laundromat Ownership with Liberty Laundry (Laundromat Millionaire Recast)

Laundromat Ownership · Episode 12 · Laundromat Millionaire recast

Apple Podcasts Spotify YouTube All episodes

An October 2025 recast of Ian Gollahon's appearance on the Laundromat Millionaire Show with Dave and Carla.

Liberty Laundry: A Real-World Test of Semi-Passive Laundromat Ownership

When people ask whether semi-passive laundromat ownership is actually achievable, Liberty Laundry is a useful case study. Brian Henderson’s father built the business from the ground up — one store about 20 years ago, eventually growing to a three-location chain in the Tulsa, Oklahoma area. By the time Ian and Brian acquired the business on April 21, 2023, it was generating $2.1 million in annual revenue, roughly $700,000 per store.

The acquisition wasn’t a standard market transaction. Brian’s father made his position clear: he was selling the laundromats that year, whether Ian and Brian bought them or not. For Brian, owning the family business had always been part of the plan. For Ian, who had spent years talking to over 3,000 laundromat owners through Wash Dry Fold POS, the fundamentals for semi-passive ownership were already there — a well-run, fully staffed operation with years of operating history and a management team largely intact from Brian’s father’s era.

The three Liberty Laundry locations sit in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, spaced roughly 10 miles apart: about 10 minutes east and 20 minutes west from the center store. Brian came up in the business as an attendant, moved into management, and eventually — with Ian — into ownership. Most of the management team Brian’s father had built was still on board at the time of the sale.

Growing Revenue from $2.1M to $2.5M

Ian and Brian added $400,000 in laundromat revenue in roughly two years, all while moving the business toward a more semi-passive footing. The moves were practical, not speculative.

Getting all machines running. Some equipment had been waiting on parts for months. Ian and Brian treated that as an urgent problem and pushed distributors to resolve backlogs immediately.

Switching to Laundry Works. Liberty Laundry had been a hybrid operation — half coin, half card. Removing coins eliminated the labor of managing coin boxes and hoppers, which is the single biggest barrier to semi-passive laundromat ownership in most stores. Customers who came in with coins were converted at the counter: hand them a $20 bill, explain they get $22 back on the card plus a $2 bonus, and most of them don’t look back. Card customers tend to load larger balances and return more consistently because they still have money on account.

Redesigning outdoor signage. Ian’s background is in billboard advertising. He rebuilt the signage around one question: what brings in a customer who already has a washer and dryer at home? Comforters. They’re fast to process, command a high per-piece price, and require a machine large enough that most home units can’t handle them.

🔑 Insider Key

Never charge comforters by the pound. Customers will try to sneak them into a regular laundry bag. Comforters need their own washer and their own dryer. Liberty Laundry charges $40–50 per piece and features the word “comforters” prominently on every piece of outdoor signage. If your self-serve signage doesn’t mention comforters, you’re leaving that revenue on the table.

Rebuilding the website. A redesigned site produced a 10x increase in job applications, improving hiring quality across all three stores. Ian hired this out rather than doing it himself, and it paid for itself immediately through a better candidate pipeline.

Raising employee pay. Everyone got a raise from day one. Better pay combined with clearer training and a real management structure improved retention.

Liberty Laundry’s Delaware store is on track to do $1 million in self-serve revenue in 2025 alone. That store cost roughly $1 million to build and equip about 20 years ago. Ian estimates a comparable new build today would run $2–3 million — a useful data point when reviewing insurance coverage levels.

The Team Hierarchy Behind Semi-Passive Laundromat Ownership

Liberty Laundry employs roughly 25 people across three stores. The staffing structure that makes semi-passive laundromat ownership possible is built around four layers, each with a specific accountability. Skip a layer and the model breaks — every issue ends up on the owner’s phone.

Attendants. All three stores are fully attended at all times. Unattended laundromats generate equipment abuse, one-star reviews from customers who can’t get machines to work, and real insurance liability. Full attendance also enables the wash, dry, fold operation — the revenue stream that offsets payroll costs and makes semi-passive ownership financially viable.

🔑 Insider Key

In September 2025, Liberty Laundry did $200,000 in top-line revenue with $65,000 going to payroll — and $65,000 coming in from wash, dry, fold. In Ian’s experience, drop-off revenue offsets attendance costs almost dollar for dollar. Fully attended stores aren’t a cost center when wash, dry, fold is running.

Store managers. Each location has a manager responsible for their staff, training, scheduling, and floor operations. Ian required each store manager to handle their own hiring instead of routing everything through ops manager Becky. If someone quits, it’s the store manager’s problem to backfill — not Becky’s. That single change moved real accountability to the right level in the hierarchy.

Operations manager (Becky). She sits above the three store managers and handles cross-store coordination, supply runs, and any escalations that shouldn’t reach Ian or Brian. Ian’s rule: he never talks directly to attendants about their jobs. Every communication flows through the hierarchy — a non-negotiable for semi-passive ownership at three stores.

Facilities manager (Trevor). Trevor’s entire job is the physical assets — equipment repairs, vendor coordination, roof maintenance, water heater replacements, and anything that breaks across three stores. When Ian and Brian flew to the Clean Show, a water heater failed at one location. Trevor had it resolved before they landed back in Tulsa.

🔑 Insider Key

Trevor came up as an attendant and showed initiative — asking what was wrong with equipment, offering to help fix it. Brian and Sean trained him on washer and dryer repair by having him shadow every service call. The skills were teachable; the reliability had to be demonstrated first. Ian’s view: a facilities manager is hard to justify at one store, but once you have three locations and this role in place, losing it would be an emergency.

For software company hires, Ian uses Indeed and filters hard: 100 applications, reach out to 20, send a scheduling link, talk to the 10 who actually book, interview 3–4 in person. The qualifying test before the interview: if they can’t book a calendar link, that’s a signal. The same filtering discipline applies to laundromat hires through the store website.

Three Dryer Fires and the Limits of Semi-Passive Ownership

Three laundromat dryer fires in the first 12 months of owning Liberty Laundry. Two were among the worst the stores had seen in a decade of operation. They are also the clearest argument for why semi-passive laundromat ownership cannot mean unattended.

Fire 1. A customer washed a down comforter and put it in a stack dryer on high, then left without waiting. Feathers shedding from the comforter reached the open flame behind the dryer unit. Attendants caught it and contained it with a fire extinguisher. The dryer was salvageable.

Fire 2. A customer loaded spa towels soaked in nail polish remover into a dryer without washing them first. The towels were still saturated with alcohol when they hit heat. The fire department responded, the building had to be evacuated, and Ian drove up and smelled smoke a block away. Despite being the worst fire the stores had ever seen, full attendance meant a fast response — they were open again before the end of the day.

Fire 3. Residue from Fire 2 had worked into the gas valve of the bottom unit in the same stack dryer. Even after cleaning and inspection, lint had gotten into the gas line. That unit caught fire on its own later. Because it was identified and contained quickly, it was the least severe of the three.

Ian’s point about attendance: if those stores had been unattended, Fire 1 likely takes the whole building. Insurance matters, but it doesn’t replace the response time that comes with having staff on the floor. Semi-passive ownership doesn’t mean nobody’s there — it means the owner doesn’t have to be.

Fire Prevention: Dryer Temperature Settings

After the second fire, Ian changed the commercial dryer temperature settings across all three Liberty Laundry locations. Speed Queen and Alliance equipment ships from the factory set to 190°F. Ian’s distributor typically installs at 180°F. Liberty Laundry now runs at 170–175°F.

🔑 Insider Key

Speed Queen residential dryers max out at 155°F. Commercial units set to 190°F at the factory are running 35 degrees higher than what Speed Queen considers appropriate for home use. Liberty Laundry dropped to 170–175°F and has not received a single customer complaint about dry times. The tradeoff is roughly 5–10% longer cycle time — and you can price for that.

Ian’s broader point: fire is one of the few genuine existential risks in laundromat ownership. He doesn’t believe AI will displace laundromats in the next five years. He does believe a poorly handled fire in an unattended store can destroy a business. Full attendance buys response time. Lower dryer temperatures reduce ignition risk. Both are worth the small operational cost.

He also recommends reviewing insurance coverage regularly — not just whether you have replacement cost language in the policy, but whether the dollar limit reflects current replacement costs. Equipment costs have roughly doubled in the last 10 years. A policy with replacement cost language but a $650,000 cap won’t cover a $900,000 rebuild.

Wash Dry Fold POS: Software for Semi-Passive Operations

Wash Dry Fold POS now serves roughly 1,200 laundromat locations — up from around 300 when Brian Henderson first appeared on the Laundromat Millionaire Show in 2021. Brian built the original system to solve real problems in his own stores: mixed-up orders, missing clothes, no way to track where every order was at any given moment, and employee theft through shared machine start cards. Without software like this, semi-passive laundromat ownership at multi-store scale is effectively impossible. He tried 12 other systems first.

Mobile and cloud-based. Owners can check any store from their phone in real time — who’s clocked in, how many orders are on the shelf, what’s in progress across all locations.

Kanban order tracking. The system’s core feature from day one. Every order moves through a visual board (shelf → wash → dry → done) with timestamps at each stage. When a customer claims a missing item, the timestamp ties to camera footage within about a minute.

Alliance machine start integration. The first integration of its kind between any point-of-sale system and any major equipment manufacturer. From the Wash Dry Fold POS interface, an employee selects the order and taps the washer numbers — the machines start automatically through Speed Queen Insights and Alliance’s platform, and the vend value ties directly to the order. Ian and Alliance launched this publicly at the Clean Show. See the full list of current Wash Dry Fold POS integrations to explore what’s available for your store setup.

Laundry Works + Wash Links integration. The Wash Links employee app now pushes orders from Wash Dry Fold POS and starts the correct machines from the employee’s individual phone. No shared card floating between staff members.

Machine repair ticket system. When something breaks, a ticket routes to the facilities manager. Ian rarely sees these — Trevor handles them. The system maintains a full repair history per machine, which is useful if a newer machine is generating frequent tickets and a distributor claims each call involves a different unit. Explore the full Wash Dry Fold POS features list for this and related tools.

ESD Fast Card integration. Now live alongside Alliance and Laundry Works.

Credit card processing at 2.65%. Industry standard runs 4–5%. The real cost is driven by card type — a 3% cash-back card means the issuing bank captures nearly 3% on that transaction. Wash Dry Fold POS passes through processing close to cost.

How Wash Dry Fold POS positions against the other major players, in Ian’s framing:

CleanCloud — well-suited for dry cleaning operations and international stores; based in London, available in many languages and countries
Curbside — built delivery-first, designed around curbside pickup and delivery as the primary workflow
Cents — focused on cutting-edge integrations and marketplace positioning
Wash Dry Fold POS — easiest to use (Ian has never heard otherwise from someone who has used multiple systems), most affordable, and built specifically for operators whose staff are not tech-savvy

Catching Employee Theft with Machine Start Ratios

The third reason people call Wash Dry Fold POS — after opening a new store and after wash/dry/fold volume outgrows pen and paper — is laundromat employee theft. Stopping it is one of the silent prerequisites of semi-passive laundromat ownership: you can’t step away from a business that’s quietly bleeding cash. Ian can estimate how much was stolen just from the amount: $200–300 usually means coin or cash skimming. $20,000–30,000 almost always means a manager was running wash, dry, fold orders through the card system without logging them as orders.

Liberty Laundry’s benchmark: machine starts should equal roughly 30% of wash, dry, fold revenue. On a $100 order, about $30 in machine starts is expected. If an employee is logging $1,000 per week in wash/dry/fold but showing $500 in machine starts, something is off. The same ratio catches inefficiency — using an 80-pound machine for a 30-pound load also shows up as a skewed number.

🔑 Insider Key

The Alliance machine start integration closes the biggest theft vector: it ties each machine vend directly to an order and employee ID, so there’s no shared card that can be handed off to a customer or used for side work. When machine starts are connected to individual employee devices and linked to specific orders in Wash Dry Fold POS, running a hidden wash/dry/fold operation inside your store becomes significantly harder to conceal.

Ian tracks the vend value — the retail price of starting the machine — not actual utility cost, which is pennies. Tracking vend value gives a consistent, meaningful ratio that can be held to a standard without requiring detailed cost accounting on every load.

Questions owners ask

Can semi-passive laundromat ownership really exist?

Semi-passive laundromat ownership is real, but not from day one. In Ian Gollahon’s experience with Liberty Laundry, it required roughly six months of full-time work to put the right team, processes, and technology in place. That included hiring a layered management team (store managers, an ops manager, and a facilities manager), switching from coins to a Laundry Works card system, and implementing Wash Dry Fold POS for order tracking and accountability. Once those systems were running, Ian and Brian Henderson combined work roughly 20 hours per week across three stores doing $2.5 million in annual revenue at approximately 40% net margin.

What dryer temperature should a laundromat use to prevent fires?

Based on Ian Gollahon’s experience after three dryer fires at Liberty Laundry, running commercial dryers at 170 to 175 degrees Fahrenheit is a reasonable target. Speed Queen and Alliance equipment ships from the factory set to 190 degrees Fahrenheit, and distributors typically install at 180. Liberty Laundry lowered all dryers to the 170 to 175 range and has not received customer complaints about dry times. The tradeoff is roughly 5 to 10 percent longer cycle time.

How can laundromat owners detect employee theft?

Ian Gollahon uses machine start ratios to flag potential theft at Liberty Laundry. In his experience, machine starts should equal roughly 30 percent of wash, dry, fold revenue. On a one hundred dollar order, about thirty dollars in machine starts is expected. If an employee’s machine starts are significantly higher than their logged wash, dry, fold orders, it may indicate they are starting machines for outside customers using the card system without recording orders. Wash Dry Fold POS tracks this ratio per employee, and the Alliance machine start integration ties each vend directly to an order and employee ID.

How does Wash Dry Fold POS compare to CleanCloud, Curbside, and Cents?

According to Ian Gollahon, each platform has a different primary strength. CleanCloud is well-suited for dry cleaning operations and international stores, as it is based in London and available in many languages. Curbside is built around pickup and delivery as its core workflow. Cents focuses on cutting-edge integrations and marketplace positioning. Wash Dry Fold POS is designed to be the easiest to use and most affordable option, built specifically for laundromat operators whose staff are not tech-savvy. It also offers exclusive features like the Alliance machine start integration and a machine repair ticket system.

How do you grow revenue after acquiring a laundromat?

Ian Gollahon grew Liberty Laundry from $2.1 million to $2.5 million in revenue by focusing on several areas after acquisition. He and Brian Henderson repaired all machines immediately, switched from coins to a Laundry Works card system, redesigned outdoor signage to highlight comforters as a high-margin per-piece service, rebuilt the store website, gave all employees raises, and hired a dedicated facilities manager to maintain equipment. They also ensured full attendance at all times, which enabled wash, dry, fold revenue to offset payroll costs and helped maintain the five-star reviews that drive self-serve traffic.

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 semi-passive laundromat ownership, going coinless, acquiring and repositioning underperforming stores, machine start integrations and order tracking.

Full episode transcript

Ian Gollahon 00:00

It's not semi passive when you buy it. And unless you're buying it for a lot of money, right? Unless you're paying a really good multiple on it and actually paying, buying it for what it's worth. And most people don't want to do that. They want to get it in, you know, I got this great deal on this laundromat and you bought yourself a job for the next five years. And if you self-improve and if you hire the right team and if you put the right processes in place,

Dave 00:02

Mm-hmm.

Ian Gollahon 00:23

If, if, then it can be semi-passive and you can get it to a place to where you don't have to be there every day.

Dave 00:26

Mm-hmm.

Ian Gollahon 00:31

Hello and welcome to the laundromat ownership podcast. I'm your host Ian Galahan. Me and my business partner, Brian Henderson own three laundromats on the Tulsa, Oklahoma area called Liberty Laundry in 2025. Those laundromats did $2.5 million top line revenue, but we are also the founders of the original point of sale system for laundromats, which is wash, dry, fold POS. You might sometimes see it as WDF POS online. That's what the

call us in the forums sometimes. But wash dry full POS and Liberty Laundry are the two companies that we own in the laundry space. And for this podcast, I'm actually going to be recasting my very first podcast episode,

The thing that got it all started was the Dave and Carla men's laundromat millionaire podcast that I was a guest on. Most of the podcasts I do are about guests or topics. And on this podcast, it's really going to be them asking questions about me and my past.

Without further ado, let's get into my interview on the laundromat millionaire podcast

Dave 01:48

Ian, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to have you on the Laundromat Millionaire Show.

Ian Gollahon 01:53

Thank you for having me. I'm excited.

Dave 01:54

Yeah,

for those that are watching this, Ian may look familiar to you, especially if you were just at the Clean Show. If you're familiar with Wash-Dry-Fold POS, one of the software platforms that's out there, they had a pretty substantial booth at the show just a few months ago. But the truth is we've known Ian and his business partner, Brian Henderson for a while. In fact, Carla, we were just talking before we went live that Brian was the number eight episode of the entire show, which was almost 100 episodes now.

Yeah, I had to go look it up. Was back May of 2021. So it's been a while since we had Brian on here and heard the whole wash, dry fold POS story and how it came to be. So if it's been a while, I mean, it's four years old. It's a little bit evergreen, but I'm sure a lot has changed. And that's why we had Ian on here today is Ian and Brian as business partners have been up to some pretty big things. They've acquired a chain of kind of turnkey laundromats, increased the revenue substantially by $400,000.

In just a couple years, and they're still running and growing wash dry full POS. So obviously a ton would change in the technology world, and even one year, let alone four. And so this is a little bit of an update and a little bit of a telling Ian story, which is, you know, slightly different than Brian's story. But I'm sure you look for like a familiar face to a lot of people in the industry, because you've been around a while. How long have you been in the industry? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, how long has it been since you've been in the industry? It's been

Ian Gollahon 03:13

I think I talked to about half the people at the last Clean Show, so yeah, lot people recognize me.

Dave 03:21

10 years?

Ian Gollahon 03:22

Yeah, I started in 2016. So about 10 years, I guess maybe nine, but yeah, it's been a while. I've learned a lot. And man, has it been such a good thing. It's really changed my life for the better. I just can't imagine if I had not met Brian Henderson and gotten into laundromats. What would I be doing today? I don't know, but I don't think I would be, you know, on the same journey of self-improvement and self-actualization that I've been on. And so

Dave 03:25

Okay.

Okay. Yeah.

Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 03:51

It's really been a blessing for me.

Dave 03:53

Wow, very cool. Prior to getting into the laundry industry, was your background more in software development? Is that how he got you into wash, dry, fold POS?

Ian Gollahon 04:05

Great question, he actually in sales and marketing and I was trying to sell him or I did sell him some billboards for his laundromats, just like some like little smaller billboards, more like eye level, it's stoplights kind of around the laundromats. They didn't really work that great, but we became friends anyway. I mean, he was like, I'll try them. I gave him like a cheap deal on, you let's just give it a shot. I mean, maybe they paid for themselves, you know, but they didn't have some amazing outcome, but.

Dave 04:12

Really?

Ha ha ha.

Ian Gollahon 04:33

Me and him, he's just such a nice guy. He's just one of those salt of the earth type of people. I've honestly never met someone just so honest and caring and giving. I remember when we first started working together, we went to go eat at a little local chain, Rib Crib, and the lady didn't charge us for our drinks. And I grew up, we didn't have a lot of money, so was like for us, free sodas at sit-down restaurant, this is our birthday, but.

Dave 05:00

You're like, yes!

Ian Gollahon 05:02

Brian was like, you didn't put the sodas on the tab. And she was like, don't worry about them. He was like, no, we had the sodas. I want the business owner to get paid for the sodas we drank. So if you wouldn't mind putting them on the tab. So she took the tab back and put the sodas on. And I was like, wow, what a person that it would never even have occurred to me that that level of honesty. He's really an inspiring person to work with. He's really.

I feel like helped me a lot on my own personal journey. So, yeah, it's been great. But no, before that I did billboards, I did sales. So I've been in sales for, since I was like 14.

Dave 05:38

Yeah.

Has that

been your primary role at Wash, Dry, Fold POS? Was more on the sales side of it?

Ian Gollahon 05:47

Absolutely, and even at Liberty Laundry for the laundromats we've acquired, it really has just been about increasing revenue. And I started in sales because my dad was in sales, I thought, well, if he could do it, I can do it. And so it's kind of a family thing. But also, just haven't, a lot of other work is really hard and sales has always been easy to me. You just talk to people. I like people, I like talking and…

So it's just, it's been fun and you do get to help people occasionally and that's always good. And so yeah, I've just been in sales. Think I remember like one of my first little sales thing was like, you know, the door to door, you're selling like newspaper subscriptions or like kids, you know, I was like 14. I couldn't drive yet, so I couldn't get a real job. But this guy would pick me up and yeah, we all got back to the van and I think everyone else had sold combined. There was like six kids or something, but they had sold three and I had sold 12.

And so was like, okay, it sold four times the rest of everyone else combined. So I guess this is what I'm going to do. And I've just been doing it ever since. So that's, that's kind what I like to do. And it's, kind of moved more into management and marketing and growth and not as much. Don't do sales calls every day like I used to, but I'm still in that space. Yeah.

Dave 06:50

Yeah.

So we definitely want to get to Wash, Dry, Fold POS. And we want kind of an update on so much has changed since we last had Brian on here. But before we get into that, let's hit a little bit on your laundromat journey. So you acquired three laundromats, basically a turnkey chain of laundromats back in 2022. Is that correct? Liberty Laundry. So three laundromats in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, which is your hometown, I assume.

Ian Gollahon 07:20

Yeah, Liberty Laundry, yep.

Yeah, yeah, yeah,

Dave 07:28

Yeah.

So a couple of things I want to talk about with that is one, I know you all increased revenue, even though it was a turnkey store, you would think, okay, there's not much more you can do. I want to hear about how you increase revenue. And the other thing that I really want to hit on is the fact you all do this along with wash, dry, fold POS tells me you do not work in your business, but you work on your business. So kind of how you manage that. Let's start with

Let's start with how did you increase the revenue from 2.1 million at acquisition to now 2.5 million? What kind of things did you figure out that could bring in that extra revenue?

Ian Gollahon 08:03

That's right.

Yeah, and we acquired it on April 21st, 2023. 2023. But yeah, so, you know, we just looked at it and said, okay, what can we do to just improve the situation as fast as we can? Obviously there were some machines that needed to be repaired, right? So getting all the machines working. And it wasn't that the previous owner was slacking, it's just that you know how it is with distributors, you know, all that parts on order or whatever. And so we were like, look,

The parts been on order for six months. You guys gotta fix it or we got a real problem here. We really tried to get all the machines fixed as quick as we can. The logo was out of date. The logo had a quarter. We did laundry works. That was one of the other things we did, put laundry works on all the stores, which we thought that would decrease the revenue. But turns out just getting rid of all the coins. People love the bonus. They like to get the $2 bonus when they add 20 bucks.

Just making the place we gave everyone a raise, right? All the employees got raises. We did hire more people. We have a facilities manager that his only job is now just to go around and fix everything as soon as it breaks. And when you have three stores, there's a lot of things that break. And so, yeah, just putting in automated systems. But then one of the big things, my background being in billboard advertising,

I noticed on like the outdoor signage, it was not designed to actually sell. And so I redesigned all the outdoor signage to actually bring people in. And so if you look at some of the increased revenue, a lot of it is comforters because I put comforters on all the, self-serve, comforters, like you've only got room for like three words. And one of those words should be comforters at a laundromat because the self-serve people you're gonna get, cause they need a place to go to laundry, but.

There's a lot of people that have washers and dryers at home, but they're not big enough for king-size comforters. And so we get a ton of comforters. They're so easy to wash, right? They don't take a lot of time. And I think we charge like 40, 50 bucks per comforter. So it's a great revenue stream. So just improving the outdoor marketing, the outdoor signage was really good. And then honestly, just offering a better product. Again, the last owner was great and he grew it to that 2.1.

Million, was about 700 per store, roughly. And it just kind of plateaued there and he was kind of more focused on, he's retiring, know, he was ready to get out and I totally get it. And he had built it to where he was happy with it. And then when we got it, we were just like, what can we fix? What can we improve on that we've learned talking to other laundromats over the years? And yeah, it turns out we were able to actually, I mean,

I was just thinking about this earlier today. I work at it a few hours a week. Was just over there fixing a bill breaker, because we still don't let people into the bill breakers. But everything else we have employees for. And Brian probably works on it 10 hours a week. So I think between the two of us, we probably do under 20. And it is 2.5 in 2025. And then the net profit is at least 40%. And it's an S-corp.

Dave 11:18

Nice.

Ian Gollahon 11:22

Business that you don't put a lot of time into. Have kind of, people call it semi-passive, but you know it's not semi-passive until you really put the work in to make it semi-passive. And so that's what we've done, but we are very much process people. And when we first acquired it that first year, we were working on it 40 hours a week just to get all the processes in place so that we could step back and focus on the software company again. And that's what we've done. And that's really, you know, that's what excites us.

The laundromats have really been such a great learning experience, not only managing people, but I've been serving laundromats since 2016, but it's quite a different thing when you get that phone call and it's on fire. So it's been an experience.

Dave 12:08

Yes,

it is. Yeah. I do want to talk about the fires, but I want to back up because you hit a lot of things that you did to help increase that revenue. So first, can we back up and talk about the payment system? I know you said that, so you integrated Laundroworks into all three locations, correct?

Ian Gollahon 12:18

Yeah.

Yes, and yeah, what that means is we took away the coins because obviously emptying those little boxes and the hoppers, that is so much of the non-semi-passive part of the business is managing those coins. So we put Laundroworks in all three stores right away and we've loved that product. We actually just built a much deeper integration with them. We can talk about later on the software side, but we've been really happy with that. It's really taken a lot off our plate.

Dave 12:37

Yes.

So do your customers have to purchase a Laundromat's card to use the Laundromat? Okay. Okay.

Ian Gollahon 12:59

To start the machines they do. And so we were a hybrid store where you could do coin

or card. And so we thought that taking coins away would reduce the income. And that's what every laundromat owners, our people are all coins, you know. And I'm sure that's true in some areas, but we had about half coins and half card. And so you would think that some people would just walk away. But if they come in with coins and they're like, wait, how do I start the machine? That's what employees are for. Train your employees to go be like,

Oh, you've got coins, great. Come on over here to the register. I'm gonna get you this $20 bill here. And if you put this in, you're gonna get 22 back and machine starts. Oh, wow. So it's so much better than coins. And then guess what? They don't spend all $22. So they have to come back to your store. And so it does build loyalty. And then, yeah, honestly, it's just been better system for everyone. So yeah, I do think that has increased revenue actually and increased loyalty as well.

And people just like to load, they like to load bigger balances because they get that bonus money.

Dave 14:01

Well, and I'm not sure when these were built, would it be, was it about 20 years ago? Is that about right? I want to say, this one was about 20 years ago and you acquired them about two and a half, three years ago. So, I mean, it's a very different time in the industry. You know, we got in the industry in 2010 and those would have been built roughly five years before that, at least the first one. There was a very different time in the industry back then where, you know, our industry has evolved an awful lot just regarding technology. So there was, there was a

Ian Gollahon 14:07

The oldest one, yeah. The oldest one's about 20 years ago and then…

That's right.

Dave 14:30

Better argument for coins when we got in the industry 15, 20 years ago and when these stores were built. And I think that's I know for us, it's kind of run its cycle. It sounds like you guys felt like it had run its cycle too. But I do want to clarify on this that that Brian, which is your business partner, right, you guys own these together. This was Brian's family that built these right. And he started out in the industry as I don't know if it was an operations manager, but

I know he worked there in some way. That's kind of the, you go back to the episode eight, were talking about, that's kind of his story into the industry is they had a problem in these stores with a POS. And back then, none of the softwares and POS has really existed. So Brian was solving a problem for himself. So I find it interesting that he took that journey in the, you know, in his younger years, and not that he's not young now, but, and then he, and then he evolved into wash, dry, full pickup and delivery, or I'm sorry, wash, dry, POS and did that for

Do I want to say eight years, five, eight, 10 years, something like that. And then he's kept that business going with a team that you all have built and your partnership. But now he's gone back to owning laundromats or I guess gone to owning laundromats by acquiring his family's chain. That's a really interesting journey.

Ian Gollahon 15:43

Yeah, the way his dad put it to us was, I'm selling the laundromats this year, whether you guys buy them or not. So, for us it was like, you know, he always wanted to own the family business and he didn't start as the ops manager, he started as just, you know, running the desk, you know, just as an attendant and kind of moved up and really self-improved to get his management skills up there. And so it's funny when we bought the laundromats from his dad, most of the management team he had hired

Dave 15:48

Mmm, okay.

An attendant. Yeah, yeah.

Ian Gollahon 16:12

Or they had hired people and they were still on board. So he had hired them and then they had hired the other, like one of our managers, Amber got hired by one of the managers, Becky, that he had hired. It was funny that, yeah, he didn't really have to introduce himself because he had really helped build that company to what it was. It's funny too, even with the point of sale side of things, and I do think this is important for the conversation in general,

Dave 16:14

Interesting.

Right, yeah. Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 16:41

It's not like, hey, we can't find a good point of sale system, let's build one. It was more like the orders are getting messed up. They're getting mixed around. We're getting too busy. Things are getting lost. Know, people aren't picking up their laundry, you know, for like a week. Like how do we get it back off the shelf? Of course, employee theft, which you never think you have until you realize you do. And so there was all these individual problems. And I think,

Dave 16:49

Mm-hmm.

Ian Gollahon 17:11

Brian was really early in the industry about implementing technology in the laundromats to help solve those problems. And just so happened that the point of sale system, that's the computer on the desk that can put the systems in place to help you solve all those organizational issues. So that's kind of how we got into there as he tried, think 12 other systems and maybe some were built more for, you know, dry cleaners or some were built more for.

Dave 17:37

Mm-hmm.

Ian Gollahon 17:39

Whatever other kind of store and eventually it became clear, especially if we were going to integrate with all the major brands like Laundroworks and Alliance and Speed Queen, we really had to have our own platform to build everything that we needed to run our stores or to run John stores that are now our stores. So it ended up working out for everyone.

Dave 17:55

Yeah. So this may

be an obvious question, but I'll ask it anyways, just for the people that are watching back at home. But what made you and Brian want to acquire the stores? Mean, his dad said, I'm selling them whether you're buying them or not. I mean, you could have just as easily been like, you know, we got enough on our plates with our team and our company. What made you guys want to buy those?

Ian Gollahon 18:15

Well, that may be what I have said. That might have been my thought initially. Like, we've got a lot on our plate, you realize. But you know…

Dave 18:17

At the time.

Right. You were actually, you were both

actually aware they don't run themselves. Some people think they do. You guys do better.

Ian Gollahon 18:30

Right. I was like, you know you

want to do other stuff besides work, right? And we were going to acquire another business with even more employees because the software business you can run pretty lean, but the laundromats, I think we've got 25 employees on staff at any given time between the three stores. So it's actually in some ways it's a more complicated business. It's more complicated in some ways, it's more simple in others.

Dave 18:35

Right.

Ian Gollahon 18:58

As far as managing personnel, there's more personnel to manage and more overhead in general and more asset heavy as well, of course. But I think, you know, Brian and I always talk about what kind of vehicle do we want to be in, right? And I think people ask themselves that at some point in their lives with their careers of where do I want to end up? What's the destination? And

You know, if I'm walking, do I need to get on a bike to get there? Do I need to be in a car? Do I need to get on a plane? And, you know, for us, the destination was, well, we want to have, you know, semi-passive income for the rest of our lives, even into retirement. And you can't really run a software company into your 60s, or at least I haven't seen it done at the startup level, maybe if it's an established software company. But for us,

this was kind of the business that we want to own forever. And Watchtry Full POS is the business that maybe we'll own forever as well, but we are really aggressive about hiring young talents and putting people there that we know can run the business without us for the software side of things. And then for the laundromat side of things, I think we're actually the younger people sometimes. And it's more about the…

Our ladies, our team of ladies that we love. And we do have people of all ages, but I think for us, was more of a looking at our own personal portfolios and do we want laundromats in them? And having talked to 3000 laundromat owners, we knew it was a good business and we knew it was a good thing to buy, it was a good investment. We knew it wasn't semi-passive to your point, but also we knew how good Liberty Laundry was run.

Dave 20:22

Mm-hmm.

Ian Gollahon 20:47

And staffed and we knew that it was already pretty turnkey like he said. And when you've already done the due diligence on something like that, it makes it kind of hard to pass up an opportunity like that. I think for Brian, it was never a question. He was always gonna run his dad's laundromats one day. And so I think this was just the right time for everyone.

Dave 20:47

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. So I want to address something real quick before we get into the rest of the story on both sides of the equation so you've used the word semi passive several times already and Everybody's ears are tickling a little bit right now because whether you say I know I can see people at home just freaking out and I would love for you to expound upon that and I know what you mean because I mean Carla works a couple hours in the business doing some bookkeeping in our Queen City laundry I literally work two hours a week in the business almost every week

Ian Gollahon 21:20

They're like, it's not semi-passive. I know, it's not. I know, yeah.

Dave 21:37

It's really not that the business doesn't need us to run it. It's that it needs somebody to run it. And if you grow the business enough, as far as the margins and the net profit, things like that, that there's a there's a misconception in the industry that there aren't enough profits in the business for the owner to step out of the business and hire layers of management. We are proof that's not true. You are proof that's not true. But I'd love for you to just expand upon that a little bit more. And I wonder

how semi passive was it when you bought it versus what you've done today. Cause it sounds like you guys did an awful lot to make it more semi passive than maybe what you acquired.

Ian Gollahon 22:16

I think a lot of times what people mean when they say they're going to make a semi-password. What we've seen a lot is they buy it and then they treat it like a vending machine. Right. And I'm not saying that's where it was when we bought it, but I do think if you're not actively investing, right. And I know, you know, CapEx, no one loves it, but you have to be investing in equipment and in the buildings and in the people.

Dave 22:25

Mm-hmm.

Ian Gollahon 22:43

And in the processes and everything. If you're constantly doing that and working on the business, like you said, you can eventually bring it to a place where it doesn't function. It's not like owning a stock, but it's certainly not like working the desk at a gas station or something like that. And I do think the industry, like you said, it has shifted. You know, I think the sales pitch you hear for buying a laundromat is

Yeah, you'll just buy it and it's gonna be in your portfolio. But typically it's a journey to get to that. And luckily we kind of found it, the journey had mostly been done and that's one of the reasons we were willing to buy it because we knew it wasn't gonna be like, hey, you've got to turn this hole in the wall into this huge business. Was already, I mean, 2.1 million is not shabby for three laundromats. So, but yeah, to get it to a semi-passive place.

Dave 23:17

Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 23:39

We did have to work some with the management team. We did have to hire more people. We had to fix a lot of things. We had to put a lot of processes in place because there was a lot of cash handling when we bought it. And that cash handling is probably the hardest thing to outsource because I mean, it's just thousands of dollars in cash, right? And you don't necessarily have a lot of employees that you want to put in that situation to have their hands on what feels to them like life changing money. And so,

So I think, you know, yeah, I think it's not semi passive when you buy it. And unless you're buying it for a lot of money, right? Unless you're paying a really good multiple on it and actually paying, buying it for what it's worth. And most people don't want to do that. They want to get it in, you know, I got this great deal on this laundromat and you bought yourself a job for the next five years. And if you self-improve and if you hire the right team and if you put the right processes in place,

Dave 24:15

Mm-hmm.

Ian Gollahon 24:37

If, if, then it can be semi-passive and you can get it to a place to where you don't have to be there every day. But I know when John bought or when he built the first store, he was sleeping there for a little bit of time. Like, I mean, he was there all the time. So he kind of did the hard part, you know? And he didn't have the financial infrastructure that we had going into it, because we already had a really good business.

Dave 24:40

Mm-hmm.

I remember that, yeah.

Worked every hour. Was Wow. Yep.

Ian Gollahon 25:06

With cashflow, you know, he had just, you know, basically just transitioned away from the recording industry or the, I think it was a disc jockey and then all that consolidation happened. And so, you know, he just needed to provide for his family. And so he was just put every penny he had into an SBA loan to get it going. And it was nowhere near semi-passive when it started, but he was able to build a really good asset for his family and then really able to kind of secure

and exit that asset, even though he sold it to his son, he still has, you know, now the cash and a trust, right? And then his son is also, you know, now can manage the asset and we plan to, you know, leave it to Brian's kids as well. So it's kind of stayed in the family, but it's also been able to be realized as an asset that's no longer at risk, you know, when, go ahead.

Dave 26:01

Since we rarely

have time on these episodes to get into the nitty gritty and as much or as little as you'd like to share, I'd love to hear some of the detailed minutia of what you all did when you and Brian acquired it to what it is today. You talked about we hired some people. What does that look like? Did you hire a director of operations? Like as much or as little, know, you're What's the hierarchy of your team? Yeah, what does the team look like? Talked about to be semi-passive, part of it's building the team. Part of it too, that

Ian Gollahon 26:24

Yeah.

Dave 26:30

That know, that Brian's dad didn't have is the technology, like the switching to LaunderWorks. A lot of that makes it easier to become semi-passive. So there's that too, but what kind of team hierarchy do you have in place where you all can step aside?

Ian Gollahon 26:35

Hmm.

Yeah.

Great question. I think this really is the secret sauce. I think people don't even realize like what owning a laundromat, like what even the asset structure behind it should or could be. So let's say you've built yourself a nice laundromat and you've spent half a million on the build out or more. Then your machines, excuse me, there are hundreds of thousands of dollars, right? Those machines are.

And if you do not have them monitored, they will get abuse. They will get broken. You will have naked people in your laundry mat doing drugs. Like that's just what happens in a laundromat that's not attended. I'm sorry. Fully attended. It's like, why pay more insurance to have a higher risk portfolio? It's not really cheaper. And the thing is, you know, if you look at Liberty Laundry in Oklahoma or Liberty Laundry, okay, is the website.

Dave 27:25

Yes, it is. I'm assuming you all are fully attended.

Ian Gollahon 27:44

We have hundreds of five-star reviews. Well, if you look at like, you know, one of those semi-passive, like, you know, where they're just not working at it laundromats, you know, if someone can't get the machines to work, they're gonna give you a one-star review. And so you have to have people there to help them with the machines. So you need to watch your assets. You need to have people there so that you don't get bad reviews and really get that self-serve revenue going.

Well, those people need to pay their own salaries while they're there. The way to do that is wash, dry, fold. So you get the wash, dry, fold, the drop off side of things going. And that way that's not actually a drag on the business. Even for us, and we do have probably higher payroll costs. In fact, even printed out some financials like in, just fun stuff. Go ahead.

Dave 28:36

Can you say, do you know what percentage of your revenue

goes to payroll?

Ian Gollahon 28:40

Yeah, so just for September alone, it's about 25%, right? 25 to 30%. But September alone, we did 200,000 top line and then about 65 went to payroll. And that's about the same thing that we did in washer-ifold. We had about 65,000 in washer-ifold as well. So the washer-ifold offsets the payroll.

But it builds the whole business, right? The two, it's not like you're gonna get to, know, our Delaware store is gonna do something like 700,000 in self-serve this year. You're not gonna get to that unattended. There's just no way. You need attendance there. And so do you wanna pay for the attendance out of pocket or do you want them to pay for themselves with wash, dry, fold? So that really is how you think of the structure. And so you've got the attendance on the bottom when you think of like a hierarchy.

You got the attendance, you need every store fully staffed full time. There's a million reasons why, but to keep riff-raff off, to keep your insurance down, there's so many good reasons. But then above them, you do need store managers, because you don't want to be talking to those employees about their schedules and their surgeries or whatever. That's way, you should not be doing that with your time.

Dave 29:59

That's a full-time job.

Yes. Yes, me too.

Ian Gollahon 30:01

Yeah, that's a full-time job right there. And I've done that job before, before I got into the laundry industry, don't really

wanna do that again. So yeah, you need managers then to manage each branch and they're really responsible for keeping efficiencies, making sure everyone's trained right, making sure everyone's, even just using, have to measure the right amount of soap when they wash something. And how do they greet people when they come to the store? We don't really…

It's not like some loosey goosey thing. We have a script for everyone. We have a training process that they go through. And so each store manager really is responsible for their staff and for being on the floor. And if someone calls in, they call into that manager. And then that manager has to find someone to cover them or they have to cover it themselves. And we have really good managers that do that. But then if you have three of those managers, guess what? Managing those three managers is also a full-time job.

Dave 30:56

Yes it is.

Ian Gollahon 30:57

What about the supplies for the store? Are they all going to make their own supply runs? Probably not. And so we have an operations manager above those three managers and she helps manage them. If they have any questions or issues with employees, she helps them do that. And like, for example, one of the things that we, in the integrity of what we've changed, you know, I was actually talking to our ops manager, Becky, great, great lady. And, you know, one of her concerns was every single

hire she makes. So she does every interview and when we bought the business, she did every single hire and interview. And she said, well, they're calling me about like these issues they have because they think I can help them. So they're trying to sidestep out of the hierarchy. Right. And so I just said, look, if you want to interview every person and hire every person, you're going to be every person's boss. And that's 25 people. You don't want that. You have to train your managers to do all the hiring.

And I did help her with the process. I didn't say just go figure this out. But we helped her train the three managers to all be hiring managers. So now they all hire their own people, which means if someone quits, guess whose problem that is to now hire that replacement? It's the manager's problem, which it should be, right? And so that's like some of the legwork that you do to make sure the hierarchy, you know, I don't ever talk to like,

employees about their jobs ever. That is not where I want to be. They need to be talking to their managers. And then their managers need to be talking to the ops manager. And then if some crazy escalation happens, then she can come talk to me. But we've put that hierarchy in place and we've been really deliberate. Know, Steve Jobs talks a lot about how many things do you say no to every day, you know, and having a successful business is about saying no to a lot of things.

Dave 32:50

Mm-hmm.

Ian Gollahon 32:51

A lot of things and we say no doing our own, the word, schedules. We don't wanna be in the itty gritty of that. And to do that, you have to figure out how you're gonna manage people and how to put structures in place. Now, the hire that we've made that I think has made the biggest difference that I think

Dave 32:57

Mm-hmm.

Ian Gollahon 33:10

John probably could have made years ago if he had known how great it would be. We have a guy named Trevor who's our facilities manager. And so all he manages is not people, he manages the facilities. And so anytime anything goes wrong, which you know, a million things break in a laundromat all the time, they're constantly breaking, he's constantly fixing it. You know, there's been, there was a…

When Brian and I were on the plane to the Clean Show, there was some leakage at one of the water heaters and we had, you know, it was a big expensive replacement, but he had to call the people to get them out there and get the quotes and get it all done. And it was all taken care of by the time we got back in town. You know, same thing with the roof. The roof was leaking just recently. And so we've got to get this, you know, treatment done on the roof. They're going to put this layer of something on the roof.

You had to go meet people out and be up there on the roof with them and all that. He did all that. You know, I won't say exactly what we pay him. He probably wouldn't appreciate that, but, you know, I feel like, you know, it's a good job. It's a good paying job. But then when you look at it of what percentage of it of 2.5 million is it, it's a pretty low percentage, but it takes off so much work on work plates and

Dave 34:11

Haha

Ian Gollahon 34:30

He's a hire that, you know, and he was thinking about moving back home, you know, he's from another state. Did, you know, luckily he stayed, but you know, we wouldn't have been without him for like a week. We would have been like, we have to get someone else in that role immediately. Like it's a must have role once you have it. And I realize that is hard to do with one store, but as you scale, these are the type of things that, you know, you can either work out at full time and do nothing else, or you can have someone else.

Dave 34:44

Mm-hmm.

Ian Gollahon 34:59

Do it for you, which is what we would recommend and that's what's worked well for us. And he's better at it than we would be too. He's a really handy guy. He can fix a lot of stuff. Fixes the tile when we need to replace, yeah.

Dave 35:09

How did you know I have a ton of people that

asked me in my club coaching calls and things like that. Where did you find these people and they will ask like broad categories because our model our org chart is very similar to yours only we have about double the people. But people are constantly asking where did you find your GM your assistant GM. Where did you find your ops manager etc. What was your situation like with that because this was a position that didn't exist. So I don't know if you were just outsourcing this to plumbers and distributor service guys and.

John was doing the work or whatever. But what where did you find this individual and what were some of the qualifications you were looking for? Because I think a lot of laundromat owners, you know, if they can afford something like that, they wouldn't they wouldn't be real sure where to even start with what skills do I need other than you know, just a handyman.

Ian Gollahon 35:56

So for our current manager, facilities manager, we really lucked out because he had been just a really good employee at the store and had showed up on time and showed interest on, what's wrong with the hoppers? Maybe I can fix that. So we really, we knew he was a reliable individual. Now he didn't know how to fix washers or dryers yet, but we just trained him. And luckily, Brian,

Dave 36:04

Okay.

Ian Gollahon 36:23

Because like you said, when you do all three stores and you don't have facilities manager, it's up to you and your son, right? So Brian really was and Sean were both fixing washers and dryers or getting the distributor. And so once we hired him, we would have him shadow any fix and if the distributor comes out, he shadows them. So I do think, yeah, whoever's doing it now is essentially the person that then trains whoever you hire.

And he didn't have any expertise in the field when we promoted him basically from an attendant to the facilities manager. I mean, it was a good pay increase for him as well and a salary job, but he really showed that he was worth it and really showed that he was willing to learn. And honestly, we've done that with a lot of our employees. We've started them really lower level and then moved them up into the organization. And that's something that's really cool when you have, you know,

I don't know, five or 10 families that, you know, their main income earner, you've built from, you know, someone who maybe you hired at, you know, $14 an hour or something like that. And now they're a salaried employee. So yeah, think we got lucky on that. For the software company, we don't really have any like entry level employees that we can move out. So for WatchDrive Full POS,

I've had really good luck with Indeed and I have trained some of my managers on Indeed. Of course, we get it through the website. And I know you guys offer services to help you get your website up. If the website has done well and apply now is in the right spot, you will get a lot of applications there. That alone has paid for us redoing our website. And that's one of the things we did when we bought the stores. Totally redid the website to be much more user friendly and more modern and all that. Hired that out.

Dave 38:04

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Ian Gollahon 38:19

I don't wanna be doing that, we just paid it. I've built websites before, but that's not what I wanna be spending my time doing. So we hired a company to do that. And we have noticed probably a 10X increase in the applications that we get through the website. So that has been huge for the laundromat. And then for the point of sale company, Wastriffold POS, I use Indeed and I'll go through like 100 applications. If there's any red flags, I'll just delete it. No, no, no, no, no.

Dave 38:25

Mm-hmm.

Ian Gollahon 38:47

You know, you get 100 applications, there's probably 20 people you wanna talk to. So you either call them or you send them a link. That's what I like to do is just send them a link, schedule an appointment with me. Most of them can't get that done. And if they can't get that done, there's gonna be a lot of other things they can't get done too. And if they get that done, half of them don't show up or you call them and they're like, what, who is this? And if they can't remember an appointment and they can't remember what they applied for, it's gonna be a lot of other things that they have a hard time with as well. And so…

Dave 38:53

Mm-hmm.

Ian Gollahon 39:16

That's really how I qualified. You start with 100 or 200 applicants, you get down to 20 that you reach out to, and then you get down to maybe 10 that you'd actually talk to. Then you do maybe three or four in-person interviews. And once you've got it to that point, it's pretty clear who you need to hire out of those three or four people. And then my advice, one thing that I'm big on, as soon as you know you wanna hire that person, just call them and offer them the job.

Wait and be like, yeah, I a call. It's like a week later, they might already have a job. Know, people appreciate it when you're fast and you're direct and you don't play any games. You just try and find the right person and you have to get efficient. And sometimes it's hard to have the discipline to throw out applicants that, well, that one thing I don't like, well, then just get rid of the, just don't call them then. You know what I'm saying? Like you have to find the right people for the job.

Dave 39:49

Mm-hmm.

Ian Gollahon 40:14

And to do that, and applications are not expensive. Indeed, I think we pay like a dollar an application or something. So it's like, just get 100 and you'll find the right person. That would be, that's been my experience on those things.

Dave 40:19

Mm-hmm.

Do you also cross train your staff so that they can work in any location? Because that's one thing we do with having three locations. We have four, but with having multiple locations in the same general area, do they borrow attendance from each other? Do the managers ever work in other stores? Are the processes all the same in all the stores?

Ian Gollahon 40:46

Yes, the processes are all the same in all the stores. The managers typically stay in their own stores, right? So that's kind of their turf that they really need to be responsible for. But then the attendants sometimes, you know, they might move across town, Our laundromats that are furthest from each other, there's one in the middle, so it's kind of like a triangle. But so, yeah, if this person moves to over here, even further over there, they might want to change stores or whatever. So we do have that, and that does work well if, you know, somebody calls in sick or whatever.

Having all those processes in place and posted. But for the most part, people tend to stay at their store that is close to them or that they know the people. And that's what all the managers figure out, is who's gonna work well. These two people just do not get along, but they're both good employees. Let's move one of them to a different store. And so it kind of gives you some flexibility there, putting those processes in place.

Dave 41:40

Close are

your stores together? They 15 minutes apart or 30 minutes apart or?

Ian Gollahon 41:46

Yeah, it's, would say from one, and I did this today, I had to go get some money from one of them and stock the bill breakers, the one that was all the way across. So I'm like right in the middle. So it was like 10 minutes East and then 20 minutes West, you know, so it's like five miles, five miles. Yes, there's probably like 10 miles in between the two, which is about how big Tulsa is. Tulsa is about 10 by 10 on a grid. So we're kind of like on the outskirts of town, if that makes sense.

Dave 42:03

30 minutes.

Okay.

So Broken

Arrow, is, that a suburb of Tulsa, I guess? Okay. Okay. Big fans of Tulsa. Big fans of Tulsa King, by the way. I don't know if you guys hate that show or not. Side note. Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 42:17

It is, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's kind of like the.

Yeah, Brian loves it, Brian Henderson. Brian Henderson watches it and

I have a friend that actually did some of the sound. Have friend who's a sound engineer. Does a lot of the films and TV shows that come through and he worked on that one and some of the other. Netflix has done a few different shows based in Tulsa now as well. He's worked on some of those, but it's not for me, but I'm glad you're enjoying it.

Dave 42:32

Really?

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah. Well, when we, when we first started

watching it, we thought it was pretty cheesy, but I think we got sucked in. Don't know. This season's not going very well. Yeah. It's of off the rails, but we'll see anyway. Carla might have to edit that out, but I just, sorry. You Tulsa and I immediately am seeing Sylvester Stallone. Yes. Anyway, back to Laundromats, Carla.

Ian Gollahon 42:56

I have never seen…

Was fine toss the king yeah now

There is one last point on that. There is no show about Tulsa or Oklahoma that doesn't paint us in the worst light possible. Jen and I tried to watch a show just last night. There's some new shows, a lot of famous actors take space in Tulsa. Just right away, it's just like, oh man, it just goes right at, just the normal, oaky person, they just hate us. So every show, it's just about how terrible we are. We're just totally normal people, but.

Dave 43:15

Really?

Huh.

Well, I'm from Kentucky and Kentucky's the same way. Like every show, it's a stereotype of this hillbilly. They're always drinking moonshine and in the back hills. And it's like, you know, that does exist, but it's not the whole state. Yeah. So one thing I did want to touch on briefly is so your entrance into the laundromat industry apparently wasn't too smooth because I hear you had three fires.

Ian Gollahon 43:36

But yeah, people.

Yeah, you don't have to guess what they think of us. They're not fans. Yeah, that's right.

The first 12 months, yeah, three fires.

Dave 44:04

you didn't know the previous owner, you'd thought you'd been sabotaged.

Ian Gollahon 44:08

My goodness, it had been like

years and years since the last dryer fire. And these three, two of them were like the two worst ones they'd ever had in the 10 years.

Dave 44:17

Wow. Were the

vents not cleaned properly or was it user error? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 44:22

The vents, we are crazy about that stuff. Everything gets cleaned, everything gets

maintained, everything's on a schedule. Mean, everything gets cleaned every night, but then you also have the more deep clean stuff like that. Everything was clean. So with the first one, it was actually just a comforter and the feathers, you know, turns out feathers and open flame, because if you go behind those dryers, you know, stack units, there's open flame behind them, I guess all of them, but you can see the open flame in the stack units.

Dave 44:29

Yes.

Ian Gollahon 44:50

And I guess it was just, it was shedding feathers, right? And she put it on there and high and she left, which you're not supposed to do, we have signage up, but she put it on high, she left and the feathers were coming out of it and one of them got on fire, which just, so that one was a pain and a lot of cleanup, but luckily we didn't even have to replace that dryer. We were able to salvage that unit and.

Dave 45:14

Wow. Because you're attended

and the attendant saw it even if the person… Probably would have lost the whole store if you were unattended.

Ian Gollahon 45:21

That

is true. And they were actually able to put that one out, I think, with the fire extender grisher. Although it's tough to put out a comforter on fire with a fire extinguisher. So it was a big fire. But the second one was way worse because the second one was a lady. You know how people just cram clothes in a washer for no reason? It doesn't even get clean that way.

Dave 45:31

Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Ian Gollahon 45:48

She was doing that with these spa towels that were nail polish remover. Soaked in nail polish remover. And so they didn't get clean in the washer if she even washed them, which is self-serve, you're supposed to. But when she put them in the dryer, they were still soaking in propellant. They were still soaking in alcohol. So yeah, turns out that also is flammable. And…

Dave 45:54

Jeez.

Ian Gollahon 46:14

That was a bad one. The fire department had to come out. We couldn't put it out with the fire extinguisher. Had to evacuate the building. And I remember driving up, cause I got the call. I remember driving up and I could smell the smoke like a block away. And I was like, this is not good. This is really bad. This is like my worst nightmare. And we just put in, you know, we had just put in a lot of capital, you know, into it. And so it was, it was very stressful. But all that we lost was that, well, I guess that brings me to the fire.

Dave 46:23

Terrible feeling.

Ian Gollahon 46:43

The third fire, is that fire was so bad in that second one that I guess some of the lint or something, some piece of cotton got into the gas of the unit, the gas valve and the unit on the bottom. So I guess like, you know, when you have a fire like that, little stuff gets everywhere. And so even though we had had it cleaned and inspected and all that, it was like in some kind of gas pipe. And then as it was running,

Dave 47:04

Mm-hmm.

Ian Gollahon 47:11

That same unit, that was the only one that wasn't actually a customer's fault. It just caught on fire because it put out like whatever lint and then it's right there by the flame. So that, and that third one wasn't too bad. But the second one was really, it was stressful. Like I said, they had to bring in the water, but we had it up and running. We were open again before the end of the day. So, and with the other two as well, we were close for just like an hour or two with the other two. So we, when the…

Dave 47:21

Yeah.

Wow.

Thanks.

Ian Gollahon 47:40

Something like that, it's all hands on deck. We all come out there and all the managers come in and all the owners and the employees that we can get. We all just work really hard to get it fixed. And so we've got a good team. You know, after that, really even after the second one, I was like, guys, we've got to change something. And they're like, but we haven't had fires in years. I was like, yeah, but I own it now. So we're changing something. So, but.

Dave 47:43

Mm-hmm.

So what did you do to help

prevent them in the future this happening?

Ian Gollahon 48:05

we put up some signage. Obviously, that was the first thing, like what to do if there is a fire. But honestly, I think the biggest thing is we just lowered the temperatures. And I was doing some research on this and just getting reacquainted with it today. I know we have Speed Queen, we have Alliance on our three stores, Speed Queen. I think the default temperature from the factory is 190. That's what my distributor said. And then he installs it at 180.

Dave 48:31

Yep, it is.

Ian Gollahon 48:34

So they're already installing at 10 degrees lower, but 180 will catch stuff on fire. So we've lowered it. I think we're at 170 or 175 now, we're in that range. So I would recommend that just personally because there's not a lot of existential risks to owning a laundromat. I don't think AI is going to put us out of business in the next five years or anything. I think people are still going to be using washers and dryers. So I think…

Dave 48:42

Mm-hmm.

Ian Gollahon 49:01

A fire is really one of your biggest existential risks. And I think you do everything you can to mitigate that. And if it's just like, we haven't had customers complain about it. No one even notices. And by the way, if you buy this a Speed Queen residential and you can just look this up online, it only goes up to 155 on the highest setting. And I have to think there's some liability thing there because at 155, you're not starting many fires or any fires, right? And so if that's what they're putting in people's homes,

Dave 49:19

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Right.

Ian Gollahon 49:30

You know, I think there's a good argument.

Dave 49:33

Does it

increase the dry time a little bit to turn down the temperature? Is that the reason? Okay. Okay.

Ian Gollahon 49:39

Yeah, just a little bit. Yeah, it does.

Yeah, you're looking up maybe 5%, 10 % more dry time. Yeah, but you can charge for that. But yeah, we haven't had any complaints about it.

Dave 49:44

Okay.

You do charge for that.

Okay, nice. Well, that's a nice plug for one being attended and also have good insurance. I'm hoping you all had good insurance.

Ian Gollahon 49:56

Yes.

Yes, we did. And that was the thing I was thinking when you're driving to your laundromat and you're just thinking like, God, when was the last time I talked to my insurance person? What is our insurance cover again? Like that is important. And especially once you've owned it for a while, you forget about that kind of stuff or you just stop worrying about it. So I do think it's something you need to take care of, take it very seriously, get it done and get it off your plate and talk to a professional about that. Yeah, luckily we were well insured.

Dave 50:13

And that's

Yeah.

Yeah. Yes.

Ian Gollahon 50:30

And in all three situations, on one, we just had to replace that double stack unit. We actually just replaced all the dryers. They were getting old anyway. So we just replaced all the quantum touch stuff with all the different languages. We've been really happy with that. But yeah, I think insurance is important. And I think setting the right temperature, I didn't know it was important, but I know now.

Dave 50:50

Mm-hmm.

Well, for listeners out

there, have a couple episodes with Larry and Joel from the Launderette Millionaire Insurance Program. So definitely check those out and check out our website, but they highly recommend. Make sure you check that insurance policy every year. And another big thing is make sure you're insured for the replacement cost of it, not just the cost because that's a biggie.

Ian Gollahon 51:14

Yeah. Yep. Don't skip on insurance,

guys. This is the one thing that can get you.

Dave 51:20

Well, I'll say this too. And I

know this isn't about insurance, but you can have replacement costs, the words replacement cost of your policies. That doesn't mean you have the dollar coverage, right? And that's what some people can get really tricky because you buy equipment for $500,000 to the outfit of store. And the replacement cost you have replacement cost in there, but you only have coverage up to 650,000. Well, you built the store 10 years ago. And 10 years ago, 650 would have replaced everything.

But fast forward today, we're having years where the price is going up 20%, unfortunately. And it might cost a million dollars. Well, you may have replacement costs, but you only have up to $650,000. And it's going to cost today to replace that $900,000. So people don't think about the nuance of those things, of the price of things. And equipment has just gone through the roof since COVID. So just wanted to point that out there. You can have replacement cost in there.

And if you don't have a dollar figure that's reflective of the replacement cost, they're only going to go up to the dollar value. So a of people don't realize that.

Ian Gollahon 52:23

And

to give you a real life example, the Delaware store, which is gonna do a million in revenue this year, cost a million dollars to build and with the equipment and all in. And we've looked at doing a similar size store in a different area, we'll eventually open a fourth store. I'm not in a hurry, but it's like two, three million to do that store these days. Like it's doubled in 10 years. So yeah, it's not kind of sort of doubled like it has doubled in the last 10 years. So yeah, I think that's definitely something to keep in

Dave 52:45

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yep.

Yeah, well, I definitely want to make sure we get to wash, dry, fold POS and talk a little bit about that. So back when we had Brian on the show back in 2021, we talked a lot about his story, why he created wash, dry, fold POS. There weren't really other systems like it out there that were designed specifically for the laundry industry. There were similar ones for like the dry cleaning and other industries, but he really felt the need to create his own.

But since then there's been a lot of other companies come to the market. Just to name a few there since there's curbside, there's clean cloud. So there's a lot of competition in the market now, but I know you all have been very innovative and trying to keep up with the changing demands of the laundry industry. Cause the laundry industry has changed a lot too, no longer just.

Ian Gollahon 53:22

There's a lot now.

Dave 53:42

Self-serve and no longer just coins, but you know, now we have card payment systems and we have wash, dry, drop-off. We have pickup and delivery and all this kind of stuff. So there's been so many changes. I would like you to talk about how wash, dry, fold POS has changed over the past few years to keep up with the changes. And then also, if you could talk some about how does someone coming to the industry choose a point of sale software? How do you all compare?

Ian Gollahon 53:50

Mm-hmm.

Dave 54:11

To the other ones out there. So first, what changes have there been?

Ian Gollahon 54:16

Yeah, I love that question, thank you. So yeah, so many changes, but everyone's gotta be mobile now. You've gotta be able to take out your phone and see who's in the store, who's clocked in or hasn't clocked in, how many orders are on the shelf, how many orders are done, are they doing the orders? Like have they been clocked in for an hour and still not one is in the wash? And then to be able to check all three of your stores like that. And you know, we have our managers check our stores, we don't do that.

Dave 54:37

You

Ian Gollahon 54:45

You know, but we had a lot of single store owners that do that. Or even like at the cleaning show, someone came up to me he's like, look, I can see my stores. I can see who's doing what at my stores. And they're talking about how much they love that. So I think it's gotten very mobile. We're cloud-based now. Integrations are huge these days. And, you know, it's got to work with, we actually built the first, you know, Speed Queen Alliance integration and all that, but it's become a much more integrated system. But as far as like,

Here's my take on the industry and obviously it's bias, it may not be perfect, but I think there's probably four players have about 80 % of the industry. And I think you just named the four players. CleanCloud is really the best, well, maybe I shouldn't say what everyone's the best at, but they're quite good for dry cleaning. In fact, I refer a lot of people to CleanCloud for dry cleaning and they're really good for international as well. They're in a lot of languages, a lot of countries.

Dave 55:25

I'd agree with that, yeah.

Ian Gollahon 55:41

Now ours translates to a lot of languages, but they're actually based out of London. So, you know, if you've got an international store, I think that's a really good solution. And they're actually really nice people too, really, really good guys. I heard that episode, you guys did great.

Dave 55:51

They've been on our podcast too.

Yeah. And just so everybody knows, we've invited the curbside guys, and Erin, but they've, we're still trying to convince them. It's in holding. It's in holding.

Ian Gollahon 56:01

Yeah.

They're super nice guys

too. And you don't have to guess what their strength is curbside delivery, right? They're really delivery first. And then as you guys know, I'm sure you've talked a lot about Sense and they're kind of like revolutionizing the industry, right? They're really trying to be on the cutting edge and like, where do we fit indoor to Ashland Uber and all that. Our take on it from day one was we're trying to solve real problems for real laundromat owners.

And it's gotta be easy to use because one of the real problems you have is that your ladies are not software engineers. They're not tech savvy at all, it turns out. So it's gotta be just so easy to see a few buttons. You don't wanna overwhelm them with a million options. But then you do still need to track what washers and dryers are they using because they will get stuff confused if they're trying to do too many orders or what if.

What if they get called in, their kids sick at school or whatever and they need to run, you need to be able to see exactly what they were doing when they were doing it, where are those clothes now, and they will forget to get the, if the comforter needed more dry time than the clothes, they will forget the comforter's still in the dryer, so you need something to remind them, go get the comforter, you need something that texts the customer when the clothes are ready so they can come get them back from you, right? And that wasn't a thing when we started in 2016.

But we did have to, we would call people and be like, hey, you got to come get your clothes. You know, we're full here. So now the software just texts them and you can text them reminders through the software as well. So yeah, a lot has changed. It's really gotten more technology, but I think we've stayed true to solving real problems, making it very simple and easy to use. And then we do tend to be the most cost-effective solution. So we're about.

Half the cost of some of the other solutions out there. So if you've looked and you've thought, that's just way out of my price range, for us solving real problems with real laundromats, some laundromats do, you know, three to five grand in wash, dry, fold per month. And that's a really good spot for us to service. Now we have a lot of, you know, we do 20 grand on it and we have a store of 30 laundromats that we, they've got our point of sale system all 30.

And we have stores that do well over a million dollars in revenue that has our point of sale system too. So it's very scalable, both in number of stores and then also in the amount of revenue that you're doing in your store. But to be kind of the OG and to be the industry default or one of the industry defaults, you have to be affordable enough that Laundromat owner doing 3000 actually can justify it.

And that it will pay for itself with increased revenue and increased growth and decreased shrinkage and not talking about clothes, although it helps with that too, but decreased, are they using the right washers and dryers, right? And you can see like one of our big features is like as a percentage of machine starts, excuse me, as a percentage of the ticket value, how many machine starts are we using? So if they're using like 50 % of,

Dave 58:59

Mm-hmm.

Ian Gollahon 59:22

Let's say it's a hundred dollar orders and they do $50 worth of machine starts, like what are they doing? And it turns out sometimes they're just going straight to the 80 pounders even if they only have 30 pounds of clothes. And so it can help you identify efficiencies or inefficiencies in your system and create new efficiencies. Yeah, for us, I think we're the easiest to use. I've never heard anyone say that we're not the easiest to use even if they've used all the other systems. And I think we are the most affordable by quite a bit.

We have some, last thing, we do have some exclusive features like we have a machine repair ticket system that I'm talking about for the washers or the dryers or even your doors, if you have the sliding doors that break all the time. And so for example, one of the tickets that came in, I usually don't even see the tickets, they just go straight to the facilities manager. And so that really helps you set up your hierarchy. If you've got all the equipment, all these stores, you don't wanna know every time something breaks.

Even if he has to get a part ordered, I don't even know about it. I can go in and like, and look at the tickets. Can see where he talked to, you know, how many times that machine broke, which helps if you have new machines and they're, you know, saying, it's not the same machine. You can actually have a really nice history of all the machines. But yeah, we got a little ticket in that the bill breaker was jammed. And so I had to go because we typically don't, we still don't trust our employees with the bill breakers. That's the one thing that we still do as the owners. So I had to go in and, you know,

Dave 1:00:35

Nice.

Ian Gollahon 1:00:47

Put in new money to the bill breaker. But that's a good example of, that's kind of an exclusive feature. So there are other reasons to go with our solution, but I think most people do it for the ease of use and for the affordability.

Dave 1:01:01

Do have a question. So in layman's terms, I know you talked about the API integration with Speed Queen with Alliance machines. What does that mean to be integrated? So what does that enable your software to do since it's integrated? Cause you're saying the other, are the other platforms not integrated with those? Yes.

Ian Gollahon 1:01:07

Yeah.

So when someone says integration,

you have no idea what they mean and there's no way to know based off that single word. So you have to ask them more questions. We were the first and I got to give Alliance a lot of credit here. We were the first ever system and we actually haven't written the press release for it, but we launched this at the Clean Show. So this is a very new thing. But ever since we started, the dream was you just select the machines that you want to start from the point of sale systems and they just start automatically. You just go load them.

Dave 1:01:27

Yes.

Ian Gollahon 1:01:50

Well, that was never possible until just recently. So we now have that functionality. So on the little board that shows where all the orders are, you would just grab the, let's say you want to start washer number seven and eight, you just tap seven and eight. If you have hip, shorter speed queen, it will actually start it through that insights program. And it ties that Vend value to that order as well. So you would see as a percentage, let's say it's $5 per Vend.

And it's a $40 order. You'll see what they started as a total of the, now why would you even care to track that? It's because like you don't want them starting machines for friends and family, or if they've got a little business on the side. But in the past, even like if you said an integration like a year ago, like if you had a Laundroworks integration a year ago, that would mean that, yeah, you start the Laundroworks machines with the card.

Dave 1:02:47

Yes.

Ian Gollahon 1:02:47

And

then the system tracks how much you've used. And then like for us at our stores, there's $2 left on the card. I want my $2 back. Know, no, that's the bonus money. Remember you put in 20, you get a $2 bonus, but you can buy snacks, you can buy soaps, can buy anything here at the counter. We'd love to sell you, you know, if you need some soap or a soda or whatever. And that really helps them get that last of the balance off the card if they want that. That's what the integration used to mean.

Now it's that, but also like with the WashLynx app, it will actually push the order to the WashLynx, the employee app, and they just select that order and then go to start the machines with the WashLynx app. We actually have built that machine start integration with Alliance, which is the first major manufacturer to do it. So no one else has that with any other point of sale system or with any other manufacturer. We're the only, that's the only place where you can start.

Know, Alliance machines through the Wash-Dry-Fold POS. Now, if you have Laundroworks and you're using the WashLynx app, which I know a lot of your listeners are, that works with Sense or Wash-Dry-Fold POS now. So we've built that, the second people to do that, obviously Sense was the first.

Dave 1:03:56

Okay. Cause I know like, so we

have sense and LaunderWorks and I know our people can start the machines, but it's, guess through the LaunderWorks, I guess, not through Alliance. It's through our sense readers, I guess, is the reason we can. So we don't have the Alliance integration, but we have, I guess, because of the sense integration. So it's a little different. I wasn't sure what was different. So the big key is that you can start the machines from Wash, Dry, Fold, BOS.

Ian Gollahon 1:04:06

Through the card.

Dave 1:04:26

Because of that alliance integration. Is it only with their newest machines? Like if the machines are okay.

Ian Gollahon 1:04:31

It is, you have

to have like the insights program. So it has to be, I think it's like last maybe five years worth of machines about that. And to your point, and I think this is really good for the audience as well. If you already have the Laundroworks system, then maybe you just want that real basic integration where they're just starting the cards with the machines. Maybe that's all you need. And we have hundreds of stores that do that. But the next level is then if you use WashLynx, which is their little employee app, which you have to pay for, but it's worth it.

Dave 1:04:37

Okay.

Ian Gollahon 1:05:00

And that'll actually start the actual machines and then tie it to the orders. And so they don't just have a card that could get lost or that they could hand to a self-serve employee or a self-serve customer for a little something, you know, so.

Dave 1:05:13

Well, I know for us,

like if we have, so we do a lot of drop off and delivery. And if we have a customer come back and say, you know, you lost my blue sweatshirt. We can go into the order and we can look on our cameras and be like, okay, well we know that blue sweatshirt was placed in machine number 38 at 10 52 AM. So we can pull up our cameras for that time and be like, there's blue sweatshirt. Follow it through the cameras or sometimes, there wasn't a blue sweatshirt and they're mistaken.

Ian Gollahon 1:05:42

That happens just as often.

Dave 1:05:42

It's under their bed. There are some good.

So it is handy to know with every order, like within the POS system, know who processed it, what time they processed it, what machine they processed it in and that integration you have allows that, right?

Ian Gollahon 1:06:00

It does, and also you're getting to what I think probably the primary feature that has made Washtrype Full POS, Washtrype Full POS from day one, which is that order tracker that's, it's called a Kanban or Kanban, some people call it that, but if you've heard of Six Sigma or Lean Production Method, it's all the same thing where basically you want to be able to see at any given time as a manager where every single order is in the process. Is it on the shelf to do? Cause that, you know, affects staffing in the future.

Is it done on the shelf? Affects storage. But also, every time they're moving from the wash to the dry, they're just moving that over and you get a little timestamp. So that works really well with the cameras because then you already have the timestamps. You don't go have to watch and see like the whole day. You can just go to that timestamp and you can see it's like within a minute of when they moved it over. And so that really is, I think we do that best and we also had that first. And so everyone else has kind of come up with their own version of that.

But I think that's still really our major differentiator. But then it even goes a step further like when you have the WashLynx app. So instead of having to tap the machine to start it, you would just tap your phone on the washer and dryer that you want to start and you would actually tap the order then on your phone. And so it's not a huge difference, but like one of the guys at the Clean Show that bought a store, shout out to Joe if you're watching.

You know, he was having this issue at his stores where it's just one card and it's like, does it go around from pocket to pocket to person to person? And wouldn't it be a lot better if it was tied to their individual device that they have to like, you know, face IDs them and that's how you start the machines. You know, it's funny talking to 3000 laundromat owners over 10 years, you know, cause I used to do sales calls every day.

Biggest surprise I've heard is like, or the biggest, you know, weird kind of thing that you would see as a trend would be this employee theft of people stealing this way. They usually, they want to talk to us for one of three reasons. Either they're just opening a store and they need a point of sale system. Great. Perfect time talk to us. They already have a store and they're up to like maybe like that three grand or they're approaching that in wash, dry, fold. And pen and paper is just getting really cumbersome and really

There's mistakes are being made, reviews are being left. And so they need something.

Dave 1:08:27

Even better do it before you're up to 3000

making all the mistakes. Yeah, we do too. Doesn't always happen that way.

Ian Gollahon 1:08:31

Yes, that's what we recommend, but that doesn't always get people

right. People tend to feel the pain first before they go looking for the solution. I wish they would find us before they felt the pain. But the third one, and this is the hardest one to get out of people, and you can always tell because they just aren't giving you one of the other common ones. So why did you really call us today? Like, what do you really need a point of sale system for? They're like, well,

Dave 1:08:41

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 1:08:59

Had a manager, we had to let go, and he was doing a little business on the side where he was starting machines with the Wash Dry Fold little card. It's not always Laundroworks, it could be any of the other SpyderWash ESD, it's usually ESD, but FasCard, LaundryCard, not to talk trash, ESD is great. We just did the machine start integration with them as well. So we're really kind of.

Working with everyone and we try and be agnostic there. But there's a lot of people that have this issue where they've had a manager that they let go and this guy stole like 20, 30,000. It's always in that 20 to 30,000 range. And so if they tell me like they've had theft, if they tell me how much I already know how they stole, if it's 200 or 300, they stole some coins, they stole some cash, whatever. If it's 20 or 30,000, they were running a business on the side using that card.

Dave 1:09:40

Mm-hmm.

Ian Gollahon 1:09:56

And I've even heard like those just have a guy slip them a 20 and they just start machines for them. And like, how do you catch that? Because they have to have a way to start the machines, right? You can't just not let them start the machines. They can't do wash, dry, fold without that. So the only way that we have found is to really track the order ratios. Like, so if you're doing a thousand dollars worth of wash, dry, fold orders that week, you should have about $300 in machine starts as an employee that is specifically tied to you.

Dave 1:10:25

So that's your number is about

30%.

Ian Gollahon 1:10:28

Yeah, that's at our stores. And I've seen it's between 25 and 35. In fact, I think 30 is usually on the higher side, probably just because that's where we're priced. But 30 % is a pretty good average across the board. 30 % comes up a lot. I would say 30 % of our gross revenue is wash, dry, fold. And then 30 % of our wash, dry, fold is commercial. And then if you're doing machine starts, 30 % of the

wash dry fold order should be the same as the Venn start. Now that's not your real cogs because your real cogs are pennies to start those machines. But you can't track pennies, that doesn't make any sense. You don't even want them to see your real cogs, you wanna track the Venn value there.

Dave 1:11:05

Right. Yeah.

that 30 % is actually the retail price of that machine. Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 1:11:18

That's right, that's right. So the machine starts. So if it was a 40 or let's say it's a hundred dollar order just for easy math, then you should be starting $30 worth of machines. And that also too allows you to say, well, I don't care if they started the 20 pounders because we had, maybe we had five 20 pounders open and the 80 pounders were busy. So I don't care which machines they use. I'm just looking at the startage overall. But then, like I said, with that 80 pounder, I had a lady who was, you know, putting small orders in very large machines.

It will help you catch that because the revenue wasn't large enough. And that also works, you can't do it by the pound because you're doing a lot of comforters, which you have to sell by the piece. And I'm sure a lot of your listeners know this, but you don't sell comforters by the pound because people will just try and sneak them into the bag. And then you're like, you know, we have to charge individually for this because it needs its own washer and its own dryer. If you are charging by the pound for comforters, stop today. Don't do that.

Dave 1:11:50

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Definitely. My

goodness. You're leaving tons of money out there if you're doing that.

Ian Gollahon 1:12:16

Crazy. Tons

of money on the table and yeah, I mean, it's just not even worth it by the pound, because they'll just throw a t-shirt in there with their comforter and then you've got two separate washers, two separate dryers, yeah. No good.

Dave 1:12:22

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So for our listeners,

for our listeners out there, how do they get a demo of how to use wash, dry, fold POS and kind of its capabilities?

Ian Gollahon 1:12:38

Yeah, we actually have put some time, although we probably need to redo our demos just because we make so many updates all the time. But there's quite a few demo videos online that you can watch to just get the basic vibe of it. And then once you've kind of seen it, and I honestly don't dissuade people from looking at the other solutions too, because if you're going all in on delivery and that's the only thing you care about, we may not be the best fit for you.

But if you have a laundromat and you need something that's easy to use, you need something that's affordable, and sure, maybe you want to do some door dash and Uber, we've got those immigrations and all that. And we do delivery as well, but I think going online, watching the basic videos and just getting a vibe for all the major options that are out there is a really good first step. And then when you're ready to get into the pricing, which also changes from year to year, then you schedule that appointment.

And we will walk you through, you know, whatever you want to know about the software and especially the pricing and the business model and all that. And I mean, it's very simple. It's very affordable. It has to be. And then, you know, for credit card processing as well, I think that's the one kind of gotcha thing in the industry. Not going to say any names or anything like that, but I do think it's easy to forget that credit card processing costs something. And I know even like when Liberty Laundry was young, we used to go through Heartland.

Even Washington Fulford started, we didn't know anything about it and we just referred people to Heartland. They were charging like 5 % and we're like, that's crazy. You know, we didn't even know that was crazy. Industry standard. So most of options out there between 4 and 5 % and we're 2.65%. So we just try and sell that at cost, make it affordable. And then it's just one more reason to actually, you know, buy the software from us, which is which is what we want to sell. So I was

Dave 1:14:31

Mm-hmm.

Ian Gollahon 1:14:33

Always encourage people to remember credit card processing is not free. And when I say it's 4%, it makes it sound like that company's, you know, some monster that's taking 4 % of your revenue. It's like, no, Visa charges, like if you've got a Visa business card, that's 2.5 % that the customer is getting in rewards. I've got a card where I get 3 % on every transaction. So it's like, the costs on these things are almost 3%. So most of that goes to the other, the card issuing banks and all that.

Dave 1:14:47

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 1:15:02

So it's really that spread between 2.5 or 2.65%, which is where we're at. And then that top of the line is maybe like that 5%. So you wanna get as close to that bottom number as you can.

Dave 1:15:15

Sure, absolutely. All right. Well, I think we've covered everything. I'm looking to This has been fantastic. Appreciate you reaching out to us and offering to do this. This has been fantastic doing kind of an update on the episode with Brian, is, know, once again, kind of a little old nowadays. We recommend… Brian's was more on starting the Washtryfold And now I feel like you brought us up to date with the current competitive market with Washtryfold POS.

Ian Gollahon 1:15:39

Yeah.

Dave 1:15:43

And then also all the new things y'all have learned by becoming Laundromat owners yourselves and learning to eventually get it as a semi passive business that it is not semi passive from day one, but that with the right, the right integration of a good team, the right processes, the right technology that you can get it to be a semi passive business like we have. Like you all have.

Ian Gollahon 1:15:47

Yes.

Not when you buy it, no, no. That's right.

Dave 1:16:09

So I think those are our keynotes for our audience. Yeah, we were. I always say we want to be really careful here at Lawn in My Millionaire not to mislead people, but we do want to inspire people. And the truth is, I'm not saying they're bad people, but there are people out there kind of poo pooing on the passive, the semi passive that that doesn't exist. And I was like, that's kind of a nuanced conversation, right? It's not a binary thing. It's like, what I always tell people is the business obviously needs somebody to run it.

Ian Gollahon 1:16:32

That's right.

Dave 1:16:38

But the what was preached in the industry 15 years ago, when I got into it, is that you had to do that, right? And if you didn't, you were a bad owner and irresponsible. And of course, people were stealing. And what I tell people is like, when things were all cash, that was more true, right? It was harder to have audit systems and hold people accountable. And now the technology is coming to our industry, we and you guys are proof that you can put those audit functions in place, lean on it. And it's never perfect. Nothing's ever perfect.

There's risk in business, we have to be able to, you know, be willing to accept that risk. But there is something to be said for somebody like you all. And, and obviously us, we own five different businesses now. So you guys are running wash, dry, full POS, and you're running your, your, your, your chain of stores with a team. And, you know, we want to inspire people, we want to show people that it is possible, and we are not crazy. And, know, whether it's on a panel at a conference or the clean show, whatever, somebody, somebody says passive or semi passive.

I like the word flexible. That's a word that I just have. I think it's a I think it's a very flexible business. But we don't want to lose people. Because that I think that sometimes like, especially when they're just watching podcasts, maybe they don't know us and they don't know you guys. And, you know, we're just we're just people talking. And they're like, Yeah, that guy's full of crap. You know, whatever there's, there's no way it's semi passive. It's like, No, we're, like, we're not we're not here to brag. We're here to actually show you that there's another level to this. And if anything, multiple levels nowadays.

Ian Gollahon 1:17:38

Rest of was good.

You

Dave 1:18:03

So I appreciate you coming on and sharing that authentic side of you guys's journey I know you mentioned and I just want to throw this in there in the same semi passive conversation when you guys acquired the store You said you and Brian were I think you said both of you worked full-time in the laundromats to get it semi passive now it was already a Well running store running stores, but you had to make it your own I'm curious just real quick short answer

Ian Gollahon 1:18:27

Was already turnkey

Dave 1:18:30

How long did you guys work full time in the business before you were able to start to kind of back out a little bit? Because I'm sure that was the goal from the beginning.

Ian Gollahon 1:18:38

Yeah, I think probably six months was really intense and then, you know, month seven probably got less intense and it just, and then even, you know, the hours that I talked about today, even those were double maybe a year ago. So we just try and, what else can we get off our plate? It's the journey and it takes a while. You have to self-improve, you have to hire, you have to learn how to hire, you have to manage, but.

Dave 1:18:40

Okay.

Yeah.

Right. Yep. It's been a journey. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Learn how to delegate. That's

some people's issue is learn how to delegate. Learn how to say no. We're reiterating all the things of the episode now. Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 1:19:07

I to learn how to delegate. Yes. Yes, learn how to say no. Yes.

What's

really cool is, you guys, think you said we're on the eighth episode, right? Yeah.

Dave 1:19:19

The eighth one was the one with Brian Henderson.

And now we're like, this is episode maybe 110. I was going to say, I was going say maybe 108. So maybe 100 episodes between them.

Ian Gollahon 1:19:29

I bet we had sold maybe two or 300 systems when we were on it. It may say in that episode, we're right at about 1200 now. It's crazy, it's a journey. And to your point, these things don't happen. Yeah, are you gonna buy something that's, even if it's turnkey, is it semi-passive day one? No, you're gonna have to, if it was that semi-passive, I don't know that they would have sold it to be honest. You know what I mean?

Dave 1:19:33

It probably does, yeah.

I was getting ready to ask you that. Yeah, 1200, nice.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Ian Gollahon 1:19:56

You've got to be paying a really decent multiple if it's really that semi-passive. So yeah, I think you're absolutely right. It's a journey and it's a grind and it takes a long time. But absolutely, if you want to own a laundromat or a chain of laundromats and not do it every day. I know a guy that owns 30, Matt Nichols, shout out to Matt, one of my favorite customers, but he owns 30. One of them is just like a commercial processing plant. The other 29 laundromats, they're beautiful laundromats, Spin City, Ocala.

If you're interested. But he's got our point of sale system in all 30. He's got like a whole team. I love his manager, Hope. We work with his whole team and he's got people doing it for him and he's done a great job. He's got 10 kids too, by the way, which I don't know how you do 30 to laundromats in 10. He's a superhuman. I can't do that. But.

Dave 1:20:39

Wow. Wow.

Wow, yeah. That's impressive. Have

three, that's, man, yeah, it's short in my life. I love them, but it's short in my life. Yeah, that's awesome. Well, listen, my friend, thank you so much for putting carbon time out of your day. I know you're a busy guy. Congratulations, by the way. And we saw Brian at the Clean Show real quickly. We were both running in opposite directions, but.

Ian Gollahon 1:20:52

Yeah, I've got one dog and she's in charge of me. So don't think I could do 10 kids. I think I'd have the time of the day.

Dave 1:21:11

Brian, I know you'll watch this. Congratulations to you guys too. I'm proud of you guys. Brian probably remembers the CLA Forum days where we would get in there and chat back and forth. And that's got to be, gosh, 12, 13 years ago now. And that was the only way we had of networking. The podcast didn't exist. And even a lot of the conferences didn't exist back then. The clean show wasn't- the Facebook groups and all that kind of stuff either. Yeah, it was just a very different time back then.

Ian Gollahon 1:21:29

All in.

Dave 1:21:39

Me and Brian grew up in the industry together. I don't know if we're I think he's a little bit younger than me But we got in the industry around the same time. I was an owner struggling and he was an employee Help trying to help his dad build their businesses and they were a few years ahead of us But a lot of back-and-forth and he's he's done a lot to help a lot of people in the industry We have to and obviously you guys are too. So we need more of that in this industry We need less infighting and less ego competitions

and more just sharing and giving and you know, we can all win where it's gonna be okay. It's not a it's not a zero sum game guys. So

Ian Gollahon 1:22:09

100%.

Well, absolutely. No,

want the more laundromat owners that do better, the more virus system, honestly. So we're happy about that. And you reminded me, I've got a shout out to Sharon Brinks as well, who has also been on this journey with us and really helped build that Alliance API. Were actually using, she's been using it her store for like a year, but you know, we had to like get it all, all the bugs worked out, you know, with Alliance, it's got to be good before it's public. She's really helped us. So, and I know she's been on the podcast too. Actually heard.

Dave 1:22:19

Yeah, for sure. Sure.

Uh-huh. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Sure.

Yeah,

yeah, yeah.

Ian Gollahon 1:22:42

Her last episode as well.

So no, think people like that in the industry that they really helped move the industry forward like yourself and like Sharon and Brian. So no, I appreciate it and I appreciate you guys having me on and you guys have just been a pleasure to talk to.

Dave 1:22:57

Yeah.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, we appreciate the time, man. Listen for everyone back home. I'm going to say it again for what the third or fourth time go back and check out episode eight. Full disclosure, we were newbies back then just like you've been newbies in the laundry. Probably rough. It's pretty rough. Like Brian brought Brian brought some good value. I remember the episode being really great. The post production work and even being Carla's interviewing skills. They weren't what they are today. Not that it's anything special today. So

Cut us a little grace. That was four and a half years ago. But anyway, go back and check it out because I think you'd yeah, yeah, that's right. Well, we always say what you know, I philosophy my philosophy in life and business Ian is just get up every day and try to be better tomorrow than I was yesterday. I get a very simple philosophy. It doesn't involve anyone but me. It's I'm only competing with me. That's right. Yeah, totally agree. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 1:23:30

That's the whole point, it's a journey.

That's like the purpose of life to self-improve. I it's one of them. I don't get it when I talk to someone who doesn't actively self-improve. To me, that's what really keeps me going and brings

me a lot of joy. And yeah.

Dave 1:23:56

Yeah, completely.

Yep. Awesome. My friend.

Subscribe to the Laundromat Ownership Podcast

Spotify Apple Podcasts YouTube