Operations · Theft prevention

Sharon Brinks on Laundromat Employee Theft, Speed Queen POS Integration, and Beating Cancer

An owner who found the theft, rebuilt the controls and ran the business through cancer treatment, plus the Alliance API work that let a customer pay at the counter and start a machine across the floor.

By Ian Gollahon, CEO & Co-Founder Updated August 23, 2026 12 min read All episodes

The short version

●Sharon Brinks found laundromat employee theft in her own stores and rebuilt her cash controls around what she learned, rather than around what she assumed.
●A POS records every dollar that goes through it, but somebody still has to pull money from the bill changer and count it, and that hand-off is where the exposure sits.
●The Speed Queen integration exists because Alliance had an API. A customer picks a machine, pays at the counter with cash, credit or debit, and the POS sends a remote vend command to start it.
●Sharon ran her stores through cancer treatment, which is the clearest argument in the episode for having written procedures and staff who can execute them without you.
●The practical lesson: controls are not an accusation. They are what lets an owner step away from the counter, for a week or for a diagnosis.

Sharon Brinks talks about laundromat employee theft the way someone talks about a thing they have actually lived through rather than read about. This article covers what she found, the controls she put in afterwards, how the Speed Queen POS integration lets a self-serve customer pay at the counter and have the machine start remotely, and how she kept three stores running through cancer treatment.

This article is based on an episode

Sharon Brinks on Laundromat Employee Theft, Speed Queen POS Integration, and Beating Cancer

Laundromat Ownership · Episode 11 · with Sharon Brinks

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Why Laundromat Employee Theft Prevention Starts with Cash Access

A laundromat with even modest volume has multiple paths cash can take through the building before it reaches the operator’s bank account. Some of those paths are tracked electronically through the point of sale system. Others, such as bill changer pulls and manual reconciliation logs, depend entirely on the integrity of whoever is doing the counting. Laundromat employee theft prevention is therefore best understood as closing the gaps where cash moves without an electronic record, not as a single tactic.

Ian Gollahon, co-founder of Wash Dry Fold POS, has had conversations with hundreds of laundromat owners over the past decade. From those conversations, he has documented at least 25 to 26 cases of theft exceeding $20,000 from a single employee or manager, plus many more incidents in the hundreds-to-low-thousands range. The recurring structural element across the cases he has heard about is cash access without an independent electronic check. He is the first to acknowledge that those conversations are anecdotal rather than a representative survey of the industry.

Sharon Brinks, owner of two Speed Queen Touch laundromats in Wichita, Kansas, has experienced the issue directly. After more than a decade of running her stores, she discovered that a manager she had trusted for five years had been pulling cash from the bill changer and falsifying daily reconciliation. The amount eventually reached felony territory before camera footage and POS records were reconciled to confirm the pattern. The case was turned over to the Wichita Police Department’s financial crimes unit. An earlier theft incident at her original Oliver Street laundromat also involved an employee with bill changer access. For Sharon specifically, the changer has been the recurring point of failure across more than one incident.

Her takeaway is not that managers cannot be trusted. It is that the operating environment itself can create or eliminate the opportunity for trust to be tested. The Speed Queen POS Insights integration with Wash Dry Fold POS reduces opportunity by routing transactions through the point of sale system that would otherwise be settled at the bill changer.

The pattern by ownership model is consistent: a single owner-operator pulling and counting their own changer cash is at low risk because they perform the reconciliation themselves. Risk emerges when ownership delegates the changer keys without an independent electronic check, which is the situation Sharon has experienced twice.

🔑 Insider Key

Sharon’s framing is worth borrowing: the question is not whether to trust an employee, it is whether the operating environment unnecessarily creates opportunity. Cash without an electronic record is one form that opportunity can take. Reducing it is generally easier than perfectly evaluating character at hiring time.

Speed Queen POS Insights Integration with Wash Dry Fold POS

The Speed Queen POS Insights integration with Wash Dry Fold POS is the technical backbone of how Sharon’s stores now process self-service payments. The relationship between the two platforms is worth understanding in detail before discussing how it supports theft prevention.

Speed Queen Insights is the cloud-based management platform that Speed Queen Touch operators use to program machines, run reports, view customer activity, and manage payment flows. Insights handles cycle programming, machine diagnostics, customer accounts on the Speed Queen mobile app, and reporting that slices transaction data by machine, time, payment method, and store. It is the operator’s primary view into machine-level activity across one or many locations.

Wash Dry Fold POS is the point of sale system designed specifically for laundromats. It manages drop-off intake, wash dry fold order tracking, customer notifications, employee shift accounting, payment processing, label printing, and integrated reporting. Critically, Wash Dry Fold POS exposes an open API that allows two-way communication with compatible washer and dryer systems, including Speed Queen Touch machines.

The integration connects the two platforms so that a customer can pay at the front counter and have a self-service machine vend the exact paid amount automatically. The flow looks like this from the operator side:

Wash Dry Fold POS sends a remote vend command to a specific Speed Queen Touch machine via the Insights API
The machine treats the remote vend command as if the customer had inserted that exact dollar amount in quarters
Insights logs the transaction with the source identified as “POS counter payment”
Wash Dry Fold POS logs the same transaction in its sales reporting
The operator can reconcile across both systems by payment source and identify any discrepancy

The result is a unified payment experience for customers and a complete audit trail for the operator. Counter payments, mobile app payments, scan-and-pay QR transactions, and any remaining quarter activity all show up in cross-referenced reporting between the two platforms. Where the integration fundamentally improves theft prevention is in routing transactions that previously bypassed digital tracking entirely. A counter payment using Wash Dry Fold POS is now a fully tracked transaction. The same payment using a generic register and a manual machine start would be a tracked sale but an untracked machine activation, with no enforcement of the dollar amount actually delivered.

The integration was built and tested at Sharon’s Laundry Station stores. Speed Queen’s IT director told her directly that her store was the reason the remote vend command was added to the Insights API. Sharon has volunteered her stores as a test site for several iterations of laundromat point of sale functionality, going back to her early adoption of the prior Alliance POS.

Operators evaluating compatibility, supported machine models, and current capabilities can reference the Wash Dry Fold POS Speed Queen integration page directly.

How the Speed Queen Remote Vend Command Works

The Speed Queen remote vend command is the API call that allows a third-party point of sale system to start a Speed Queen Touch machine with a specific dollar value. This command is the technical foundation of the integration with Wash Dry Fold POS, and understanding what it does and what it replaced is the key to understanding why the integration matters operationally.

Before the remote vend command existed, third-party point of sale systems could only send a generic start signal to a machine. The operator workflow looked like this: the customer paid at the cash register for, say, $10. The attendant then navigated separately into Insights and hit start on the customer’s machine. The customer could then add unlimited extra wash, extra rinse, or extra dry time at the machine because there was no value cap on the start signal. The customer paid $10 at the counter, but the machine would happily vend $14 or $16 worth of cycles based on the options the customer selected.

That gap allowed customers to vend more value than they paid for. Sharon raised the issue with Speed Queen, and according to Speed Queen’s IT director, her store was the reason the remote vend command was added. The command allows the point of sale system to specify exactly how much value the machine should accept, capping the customer’s selection at the paid amount.

The customer flow at Sharon’s stores now works like this:

The customer selects a machine and configures their cycle (extra rinse, extra wash, sanitize, hot or cold)
The machine display shows the total price for the configured cycle
The customer walks to the counter and tells the attendant their machine number
The attendant selects that machine in Wash Dry Fold POS, which pulls in the price the customer set at the machine
The customer pays at the counter with cash, credit, or debit
Wash Dry Fold POS sends a remote vend command for the exact paid amount
The customer hits start on the machine and runs their selected cycle

The customer can still adjust their cycle, but they cannot exceed the value paid. If they want to add additional cycles or extra dry time, they pay the additional amount at the counter and another remote vend command is sent. The transaction shows up in both Insights and Wash Dry Fold POS reporting.

For operators who run a mix of self-service and wash, dry, fold, the integration also supports fully attended use. An attendant processing a wash, dry, fold order can start washers and dryers from Wash Dry Fold POS using the customer’s order, with the dollar value of each machine start tied to that specific order. The labor and machine cost per order become reportable, which Ian described as one of the original design goals of the integration: measuring profitability per attendant and per shift on the wash, dry, fold side of the business.

🔑 Insider Key

The remote vend command does more than reduce revenue leakage on cycle add-ons. It eliminates a recurring customer service problem where attendants and customers disagreed about what was paid for and what was added at the machine. Electronic enforcement removes the dispute by removing the ambiguity.

How Bill Changer Theft Unfolded in Sharon’s Stores

For Sharon, the bill changer has been the recurring point of failure. Both significant theft incidents at her stores started with employees who had bill changer access combined with the responsibility to perform manual reconciliation. Ian has heard similar accounts from many of the laundromat owners he has spoken with through Wash Dry Fold POS, though specific patterns vary by operator and by store setup.

The mechanics that made the theft possible at Sharon’s store are straightforward:

An employee is responsible for pulling cash from the changer at shift change or end of day
The employee writes a reconciliation log showing how much cash was pulled
The employee adds that cash to the POS drawer count for the shift balance
No one independently counts the drawer against the system count

In that flow, there is no checkpoint. The system trusts the employee’s count of the changer cash. The changer itself often has only a basic mechanical or electronic counter that the employee can underreport. The drawer reconciliation appears to balance because the employee combined the actual remaining cash with the system’s expected value, then wrote a falsified changer pull number that closed the loop on paper.

An employee who chooses to steal can pull twenties, fifties, and any extra denominations from the changer, pocket those, then add the remainder to the drawer. The point of sale system’s sales record looks correct because the sales were never the source of the diverted funds. The diversion happened upstream of the POS at the changer.

This is what happened in Sharon’s case. The manager who was eventually caught had been operating in this pattern for an extended period. The amount reached felony territory. Sharon identified the pattern by reviewing months of camera footage against POS records and changer counters, then comparing the reconciliation logs the manager had written. By the time the documentation was complete, the case was solid enough to refer to financial crimes investigators.

One factor that made the theft hard to spot in real time was that Sharon’s affected store was newer and ramping up. Flat numbers initially looked like slower-than-expected growth rather than something that demanded immediate investigation. The pattern she described, in which a ramping store can mask theft because there is no prior baseline to compare to, is worth keeping in mind for any operator with a store still in its growth curve.

The structural responses Sharon and Ian discussed during the conversation include:

Eliminate or minimize bill changer cash supply
Use a digital bill counter for any necessary cash counting
Separate cash counting from reconciliation logging (different employees, or owner verification)
Compare changer transaction counts to POS sales reports daily, not just weekly or monthly
Sample-review video footage against POS records on a routine basis, even when no theft is suspected

🔑 Insider Key

Sharon’s experience is a useful reference point: a newer store ramping up can mask theft because flat numbers look like slower-than-expected growth rather than a clear signal. If your new store’s revenue is materially below your projection, looking at the cash handling chain is worth doing alongside any marketing or local-market review.

The Quarter-Less Operation: Cutting Theft and Daily Maintenance

Eliminating store-supplied quarters is the change Sharon and Ian both point to as the largest reduction in their daily cash handling exposure, with operational benefits beyond theft prevention. Many operators assume customer revenue depends on quarters being readily available. Sharon and Ian’s experience at their respective stores ran counter to that assumption.

Liberty Laundry, the three-store operation Ian Gollahon co-owns in Tulsa, Oklahoma, transitioned to a no-quarter-supply model and did not see revenue drop. Top-line revenue moved from $2.1 million to $2.5 million across the three stores during a period that included this change, although Ian was clear that multiple operational changes contributed to the growth and that the quarter elimination was not isolated as the sole driver. The decision to drop quarter supply was not driven by revenue projections. It was driven by the labor cost of pulling, counting, and replenishing quarters across multiple locations every day.

Sharon’s stores follow the same model. The bill changer is no longer routinely supplied with quarters. Customers pay in one of four ways:

Bring their own quarters and use them at the machine
Use the Speed Queen mobile app, loading credit, debit, or cash through a value center
Use scan-and-pay via the QR code on the machine for direct credit or debit payment
Pay at the counter through Wash Dry Fold POS, which sends a remote vend command to the machine

The bill changer in Sharon’s stores carries signage directing customers to the counter for help, which routes the conversation to “we can pay for that machine right here at the counter” rather than “let me load up the changer with cash.” That redirect pattern, applied consistently, transitions customers to digital payment without friction.

The operational benefits compound:

No daily quarter pulls or hopper refills
No quarter inventory to track or buy from the bank
Less accumulated quarter cash to secure or transport
Less employee access to cash without electronic trail
Customer receipts available for any counter transaction

For customers transitioning to the new model, a one-time bonus program (load $20, get $30 in machine value, for example, scaled to a 50 percent bonus during transition) typically converts most regulars without revenue loss. After the transition period, the bonus rate drops to a sustainable level (10 percent is a common rate at Liberty Laundry), but the operational savings persist permanently.

The customer experience often improves. Counter payment lets customers pay with credit or debit, get an itemized receipt, see exactly which machines they used, and reconcile the transaction with their records or employer reimbursement. Commercial accounts and reimbursement-driven users find this a meaningful upgrade over loose quarters. Sharon’s stores see customers actively appreciate the receipt feature for that reason.

🔑 Insider Key

Liberty Laundry and Sharon’s stores both expected revenue to drop when they stopped supplying quarters. Neither saw that drop materialize. A transition bonus eased the customer adjustment in both cases. Operators considering the change should still model their own customer mix and market before assuming the same outcome.

Wash, Dry, Fold Order Tracking and Audit Trails

Beyond the self-service integration, Wash Dry Fold POS provides operational tracking for wash, dry, fold orders that builds an audit trail useful for both customer service and theft prevention.

Order intake captures customer information, weight, due date, and any special instructions. The order then progresses through clearly defined stages:

Sorting
Washing
Drying
Folding
Ready for pickup

At each stage, the employee can tag the specific machines used. When an order is washed in machine 12 at 9:42 AM and dried in machine 23 at 10:30 AM, the system records both events with timestamps. When the order reaches “ready,” an automated text notifies the customer.

The customer service value of this tracking shows up when items are reported missing. A customer might call several days later saying their favorite red sweater never came back. The operator can pull the timestamps for the order, find the corresponding video footage, and verify whether the sweater was in the original drop-off bag. In most cases the missing item was not in the bag at all, but having the verification removes ambiguity and resolves the conversation quickly.

The theft prevention value comes from reconciling order revenue, employee productivity, and machine utilization over time. If an order is started but never properly closed out in the system, that fact is visible. If an employee consistently has unusual gaps between intake and washing, the pattern is visible. If wash, dry, fold revenue is not tracking proportionally with weight intake, the pattern is visible.

Pickup includes a barcode scan that marks the order as picked up, with payment collection prompted before release. The largest text on the bag tag and the receipt is the payment status, by design, so attendants do not release laundry without collecting payment first. Ian’s business partner Brian originally pushed for this design after seeing how easy it was to overlook payment collection at handoff in their own stores.

The point-and-say verification method, which Sharon’s team uses, adds a final check at handoff. The attendant says aloud “Sharon Brinks, five bags, two hangers” while pointing to each item, and the customer confirms the count. Including the customer in the verification reduces both lost items and disputed pickups in Sharon’s experience.

For internal links between order tracking and broader Wash Dry Fold POS functionality, operators can find detailed setup and integration guides at support.washdryfoldpos.com.

A Five-Layer Laundromat Employee Theft Prevention Framework

The threads from Sharon’s playbook combine into a five-layer approach to laundromat employee theft prevention. Operators implement these layers in different sequences depending on store maturity, budget, and existing infrastructure. The framework below reflects how Sharon and Ian have evolved their stores over time, not a universal prescription.

Layer 1: Eliminate or minimize cash supply at the machine level. Stop supplying quarters in the bill changer. Direct customers to digital payment options or counter payment instead. For Sharon, this change closed the specific gap that her two prior theft incidents had relied on, which was the bill changer being a meaningful destination for store cash.

Layer 2: Route every payment through the point of sale system. The Speed Queen POS Insights integration with Wash Dry Fold POS allows counter payment to flow directly to machine vend commands. Mobile app and scan-and-pay options route through Insights natively. The fewer untracked payment paths exist in your store, the fewer opportunities for diversion.

Layer 3: Build electronic audit trails for every cash event. Wash Dry Fold POS timestamps order events. Insights logs machine activity. Camera systems record physical activity at counters and changers. When these records are actually reconciled against each other on a routine basis, a sustained theft pattern leaves traces that are visible against the reconciliation log.

Layer 4: Separate cash counting from reconciliation logging. If the same employee counts the cash and writes the reconciliation log, that employee owns the integrity of the count entirely. Separating these activities (whether through owner verification, a different employee on a different shift, or a digital bill counter that auto-reports) creates a checkpoint that an individual cannot override alone.

Layer 5: Sample-review video against POS records routinely. Sharon’s experience is that video footage is most useful when it is reviewed routinely, not only after a theft is suspected. By the time suspicion arises, months of footage may have rolled off and the documentation is incomplete. Sampling video against POS records on a regular schedule (even just spot-checking a small set of transactions per shift across a week) makes it easier to surface patterns early.

Each layer is independently valuable. Combined, they make a sustained theft pattern harder to execute and easier to detect. Sharon’s stores have moved toward this combination over time. Her view is that the layered approach is what makes ongoing theft difficult to hide rather than impossible to commit, and that sample-based video review combined with electronic reconciliation has been the most useful additions for her operation.

Wash Dry Fold POS automates several controls within this framework. The platform’s laundromat employee theft prevention feature set includes recallable past till counts, employee-level machine start and production value tracking, time-stamped activity logs, and machine-start-to-order-value ratio reports for every employee. These features support Layers 2, 3, and 5 by reducing the manual work required to maintain the audit trail.

Why Pickup and Delivery Did Not Pencil for Sharon’s Operation

Pickup and delivery is a frequently marketed expansion path for laundromat owners. Sharon ran a separate LLC for pickup and delivery for several years and ultimately shut it down because the operational complexity outweighed the revenue contribution for her operation.

The shutdown was driven partly by personal circumstances. Her cancer diagnosis in May 2024 made the operational complexity unmanageable, and her stepdaughter who had been running the operation became pregnant and chose to be a stay-at-home parent. But Sharon’s analysis of the business was already pointing toward the same conclusion before either of those factors crystallized.

Her observations about pickup and delivery economics:

Customer acquisition cost is high relative to lifetime value
The lifetime value payback period is one to two years
Margins are thin, requiring high price points to cover all costs
Operational complexity scales with route count, vehicle maintenance, insurance, and software
Third-party gig delivery introduces brand risk that often outweighs convenience
Residential delivery customers often want privacy that third-party drivers compromise

Sharon described the operation as “three-dimensional chess” relative to in-store wash, dry, fold. The number of moving parts (route planning, customer scheduling, vehicle uptime, driver management, insurance, software platform reliability) creates compounding complexity that eats margin if any single dimension goes wrong.

Her recommendation for operators considering pickup and delivery is sequenced: master in-store wash, dry, fold first. Know your numbers cold, including unit economics down to dollars per pound. Price your in-store service to support a single attendant per shift. Only then explore pickup and delivery, and start with small commercial accounts where margins are higher and customer volume is more predictable than residential.

For Liberty Laundry, pickup and delivery represents less than one percent of total revenue across three stores, despite being marketed actively. The largest commercial account at Liberty generates approximately $50,000 per year and prefers in-store drop-off and pickup over delivery because the price-to-convenience tradeoff favored drop-off for that customer. Sharon and Ian both pointed to small commercial accounts as the more reliable path for any operator considering delivery at all, with residential delivery being the area where they have most often seen disproportionate operational overhead relative to revenue contribution.

Operating Through Adversity: A Cancer Diagnosis Mid-Construction

In May 2024, Sharon’s annual mammogram revealed a 2.5 centimeter HER2-positive tumor that had not spread. The diagnosis was Stage 2 due to tumor size. Treatment proceeded along a clear timeline:

May 2024: diagnosis
June through October 2024: six rounds of chemotherapy, three weeks apart
November 2024: lumpectomy (no live cancer cells found, no lymph node involvement)
January through September 2025: 11 Phesgo injections (a HER2-targeted therapy combination), three weeks apart, plus radiation

Her flagship’s second location opened in August 2024, in the middle of chemotherapy. The brain fog and fatigue from chemo made operational management nearly impossible during the worst stretches. She delegated the pickup and delivery business to her stepdaughter, leaned heavily on her management team, and managed essential decisions through the periods when her energy permitted.

Sharon is now in the five-year post-cancer monitoring phase, with semi-annual oncology visits. She has lost approximately 60 pounds, completed scuba diving certification, runs two miles twice weekly, and works with a personal trainer on weight training.

Her health message is direct: get your annual mammogram. Her 2023 scan showed nothing. Her 2024 scan, taken one year later, caught the tumor before it had spread. Sharon credits annual screening with catching her cancer at a stage where treatment had a clear path. She quoted Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Cancer Book: “Nobody dies from breast cancer. What kills you is when those cells travel to vital organs.” Sharon’s takeaway from her own experience is that annual screening is the most reliable way to catch cells before that travel happens.

🔑 Insider Key

Sharon’s experience suggests that delegation infrastructure built before a crisis matters more than any single operational tool. The systems and team Sharon had in place before her diagnosis allowed her to keep the business running through chemotherapy, even though her own energy and capacity were significantly reduced for months at a time.

Questions owners ask

Where has employee theft happened in Sharon Brinks’ laundromats?

There is no single industry-wide statistic for the most common cause of laundromat employee theft, and Sharon and Ian were careful in the conversation not to make universal claims. In Sharon’s two significant theft incidents, both involved employees with bill changer access who could pull cash and falsify the daily reconciliation log. Because the point of sale system never saw the changer cash directly, the theft continued for an extended period before Sharon identified the pattern through camera footage and reconciliation review. Ian Gollahon has heard structurally similar stories from many laundromat owners he has spoken with through Wash Dry Fold POS, but the specific patterns vary by store. The integration with Wash Dry Fold POS is designed to reduce this category of risk by routing payment through the POS rather than through the changer.

How does the Speed Queen POS Insights integration work with Wash Dry Fold POS?

The Speed Queen POS Insights integration with Wash Dry Fold POS uses the Insights API to send remote vend commands from the point of sale system to Speed Queen Touch washers and dryers. When a customer pays at the counter for a specific dollar amount, Wash Dry Fold POS sends a remote vend command to the customer’s machine for that exact value. The machine accepts the command as if the customer had inserted that amount in quarters. Both Insights and Wash Dry Fold POS log the transaction, allowing the operator to reconcile across systems and report by payment source. The integration also supports starting machines from wash, dry, fold orders, with the cost tied to the specific order for profitability tracking.

What is the Speed Queen remote vend command?

The Speed Queen remote vend command is the API call that allows a third-party point of sale system to start a Speed Queen Touch machine with a specific dollar value. Before the remote vend command was added to the Insights platform, third-party systems could only send a generic start signal, which allowed customers to add unlimited extra cycles beyond what they paid for. The remote vend command caps the value the machine will accept, eliminating that revenue leak. The command was added to the Speed Queen platform after Sharon Brinks raised the issue with Speed Queen’s product team and provided her store as a test site for the integration.

Should laundromat owners stop supplying quarters?

This is an operational decision that depends on your store, your customer base, and your existing labor and theft exposure. Liberty Laundry and Sharon’s Laundry Station stores both transitioned to no-quarter-supply models and were satisfied with the result, including not seeing the revenue drop they had anticipated. A one-time transition bonus (loading $20 returns $30 in machine value, for example) helped convert regular customers to digital payment in both cases. Liberty Laundry now runs an ongoing 10 percent bonus on loaded value to sustain the digital-payment habit. Operators considering the change should model their own customer mix and the specific labor and theft savings they would expect, rather than assume the same outcome.

Is pickup and delivery profitable for laundromats?

Pickup and delivery can be profitable, and some operators do it well. For Liberty Laundry, it currently represents less than 1 percent of total revenue across three stores despite active marketing. Sharon Brinks ran a profitable pickup and delivery LLC for several years and ultimately shut it down because the operational complexity was not justified by the revenue contribution. Both Sharon and Ian recommend mastering in-store wash, dry, fold first, knowing the unit economics in detail, then exploring small commercial accounts before residential delivery. Their experience suggests that customer acquisition cost is high relative to lifetime value for residential pickup and delivery, but they were also careful to note that operators with different markets, marketing approaches, or commercial customer bases may see different results.

What payment methods do Sharon’s laundromats accept?

Sharon’s stores accept four payment methods: customer-supplied quarters at the machine, the Speed Queen mobile app (credit, debit, or cash loaded through a value center), scan-and-pay via QR code on the machine, and counter payment through Wash Dry Fold POS. Her four-channel approach handles a range of customer preferences while keeping reporting unified through the Speed Queen POS Insights integration. Stores with different machine manufacturers will have different specific channel options. The principle Sharon and Ian both pointed to is that fewer untracked payment paths in your store generally means fewer opportunities for cash to move outside an audit trail.

What equipment mix do Sharon and Ian use?

Ian’s view from working with high-revenue laundromat operators is that a few positions tend to be common, including no top-loading washers, no soft-mount front loaders, and a meaningful share of large-capacity machines in flagship builds. Beyond those points, equipment mix decisions depend on market, square footage, and customer base. Sharon operates two flagship stores with different mixes (her first has 30 washers and 1,400 pounds of wash capacity, with four 80-pound machines and 200-pound machines; her second has 24 washers and 1,100 pounds, with two 80-pound machines that in hindsight she might have made four). She is genuinely uncertain about some decisions for any potential third store, including the share of 20-pound machines and whether to start the entry tier at 30 or 40 pounds. Operators planning a build should treat mix prescriptions beyond the firm “no top loaders, no soft mounts” stance as market-specific rather than universal.

What is the point-and-say method for wash, dry, fold pickup?

The point-and-say method is a verbal verification ritual at wash, dry, fold pickup. The attendant says aloud the customer’s name and the count of bags, hangers, and other items while physically pointing to each one. The customer confirms the count by listening and observing. The method involves the customer in the verification process and dramatically reduces lost items and disputed pickups. It works because customers will speak up if a count is wrong (“I’m supposed to have three hangers, not two”) in a way they would not if the items were simply handed over without verbal acknowledgment.

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 laundromat employee theft prevention, cash handling controls, Speed Queen and Alliance machine start integration and attendant procedures. Sharon Brinks, the guest in this episode, is a multi-store laundromat owner.

Full episode transcript

Sharon Brinks 00:00

I had a 25-year career prior in computers. So was a computer nerd before I became a laundry nerd.

Single mom, two kids looking for additional income.

I've always been doing laundry for somebody else.

It was something that the community had always depended on, and the appreciation of fixing it up really meant a lot to me.

Sharon Brinks 00:18

I got diagnosed with breast cancer in May of 2024, started chemo in June, finished chemo in October.

Sharon Brinks 00:26

I've kicked the cancer to the curb and doing great.

Sharon Brinks 00:30

Both my parents grew up in the depression and instilled in me the value that you don't steal from anybody. You work for it. And I've worked my butt off my whole life, so has my husband. And have somebody want to take a shortcut and try to take from that, take from my family.

Ian Gollahon 00:38

That's right.

Sharon Brinks 00:47

So now we just use a Speed Queen app. We don't have a loyalty card per se.

This awesome POS system we have called Wash, Dry, Fold POS,

has an API which is a little software piece which talks to all the equipment

Ian Gollahon 01:01

Sharon Brinks 01:06

Yep.

Ian Gollahon 01:22

Hello and welcome to the laundromat ownership podcast. I'm your host Ian Gollahon me and my business partner Brian Henderson on Liberty Laundry in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It's a chain of three laundromats. We did about 2.5 million in revenue, top line revenue in 2025, but we're also the founders and owners of Wash, Dry, Fold POS, the original point of sale system for laundromats. Today we have with us a very special guest, Sharon Brinks and

I know Sharon for being a very successful, one of our most successful customers over the years. And it was really gracious and generous of her to join us on the podcast. But Sharon, why don't you introduce yourself and kind of give people an idea of the scope of your operations and just an overview.

Sharon Brinks 02:09

Sure. So I'm Sharon Brinks. Hi. In Wichita, Kansas. I bought my first laundromat January of 2014. It was a little run down zombie mat, if you will. I was single mom, two kids looking for additional income. I fixed it up, put in some new equipment. It was already a Speed Queen store. So I put some new Speed Queen equipment in there, cleaned it, painted it up.

Really fell in love with the laundry business at that point. Mean, that was the bomb for me. Fast forward a few years, got married, moved into Wichita proper, still had that little laundromat about 30 miles outside of Wichita. My husband and I built our big flagship store, the Laundry Station, opened it in 2018. Then we decided to go ahead and close the store in…

That other little town, the perfect storm hit, long story, we'll get into a little bit of that here on another topic later. But we closed that store, sold the equipment, sold the building, then built our second store in Wichita. So we have two stores, both are Speed Queen Touch.

Stores. We use Wash, Dry, Fold POS in both stores and that second store we opened a year and half ago in August of 2024. So there we are.

Ian Gollahon 03:35

thanks for the quick summary there. I appreciate that. And that kind of gives everyone an idea of how long you've been doing this and what you've done so far. And just to let the audience know, your stores are very successful. And you also do speak at lot of conferences and laundromat owner gatherings. And you're kind of one of the original thought leaders in the space. So.

Sharon Brinks 03:55

Ian Gollahon 04:03

So I wanted to give you, I wanted to give you your credit there as well.

Sharon Brinks 04:03

I try. I've taken a little bit of

time off here lately to just kind of double down and focus on our operations, but I'll jump back into it probably next year. So, yeah.

Ian Gollahon 04:16

Well,

I actually want to go back to before you even got into the laundromat sphere of knowing everyone back to 2014. What do you think it was about just kind of turning around that little store that made you fall in love with laundromats? It was it just the process of making something better? What do you remember?

Sharon Brinks 04:40

Yeah. So self-employed at the time. I was a real estate agent. I had a few rental properties, one of that little additional, you know, passive income. Yeah, so passive. But I lived about 20 minutes away. I wasn't like I lived right down the street or anything. But we were partially attended at that time.

Ian Gollahon 04:49

So passive, yeah.

Sharon Brinks 04:59

I inherited two employees from the previous owner. They were getting a divorce, so that kind of forced the sale to split the proto seeds. I've always loved doing laundry. I mean, I've done laundry since…

You know, got married the first time around. So that's it's been several decades ago. I've always been doing laundry for somebody else. So I just love that process of getting clothes clean. And then this particular laundromat was it had been a laundromat and a dry cleaners at the time, years and years before, but since 1961. So it was a fixture in the community. It was the original laundromat for that little town. So everybody I had so many people that would come in and say, I remember being

Ian Gollahon 05:37

Mm.

Sharon Brinks 05:46

Here as a little kid, my mom would bring me here, or my grandmother would bring me here, and we'd do laundry. So it was something that the community had always depended on, and the appreciation of fixing it up and making it a lot nicer really meant a lot to me.

That was fun. I've always wanted to work for myself anyway. I had a 25-year career prior in computers. So was a computer nerd before I became a laundry nerd. So I got laid off due to a corporate merger, and that's what started the whole, I'm going to be a real estate agent, have some rentals, and then buy this laundromat. So I've always wanted to be self-employed anyway. So this just…

Ian Gollahon 06:07

Mm-hmm.

Sharon Brinks 06:27

That was just, just, the timing was right for me. So, but yeah, I love the laundry business just because of that.

Ian Gollahon 06:31

You know, it's.

It makes sense. I do think there's a lot of people just like improving the world around them. Whether that's taking dirty clothes and making them clean or taking a run down laundromat and making it nice, I think there's really some value there and something to be said about just improving. We all want to make money. We all have to make money with what we do. But when you can actually see that you've made a difference and that you've made things nicer for people and that's part of their day to day life.

That part is kind of rewarding in addition to the revenue, because we've all probably had jobs where we had revenue, but we didn't get that other piece of it where we weren't making anything nicer. We didn't get to see the fruits of our labor in that way. So that makes a lot of sense. And also, I'm struck by your story, even though it's very unique.

Sharon Brinks 07:19

Right.

Ian Gollahon 07:28

Heard so many times people come from software or from real estate development or like it's like people get into laundromats from every rich way. There's no standard path to, you know, becoming a laundromat owner. And so it's, it's unique, but not surprising in that. Yeah. You had this software background and we actually do. We have so many IT people that have our software, so many of our customers that were in IT or, software development at some point in their lives. So.

Sharon Brinks 07:29

You

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 07:58

Tell me then a little bit more about, you, sold off the first store and then you opened the second store and then you opened a third store after that. Is that correct? So you've had three total?

Sharon Brinks 08:06

We opened

the laundry station. This, the other one was named Super Suds. Suds with a Z, not to be confused with the one in California that everybody knows. So Suds with a Z. So Super Suds was still open. We decided to build the second one and it just wasn't worth the hassle of driving back and forth at 30 minutes to go to the other one that made this much money where…

Ian Gollahon 08:09

Yep. Yeah, that's right. That's right.

Right.

Sharon Brinks 08:35

You know, the population, the money was in Wichita, not in the little town. So we opened that second one, then closed the first one, and then opened the third one. So that was the order of events. Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 08:38

Laundry station, yeah.

That's what I thought.

And the second one did more revenue just right off the bat from the first one.

Sharon Brinks 08:54

It did. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's more dense population than town. Mean, it's Wichita is a city of well, and I could tell you are top the head. But the one the one mile radius, definitely three mile radius. But I think the one mile radius around that second store is probably the entire population of the of the city that the first stores in. So, yeah, a lot more.

Ian Gollahon 08:59

That's what it was, okay.

Bye.

And how

big was that? How big was that first laundry station?

Sharon Brinks 09:22

The supersides one or the second store. So it has 30 washers, 1400 pounds of wash capacity. And we open with 35 dryers, dryer pockets when you have 33, because when we retooled.

Ian Gollahon 09:26

No, the second one. Sorry, the second. Yeah, Yeah, yeah.

Sharon Brinks 09:41

You know, retails after only five years, you know, having brand new equipment and you can retail after five years, but we did. So I got rid of the 30 pound stacks and replaced those with two more 75 pound single pockets. So that reduced us from 35 pockets to 33. So, and now our newest store is 24 washers with 1,100 pounds of wash capacity and 25 dryer pockets. So.

Ian Gollahon 10:09

Did you go with

any 80 pounders in that second store?

Sharon Brinks 10:12

Second store we

went with two, I probably should have went with four. At the first laundry station we have four 80 pounders, but we also have 200 pounders. Yeah, I should have went with two less 20s and two more 80s, but hindsight's too much.

Ian Gollahon 10:30

Well, that's

been the story of our stores as well. It's like each store we go with the larger machines or whatever it's like and that is very common of I Think and this is just my personal opinion. I think the distributors they want to sell you as much They want the ticket to be as big as they can for the square footage of that store

Sharon Brinks 10:51

So here's the thing with me and anybody who's ever met me knows probably gets this but I will ask the distributor, I'll tell them this is what I want, get me a quote for this equipment. I've never asked them for what's your opinion of my equipment mix so tell them what I want. So that was on me. I wanted 620s and I should only went with four. Actually the next store we're looking at our third location, we've got our eye on the spot. We haven't pulled the trigger yet but I'm like this close but

Ian Gollahon 11:06

Right.

Sharon Brinks 11:21

It would be a just a bare piece of land and build the building up, but we might start with just 30s or 40s. We might not even have 20s. Don't even get me started on soft mount horizons. No, no top loads and no soft mounts. So yeah.

Ian Gollahon 11:29

The 20s, yeah.

Yes,

I agree 100%. And it is funny. I always talk to people about like, you know, if you get a thousand laundromat owners in the same room, they'll argue about everything in the book. But then if you just put the top 10 % in revenue, they'll agree. Like no top loaders, no soft mounts Make sure you get good 80 pounders in there. Don't do too many 20s. Cause we've all made that same mistake. We've all had that first store that had that machine layout and go ahead.

Sharon Brinks 12:01

Yeah. Now that being said,

we've got eight 20s at our at our first laundry station and often they're all in use on, you know, Sunday afternoon. Would I change that equipment mix? I'm not sure. I might take out I might take out two of the 20s and put in more 40s or just put in more 40s. I'm not sure. But very first, the supersets little rundown store, top loaders, half of which were out of order.

Ian Gollahon 12:23

Yeah.

Sharon Brinks 12:30

Bunch of the horizons and that's how I learned my this taste for those that rubber gasket. You pull that thing up and the smells and the horrific things that you see under that rubber gasket, especially when we became an unattended store and nobody was in there cleaning it. When I had a cleaning crew, I would have a cleaning crew come in every couple of days and clean it out, but they wouldn't get under those gaskets and that's, yeah, I can still remember the smell.

And what it would look like. It was disgusting. So, no.

Ian Gollahon 13:02

Yeah,

yeah. If someone were to say like, why isn't laundromat ownership, you know, semi passive from day one? One of the first things that would come to my mind would be machine repair. Everything in the store breaks, whether it's a vending machine or a soap machine or a washer or a dryer, and they all break all the time. And someone's got to fix them. It's either going to be you or you have to hire someone to do it. So.

Sharon Brinks 13:15

Yeah. Yeah.

And

the newer stuff won't fix won't break as much, but it will. I mean, I've had bad water valves and the screen cracks, those plastic covers on the front of the touch screens. Alliance, please, for the love of all things holy. Figure that one out. I'm so tired that I've got.

Ian Gollahon 13:27

That's right, still breaks.

Sharon Brinks 13:44

I have a request in and granted it's covered by warranty. The part is, but not the labor and I'm not going to put those things in. So I've got about a plus for another eight of them between the two stores again. So, but it doesn't affect the controls underneath just, just to be clear. It just looks up. It's, the. Yeah. Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 13:56

Yeah, we had some.

Yeah, that's a good thing. It's just like the cover that cracks. We've

had some on our 80 pound because we got some new quantum touch 80s and we had some issues with the door hinges being overly tight and it was just like really hard to open and yeah, yeah on that. Yep. Yep, yep. We've had we've gone back and forth on that. So yes, even though new machines are much better to have and good to get and we've been very happy with ours.

Sharon Brinks 14:17

On your 80s? My two at the second store, I have the same problem. Yep.

Ian Gollahon 14:31

Nothing works all the time in a laundromat. That's just, and that's going to be with any manufacturer and any, any situation that you have, it's, it's not semi passive unless you've built it to be semi passive and you have the right people employed. So let's kind of transition into that because you're saying you're building a third store and you know, when I hear that I get, or you're going to open your third store, I guess is your fourth store to own, but um,

Sharon Brinks 14:31

Yeah.

What we're thinking about.

Right.

Well, we haven't bought the land yet. We're looking at the location. We're thinking about it. We're pondering it. I do want to do another store. It's just going to be that one or that spot or not. So, yeah.

Ian Gollahon 15:01

Okay.

Well, tell me a little bit about your, personal motivation on that. Cause this is the, this is something that I think about a lot where it's like, we have three stores at a certain point, it's doing a good amount of profit for you and your family, or at least that's, that's our situation. It's, it's making good money. And then do we want to expand and have more problems and more employees and more managers and more meetings and more.

Sharon Brinks 15:25

Right. Right.

Yeah. Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 15:39

Headaches and you know, it's like, obviously you want the revenue. You want to keep building. There's this thing inside of us that just wants to keep on doing well when we succeeded something and doing what we're good at. But tell me what that conversation sounds like for you, because I know you've had health struggles in the past, you know, five years. I don't know how much you want to go into that today, but yeah.

Sharon Brinks 15:56

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'll get my

PSA on have your mammograms ladies here a little bit. But yeah, it's, it's like, okay, I've had I've had great success. First store, great success in the second store. Well, let's try it again. So, you know, but then on the other hand, my husband and I aren't getting any younger, but we're still in great health. Mean, you know, just

Ian Gollahon 16:04

Yes.

Sharon Brinks 16:26

You I've kicked the cancer to the curb and doing great. I'm healthier than I've ever been, to be honest, but lots of energy, obviously. It's the fun of building it. On the other hand, if you've ever built a house with your spouse and you've survived that, your marriage has stayed intact, then you got a good marriage. So my husband and I have built

two laundromats together and we're still married. So far so good. It can be a challenge. Can butt heads

Sharon Brinks 17:03

The money's nice. We've had success with the first two laundromats. I'm blessed with a husband who loves to build laundromats, but doesn't like to run them. And I like to run them, but the process of building them is very stressful. It's fun. It's interesting. He is a structural engineer, so that helps a lot.

So I'm like, okay, I want this many washers, I want this many dryers, and I kind of want them in this direction. And okay, what constraints do I have within the space? Know, like, because we have to be cognizant of where's the, so like the place we're looking at or the piece of land we've already scoped out, where's the sewer, how big's the water line, where's the storm sewer, we've already got curb cuts, ingress, egress.

Ian Gollahon 17:28

Yeah.

Sharon Brinks 17:54

Stuff like that. I look up the demographics. I'm also a real estate broker, so I look up all the demographics of the one mile, three mile, five mile, even half mile around there. So I like that whole process of creating and building it. And yeah, don't get me wrong, the money's nice too, but I think when you have one store, you've got some brand recognition when you have two stores.

Ian Gollahon 17:57

Thank

Sharon Brinks 18:22

There's a little more brand recognition. Then when you have that third store, you get more of a brand recognition, which I'm sure you guys learned over the years. Oh, Liberty Laundry, yeah, I know that one. I'm used to live over by this one, but now I've moved over by that one. And then if you have some sort of loyalty program for payments, that even helps too. So, so. Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 18:43

Yep. It bridges across all three stores in that case. And that's

nice when you have to shut one down to do a cleaning or some kind of roof repair or, know.

Sharon Brinks 18:52

Exactly, exactly.

If we've had, yeah, if you have some sort of horrible incident, like we had a water line problem in the middle of winter one time.

Ian Gollahon 19:01

Yep, we've had that.

Sharon Brinks 19:03

We could send people to another store or okay, we've got a wash dry fold, still has to happen. We can go do it at the other store and still have people come and do pick up and drop off at the other one. So it's nice having that backup location. But yeah, my husband and I aren't getting any younger. We're in our early to mid 60s and there'll come a time when we've like, you know what, we're done. Will that be in six months? Will that be in a year? Will that be in five years? I don't know, but right now we're in great health and

Ian Gollahon 19:19

Yes.

Sharon Brinks 19:33

You know, we're going be in which to offer the foreseeable future. So when I got nothing better to do so. So. I think I finally hit my stride, yeah.

Ian Gollahon 19:40

Well, people like doing what they're good at. I think it's clear that, you know, you've had a lot of that's right. You've had a lot of things in your life

really prepare you for this kind of a thing and to execute at this scale and make this big of an impact on the physical space. I mean, it's really a cool thing. I mean, that's not something that that the average person gets to do. So I could definitely see why that would be satisfying. One of the things you mentioned

Sharon Brinks 19:56

Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 20:09

Having the three stores and having the loyalty card that goes between the three stores. That may be kind of a good transition into this next question, which was about the Alliance integration with Wash Drive Full POS. And do you have a separate payment system besides Insights or is it just the Insights app that they use?

Sharon Brinks 20:22

Yeah.

So now we just use a Speed Queen app. We don't have a loyalty card per se. So it's just app based, there's no cards on it. That's the way they can get rewards is if they use the app and they can use credit or debit. Or we have a value center at each of the stores where they can feed in cash and load that onto their app as well. So Insights is the software that runs all this stuff. The app is just the Speed Queen app.

Ian Gollahon 20:51

And that's like an insights value center that speed quintiles.

Okay.

Sharon Brinks 21:00

So Insights is, my understanding is Insights is what you and I as store owners use behind the scenes to program the machines, run all the reports. And there's, there's so many reports. You can slice things so many different ways. It's incredible. Machine drain times, fill times, how people have paid, who are your customers. They do have a CRM, which to be honest, I've never used, but.

I've just not really gotten into that. But it's for the self-service folks. So at our store, we have four ways to pay. You can use quarters at the machine. We no longer supply quarters. We can talk about that later as to why. But you can bring your own quarters and use quarters at the machine. You can use the Speed Queen app, credit, debit or cash using Speed Queen app.

Ian Gollahon 21:44

Hahaha.

Sharon Brinks 21:54

We've enabled the scan pay wash, Alliance, guess I think they have it on the HIPPSH machines also, but anyway, Speed Queen has started that just the last few months. You scan the QR code on the machine and pay for it with credit or debit on your phone, or they can pay at the counter, which is a really cool thing because this awesome POS system we have called Wash, Dry, Fold POS,

Ian Gollahon 22:16

Right.

Sharon Brinks 22:24

Has an API that which is a little software piece which talks to all the equipment and you can pay at the counter. You know have all my machines set up as to what the pricing is. The customers set the price they pick the additions, upcharges, whatever they want, the extra cycles on the machine. On the counter tell me the name, me or tell the attendance.

I'm talking fast now because I get all excited. As part I get all Tell the attendant the number of the machines that they want and then the attendant just selects those machines. It pulls in from the machine.

Ian Gollahon 22:53

No, you're good. You're good.

Sharon Brinks 23:08

The price that the customer selected and then they can pay at the POS with cash credit or debit. And then it sends the remote Vend Command, POS system sends the remote Vend Command back out to the machine and says, okay, customers paid $10 at the counter. It's just the same as they've put $10 worth of quarters in the machine. So all I have to do is go back and hit start. So it's slick, Wash-Dry-Fold POS is reporting on it as well.

Ian Gollahon 23:29

That's right, yeah.

Sharon Brinks 23:36

Numbers also, since it's remote vend, it's reported back into the Insights reporting. So I can see what was vended and where, was it coins, it watchdry fold POS, or was it from the app? So I can slice it and dice it different ways, pull it into a spreadsheet that I keep track of all of our weekly sales numbers on.

It just makes it a lot easier, a lot easier.

Ian Gollahon 24:01

Yeah,

the integration has been really important, not just for Speed Queen, but even if it's like a Laundroworks or a FasCard or a SpyderWash to build those integrations has always been important. I think one thing that I didn't understand when we first started building that Alliance integration, we thought the main, well, and this is still a main function of it, right? We were really, or at least I was hyper-focused on, okay,

Sharon Brinks 24:10

Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 24:28

You need to start the washers and dryers from the point of sale system because you need to have, okay, this is Jeff's order and I'm going to start two washers for Jeff and three dryers or two dryers. And then that all comes back as ratios of, how much did we spend on that order versus how much did we bring in? And you can sort that by employee so you can look out for theft and efficiencies. And I was really focused on that, I think, because it's called wash, dry, fold POS, right? It's not, you know, so I'm focused on the wash, dry, fold piece of it.

Sharon Brinks 24:46

Right. Right.

That's fine.

Right.

Ian Gollahon 24:58

But then as soon as we partnered with Alliance, because we were the first ones to build this machine start integration with them, with at your store, right? And I'm sure, I'm sure you, yes, right. Yeah. You volunteer for all the testing in the industry. All the stuff was built at your store. We need to get you a shirt that says like laundromat industry, crash test dummy, like.

Sharon Brinks 25:06

Yep. Crash test nephews again.

It's been claimed, sure.

Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 25:25

And

then just list all the things that your store has developed or that has been developed at your store. But, once, once we had it ready and we released it and we, you know, Alliance started sending us all these customers because as they kind of wind it down, their point of sale software and trying to get people off theirs and onto something else, one of the first things they would talk to us about was well,

What if I have a self-serve customer who wants to start a machine with their card, but they want to do it at the cash register? And we hadn't really thought too much about that, but it became clear that that was going to be a really central part of the integration. Even part of it, and you can correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I think some of the other softwares out there, they would just send a start command when you paid. And so then you could…

Sharon Brinks 25:57

Yep.

Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 26:20

Like add extra washes or add extra dry time. And it wouldn't know because the point of sale system was just taking in some amount of money and sending a start command. And so it was really important for us when we built it to say, no, no, no, if you get $10 at the point of sale system, you need to send $10 to the washer. And then if they want to add more, you know, an extra rent or if it's a dryer and they want to add more dry time, then that needs to be a separate.

Sharon Brinks 26:29

Yeah. Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 26:47

Add on and that needs to go back to the point of sale system. Need to add more money. And so we kind of built ours a little bit different than how it had ever been built in the past by tying specific values into exactly what we're sending back out to the machines from the point of sale system. And that seems to be what people want. We've, you know, we've had multiple people say, Hey, you guys did it right. Everyone else has done it wrong. Know,

Sharon Brinks 27:13

Yeah.

So for the, for speed queen or for the Alliance products, my understanding is I was told by the director of IT that we were the reason the remote VIN command was added. Mean, yeah, because of that exact problem was I, it would just send the, like we would go over into before you guys had that API in there. We could still, we'd ring up the sale and watch dry fold POS and.

Ian Gollahon 27:24

Right, that makes sense, that makes sense.

Sharon Brinks 27:42

You know, they pay their $10 or just figure, you know, just to make it even $10. So we add that to the cash register, but we'd still have to go over to Insights. I'd have to give my attendance access to Insights and they would go over and hit start. And yeah, then anybody could go put extra wash, extra rinse, whatever. So, so they added the remote VIN command and then I taught them, okay, now you're going to do a remote VIN for $10.

So now they can pick whatever options they want, but they can't go over $10. So yeah. So yeah, and the line was POS that they used to have. We had it too. And yes, were, add that to my shirt. We were test dummies for that. Also, they were rolling it out to some of their other like franchise stores and whatnot. So we, some of the…

Ian Gollahon 28:13

Right, right. No, that makes sense.

Sharon Brinks 28:32

Alliance folks came down and installed it and trained us on it. So we had that for a couple years. We opened our first store in 2018 with Wash, Dry, Fold POS. You guys have the PC-based version.

Cool thing about the Alliance POS was that they had that API. So I knew it was a possibility. You know, we could just put it in the POS system and have it automatically turn on. So that was the only reason we went away from Wash-Dry-Fold POS was, oh, you've got this cool API and you're gonna, you know, we get to be on the cutting edge of, you know, of technology again. And so we went with that, but the Wash Dry Fold piece of it just…

Ian Gollahon 28:54

Yeah.

Sharon Brinks 29:19

Never got where it really needed to be and I'd make suggestions and they weren't implemented and like I just I can't deal with this so we weren't on it I think maybe a couple years and then we went back to you guys because you by then you had a cloud-based system and it was even

Ian Gollahon 29:29

Hmm.

Sharon Brinks 29:40

With not having the remote VIN command there yet, it was still head and shoulders above what we had before. So never looked back. And then once we got the remote VIN command and you guys got the API in there now, it's smooth sailing. I love it. Yes.

Ian Gollahon 29:53

Now it's the best of all worlds, yes.

Now it is, but it wasn't easy getting there and I appreciate your patience with us over the years in getting there. I do think, well thank you, it was worth it for us as well. I think what some people miss is an alliance, which we both have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of alliance, so I'm not trying to…

Sharon Brinks 29:58

It wasn't.

It was well worth it though. It's worth the wait.

Ian Gollahon 30:22

Criticize them or anything, but I do think that, yeah, yeah.

Sharon Brinks 30:23

Yeah, more than a million here probably 1.5

because a retail to store and then built another one. So we're at 1.5. I think plus

Ian Gollahon 30:32

I think Liberty Laundry over the years is probably around two or something. Yeah, it's a lot. Yeah, it's plenty. Yeah, yeah, it's plenty. And we've retooled several times just recently as well, or in several stores. We're kind of doing it like all the washers in one store and then all the dryers in one store. And then we're just doing it in cash. And so we just kind of slowly retool all three stores that way. But what I was gonna say is,

Sharon Brinks 30:36

Or now. We've got three stores,

Yeah.

Yep.

Ian Gollahon 30:57

Yeah, they know what they know about washers and dryers probably more than anyone else in the world. But that is actually different from operating a laundromat on a day to day basis and actually having to manage the attendance that do the wash dry fold and making sure that they can operate the software. And then what reports do you even need? Kind of like you said, you've got, okay, if you've got a hundred different types of custom reports you can create, the average laundromat owner is not a

Sharon Brinks 31:07

This.

Ian Gollahon 31:25

Tech guru and the average lunch mat owner is going to be like, this is too many options. So it really does take another laundromat owner to go in and, you know, I think it's, I think the differences in the development approach there was that they were listening to their laundromat owners and then trying to put that on the roadmap and then trying to get that released, you know, and eventually they just had to shut the whole thing down.

But that's a lot different from then if you've built that specifically to solve your problems in your laundromats and then like just all day every day you're doing the laundromat owner point of sale thing. That's a little bit different from if you know, manufacturing equipment is your main revenue stream and then you're building some software on the side. And so I think that's kind of been part of what you know, everyone wants to

Sharon Brinks 31:58

Bye.

Right.

Ian Gollahon 32:20

To just build what we've built as like a little add-on, but it turns out it's hard to do that. It turns out even with millions of dollars and years, is very difficult.

Sharon Brinks 32:30

Yeah, yeah, I've

done programming, systems analysis and design, project management and IT for, I was just going back and rereading my old resume and I was like, oh my gosh, yeah, I used to do that, didn't I? And it's, it's, it's, it's easy to criticize, but it's really hard to do and the bigger the company, the harder it is to get stuff through. So, you know.

Ian Gollahon 32:57

That's

very true. And it's easy to say like, well, it just needs to do this and that. And this, I just needed to do these 10 simple things. And then by the time you get it in your hands, it's like, well, it needs to do these other hundred things too, of course. And then now that we've got it, we want it to do another hundred things as well. So that's just kind of, you know, that's, that's a software company is you're just constantly making it do more or do what it does more easily. And I guess that was one of the next questions I had for you was,

What features do you end up using the most and what features do you feel like kind of set it apart the most from maybe other softwares that you've tried like alliances, which we don't need to pick on theirs because it's not even available anymore. But maybe that's a good reason to pick on it is, you know, we can say, well, it didn't do these things.

Sharon Brinks 33:38

Right.

Well,

yeah, the whole tracking of the wash dry fold order from intake, know, you intake, you put the due date on it, you move it from, okay, it's to do, we're sorting it, we're washing it, we're drying it, we're folding it, we're ready to pick up.

What machines were used and the integration like what you'd originally thought of was I picked the machine, you know, the washer and it sends the command over to start the washer.

Okay, now I move it to the dryer. Okay, which dryer do you want? Send the command over to start the dryer. So I've got a date time stamp of when the washer was started, when the dryer was started. So if the customer comes in and says, hey, my favorite red sweater didn't come back, I know what time on my video to go back and look and say, yeah, 99 times out of 100, your red sweater did not come in with your order. But I know what time to go look, at least.

Ian Gollahon 34:19

Yep.

Mm-hmm

People

really underestimate how valuable that is. They're like, I don't want to use all those timestamps. I don't want my ladies to be going back to the, that's one of the most common ones I get is like, they have to go back to the, the cash register and select the machines. It's like, are they just going to be standing by the washer otherwise? Like where else are they going to be in your store besides back at the register to help people and then select the next, but, those timestamps for exactly what you said are just. Yeah.

Sharon Brinks 34:43

I'm done.

It's invaluable. Is invaluable.

And then when the order's done, text them automatically. Says, you're the customer. Your order is ready for pickup. Yeah, who does the order? And I know some people, some places will keep track of how many people worked on their order and who gets credit for it. 100 % here, 50%, 50%. I don't use any of that.

I can't speak to any of it, but yeah, just knowing the progress of the order and how long it took and then has it been picked up, know, scan the ticket. I've got barcodes on the tickets, scan the ticket, market picked up. It's not paid, we're prompt for payment before they send it out the door. That's always important. Make sure you get paid before you release that laundry to somebody.

Ian Gollahon 35:58

Right, even having like that was one of Brian's big things was like it needs to say, you know, collect payment before returning or not paid, pay a pickup and that needs to be the largest thing on the receipt and on the sticker so that you don't accidentally give it back to them before you collect the payment. Yes. Yep.

Sharon Brinks 36:04

Yes.

Yeah.

And we still do it occasionally, but not as often as we used to. The labels on the bags,

I can customize my lines on the labels on the bags. So you do have to be able to count. If there's five bags, I need you to count that you are giving back five bags. So, you know, it's idiot-proofed as much as possible, but you still have to have people that can read and count. So.

Ian Gollahon 36:42

Yeah.

Well, we always talk about the point and say method, which, you know, when we do have, cause like you said, you make it as idiot proof as you can. And somehow still someone doesn't get all their bags or someone gets the wrong bags or something. And we'll actually go back talking about those timestamps. We can look at the timestamp of when it was picked up and we teach the point and say method. So you're supposed to say Sharon Brinks five bags, two hangers.

Sharon Brinks 37:01

Yep. Yep.

Ian Gollahon 37:10

And we can go back and we say, you're not pointing to the five bags and the two hangers. And if you actually have them point at it, what'll happen is if they say, you know, Sharon brings five bags, two hangers. And then if you're sharing Brinks and you're saying, well, here's the five bags, but where are the two hangers? I'm sorry. I got busy. My son's in the, you know, whatever. And so, you know, everyone gets

Sharon Brinks 37:15

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 37:36

Everyone gets sidetracked every once in a while, but that's why if you point and say you're involving the customer then to help your employee get the customer all their items back. Yeah. Yeah. But it's Brian's idea. I'm going to take credit for all his good ideas. Like I always do, but no, it's really.

Sharon Brinks 37:42

Yeah.

That's okay. Well,

and I'll tell the store managers that I came up with that. So yeah.

Ian Gollahon 37:59

There

you go. You take it from me. I took it from Brian. Just it'll be your idea. Next time you are on stage, just take full credit for that. And as long as you mention our name, we're good. So I know that you guys have done delivery and have you scaled that up? What part of your store is that? Like how much of your revenue is that and how long did it take to scale?

Sharon Brinks 38:01

Exactly.

There you go. There you go. There you go.

Zero. So, you had alluded to me having some health issues back in, so, 2024, we're trying to build that second store and we had a separate pickup and delivery business. I only had one employee, happened to be my stepdaughter. She was running the whole thing and I'm…

Ian Gollahon 38:32

Yep.

Sharon Brinks 38:49

So I got diagnosed with breast cancer in May of 2024, started chemo in June, finished chemo in October. And I'll tell you what, the brain fog is real. All I wanna do is just sit and stare at the wall. No energy, can't think, hard to form a complete sentence. Got one laundromat we're running, we're trying to build a second one. I'm trying to make sure the pickup and delivery is going smoothly. And I'm like, I…

Ian Gollahon 39:01

And

Sharon Brinks 39:19

Kind of superwoman, but I can't really do it all, especially not on chemo. I gave up. We gave that pick up and delivery business to my stepdaughter. And so as of the first of the year of 2025, was her business and she was running the whole thing.

Ian Gollahon 39:30

Hmm?

Sharon Brinks 39:38

And then last year, she became, so this is kind of timely. Last year, she got pregnant with her second child and decided that she's going to be stay at home mom full time. So she shut that business down. This is timely because she actually gave birth to that second child yesterday. So, so yeah, we got a second grand, from them.

Ian Gollahon 39:55

Congrats! Very cool.

That's great.

Sharon Brinks 40:02

That was kind of timely there. So we no longer offer pick up and delivery. I do think it's a viable thing. I personally want to focus on self-service. I like the drop-off in store. We are priced to a point to where I only have to have one person there at a time to do that drop-off service. If I was to lower the price, then we'd have more.

Business and you know how it ratchets up. You lower the price, you got more business. Now I got to have a second person there. Now I need more business to pay for that second person. That's just, I'm keeping it at one. So, wash, dry, fold, in-store drop off.

Supplements the payroll somewhat, but also shows that, we are the experts at laundry. You've got a laundry question, come ask us. You get stained, come talk to us. You're not sure which size machine. We do laundry all the time, so come and let us help you with that. Pick up and delivery, think in our particular market, I really believe in the small commercial.

Ian Gollahon 40:52

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Yeah.

Sharon Brinks 41:13

Is where it's at. Residential eat you alive. If you're just starting out, think the small commercial, you want the people at the Uni-First, the Airmarks, those people don't want to touch. But like the boutique specialty things, I would say try to avoid, you know, places that have massage oils and stuff. Those are just nasty. You've got specific chemicals you want to deal with, but start with the easier stuff.

But yeah, I think it's a viable business, but my explanation of that, if you're a laundromat owner, get your wash, dry, fold in-store process nailed down to perfection. You've got to be able to know your numbers. You've got to know your numbers. My gosh, you've to know your numbers on in-store drop-off. Then consider doing pickup and delivery. I would not recommend doing third-party Uber type things that just…

I could show you a picture of the Uber

Ian Gollahon 42:11

You

Sharon Brinks 42:12

Driver that rear-ended our van. Actually, he was a door dash driver. Take that back. Tank top, the tattoos, and the cigarette hanging out of his mouth. I don't want that type of person picking up and delivering our laundry. And that's the image that you have.

Ian Gollahon 42:23

Yep.

Well, that's best case scenario. That's if they can actually pick

it up and deliver it. Mean, the complaints we hear about, because our software accommodates that. And we've had to add that feature just because other players in the industry have it. But since we've added it and we've had enough people use it, I overwhelmingly just say, don't use it. Don't do that. It's such a bad thing. You know, you're… Yeah.

Sharon Brinks 42:57

Yeah. If it works for you, but you're giving the reputation

of your company over to somebody who is doing door to ash. If that's, if you're okay with that, fine. You can run it out of your own vehicle. Mean, that's pick up and delivery is a whole nother animal. But my, explanation of that is if you remember Star Trek and they had three dimensional chess, it's kind of, it's washed dry fold up a notch. That's three dimensional chess. There's so many other.

You know, pun intended moving parts that are involved with that. You're not only washing. There's also another trust thing if you're talking about personal laundry. It's one thing for somebody to drop off with you and you're washing their underwear for them. For pick up and delivery, not only you're washing their underwear, but now you know where they live.

Ian Gollahon 43:35

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sharon Brinks 43:45

And not everybody, you might think the people that drop off in your store might want that convenience. There's a lot of people that don't want you to know where they live. For whatever reason, they want their privacy, they kind of want you to be their closet. We don't really have that problem a whole lot, but it's just something that I can't see us getting back into. Never say never, but if we do, it'll just be, it would just be small commercial.

Ian Gollahon 44:09

Well, we do it and it's just a pain in the rear and it's no revenue. Mean, there's no way it's 1 % of our revenue. No way. Know, we… Go ahead.

Sharon Brinks 44:15

Yeah.

So Steve did a

presentation at the CLA's Wash-Dry-Fold Conference on pick up and delivery and knowing your numbers. And he has a whole extremely elaborate spreadsheet. He has a spreadsheet. He's an engineer. What can I say? He's a spreadsheet guy. Every possible variable that you could possibly have and where you need your price point to be. And you're absolutely right. It's…

Extremely difficult. You've got to know your numbers down to a T and have that price point high enough that you have the, you can cover all your expenses and the profit that you want. And most people don't take the time to do those numbers. And in the household that's involved, it's like, yeah, I don't need that at this point in my life.

Ian Gollahon 45:01

Now… Yeah.

I found that the more the laundromat owner understands their numbers, the more bearish they are on delivery. The more, the more they understand the industry, the more bullish they are on wash, dry, fold. And I'm always trying to help laundromat owners that are, I think what happens is they see all the marketing and they know that they want to do laundry delivery.

Sharon Brinks 45:15

Valation self-service.

Yeah. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Ian Gollahon 45:35

That's the one thing they know. Maybe they'll get a laundromat to do it. Maybe they'll do wash, dry, fold too. And it's like, you're thinking about this literally on its head. Like you'll be, it's, it's, I think it's very difficult. I think 10 times more people fail at laundry delivery than fail at laundromat ownerships. I've seen laundromat owners that are really bad. I mean, these people are really like, how do they even have a business? I don't know. Like the way they treat everyone and, and, you know, every.

Sharon Brinks 45:52

Yeah. Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 46:05

I mean, you know, when you've got over 1300 customers like we do, get, you get all ranges, you get the best in the industry and you get the people that are like, how, how are you still open? And, you know, with the delivery side of things, it's like, that's actually really easy to fail at. Even if you're a top operator versus just like owning a laundromat, doing the self-serve and the wash dry fold.

Sharon Brinks 46:17

Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 46:32

It's a really low bar. Like you don't have to be that good of an operator to have a successful business doing that. Now, if you do it well, that's when you start seeing growth and they're opening more stores and they're opening these like super nice stores with new machines. And so when you can operate that well, that kind of separates, you know, the good operators from the, the ones that are still learning. But the delivery thing, there's just so much marketing around it. And so there's so much excitement around it. And I'm.

Sharon Brinks 46:44

Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 47:02

I try to not be like, don't do delivery because I don't want to tell people what to do. But I am trying to like help them be like, well, get yourself serve and your wash dry fold. Those two things go together because they will grow each other and you need the attendance there to help the self serve customers figure out how to start the machines and make sure they don't abuse the machines and make sure they don't crack the screens and make sure they don't start fires. Or when they do, need your attendance there to put out the fires and

Sharon Brinks 47:29

Huh?

Ian Gollahon 47:30

To lower your insurance rate. Mean, on and on and on, but then the delivery is a second business that is very hard. That is very expensive.

Sharon Brinks 47:38

It's completely separate.

We actually had a separate LLC for it. Yeah, it is a separate, completely separate business.

Ian Gollahon 47:42

Yep, yep.

And the margins are very narrow and the customer acquisition cost is very high. And the LTV, the lifetime value of the customer, the payback period is one to two years. So, you know, it's expensive to buy a customer and then you've got to hold them for one or two years. And you've really got to perform at a really high level to keep them for that one or two years. So if you go into it, buying those expensive customers and you don't have all your wash dry fold processes down.

Then I just see a lot of people, you know, not succeed at that and they end up dropping it for one reason or another, but then the only people that go out and talk about it are the people that, you know, are that top 1 % that are, that are operating. Yeah. And so I thought it was an important thing to talk about because I think, I do think, and just to be transparent about our numbers.

Sharon Brinks 48:29

Yeah, you never hear the ones that fall. Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 48:39

You mentioned commercial accounts and that's what I'm always telling people too. Like we have a commercial account that does 50,000 a year with us and we did some delivery with them and they're like, that's too expensive. We would rather just drop it off and pick it up. And so we have another small commercial account that does like 500 a week and that's our main, you know, delivery income right there. And it's fine. We do some residential's on the way to and from them. Um, but it's, you know, you're talking about less than a thousand dollars.

Sharon Brinks 48:50

Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 49:09

A week out of $2.5 million a year, but then you've got insurance for the van, you've got the delivery driver, you've got the delivery process, you've got all the backend, the software, and then you've got to run the Google ads and you've got to run, you got to get the customers to, it's a lot of extra work for insignificant amount of revenue in most cases. I know some people have done incredible with it and we do have people that use our platform that use Wash-Dry-Fold POS that are doing big numbers with it and

you know, we're happy for them, but that is a surprisingly small amount of the customers.

Sharon Brinks 49:41

Yeah, that's about our

ratios. It was like this much income from pickup and delivery versus this much from self-service and wash dry fold. It's so, you know, to me it's the business is three separate. You've got self-service. The beauty of that is the customers are their own labor. Very capital intensive for the equipment, but utilities, but they bring their own labor. Then you've got wash dry fold. It's a separate business, if you will. And

Ian Gollahon 49:56

Mm-hmm.

That's the easy money. Yep.

That's right.

Sharon Brinks 50:11

Then you've got pick up and delivery. So, but that's another thing that's so intriguing about this industry. You can run your business any way you want. There's so many different combinations. You can be attended, you can be unattended, you can be unattended and have drop lockers for your wash dry fold. You can just any combination you can think of. So our model is we open at 730 in the morning, we close at 10 at night, last wash 915, fully attended.

Ian Gollahon 50:13

Okay.

Sharon Brinks 50:41

The stores are built in such a way that we can't be unattended. You could just walk right behind the counter. So fully attended and customer service is number one.

We try to be like the Chick-fil-A of Laundromats. We're trying to be helpful and just the best we possibly can. Fun fact, our first door, our first laundry station that we opened in 2018 is patterned off of Liberty Laundries' Delaware store. So if you look at pictures of it, the tile around there, the whole layout of the dryers in the back and the washers and the sliding doors and everything.

Yeah, that was, so I always try to give a shout out to Liberty Laundry and your Delaware store that that was the inspiration for the laundry station on Oliver Street.

Ian Gollahon 51:35

Well, I really appreciate that. The laundry station is probably even nicer than the Delaware store. But every time I see the photos of it, I'm like, wait, this is my Delaware store. And then I'm like, wait, no, no, no, I see the laundry station sign. It can't be. It just is like such a weird thing. But you've done such a great job. I actually send people like the pictures of how to set up your counter space and your wash dry fold area. I use your setup probably more often than I use our own setup as an example of how to do it because it just

Sharon Brinks 51:45

Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 52:05

It looks so good and it's done so well.

Sharon Brinks 52:06

I wish we had

more room. Would do that differently now, knowing now if I'd known that.

Ian Gollahon 52:10

Yeah. Ours

has a little bit more room, but it doesn't look as good as yours.

Sharon Brinks 52:14

Yeah, exactly. So anyway, so I to make

sure I got that shout out in there to you.

Ian Gollahon 52:21

Well, I just wanted to ask you because I think that you're telling an inconvenient truth that honestly, nine out of 10 of the laundromat owners that I've talked to tell a very similar story. But it's hard to sell software if you're not doing the delivery. And so the one out of 10 are the ones that get all the space because there's software to sell on the back end there. And so the market just kind of pushes that.

Sharon Brinks 52:32

Yeah.

Now, want to be clear when we had our pickup and delivery business, we did use a different software. We didn't use the Wash-Dry-Fold POS software. Yeah, I don't even think you did. And shout out to Simmons's, we used curbside. Worked great. I liked it. We had a different software before then that got sunsetted. So we went over to curbside and that's.

Ian Gollahon 52:49

You know, 10 % or less forward.

I don't think we had it back then, but yeah, go ahead.

Yep, nice guys.

Sharon Brinks 53:10

What was in use before the business folded. And it was profitable. I we were making money. It just wasn't worth the hassle, you know? Yeah, just wasn't worth the And at that time in my life with going on the chemo, just, yeah, that was just one thing I did not need going on.

Ian Gollahon 53:31

Well,

we've got to be able to say that we understand and that we've done it and all that. It is, it's not easy, it's not the easy way to do things. It's kind of the, it's the business on top of the business, like you said. And so there's a few.

Sharon Brinks 53:42

Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 53:48

Other things that I want to talk to you about and, and just kind of to come back to the whole reason why, the whole premise behind this laundromat ownership podcast was to talk about the inconvenient truths of laundromat ownership and to kind of say the things that people need to hear. And that would be really helpful, but that no one wants to say out loud because they're worried about the industry or they're worried about the software guys, or they're worried about whatever.

And one of those things is around employee theft. I know that we've had a lot of employee theft at our stores over the years. We've fired a lot of people for it. What are your experiences in that area? Share whatever you want to and you don't have to share everything you don't want to.

Sharon Brinks 54:22

Yeah. Yeah.

Well,

we just had a horrific one from the manager that I trusted for five years. Did so much for, helped out, helped her family. You think you've built the bond, you can trust them. And then I stumbled across how she had been stealing from us.

Now, to be clear, a Wash-Dry-Fold POS tracks every dollar that goes through, but you're trusting that person also to pull the money from the bill changer and to write down the morning reconciliation correctly. And I didn't have one of those changes that…

Ian Gollahon 55:06

If you

Sharon Brinks 55:13

Has all the fancy counting and it just had like a little counter in it so you're trusting them to take the take the money out count it and Write it down correctly and actually count the Wash-Dry-Fold POS drawer and enter in the amounts Never count the drawer took the money from the bill changer added it to the drawer in the shift Would pull the 20s pull any extra bills from the bill changer put it in her pocket. I guess you didn't think my cameras worked

Ian Gollahon 55:39

Mm-hmm.

Sharon Brinks 55:42

Because I've spent the last couple of months documenting the videos, pulling videos, documenting videos. We have a case number. Gonna submit all that

Ian Gollahon 55:52

You

Sharon Brinks 55:52

To the financial crimes department at Wichita Police Department, but we are well into felony territory. We're into, yeah, it's embarrassing, the amount. It's embarrassing to me how much I trusted her. And she had a prior 10 years ago, she did jail time for.

Ian Gollahon 55:58

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Sharon Brinks 56:11

People can change, that one didn't. So

hopefully she'll learn from the error of her ways, but there was that one. I had another one at the Oliver store, had access to the bill changer. And then remember how I said when I had my supersize laundromat, we opened with, when I bought it, I had two employees that I'd inherited.

Ian Gollahon 56:34

Yeah,

Sharon Brinks 56:34

Yeah, then we

Ian Gollahon 56:34

Yeah.

Sharon Brinks 56:35

Became unattended completely because again, the bill changer. Every time I've had significant theft, it's from giving them access to the bill changer. And you can say, well, you should just always just do that yourself. Have a relative. We're doing the volume that I am not going in and dealing with that bill changer every single day. No.

Ian Gollahon 56:47

Mm-hmm.

Huh.

Sharon Brinks 56:57

No, and that's what it took was you'd have to fill up or have two or three bill changers. So we're not going coinless, but we're just not supplying the quarters anymore. And you know what? Don't be afraid of that. We have not missed a beat. We have not missed a beat. She would always direct people to the bill changer when they wanted to break, like break a 20 or whatever. What we're supposed to do is, oh,

Ian Gollahon 57:09

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Sharon Brinks 57:25

You can pay for that machine right here at the counter because of how Wash-Dry-Fold POS has that API and we just started for him. She would send the bill changer to load up the bill changer with cash. Well, now we have a sign on our bill changers, which I'm, you know, they're for sale if anybody needs to. We have a sign on them that says see attendant. So then they, you know, new customers will come over the attendant and like, do not.

Ian Gollahon 57:37

Got it.

Sharon Brinks 57:50

Supply quarters like, no, you don't need to touch those nasty quarters with germs on them. You can pay right here for the machines. Just tell me the number and we can even give you a receipt for that, which people love that, especially if they're doing it for somebody else and they're getting reimbursed for it or, you know, they can actually show what machines were used and how much they paid for it. And then they can reconcile later on. So every time I, yes, yes, my, my hundred pound machines at Oliver.

Ian Gollahon 58:11

It's easier than like 40 quarters. Yeah.

Sharon Brinks 58:21

Base price is $16 or $17, I can't remember which. And then you can add extra wash, extra rinse, extra time, blah, blah, blah. And it gets up there. Nobody wants to mess with those kinds of quarters. And that's why the bill changer needs attention every single day, because your dispensing's sit down on many of them. And we only had single hoppers, one single hopper change machine at each store.

Access to cash, especially when there's no reconciliation, there's no accountability as far as a system that's on a computer, right? So if you're just pulling bills out of the changer and there's no accountability there except on camera, that's one thing. But access to cash without identifiable accountability just makes people stupid.

I don't care who they are, don't care how much you trust them. Even if it's family members, you gotta think, yeah, I don't know, now my numbers are off. I've never had that problem with family members, but it just, cash makes people stupid. They make bad choices, so.

Ian Gollahon 59:13

Yeah.

Yeah. Yep.

Sharon Brinks 59:34

That's yeah, so that's it's been ugly. We're finishing that episode in the new store when we build another store. We'll even put coin boxes in my equipment. I don't know. I might put coin drops in just because people do like. I don't know why people like to bring their quarters in and use them. On the other hand, hate having to pull those quarters once a month. They're still bringing in enough that I have to pull quarters once a month.

Ian Gollahon 59:54

Yeah.

Sharon Brinks 1:00:01

But I have the keys to the washers and dryers now. I pulled all the keys for that kind of stuff. Yeah, just remember, cash makes people make stupid choices.

Ian Gollahon 1:00:12

One of the

It really does. It really does. One of the first things we did when we bought Liberty Laundry from Brian's parents, you know, when that ownership transitioned, we just knew after I guess wasn't the first thing, but within like three or four months, we just knew we had to get rid of all the quarters because the amount of emptying the machines and the hoppers and the counting and the manual labor, like you said, is just too much. Once you're doing it at scale, it's a full time job. And so

We just knew we had to get rid of quarters and we figured that we would see a substantial drop in revenue because like you said, people love the quarters and they just want to come in with all their quarters and they want to spend them and that's their habit. And when we went quarterless, we took out the ATMs and put bill breakers and we took out the hoppers and put bill breakers in there instead. And of course the value add centers. Since we've gone,

Sharon Brinks 1:01:00

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 1:01:11

Quarter less the revenue has just been up. Mean, we've gone up when we bought it, it was 2.1 and now it's 2.5 million. And so in just a few years we've seen significant and there's a lot of things we've done to try and increase that revenue. But one of the things we did that we thought would decrease it was get rid of the quarters, just, just to make it easier on us. We knew the customers wouldn't like it. We were just like, this has just got to be easier to run as a business. And when we did that, we did the big bonus program. Like.

Sharon Brinks 1:01:19

Okay.

Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 1:01:40

Bring your quarters, great. This is $20 worth of quarters. You know what? I'm gonna give you this $20 bill. I'm gonna walk you over to the Value Add Center. You're put in the 20 and you get $30 worth of machine starts. That's a 50 % bonus. We did like a 50 % bonus for the first month. Now it's only a 10 % bonus. So you load $20, you get 22. But if you're worried people are gonna push back, then that 50 % bonus on that first month.

Sharon Brinks 1:01:48

Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 1:02:07

It didn't really end up costing us anything. Cause if you look at your cogs, mean, your cogs are just like your utilities. So utilities were up a little bit that first month or two, but it's like the actual, revenue was not much impacted. In fact, I feel like people spent more because they were trying to get those, those bigger bonuses. You know, selling wash dry full POS for

I sold it for, I don't know, eight years straight. Still sell it, but I'm kind of the more in the marketing ops side of things now. Uh, Rebecca does our sales now, but, um, I would say about once a week I would get on the phone with someone and I could usually tell, I usually had an idea that I say, well, what, what, what brings you to contact us today?

And they would say something like, well, I just figured it's about time. I'm like, no, no one just thinks, it's about time to spend thousands of dollars on a point of sale system and train all my staff on it. And then once we get into the employee theft piece of it and how it prevents employee theft. And if you even look under the history of cash registers, they were created to prevent employee theft. That was the single purpose of them. They do a lot of things now, but, initially it was to prevent employee theft and.

Sharon Brinks 1:02:58

Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 1:03:24

The number of people I've talked to, I would say I've probably talked to 100 or 200 that have had hundreds of dollars stolen from them. And then people that I've had in excess of $20,000 stolen from them, it's gotta be 25, 26 laundromat owners at least. And there's really not that many high performing stores that could even have that much revenue to steal in that short of time. So go ahead.

Sharon Brinks 1:03:32

Yeah.

Yep. Yeah.

You know, it's sad is when you're doing enough

business, you don't notice that it's missing. But we had that one store was still ramping up, but the revenue looked flat. So yeah, yeah. So that's that's the embarrassing part.

Ian Gollahon 1:03:56

That's right. That's right.

Right. It takes a while to catch those things.

Well, I think, I mean, I don't think there's anything to be embarrassed of just because I think it happens to so many laundromat owners. And it's just, mean, people, when someone steals, that's them. It's not you that they stole from you. Know, that's my personal feelings on it. And we've had it happen to us as well.

Sharon Brinks 1:04:26

Both my parents grew up in the depression and instilled in me the value that you don't steal from anybody. You work for it. And I've worked my butt off my whole life, so has my husband. I'm the first person in my family to graduate high school, let alone college. So I've worked hard to get where I'm at and have somebody want to take a shortcut and try to take from that, take from my family. That's a…

Ian Gollahon 1:04:33

That's right.

Wow. Wow.

Sharon Brinks 1:04:53

That's the cardinal sin. Yeah, don't do that.

Ian Gollahon 1:04:56

You

know, it's very emotional. It's very upsetting. And I think that's why there's not a lot of people talking about it in the industry, but being on the point of sale side of things, we get to see that it is a big part of the industry that people don't want to talk about. And part of it is it's just, you know, it's just hard to talk about. And like you said, it's embarrassing. And for us, it's like, it's happened to us. I don't know how, like a dozen times now. And so it's like, for us, we just think of it as, well, this is part of hiring at that.

Sharon Brinks 1:05:16

Embarrassing, yeah.

Ian Gollahon 1:05:24

Now, if we were paying our employees $100 an hour, do I think we would still see the same amount of theft? No, we'd be out of business. Obviously, you couldn't run a laundromat at $100 an hour, But I do think it has something to do with laundromats are typically paying somewhere in that $12 to $20 per hour point.

Sharon Brinks 1:05:28

Yeah.

This manager

was well over $20 an hour and had, I was paying her direct primary care membership. So, she was paying.

Ian Gollahon 1:05:50

Crazy.

Wow. Which is really, yep, yep. But that's

also probably the highest she's ever been paid though, right?

Sharon Brinks 1:06:00

Probably the highest, yeah, yeah. I'm guessing, I doubt she was making that much of Dollar Tree. So, of course she came to me. But yeah, had a good job. Yeah, anyway, her loss and we've got a much better staff in place now. I we actually cleaned house, I got rid of a couple of others that weren't stealing. Well, one was just a low performer. Another one found a different job and…

We've cleaned out, man, we got so much better staff now and everybody understands why we have a better staff now and Sharon's PO, so.

Ian Gollahon 1:06:38

It's

work, it's work to get a good staff in place. And a lot of laundromat owners don't want to do it. They would rather have the staff that steals from them and that isn't very good because at least that's the stuff they have and it doesn't require any labor on their part to improve that. And like I said, you can own a laundromat like that. And I know a lot of owners that that's how they run their laundromat, but you're not going to really excel like you have or like Liberty Laundry has.

Sharon Brinks 1:06:41

I'm fine.

Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 1:07:06

If you run your laundromats like that. In fact, usually those laundromats don't get over 250 to 300 in revenue. The laundromats that get over 500 in revenue, I know our stores are all over 700. But I think to do that, have to…

Sharon Brinks 1:07:13

Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 1:07:25

You have to put in the time to get the right people there. And, I appreciate you being honest and upfront, even though it's painful on that thing, because I do think it helps a lot of people. And, and I mean, just earlier this week, we were talking to a laundromat owner. This is embarrassing. Now, if you want to know a story that's actually embarrassing, they, they came to their laundromat, which was a wash dry fold.

Sharon Brinks 1:07:33

Mm-mm. Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 1:07:47

Laundromat self-serving wash right fold and they weren't down the street from it or anything and some of these owners live a few hours away from their stores, which you and I both would never do that.

Sharon Brinks 1:07:56

Right.

Ian Gollahon 1:07:58

But he was he was going to his laundromat hadn't been there in a week or two and found a point of sale system on the counter. One that he had not bought. It was, you know, one of those square systems that you can get, you know, and it was one of his employees was accepting credit cards and guess who the money was going to the employee. They, know, they

Sharon Brinks 1:08:11

Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

Ian Gollahon 1:08:22

He had a point of sale system he didn't even know about. It was, you know, one of his employees had opened a Square account and was accepting credit cards so you talk about embarrassing theft. That's pretty embarrassing as far as employee theft that you didn't even know you had a point of sale system. We talked to…

Sharon Brinks 1:08:36

Wow. Yeah, here I said cash

makes people stupid. And I've always said that I've never had anybody steal from me using credit or debit card. But that would be an example as if they did.

Ian Gollahon 1:08:45

It happens. It does

happen. There's just a lot of theft in laundromats and most of it is employee theft. And so, I think that's my PSA that I wanted to talk about today. So I appreciate you giving me the time to that, but I want to hear your PSA about the mammograms.

Sharon Brinks 1:08:59

Yeah,

so following on your thing, keep an eye on your stores. You can be passive about it, but you're also going to get probably stolen from. The more you're in there, I try to be proactive, be in my stores, make sure the employees know that you're watching, not just creepy watching them, but you're paying attention to your store.

Mice will play when the cat's away type thing. Yes, they certainly will. So, okay, my PSA. Ladies, get your mammograms every year. So, like I talked about on May of 24, I got diagnosed with breast cancer. I just had one tumor.

Ian Gollahon 1:09:32

You don't want to be totally absentee. If you're totally absentee, they will take advantage of it.

Sharon Brinks 1:09:52

So I'm right now I'm healthy. I'm fine. And this is really my hair now this time. So Yeah, I did go on a put on Jordan Barry's and I actually pulled my wig off. So this really is my hair this time

Ian Gollahon 1:09:57

I see that. I like it, it looks good.

won't get the big wig reveal for this episode, but that's okay. It's better to have the real hair.

Sharon Brinks 1:10:09

You don't get the big laborialis. But

it does need to be colored because that's my natural color. So I'm not a natural blonde. So, surprise. I'm good colorist. So there was nothing to be seen on my mammogram in 2023. 2024, I had one two and a half centimeter tumor. It had not spread, but it was a good size tumor. That was considered stage two because it was over because of the size.

Ian Gollahon 1:10:17

It looks good.

Wow.

Sharon Brinks 1:10:39

So we hit it aggressive. The type was HER2 positive, which is treatable, but it is an aggressive and fast growing type of cancer. So thank goodness we caught it then. Had I decided to skip my mammogram in 2024, then I don't know what I'd been dealing with in 2025. It could have spread and whatnot. Six months of, well, six treatments of chemo three weeks apart. Then I had a lumpectomy.

Ian Gollahon 1:10:59

Wow.

Sharon Brinks 1:11:06

Just the lumpectomy in November of 24. It showed it was all gone. There was no, there were no live cancer cells. Had lymph nodes biopsied as well. And that left side, no cancer, nothing. It hadn't spread even to the lymph nodes. So, but just in case, and I still had radiation in January, February through September of 25, I had the shots are called Fezco, which is a combo. It's a chemo type drug. So I had to have 11 of those.

Three weeks apart, during which time I believe is when my previously aforementioned employee started stealing from me while I'm still on cancer treatment.

So I'm now in that five year period, post cancer, cancer free of when I just go visit my oncologist every six months just to kind make sure everything's okay. And, you know, they do some blood work and make sure I'm okay. And then they'll release me from everything at the end of the five year period. So everything's good. It's completely gone. I've lost, was working on that anyway.

But lost I think about 60 pounds total. I lost a bunch ahead of time. Chemo didn't help a whole lot, but then I lost the rest of it after that.

Ian Gollahon 1:12:10

Wow.

Sharon Brinks 1:12:17

But yeah, get your mammograms. I heard some from so many people, so many women I still hear it occasionally. I just don't want to know. Yeah, you do want to know. You do want to know. Because if it's spread

The best quote I saw was from a book that's called, and the gal's name is actually Susan Love, and it's called Dr. Love's breast cancer book. And she's actually a breast surgeon, but she had had a type of cancer, wasn't breast cancer, but she had had a type of cancer herself. So it's basically the encyclopedia about all different types of breast cancer treatments and stuff.

And the quote from that that I like to give people is, nobody ever dies from breast cancer. What kills you is when those cells transfer to travel to vital organs. And then when they're in those vital organs, that's what can kill you. So catch those cows before they get out of the barn.

Ian Gollahon 1:13:11

Right.

Sharon Brinks 1:13:16

Catch it, catch it

Ian Gollahon 1:13:17

Yeah.

Sharon Brinks 1:13:17

Early detection really is key. They always say that. And you know, you hate going in there and having that whole memo and everything getting smushed. Used to be bigger than I am now. And it was seriously did not feel comfortable. But I'll tell you what, it was, I'm so glad I caught it early with just that one tumor and got it out of the way. I've got a new appreciation of life. You know,

Ian Gollahon 1:13:26

Squish. Yeah, it doesn't sound very fun.

Sharon Brinks 1:13:45

I've kicked cancer, so what's life going to do to me? Even having an employee steal a ridiculous amount of money from me, I'm still alive. I've still got more inventories. I've still got more laundries to build. And heck, I even got my scuba diving certification. So cancer didn't kill me, so I thought I'd try scuba diving. So yeah.

Ian Gollahon 1:14:00

Well, you're still doing great.

That's right. You're

doing better than you've ever been. And the lady who stole from you is probably in going to be in a little bit of trouble here in the near future. Whatever the case. Right, right.

Sharon Brinks 1:14:13

Yeah.

Yeah. It'll be interesting. Yeah, I run

two miles twice a week. I work out with a personal trainer for an hour on weights once a week. Just you know, got to keep the muscles and the bones strong and stuff. And that's I will not go to the gym and lift weights. I have to pay somebody to tell me to lift weights and account for me and stuff. But so yeah, I'm healthier and stronger than I've ever been.

Ian Gollahon 1:14:30

Mm-hmm.

That's excellent. That's really good. Well, there's one thing that I want to close on and I really am glad that that we didn't lose you to cancer and that we've got you back and better than ever because I feel like you're really, really one of the women that I look up to most in this industry and also just one of the one of the best voices I think that we have. So I really appreciate that. And I do want to hear from you.

Sharon Brinks 1:14:55

Let's go.

Ian Gollahon 1:15:13

The craziest thing you have ever seen or heard of and in any of your laundromats. What's just the experience that you're just like, I cannot believe that just happened.

Sharon Brinks 1:15:23

Well, we've had several. Two that came to mind was the little rundown. The first one was the little rundown laundromat that I had at Super Suds. Somebody, some guy there ran poker tournaments and apparently thought it was a good idea. No, no, in town. But apparently thought all his poker chips needed to be washed. And he used one of the aforementioned horizons.

Ian Gollahon 1:15:41

Out of your laundromat? Okay, okay. Okay.

Sharon Brinks 1:15:54

And a top loader and washed them, which doesn't sound like a bad idea until you realize, I don't know what he put in there if it's just the water, but the plastic dissolves and flakes off and there's a metal disc in the center. That I didn't know that either. I had for a long time, I had a big bucket full of poker chip remains. In fact, it might, I might have it in the back room at Oliver.

Ian Gollahon 1:15:56

Okay.

Okay, I didn't know that.

Sharon Brinks 1:16:21

Yeah, poker chip remains that we scooped out of the washers, scooped out of the drain line. You can just imagine how it clogged up the drain. That's how I found out overflowed poker chips. So yeah, that was that one that that horizon was never the same. It never it I mean, at the time it was like, I don't know what that much they go for now. That's like a $2,500 machine. And it was one of my new ones. Just ruined that machine.

Ian Gollahon 1:16:28

Yeah.

Sure you're finding those things for months.

Man.

Sharon Brinks 1:16:51

And, but the other one was, we were on vacation and the attendant sends us a video and I'm like, what am I looking at? And somebody had brought in, it was on Sunday afternoon, had brought in some blankets from their garage to wash, because you know, they've all stuffy and stuff. He had laid this one blanket out.

And comes and tells the attendant, you know, she needs to come do something about this and she comes over and it's a nest of baby mice that are alive in my laundry. And so, yeah, I don't know where the mom went.

Ian Gollahon 1:17:23

My goodness.

Sharon Brinks 1:17:28

Anyway, we had a little nest of baby mice. I got my center camera that goes right down the center aisle on the blanket. There's this little nest of baby mice. So we've had others where the guy passes out on the toilet in the bathroom and falls off and you gotta call 911 or ask, are you doing okay? And didn't answer, I opened the door and he's sitting there on the toilet.

Ian Gollahon 1:17:46

Yeah.

Sharon Brinks 1:17:55

Could you call 911? That's two separate incidents.

Yeah, just all sorts. That's the neighborhood that most your laundromats are in. That's the people that need you the most. We have the awesome customers that bring you cookies and cakes and brownies and appreciate you. Then you have the others that will cuss you out or, fall off the toilet in the bathroom and need medical assistance. Welcome to our world of Laundromat Ownership

Ian Gollahon 1:18:03

Yeah.

That's right. Either, that's right.

They're either customers you just love and couldn't live without, or they're overdosing in your bathroom. That is kind of the, the dichotomy you get there, unfortunately. But, but,

Sharon Brinks 1:18:27

Yes, yes. And like, yeah,

there's been other stories, but those are the ones that come up the top of my head. I'm sure if I asked my tenants, they'll be like, there's another time. It's like, yeah, I forgot about that one.

Ian Gollahon 1:18:40

Yes.

Well, I so appreciate you spending so much time with us today and it's really been a pleasure to get to talk to you and I've learned a lot and I've had a really fun time as well. Thanks so much for joining us and I'll have to have you back on again.

Sharon Brinks 1:18:56

Okay, we'll do it when I get store number three up and two we'll have Wash-Dry-Fold POS.

Ian Gollahon 1:18:59

Let's do it.

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