Growth · Pickup and delivery
Stop Pushing Laundromat Delivery Before You Are Cashflow Positive
A crossover with CCI’s Drive Time podcast, where the sequencing question every first-time owner gets backwards finally gets a straight answer, plus the CCI ProLink integration and the machine start ratio report.
- ●Ian Gollahon’s advice to first-time owners is to hold off on laundromat delivery until the store is cashflow positive, because delivery is a separate, capital-intensive business with a long payback period.
- ●The sequence he recommends is self-serve first, then wash-dry-fold, then delivery. At Liberty Laundry, 70% of $2.5 million in revenue is self-serve, and one store does $700,000 of self-serve on its own.
- ●Self-serve and wash-dry-fold grow each other. Ian’s position is that a store will not reach that level of self-serve revenue without wash-dry-fold running alongside it.
- ●The CCI ProLink integration lets Wash-Dry-Fold POS start specific machines from the order screen, so an attendant cannot start machines that are not tied to an order.
- ●Machine start ratio reporting compares machine spend to order value. Liberty Laundry sees about 37%, and the point of the report is not the average but the attendant whose number does not match everyone else’s.
The most common request Ian Gollahon hears from someone opening their first store is laundromat delivery, and it is almost always the wrong first move. This episode is a crossover with Drive Time, the podcast for laundromat distributors hosted by Steve Marcionetti of CCI, so Ian is the guest instead of the host. The conversation covers the order in which services should be added, what delivery actually costs to acquire a customer, the CCI ProLink machine start integration, and the machine start ratio report that surfaces the attendant whose numbers do not fit.
Recorded in April 2026 for Steve Marcionetti’s Drive Time podcast and republished here as episode 10 of Laundromat Ownership.
This article is based on an episode
Stop Pushing Delivery Before You Are Cashflow Positive
Laundromat Ownership · Episode 10 · with Steve Marcionetti, CCI
When to add laundromat delivery, and when not to
Steve asked Ian what mistakes he sees owners make with technology, and Ian had an example from the phone call he took immediately before the recording. A first-time owner, buying a point of sale system, needing it to work with his card system, and wanting laundromat delivery running from day one.
Ian’s answer was that delivery on day one is a money pit that takes two to three years to pay off. Not that delivery is a bad business. Liberty Laundry does delivery, and Wash-Dry-Fold POS has customers doing serious volume with it. The problem is the order of operations.
His framing is crawl, walk, run. Figure out self-serve. Add wash-dry-fold, because it will help grow your self-serve and because you need staff on site anyway. Then, once those two are producing, look at delivery. Trying to run all three at once as a first-time owner is, in his words, way too much, and the part he keeps coming back to is staffing: you do not have employees yet, so talking about a delivery vehicle is premature.
The sharpest version of the point is the one Steve latched onto for the rest of the episode. If you do not even know how to make the pizza yet, do not start the delivery route.
🔑 Insider Key
The question is not whether delivery works. It is whether you have proven the business model underneath it. Adding a capital-intensive service before the store is cashflow positive means two unproven businesses funded by the same shrinking pile of cash.
Laundromat delivery is a customer acquisition business
The reason Ian is so firm on the sequencing is the arithmetic of acquiring a delivery customer. In his experience spending on Google and Facebook ads for Liberty Laundry, $2,000 of advertising for delivery might return roughly $200 worth of orders. Hopefully those customers keep ordering and you make the money back over about two years, but the payback period on a single delivery order runs at least six months.
He puts it in the language of customer acquisition cost and lifetime value on purpose, because that is the shape of the business. A delivery order costs somewhere around $100 to $200 to win. There is no floodgate that opens when you publish the booking link, and no first-time owner budgets for a two-year payback.
That is before the rest of the build. Laundromat delivery needs ads, a website, a vehicle and someone to drive it. Ian’s summary is direct: it is a whole separate business, and it is very capital intensive. Deciding to launch it alongside your first store means choosing to start two businesses at the same time.
The right moment, in his telling, is when the store is producing more cash than you know what to do with. Liberty Laundry got there years ago, and that is when reinvesting in trucks and delivery marketing makes sense. Doing it while you are not yet cashflow positive is what he calls getting ahead of your skis.
If you don’t even know how to make the pizza yet, don’t start the delivery route yet.
What has to work before laundromat delivery
Ian’s case for the sequence is not theoretical. Liberty Laundry runs three stores that did $2.5 million in top-line revenue in 2025, and about 70% of that is self-serve. One of the three does $700,000 of self-serve revenue on its own.
His read on that number is the part worth sitting with. He does not think a store gets to $700,000 of self-serve without wash-dry-fold running in the same building. The two grow each other: the attended counter puts staff on the floor to help self-serve customers with the machines, which lowers liability and improves the self-serve experience, and the self-serve traffic feeds the wash-dry-fold counter. Those two services are where the majority of the revenue lives, and they are also the two that reinforce each other.
Laundromat delivery does not work that way. It does not fill the machines you already own with walk-in traffic, and it does not make the store floor better. It is additive revenue that has to be bought.
None of this is an argument against building it. Wash-Dry-Fold POS includes pickup and delivery in the platform, so turning it on later is not a project. What Ian is arguing against is turning it on first.
Starting machines from the order screen with CCI ProLink
Steve moved the conversation to the interface between the two companies. CCI launched its Wash Dry Fold ProLink in the middle of last year, opening up its payment system so a point of sale could do more with the machine start data CCI was already collecting. Wash-Dry-Fold POS was an early adopter.
Ian’s explanation of why it matters starts with the problem it replaces. Attendants have to be able to start machines to process wash-dry-fold. Coins are worse. So most stores put money on employee cards, and that works right up until you ask the obvious questions: what if they use the card for friends, for family, for a self-serve customer who hands them a twenty on the side?
The fix is tying machine starts to the order. Say a $1,000 wash-dry-fold order comes in. As it moves through order tracking from To Do to Sort, Wash, Dry, Fold, Done and Picked Up, the system keeps custody of the order with timestamps at each stage. Before ProLink, the attendant would tell the software they were starting machines three and four, and the software would record what those machines cost to start. That number then had to be reconciled against the CCI report of what the cards actually started.
With the FasCard and LaundryCard integration and ProLink, the attendant taps three and four and the software starts machines three and four. There is no separate card to spend somewhere else, and no machine start that is not attached to an order.
Steve added the piece from CCI’s side. Depending on which generation of card reader is installed, the order number from the POS displays on the reader itself, color coded by order. Walk a row of machines and the red ones are orders one through four, the blue ones are five through eight. In a store full of self-serve customers, you can see at a glance which machines are running wash-dry-fold and which order is in each one.
🔑 Insider Key
An employee card is spendable value handed to a staff member. A machine start tied to an order is not. The distinction is the whole point of the integration, and it is the difference between reconciling two reports after the fact and preventing the mismatch up front.
Machine start ratio and the number that does not fit
Steve raised the natural objection: why not just start 20 machines for one $1,000 order? The answer is reporting.
Machine start ratio is the value of machine starts on an order divided by the value of the order itself. Wash-Dry-Fold POS reports it daily, weekly or monthly, and Liberty Laundry sees about 37%. Ian does not know why 37% shows up at so many stores, but it does. On a $1,000 order, that predicts roughly $370 of machine starts. Big orders run leaner, small orders run heavier, so no single order lands on the number.
The value is in the comparison, not the average. Look across 100 or 200 orders and every attendant, and you get 37, 36, 35, 38, and then one at 50. That 50 is the report’s actual output. Ian’s list of possible explanations is honest about the range: she may have only done two very small orders, she may not be working, she may have a side business running out of your store, or, in a case they have actually seen, she may be putting 20-pound orders into the 80-pound machines.
That last one is not theft, and it still costs money. Liberty Laundry has two 80-pound washers. Filling one with a 20-pound order is inefficient on its own and it cannibalizes sales from the rest of the store, because when a bus full of customers walks in those machines need to be open. Machine start ratio surfaces it either way, which is why Ian treats it as both a theft prevention tool and an efficiency tool.
How often you run the report is a judgment call. Ian’s framing is that however little or much you trust your employees is how much you want to run these reports.
Getting money off a card without cash back
The other reason to connect the POS to a card system is smaller and comes up every day. A customer has $2 left on a FasCard or LaundryCard and wants it back. The kiosk says non-refundable, and the bonus dollars were never cash to begin with.
Liberty Laundry’s answer is to sell them something. Attendants are not handing customers money all day, but they can sell soap, snacks or wash-dry-fold against the card balance at the point of sale. It gives the customer a way to use the value and keeps cash out of attendants’ hands, which is the same instinct behind everything else in this section.
Why the counter screen stayed simple
Steve’s other line of questioning was about simplicity, and how a product avoids getting complicated as it adds features. He remembered meeting Brian Henderson around 2013, well before Wash-Dry-Fold POS existed, when Brian came to evaluate CCI’s Gen 1 FasCard product for his family’s laundromats and left behind a product review Steve says he should have written himself.
What customers told the company early was consistent: the attendants running the counter are not computer programmers, and the software cannot be complicated. Brian had attendants at all three of his stores who would tell him immediately when something did not make sense, so the design got tested by the people who actually had to use it. Tapping a washer instead of finding it in a dropdown came out of that. Every laundromat POS works that way now, and somebody had to figure it out first.
Ian is clear that simple does not mean thin. The system does laundromat delivery, customers place delivery orders on the store’s website, it integrates with the major card systems, it does the locker integrations, and it has the deep CCI integration this episode is about. The point is that a store not doing dry cleaning should not be looking at 300 dry cleaning buttons. Steve’s version, from CCI’s own early days, was to make the buttons as big as possible, because the attendant who has been there 25 years needs a big button to push.
Simplicity is also why a distributor will attach it to a deal
Coming out of a sales background, Ian’s read on distributors is that complications jeopardize deals. So Wash-Dry-Fold POS is built to add nothing to the distributor’s workload: it ships ready to plug in, and the buyer gets a two-hour setup and training session so they know the system on day one. Support is a full-time salaried team based in the USA, in Oklahoma and Kentucky. For a distributor closing a CCI store, that combination is the reason to mention it at all.
Five businesses inside one laundromat
The part of the conversation Steve most agreed with was the layering. CCI is heavily weighted toward self-service, and Steve draws the same distinction Ian does: self-service is one business, full-service wash-dry-fold is a second business you can start, pickup and delivery is a third, commercial accounts are a fourth, and lockers are a fifth. Ian’s aside is that you can get seven going if you want to.
They can all run in one building. The mistake Steve sees constantly on social media is people whose first stated goal, before they own a store at all, is pickup and delivery plus commercial accounts. His half-joking counter is that anyone purely chasing the commercial business should skip retail entirely, rent commercial space at half the cost and open a commercial laundry. Nobody does, because what they actually want is to own a laundromat.
Which brings the episode back to sequencing. Take it in steps. Get one layer producing before you add the next, and let laundromat delivery be the layer you add with cash the store generated rather than cash you still need.
See the counter workflow on the real system
The demo videos walk intake, order tracking, machine starts and reporting end to end.
What to do this week
- 01Check whether the store is cashflow positive. If it is not, that answers the delivery question for now. Everything below assumes it is.
- 02Total what you spent to win your last ten delivery customers. Divide by ten. If you have never run that number, you do not know what delivery costs you.
- 03Find out what share of your revenue is self-serve. Liberty Laundry is at 70%. If yours is far lower, the growth is probably on the floor, not in a van.
- 04Count how many employee cards are loaded with spendable value right now. Every one of them can be used on something other than an order.
- 05Pull a machine start ratio report by attendant. Ignore the average. Look for the one number that does not match the others.
- 06Check your biggest machines against your biggest orders. If small orders are running in the 80-pounders, you are losing self-serve sales you never see.
Questions owners ask
When should a laundromat add pickup and delivery?
Ian Gollahon’s advice is to wait until the store is cashflow positive and self-serve and wash-dry-fold are both producing. Laundromat delivery is a separate, capital-intensive business that needs ads, a website, a vehicle and a driver, and in his experience it takes two to three years to pay off if you start it alongside a first store. The right time is when the store is generating more cash than you need to run it, so the delivery build is funded by the business instead of competing with it.
How much does it cost to acquire a laundromat delivery customer?
In Ian Gollahon’s experience buying Google and Facebook ads for Liberty Laundry, roughly $2,000 of delivery advertising returns about $200 worth of orders, which works out to somewhere around $100 to $200 to win a single delivery order. The payback period on an order runs at least six months, and getting the ad spend back typically takes about two years of repeat ordering. Those are Liberty Laundry’s numbers, not an industry average.
What order should a laundromat add services in?
Ian Gollahon recommends self-serve first, then wash-dry-fold, then pickup and delivery. Self-serve and wash-dry-fold grow each other: the attended counter puts staff on the floor to help self-serve customers, which lowers liability and improves the experience, and self-serve traffic feeds the wash-dry-fold counter. At Liberty Laundry about 70% of $2.5 million in revenue is self-serve, and one store does $700,000 of self-serve alone. Delivery is additive revenue that has to be bought with advertising.
What is machine start ratio?
Machine start ratio is the value of machine starts on an order divided by the value of the order itself. Wash-Dry-Fold POS reports it daily, weekly or monthly, and Liberty Laundry sees about 37%, so a $1,000 wash-dry-fold order would predict roughly $370 of machine starts. Big orders run leaner and small orders run heavier, so the useful part is the comparison across attendants rather than any single order. Across 100 or 200 orders, ratios of 37, 36, 35, 38 and then one at 50 point to the attendant worth a closer look.
What does the CCI ProLink integration do with a laundromat POS?
CCI ProLink lets Wash-Dry-Fold POS start specific machines directly from the wash-dry-fold order screen instead of an attendant using a loaded employee card. The attendant taps machines three and four and the software starts machines three and four, so machine starts cannot be spent on friends, family or a self-serve customer, and the machine spend is attached to the order rather than reconciled against a separate card report afterward. Depending on the generation of card reader, the POS order number also displays on the reader, color coded by order.
How can a laundromat give money back off a loyalty card?
Liberty Laundry does not give cash back. The kiosk states that card value is non-refundable, and bonus dollars were never cash. Instead the balance can be spent at the point of sale on soap, snacks or wash-dry-fold service, which gives the customer a way to use the value while keeping attendants from handing out cash all day.
How many businesses can run inside one laundromat?
Steve Marcionetti and Ian Gollahon count at least five distinct businesses that can share one building: self-service, full-service wash-dry-fold, pickup and delivery, commercial accounts and lockers. Ian’s point is that you could run seven if you wanted to, but each one is a separate business with its own costs and customers, so they should be added in sequence rather than launched together.
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 delivery economics, the order in which services should be added, machine start integrations with card systems and machine start ratio reporting.
Full episode transcript
Ian Gollahon 00:00
Hello and welcome to the Laundromat Ownership Podcast. I'm your host Ian Gollahon. Me and my business partner Brian Henderson own three laundromats in the Tulsa, Oklahoma area. They're called Liberty Laundry. In 2025, those three laundromats did a total of $2.5 million top line revenue. And we also own the original point of sale system for laundromats. We're the founders of it back in 2016. It's called Wash-Dry-Fold POS, sometimes abbreviated
WDF POS. So if you ever see that abbreviation, you'll know what they're talking about. But that's our company that we started a long time ago to help other laundromat owners deal with their point of sale system, manage their staff, manage equipment repairs, prevent employee theft, and so on. The podcast that you'll be listening to today is actually a crossover with Steve Marcionetti's podcast Drive Time, which is more for laundromat distributors.
But because it was actually an interview of me, your host, I thought you might be interested in it. He does actually have some pretty good questions like what do most laundromat owners miss? And there is a special promotion on the point of sale system if you're interested in that as well. But without further ado, let's get to Steve Marcionetti's interview of me on drive time.
Here it is, thanks.
Steve Marcionetti 01:21
All right, Ian, thank you very much for joining me. It's great to have you on the podcast. You know, it's, we were just talking before we got things started, you know, it's just a reiteration of the distributor relationships that we have and how complicated it can be for a distributor to know everything there is about everything laundry related and
So it's great to have somebody from an ancillary perspective that works with companies like CCI and talk about wash dry fold. You know, but before we get too deep in it, I know that, you know, we want to tease everyone listening with this, special offer that you have for us. And we're going to, we're going to kind of make everyone wait to the end of it. So.
Just so we don't forget those listening. We have a special offer for those listening as it relates to Wash-Dry-Fold POS, but we'll get to that. I think that'll happen to short shortly enough But you know, know, why don't you start telling us a little bit about yourself? I know I know who you are I know you come from but I think it's great opportunity to talk about Who you are and kind of talk about wash dry fold and kind of what role you play
Ian Gollahon 02:37
Yeah. So I started kind of getting into the laundromat industry, probably a little bit similar to a lot of the listeners. I was in sales and it was B2B sales and I was selling billboards. I don't know if you see the little billboard back there with my name, but that was
Steve Marcionetti 02:51
I saw that, yeah.
Ian Gollahon 02:52
From when I went to corporate training with Lamar, the billboard company. And I went to this little entrepreneurship meeting and one of the guys there was Brian Henderson and he was there for his family's
chain of laundromats and we just really hit it off and became friends and I was kind of helping him think through how to sell this point of sale system that he was using for his own laundromats and he had a lot of other interests from other laundromat owners and I was trying to help him kind of figure out how do you structure it? How do you sell it? And he was starting to get bogged down pretty quick with the support as you guys know, when people, they buy something, that's not the last you hear of them. So
Steve Marcionetti 03:31
Mm-hmm.
Ian Gollahon 03:32
Get a…
Getting the equipment set up and making sure everyone knew how to use the system and training them and all that. And he got so busy with that so fast that right away he was like, man, I really need someone to take the sales piece of this off my plate. And so pretty early, I, you know, in that first year that was back in 2016, I joined the company and Brian and I have just been figuring it all out since, you know, and there's no, no.
User guide to how to build a multi-million dollar business, but we have figured it out as we've gone along. Yeah, we've sold over 1300 point of sale systems now 10 years later. And certainly one of the big four players in the point of sale space and certainly been a leader, especially in the higher grossing laundromats nationwide.
I kind of run the day to day and I do the sales piece of it. And Brian really has moved into the technology stuff because that's, mean, we're a technology company and so that's a full-time job for him just to do the, the, the software and the software team and the team of developers.
Steve Marcionetti 04:38
Yeah, yeah, you know, know quick side story about brian and I brian and I met years before
He started Wash, Dry, Fold POS because he was working with his family's laundries as you mentioned and he was involved in that and he came and visited me at our office. Gosh, I don't even know what year it was but it was a number of years before he started the business to evaluate our product and we got a chance to spend some really nice one-on-one time evaluating our Gen 1 FasCard product. I this has gone back probably 2013 or something like that.
Ian Gollahon 05:12
Man, yeah. That's a
while ago, yeah.
Steve Marcionetti 05:15
And you know,
and I've known him for a while, but one of the things that he, one of the great impressions that he left with me was this ability to take somewhat complex ideas and make them simple. And if there's one thing that I know when I talk to customers who have your products is how simple it is.
And I could, it just sounds so natural, is the idea that Brian was the perfect person to take something that maybe was a little complicated or could be complicated and just simplify it and make it there. And I know that, you know, over the years, functionality gets more complex or more advanced. And so, you know, it starts to become more of a challenge. But I know that that was something he left me with when he came to visit. He put together this amazing,
Review of our products that I should have done, you know and it just because it was how he simplified our conversations into almost like a Product review that he didn't even had hadn't even purchased, know, mean it was just his way of kind of just like Sharing this with her here I spent some time with Steve and this is what I learned about this product and I can just you know When I learned that he had started, you know the company or started developing this product
So you're you have aligned yourself really well by whatever the chances were that got you connected to Brian it was fate and you know We've had a chance to get to know each other a little bit over the years as well. So it's a it's a great pairing so Amazing, know, I'm curious What did you know about the laundry industry prior to meeting Brian and starting to talk about that and then kind of trailer that into
but what you thought you knew versus what was reality when you finally started to work in it.
Ian Gollahon 07:16
Yeah, I think however much the average person knows about laundromats, I knew less for sure. Like this, whatever, wherever that is on the graph, I was, I was, I just knew nothing. I had been inside of a laundromat a few times when I was in Chicago. I used to live in Chicago and, and, the, we had that multi
Multi housing, I think is what they call it now. But we had, you know, we had units in the basement. Sometimes those went out. So we had to go to a laundromat.
Steve Marcionetti 07:44
Hmm?
Ian Gollahon 07:46
And that was my experience with laundromats. And the laundromat we went to was just the typical laundromat experience where it was like
Steve Marcionetti 07:52
Mm-hmm.
Ian Gollahon 07:53
Kind of a hole in the wall. And there was this little lady running it who would do the wash dry fold if you wanted her to. And,
Steve Marcionetti 08:00
Right.
Ian Gollahon 08:00
You know, and so but just all on pen and paper, of course, no, no actual like. And I do remember being like.
Does this lady even work here? She doesn't look like that. She didn't have a uniform or anything. And so I was like, is she just hanging out at the laundromat and I'll pay? Like I didn't, I wasn't convinced she worked there.
Steve Marcionetti 08:16
She's
just started a business in a laundromat.
Ian Gollahon 08:21
Right.
To this day, I don't know. That's probably what it was because she didn't have any kind of… There was no counter. She was just like, yeah, give me… I'll write it down. I've got to…
Steve Marcionetti 08:26
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll do it, yeah.
Ian Gollahon 08:31
And so, yeah, so that was my experience with laundromats. You know, Brian, we started playing tennis afterwards and I was asking how he's doing. Like, you know, my family's laundromat was on the cover of Planet Laundry this month.
I was like, man, that's hilarious. Can you imagine if there was a magazine called Planet Laundry? He was like, no, there is. There is. It's a trade magazine and we're on the cover. And I was like, dude, you're messing with me. And he was like, no, there really is. I was like, what are you talking
Steve Marcionetti 09:00
Yeah
Ian Gollahon 09:03
About? And so he had to show it to me for me to believe it. And so, yeah, that's about where I came in to the industry. So I really knew nothing. But I did know sales and I knew value and marketing and
That was really what I brought to the table is how do you convey value to the business owner? And even something like that you brought up about the simplicity, you know, there was a lot of directions we could have taken our marketing in those early days. But what our customers were telling us again and again was these ladies can't use anything. These ladies don't
Steve Marcionetti 09:36
Yeah.
Ian Gollahon 09:37
These are not computer programmers. They don't know. Don't give me anything complicated. It's got to be easy for them to use. Now, as the years have gone by, our I think our
Our competitors trying to say that is a negative thing, but the reality is it still does delivery. We can go onto your website. You can place a delivery order. We're doing the laundry lockers integrations. It integrates with all the major card systems. We even have deep, deep integration with CCI, obviously,
Steve Marcionetti 10:04
Mm-hmm.
Ian Gollahon 10:05
But it has all the features. It's not that it doesn't have the features. It's that.
It's gotta be easy to use. And for it to be easy to use, it has to be simple. There can't be 300 buttons about dry cleaning if you're not doing dry cleaning in your laundromat. And so that really has been key to how do we market this and then also key to how do we actually develop it and make the software. Luckily for Brian and for me, he had the little old ladies at all three of his laundromats that couldn't use software. So they were the perfect ones.
Steve Marcionetti 10:35
Yeah.
Ian Gollahon 10:38
If he built something that was too confusing on how to use, they would let him know like, don't, Brian, I don't know how to do this, you know? And so, well, what if I put it right here? What if I made it more simple? What if instead of a dropdown, you just tapped the washer and you just tap the dryer instead of having to find it from a list. And those were some of the really early insights we had that, you know, now all the pointy cell systems are built like that, but there was actually someone had to figure that out. So that was us. So, but yeah. Yeah. So I came in at
Steve Marcionetti 10:59
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
Ian Gollahon 11:04
The very beginning to answer your question. I knew nothing. Yeah.
Steve Marcionetti 11:06
I, well
that's interesting and very honest as well. I appreciate that. Know, when I say simple too, and I hope I didn't make the wrong impression, it was not a matter of lack of functionality as much as making something that could be complicated simple. And I am aligned with that so closely in our early days as well. Was, you know, make the buttons as big as possible because,
because Estelle, that is gonna be my attendant who's been here for 25 years, she needs a big button to push. Yeah,
Ian Gollahon 11:41
That's right. That's right. They don't have good vision,
Steve Marcionetti 11:45
And so to some level you have to remember who your user is. And so certain things have to be built a certain way in order to make it. So functionality is, obviously we, as software companies,
We want to develop new functionality that starts to express more complications, but it's a true talent to keep it simple. So I
Ian Gollahon 12:10
That's right.
Steve Marcionetti 12:11
Love what you guys have been doing. So I want you to tell me a little bit more about Wash, Dry, Fold POS. You know, like, I think you're known for being just this, it's a really down to earth company that has made things simple, but tell me,
Ian Gollahon 12:25
Yeah.
Steve Marcionetti 12:26
Tell, tell, tell my, my, my, listeners, what is Wash, Dry, Fold POS and what are you known for?
Ian Gollahon 12:32
Yeah, so we're the original point of sale system for laundromats. And when we came into the industry in 2016, you could use a dry cleaning software to run a laundromat or you could use some other software to run a laundromat. But we really became the first laundromat point of sale company that I don't know of an older one than us. That's really what we are still known for over the years.
Even though it's gotten more advanced, we have really stayed true to that simplicity. So I think you did hit the nail on the head. It's got to be easy for people to use. Ironically, we were the most expensive back in 2016. And even 2019, we were priced at the top of the market. If you just lay out the four major options today, which four options have 80 % of the market share, right? And so we have about 20%. So that makes us, you know, about even with the other big three that are in our space.
Steve Marcionetti 13:27
Yeah,
sure.
Ian Gollahon 13:29
If you just lay out all of our prices, we're about half the price of anyone else. Now,
Steve Marcionetti 13:33
Wow.
Ian Gollahon 13:34
Certainly half the price of two of the three. And
Steve Marcionetti 13:36
Okay.
Ian Gollahon 13:38
The reason for that, one of them is credit card processing. We wanted to just make that cheap and it's like 2.65 % and then we do 10 cents per authorization. We can get lower than that and do interchange pricing. But I don't want to get too deep into the pricing, but just to say that, you know,
We're the affordable option now, which feels weird because we were the premium option, but we just, we just have stayed true to who we wanted to be. We, and if you're first starting wash dry fold and you don't have a big operation, it's really hard to justify spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars per month on some software that's going to help you service a hundred dollars a month in revenue. And so we've wanted to stay really approachable. And I think that has helped us.
And then I think we're also really well known for our customer service. So if you go on to our reviews, we're all US based. We either live in Oklahoma or Kentucky. So we may have an accent, but we
Steve Marcionetti 14:35
You
Ian Gollahon 14:37
Definitely, you're not going to get someone that can't speak your language or anything like that. So that's really important to us to be American owned and operated and to have full-time salaried employees. And then
Every one of our employees except for one, our newest hire, all of them have worked on a laundromat at some point. And in fact, most of them, like the lady who trains each person who buys a point of sale system, she used to operate eight laundromats for six years. So she had like a hundred employees underneath her. She's trained like three or 400 employees before she started working for us on how to use the system. Cause there's a lot of turnover in laundromats. And so she was already an expert at training people on how to use it before we hired her.
And then she's hired. She's trained like a thousand stores since. And so you're going to get someone who there's not going to be a question you've, you could ask her that she's not already had. Yeah. I
Steve Marcionetti 15:32
That herd.
Ian Gollahon 15:33
Mean, she's heard it all. She's done it all. And so, I think if you're scaling really quickly and you're maybe a different business type, you can't afford to do that. Right. If you've got 30 employees, there's no way they've all worked at laundromats, but
I watched my full POS or pretty small US based team. We all live and breathe laundromats 24 seven. So, so yeah, it's, it's definitely, and then Brian and I also, I know I came into it with no laundromat ownership experience, but now Brian and I own three laundromats called Liberty Laundry in Tulsa, Oklahoma. So I've, I've gotten the call when the laundromats on fire. I've gotten the call to stop by the store and fix the bill breaker is jammed again.
Steve Marcionetti 16:17
Mm-hmm.
Ian Gollahon 16:17
So I've
been living the laundromat owner lifestyle for a while now too. And our three stores do about 2.5 million in revenue combined.
Steve Marcionetti 16:24
Mm.
Ian Gollahon 16:25
So they're definitely in that top 5 % of grossing stores in the nation. I've got that laundromat owner side of me now as well. Brian dragged me kicking and screaming into it, but he did a good job.
Steve Marcionetti 16:39
Yeah, that's, um, you know, there's, there's a lot to be said for, you know, w I mean, listening to you tell your story and talk about where your experience comes from and now in ownership, you know, of stores as well as it's not far off from our own. And my family has been in the laundry business for a long time and I was on your podcast. Talked about that a bit, um, you know, a few weeks back, but, um, you know, there is something really to being able to develop a product in the industry that you are.
Completely committed to and are not just watching it and observing it from the outside and acting as kind of an outside influence, but you're actually in the industry and doing it. Again, we own laundries as well. And so we use our locations as I'm imagining you do as well as test sites for when you're developing a function or a feature that you want to get real world experience without, you know, making a customer feel too much like a guinea pig as they like to be talked, as they like to say.
Ian Gollahon 17:36
Let's try it.
Steve Marcionetti 17:38
And I would imagine that's not uncommon with you folks as well. And your pricing story is really interesting too, because particularly now where we have all this, I would call it new money that has kind of entered our industry and there's a lot of conversation behind that. And both of us kind of somewhat in competition with that now.
Certainly navigating what feels different than it certainly did 10 years ago, is this idea of that, why raise prices if you don't have to? And the idea that you are independently owned as we are, and you basically, you're bootstrapped, you guys are your own, you have your own destiny in your hands, is that you aren't, aren't, you aren't,
being forced to do things like increase revenue for no other reason than to increase revenue.
Ian Gollahon 18:31
Yeah.
Steve Marcionetti 18:32
And I think there is a lot to be said then you're also probably willing and I'm extending my views on you a little bit here as you're willing to do more for a customer that I think that others may not be willing to do because of this connection that you have with the industry.
And I think that there's a lot to be said for those that are evaluating any product, whether it's point of sale or a payment system, is this idea of who are you buying from? Who are you partnering
Ian Gollahon 18:59
Them.
Steve Marcionetti 18:59
With? And I love the story. It's very reminiscent of ours as well. So thanks for sharing that.
Ian Gollahon 19:07
Of
Steve Marcionetti 19:08
You know, I want to talk a little bit. We have a special interface together. We have a connection and our products.
You know, our wash dry fold ProLink was launched in the last year or beginning, it's the middle of last year and you guys were early adopters, you know, this idea of us opening up our system so that, so that companies like Wash-Dry-Fold POS could do more inside the payment system and leverage the information that we're gathering anyway about machine starts and all of that, so that you have a way to create kind of a seamless
experience for staff as they process wash, dry and fold. And I don't want to go too far in it because you guys have, think done one of the, done a great job interfacing with that. But can you, can you share a little bit about how you guys are now interfacing with, with CCI and using our ProLink feature?
Ian Gollahon 20:05
Yeah, I think the most the way I look at it is most of our stores before this ProLink. If you want your attendance have to be able to start machines for wash dry fold. They just have to eat right you can't and you don't want to use coins. That's even worse. You're right. But
Steve Marcionetti 20:18
Mm-hmm, right
Ian Gollahon 20:22
You know the idea of just putting money on the little employee cards.
Okay, yeah, they've got that. But then what if they use it for their friends? What if they use it for their family? What if they use it for the self serve customer and then take a 20 on the side? And so how
Steve Marcionetti 20:35
Mm-hmm.
Ian Gollahon 20:36
Do you make sure that they are only using it for wash dry fold orders? And so the way the software works is let's say you've got Steve Marcionetti's order here. He's got $100 worth of wash dry fold. Well, let's do $1,000. Steve's a high roller here. So we're going to do $1,000 worth of wash dry fold.
As you start dragging and dropping that through the process, so it goes from to do, to sort, to wash, to dry, to fold, to done, and then to picked up by customer. So we want to keep track of the custody of the order the whole time and have those timestamps, lots of important reasons why. But used to, you would just tell it, okay, I'm starting machine three and four. And then that documents, okay, we know how much machine three and four.
Cost to start. And so that number then on that report should match the number on the CCI report that matches. Use those cards to start. Well, it's better now because instead of them having a card, you can just hit three and four and then it actually starts machines three and four. And so they can't just start machines that aren't tied
Steve Marcionetti 21:41
Mm-hmm.
Ian Gollahon 21:42
To orders. Well, why don't they just start 20 orders for Steve Marcionetti's thousand-dollar order or whatever? I don't they just start 100 machines.
Well, because we're also providing reports. They could be run daily, weekly, monthly, however, however little or much you trust your employees would be how much you want to run these reports, but it'll show you a ratio. And so we see it at our stores is 37%. I don't know why so many stores see 37%, but that is a common ratio. And so that would means for a thousand dollar order, you want to see $370 worth of machines started. It's not going to be exactly 370. For big
Steve Marcionetti 22:17
Sure.
Ian Gollahon 22:18
Order, it'll be less.
For a small order, it'll be more. But the thing is, if you're looking at 100 orders or 200 orders and you're looking at all your employees and you see 37, 36, 35, 38, and then 50, what on earth is going on with that 50? Did she only do two
Steve Marcionetti 22:32
Yeah, it's a trigger.
Ian Gollahon 22:35
Really small orders? Is she just not working? Or is she got a business on the side that she's opened up? Or we've even seen it, you know, where they just are using the biggest machines possible.
Even for 20 pound orders. And it's like, it's like, we need those 80 pounders open. We only have two. You know, like there's, we need that. What if like a bus full of people comes in and you've got 20 pounds in there? And not only is that not efficient, but it cannibalizes, you know, sales from the rest of the store. And so this functionality adds a layer of security. Adds a layer of efficiency and it just makes the two systems.
Work better together. And then of course, if they've got money on their fast card or laundry card, they can still use it at the point of sale system and buy soap or whatever they need to buy. So it accomplishes that too. And the biggest way we utilize that at our store, sorry to over answer your question here, but the last bit of
Steve Marcionetti 23:29
You
Ian Gollahon 23:30
It is if people want money back off those cards, I got $2. I want my $2 back. It's like, no, you got a $2 bonus. Remember when you did when you did the 20 or whatever. And so
If they want money out that, whether it's bonus or not, we don't want our attendance handing customers money all day. And so we just say, well, we can't give you money back. Says on the kiosk non-refundable, but we can sell you soap. We can sell you snacks. We can do wash dry fold. So it allows
Steve Marcionetti 23:58
Mm-hmm.
Ian Gollahon 23:58
Another way to get the money back off the card besides just cash back. So I would say that's kind of the broad overview of why we would even connect. Why even connect the point of sale system to the fast card or to the laundry card.
Steve Marcionetti 24:10
Yeah, no, thank you. That's a great description. Further for those who are leveraging our products, the other piece to that is if, depending on which generation of our card readers you have, you can also present the order numbers on the card reader. So as your attendance.
Start machines using your software you guys have an order number like all systems do those order numbers will present themselves on the card reader so you can almost have a nice visual as you look down a row of machines and we color code them on an order basis too, so all the red ones
Ian Gollahon 24:43
Yep.
Steve Marcionetti 24:43
Might be order one, two, three, four the blue ones are going to be order five six seven eight and so there's this great visualization of
that these machines are running wash and fold orders, because you might have a store full of customers at the same time, and
Ian Gollahon 24:54
Mm-hmm.
Steve Marcionetti 24:56
You can easily tell which machines are running wash, dry, and fold orders, and which orders are in those machines. So yeah, I think this all comes from some early conversations that we've had before we even started developing this, and how can we best bring two completely independent companies together to provide just a seamless interface between point of sale and.
Payment system, so I think I think it's great description You know, this is a this is a podcast for distributors. I mentioned earlier and I know that you guys You know, you don't really sell through distributors and really none of the none of the POS system is really sell through distributors It's just kind of a little bit of a different product but that doesn't mean that it's not
Ian Gollahon 25:35
That's right. Mm-hmm.
Steve Marcionetti 25:40
An important part of a package that a distributor is gonna put together and so, know, it's very common that they
align themselves and they work and they at least refer somebody to, know, to what they like. And certainly, um, you know, you guys offer an excellent solution, certainly paired well with CCI, you know, but I, I'd curious when we talk about technology is because, you know, one of the things I learned from distributors, sometimes they can be a little bit, um, they don't like technology because it adds complications sometimes to their life. So, you know, do you have any advice or any thoughts about what common mistakes you see?
Whether it's store
Ian Gollahon 26:17
.
Steve Marcionetti 26:18
Owners or even distributors that make when they're considering technology, what are they over emphasizing something? Mean, what do you see happening?
Ian Gollahon 26:26
Yeah, several things come to mind right away when you
Steve Marcionetti 26:30
Yeah
Ian Gollahon 26:31
Say that. So I do see from a store owner side of things. In fact, I just got off the phone before this phone call. I like, I got to go. I've got a podcast. I got to be on. He was like, okay, one more question, though. And
Steve Marcionetti 26:41
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Ian Gollahon 26:43
So but really nice guy. Carmen, if you're listening. Hello. But
Steve Marcionetti 26:46
You
Ian Gollahon 26:48
He was telling me he's opening his first store and he's going to buy our system and it's got to work with card machines and all that. Great. Okay,
Steve Marcionetti 26:56
Mm-hmm.
Ian Gollahon 26:56
We got that. And he wants to do delivery. First thing. Okay. All right. You're going to find that that's just a money pit that takes
Steve Marcionetti 27:03
You
Ian Gollahon 27:04
Two to three years to pay off. You spend $2,000 advertising for delivery. You're going to get like $200 worth of orders. Now, hopefully they'll keep on ordering and
Steve Marcionetti 27:15
Sure.
Ian Gollahon 27:16
After
two years you get your money back, but it is a heavy CAC, CAC Heavy, Customer Acquisition Cost Heavy, and LTV, like it's at least a six month payback period on these delivery orders. It's already doing too much to do self-serve, wash, dry fold, and delivery at the same time if you're a first time owner. I just think that's way too much. Like you don't even have employees yet. What are you talking about getting a delivery vehicle? Like figure out self-serve.
Then add wash dry full because that's going to help you grow your self serve and you need people there to help with the machines and all that. So you want to be attended also for liability purposes. But those two things are going to be the majority of your revenue. And we do 2.5 million. Mentioned with three stores. Well, 70 % of that is self serve. I have a laundry method is 700,000 in that laundromat alone is self serve. You will never get to 700,000 of self serve if you're not doing wash dry fold there. Those two grow each other.
So those
have to be there. It lowers your liability. Gives you a better customer experience for the self-serve. But delivery is a whole separate business and you have to buy ads. You have to build a website. It's like, do you want to start another business while you're starting this business? And it's capital
Steve Marcionetti 28:29
Mm-hmm.
Ian Gollahon 28:30
Intensive. It's very capital intensive. Excuse me. So I would say, and we do delivery again. I'm not saying don't do delivery. We have customers
Steve Marcionetti 28:39
Yeah.
Ian Gollahon 28:39
That do delivery and do a lot of money with it. I'm just saying that.
You know, there's something to be said about crawl, walk, run.
Steve Marcionetti 28:47
Yeah.
Ian Gollahon 28:48
And if you're trying to do too much too fast, you're not going to succeed at anything. And that's especially dangerous if you want to, if you're not cashflow positive yet, because if you're dealing with, and I hope everyone who's listening to this and has a laundromat gets there. I've definitely, we've been there for years with our laundromat. Eventually that thing will just pour out so much cash.
You just, you're buying new machines. You're, we just bought new vending machines, you're buying a washer and drive. We don't know what to do with the cash. So we're going to reinvest it in delivery. Now we're doing delivery, we're buying some trucks. We're going to, and you try and get your revenue. That's when to do it. Don't do it when you just spend all your cash and now you, you're
Steve Marcionetti 29:25
Hehehe.
Ian Gollahon 29:26
Not even cashflow positive. You haven't even proven your business model yet. So I think that's the biggest mistake I see owners make is just getting ahead of their skis. Perfect
Steve Marcionetti 29:34
Yeah.
Ian Gollahon 29:35
The product first. Like if you don't even know how to make the pizza yet, you don't even know wash, dry, fold.
Don't start the delivery route yet. Like, like figure it out, get the team in place. And then if you want to do delivery on your first year, even six months into it, okay, great. Like if you have got our product, it's included. So that's easy, but it's not like there's just going to be a flood gate. You're to put up the link to do delivery and get a hundred deliveries. No deliveries cost you like a hundred, $200 each to get one. So it's not, you know, you're talking to someone who spends a lot on Google ads, right? And so, and Facebook ads and all that. So
And then for distributors, to make it specific to them, I come from that sales background where you really just want to get the deal closed and any
Steve Marcionetti 30:22
Mm-hmm.
Ian Gollahon 30:22
Complications to the deal jeopardize the whole deal. You don't want to jeopardize the whole deal with a $4,000 addition to it. You just want to get it closed and done. And so our product, I think, works pretty well there because
It works with all the major card systems, but it especially works well with CCI. So if they're doing a CCI store, it's going to be the best solution for that. Of course, in my view, of course, I'm biased, but
Steve Marcionetti 30:46
You
Ian Gollahon 30:47
We have that deep integration with CCI. We will ship it. We will guide them on how to just take it out of the box and plug it in. It's not hard. This isn't adding a complication. And then we will give them a two hour setup and training session so that they know more about that point of sale system than you do
Steve Marcionetti 31:03
Mm-hmm.
Ian Gollahon 31:04
Day one. And so we've
built it in a way that we want to take off all the work from the plate of the distributor. And when we tried to work with distributors, they really wanted to get more involved and like train the customer or set it up themselves. And it's like, honestly, you don't need to, like if you want to unplug it and put the scale up and all that, sure, that's fine. But at the end of the day, we've designed it to be very easy to sell, very problem free. There's no reason to complicate it and say like,
Well, if you go with this card system, get this point of sale. But if you go with this one, get this. It's like, we're just we're the easiest. We're the cheapest. We're the best. We're the easiest to use and the simplest and best set up and training experience as well. And so we just want to take all that fulfillment piece of it off your plate and instead make it a very easy to use experience that they're going to have a good experience with. Not going to send them to, you know, they're not going to say, I can't get a hold of someone or the one guy I talked to was in India. That's just not what they're going to have with us.
If that makes sense.
Steve Marcionetti 32:06
Yeah, that
makes perfect sense. I know it was a lot of odd to unpack there and I related so much with what you just you told us and just to kind of rewind a little bit, this idea of run, walk, know, crawl, run, know, whatever, crawl, walk, run, yes, you know,
Ian Gollahon 32:25
Paul Rock run. Yeah, you got it.
Steve Marcionetti 32:27
And I had, kind of unpack it is
is so true because in reality we're a big self-service. Mean, that's what as we focus on self-service, we let the people who are experts at the full service, which I'll defer to you on there. And I often make that same analogy that there's different layers to businesses. You've got your self-service. Then another business you can start is a full service wash, dry and fold. And then another business you can start is a pickup and delivery. And
Ian Gollahon 32:57
Order.
Steve Marcionetti 32:57
Another business is a commercial.
And you know, they all can run, yeah, lockers, mean, it's just, all these
Ian Gollahon 33:00
Lockers. Yeah, you can get seven businesses going on here.
Steve Marcionetti 33:04
Businesses can happen, but when, you know, I spend time, as we all do on social media, and we see so many people wanting to get into this business. And the first thing in their inquiry about wanting it into it is, I wanna do a pick-up and delivery, and I'm do commercials, and go, they haven't even started a store yet, you know I mean? It's like, and I almost would recommend, honestly, if someone's pure,
Go to a commercial space where the rent is half what a retail space would cause and open a commercial laundry. Now, nobody's going to do that. That comes to Facebook.
Ian Gollahon 33:39
Right.
Steve Marcionetti 33:40
They want to own a laundromat. There, but it is such good advice to really take this in steps and, take it there. And I, I preach that all the time and it's good to it's refreshing to hear it from you.
Yeah, this is really good stuff. Think the simplicity that you talk about in eliminating the complication from the distributor is, be really well heard here. This idea that they need something on their counter, they need a way to process things on the counter and it needs to be something simple and you're not going to make the distributor do a lot of back flips in order to make that happen. You're going to work with the store owner.
And you're gonna, and you're gonna make sure that they are set up and you've talked about your customer service and I've heard nothing but positive things about it. Um, you know, ever since you guys have, have been on the, on the scene. Um,
yeah, that's, that's
Ian Gollahon 34:28
Thank you.
Steve Marcionetti 34:29
Excellent, excellent stuff. Um, you know, you kind of already answered my last question about some of the advice that you've given. So it's good, but I do want to circle back to this special offer that you
Ian Gollahon 34:40
Yeah.
Steve Marcionetti 34:40
Have for CC at, for our drive time listeners. And so I'm going to let you take it from here and kind of explain what you have for us.
Ian Gollahon 34:47
Sure. Well, we really love working with CCI stores. We see them be successful. It's a great technology stack. And if you listen to this podcast, you know how hard Steve works and his team on constantly updating it. So we did want to do a special offer for anyone who's listening to the podcast. If you decide you want this for your store, if you're a distributor and you own a store, you want it in your distributor store so you can see it and test it. Whatever the reason, the coupon code is CCI. It's not advanced, right?
Steve Marcionetti 35:16
Simple, simple.
Ian Gollahon 35:17
If you mentioned CCI, this is not a long coupon code, but it is $300
off. And so if this is something that it sounds like you want to do, and it sounds like something that you want to integrate with your fast card or laundry card, or even if you're just listening to this podcast, and it sounds like something that would work well in your laundromat, then we want to give your listeners that special discount. So if you mentioned CCI and the coupon code, there'll be a little spot for it. CCI, you get $300 off.
We do, you if you got any questions, you'll go to washdryfoldpos.com book a call with our team. Rebecca is like the nicest person ever. Everyone loves her. You'll have a lot of fun talking to her and just making sure you understand the system and then she'll walk you through the checkout process and you'll have that coupon code at the end as well. So, yeah, so happy to do that for any distributors listening here and happy to do that for the CCI team. I know how much value they bring and add to everything.
Steve Marcionetti 36:15
Well, that's terrific. Know, and really appreciate it too. I think that, you know, just because not everything is a distributor sale doesn't mean that you can't add value to the distributor sale in some way. And this idea that we've, you know, at this point, we, think we've done a good job of explaining. Ian, this has been just a great conversation. I really appreciate you participating.
Thank you so much. I've been appreciated. I'm sure we'll get a chance to talk more over time about other topics. I think that might be good and aligned, but thank you so much. It's been great speaking with you. So long.
Ian Gollahon 36:47
Thank you, Steve. It was a pleasure. Thanks. Bye.
Steve Marcionetti 36:49
All right. Bye bye.
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