On any investment, you make your money on the buy. Your laundromat can make or not make money based upon what you paid for it. Watch this episode to help ensure you make a wise investment and do NOT get taken to the Cleaners. Find out how Curbside Laundries Wash and Fold Point of Sale can help your resale value of your laundromat.
Speaker 1: 0:01
Welcome to state of the laundry industry with laundry mat episode 27, how to buy a laundromat and not get taken to the cleaners. Welcome to the first of a three part series of how to buy a laundromat. Today . We’re gonna focus on how to buy a laundromat and not get taken to the cleaners. I’ve been debating whether to do this episode because one, I want to help people. But two, I don’t want people to reverse engineer what I say and take advantage of other people. Here’s rule number one, almost everything can be faked when you’re looking at the utility bill. When you’re looking at counts, when you’re looking at anything, what exactly are you looking at? And you gotta answer that question. You need to trust, but verify, and you need to verify more than you trust. You’re not buying a laundromat based upon whether you think the owner’s a nice guy or not. I haven’t met too many people who aren’t very nice. One of our very first customers at curbside laundries was a working professional full-time job. And he took everything he had and put it into the laundromat. And every single trick you could imagine was used against him. And I had no idea at the time. And I just knew that keep in mind, my brother and I were , were literally working out of our garages at the time. And we saw his revenue go up and up and up. And we helped this person build up their wash and fold . We helped them build up their pickup and delivery business. And we were so giddy and excited. And we said, Hey, you know, aren’t you excited too? And he wasn’t and it turned out he wasn’t excited because he was losing money every single month. So despite growing his washing fold a lot, at least from our point of view , um , he was underwater every single month because he needed to hit a grand slam every single month because all the numbers that he used to base his purchase on was a lie. Number one rule is don’t get taken to the cleaners and it’s not just why are they selling? But you also have to look at everything and you need to verify everything. One of our clients, when he went to buy a laundromat, he put in a wifi camera in the laundromat. Of course he got the seller’s permission. And because everything was on the up and up, there’s no reason to say no to that. He had his camera in there. So he was able to do counts. And one rule of thumb when you’re looking at information is how hard would it be to fake it? And not only how hard would it be to fake it, but how long would it take? Are you looking at one months of utility bills? Are you looking at three years of utility bills with historical information is very important. When looking at data now on the flip side, we have a client who found a laundromat and the numbers for was , and fold were spectacular. He said, too good to be true. So he passed up on the information because he did not believe the numbers for the was and fold business. So he passed on it. He ran into the new owners and he asked them , Hey, by the way, were they telling the truth about the was and fold numbers? Because the records were not very well kept. It was just paper. They said, yes, he was telling the truth. And they took a leap of faith when they made the purchase, but it turned out, it paid off. Now I’m against taking leaps of faith. I always like verifying. Were there ways of really verifying that? Looking at the counts, looking, you know, dropping in at different times of the day, doing your due diligence, because in the same token where he didn’t believe those numbers, he missed out on an opportunity. So he didn’t trust, but was it verifiable? And if it was, there was an opportunity right there. And the second lesson is as a seller, when you do own the laundromat, you need to make sure that your numbers are verifiable too, cuz you never know if you’re gonna sell. I mean, five years down the road, it could be , everything could be totally different and you may decide to sell and you always need to be in a position where you can sell if you want to. So if you’re looking at your washing full numbers or anything, it really helps to have a system in place where you could drill down and prove the numbers. So that’s one thing at curbside laundries is if there’s a perspective buyer out there you could, and you’re using curbside laundry software, you could look at any month’s revenue. You could look at any order, you could drill down to any customer and you could see down to the time exactly when the transactions happened, everything is verifiable. And when you show charts that are beautiful and you say, okay, and here’s the historical information. There’s no question that it’s real by making sure there’s no question that it’s real. That helps significantly. When you do find the right buyer that they trust you and they’re able to verify trust and verification helps your resale value. In the meantime, when it comes to purchasing a laundromat, make sure you verify the information, make sure you do spot checks, make sure all the information lines up and is legitimate. One final tip. Make sure the laundromat you are buying has enough room for storage. You need a place to store the clothes for wash and fold . And a lot of our clients using our curbside laundries point of sale and also doing pickup and delivery. They make more money on wash and fold than they do their entire selfer business. So you wanna make sure whether you’re getting doing wash and fold right out of the gates that you give yourself. The opportunity to do was and fold . If you decide to do that later on. So if you like to learn more about the curbside laundries point of sale and pick up and delivery solution, go to curbside laundries.com and thanks again for watching.
