103. Buying a Closed Laundromat an Hour and a Half Away with Lloyd Silver

00;00;00;11 – 00;00;21;05
Jordan Berry
Hey. Hey, what’s up, guys? It’s Jordan with a lot of my resource podcast is Show 103. And I pumped you here today because today we have on the show Lloyd Silver, who owns a couple of mats that build a pickup and delivery service from scratch. And he’s a marketing expert. He’s a marketing guru. He’s owned his own agency.

00;00;21;12 – 00;00;43;00
Jordan Berry
And so today we get into how he got into the business, how he grew his pickup and delivery business from scratch. And then we dig into the marketing side of things because I know that’s something that a lot of us could really benefit from improving our marketing. So a lot of really good stuff in this episode. Before we jump into it with Lloyd, I want to get to today’s fast lane tip.

00;00;43;25 – 00;01;10;29
Jordan Berry
Gasoline tip is an exciting one. The deluxe find for diligent capital investments has just been released and I would drop a link. It’ll be the first link you see down below if you’re interested in investing in the automotive industry, but you don’t want to be an active owner. We talk about here how it’s a time independent business, but it’s not a passive business by any stretch of the imagination.

00;01;10;29 – 00;01;32;14
Jordan Berry
Just get on one of the forums or the Facebook groups and you’ll see that pretty quick. But if you do want to invest in laundromats passively and benefit from the cash flow from that, you can join up with the diligent capital investments team. That’s myself, Ross Dodds, Michael Ambrose. Both of them have been on the podcast first and we have just launched our fund.

00;01;32;14 – 00;02;05;08
Jordan Berry
It is for an accredited investors. So if you’re an accredited investor and are interested in jumping on board with us in this crazy industry that we got here, laundromats, check out the link down below in the description for on YouTube. It’ll be on the show notes which is that a lot of my resource dot com slash show 103 or shoot me an email Jordan at laundromat resources dot com and maybe put something about diligence in the headline they’re super excited we’re super excited to get going.

00;02;05;08 – 00;02;25;29
Jordan Berry
We’ve already got a bunch of laundromats lined up in the pipeline. We’re raring to go. Hopefully some of you guys be able to join us on that journey. Awesome. All right. Let’s jump into it with Lloyd Silver because again, this is an awesome, awesome episode. So good. We did it twice, actually. You’ll hear about that. All right. See on the back end, Lloyd, how are you doing?

00;02;25;29 – 00;02;29;01
Jordan Berry
Thanks for coming on the show today, Jordan.

00;02;29;01 – 00;02;29;18
Lloyd Silver
Appreciate it.

00;02;30;05 – 00;02;49;22
Jordan Berry
Yeah, no, my pleasure. And you know, little inside scoop, this is actually our second go about of doing this because of some technical difficulties on my end. My apologies, but you are a rock star for coming back on and you’ve got some great things to share. I already know that. But I’m I’m really excited to hear what I learn about you a second time around.

00;02;49;22 – 00;02;52;06
Lloyd Silver
So absolutely. It’s been a month. So you know things.

00;02;52;06 – 00;02;55;10
Jordan Berry
Yeah, yeah. Oh, man. I’m sure everything’s changed.

00;02;55;11 – 00;02;56;07
Lloyd Silver
And everything changed.

00;02;56;07 – 00;03;06;18
Jordan Berry
Though, including your background. So why don’t you tell us your your background? Who are you and kind of what’s your background like? And then how did you get into the laundromat business?

00;03;07;00 – 00;03;37;26
Lloyd Silver
Yeah, sure. So I really have gone through a couple of different career segments in my life. So I started out in finance, I was a chartered financial analyst. What I did in that capacity was manage investment portfolios, analyze investment opportunities, manage pension funds, all great stuff, had a great time doing it. I hate mornings, but I’m not a morning person and being on the West Coast and most of that stuff is happening at five in the morning, six in the morning.

00;03;37;26 – 00;04;04;28
Lloyd Silver
I lasted about ten years and got quite burned out from that. So from there I opened up a marketing agency and that was always really a passion of mine. I always had marketing projects on the side that I was doing, but it was time to actually go full blown as a marketing agency. We launched that specifically focused on working with local businesses, helping them get more visibility online and get more customers.

00;04;05;12 – 00;04;30;07
Lloyd Silver
And we grew. I started the second agency from that and that was focused more on the content side of things, a little bit different type of customer. And I did that for quite a while and I still own my agency, but it’s just not my focus day in, day out these days because for whatever reason, during the pandemic, I bought a laundromat and you know, I was looking at different opportunities.

00;04;30;07 – 00;04;52;12
Lloyd Silver
I wanted to diversify my income from a pandemic, from a recession, and and really got attached to laundromats. The more that I like that, I let it quite a few other businesses, but I settled on a laundromat and I bought my first one February of 2021. That was the acquisition date and we went from there.

00;04;53;13 – 00;05;11;00
Jordan Berry
Yeah, you are right in the like at the tail end of all the thick of everything. There we are in the business. That’s cool. So I mean, I’m assuming that laundromat was already up and running when you when you bought it. How did it fare during the pandemic?

00;05;11;23 – 00;05;35;02
Lloyd Silver
Yeah, so actually it wasn’t it was closed. I bought a closed laundromat. It had been closed for about a year, not because of the pandemic for personal reasons from the owner. They had some stuff going on and it was kind of an interesting thing. So first of all, I got referred to the current owner from my equipment distributor.

00;05;35;13 – 00;05;57;28
Lloyd Silver
It was actually like my equipment distributor. I was talking to a couple, but one in particular, he he just did a fantastic job. We had a conversation. I told him when I was looking for it, we really got a call from him the next day saying that one of his one of his customers wanted to sell. And I was on a phone within minutes and had a purchase agreement done within about three days, but it had been closed.

00;05;57;28 – 00;06;24;10
Lloyd Silver
He actually acquired it from the shopping center that it’s located, and it was one of those laundromats that had been closed and the shopping center took possession of of the equipment. And, you know, long story short, he wound up owning it, wanted to buy it for his parents. They said, well, we want to be retired. We don’t want to be at the Laundromat and commemoration.

00;06;24;10 – 00;06;26;27
Jordan Berry
Check with your parents before you buy him a business.

00;06;27;03 – 00;06;44;20
Lloyd Silver
So, yeah, so it was a funny story, but you know, he had it for several months and never had it opened a single day. So by the time I got my hands on, it had been had been closed a good year at that point. So we were really starting over. People knew there was a laundromat there at one point.

00;06;45;20 – 00;07;08;19
Lloyd Silver
They didn’t have a really good reputation. It was definitely in that zombie category, a lot of older equipment dirty, a lot of homeless issues. I think I heard from someone that’s one of the people that worked there was like sleeping in the back. I mean, it was just kind of a mess at that point, right? So we got it, did a full rebrand, retool, remodel.

00;07;09;04 – 00;07;30;25
Lloyd Silver
We bought it February one and we launched May 1st. So we took a few months to get all that done, all the new equipment we replaced, almost every single piece of equipment, did a nice remodel, not super expensive, but it’s amazing what some paint and some updated flooring and things like that can do. And we opened and just got like amazing feedback like right away.

00;07;30;29 – 00;07;32;12
Lloyd Silver
So it was a fun experience.

00;07;32;12 – 00;07;41;18
Jordan Berry
That’s awesome. I don’t know that you can classify that laundromat as a zombie mac because it was like dead. This is like a full on resurrection here. Yeah.

00;07;42;04 – 00;07;50;08
Lloyd Silver
Yeah, that is not me. That. That actually legitimately died, right? I think it was for for good reasons. And then we got that thing going again.

00;07;50;17 – 00;08;11;29
Jordan Berry
Yeah. So you don’t have to give details necessarily if you don’t want to. But I’m curious because I get asked this all the time and so, you know, I thought, you know, let’s let’s chat about it a little bit. How do you go about valuing a laundromat that has basically worthless equipment, has not been open for a year?

00;08;11;29 – 00;08;20;20
Jordan Berry
There’s no numbers or know anything. I mean, what was your how did you come to figure out how to buy this thing?

00;08;21;06 – 00;08;44;01
Lloyd Silver
It was actually pretty simple. And we bought a second laundromat just a couple of months ago as well. And it had been open but not producing a ton of income. So I looked at both of these the same way. It was truly an asset acquisition, right? If you can’t value it based upon income and neither is generating any income.

00;08;44;23 – 00;09;08;17
Lloyd Silver
Yeah, it was purely based upon the value of the assets and it really came down to, you know, how much is something worth it. It’s what, you know, the buyer and seller ultimately agreed to it. Right? In our area, it can cost especially my second laundromat. It can easily cost, you know, over 100 grand just to connect to city sewer and water.

00;09;08;17 – 00;09;31;20
Lloyd Silver
Right. And then you start adding on all the equipment about plumbing and the infrastructure. That’s what I value both situations in at number one, I love the location for both of these fantastic location for both self-serve and for pickup and delivery. Right. Because I knew I didn’t I didn’t launch pickup and delivery day one with the first location, but I knew I would be going down that path.

00;09;31;20 – 00;09;48;28
Lloyd Silver
We did we did offer a wash in fall, but just drop off, not pick up a delivery. But both locations had you know, they were great, perfect for both really nice demographics, everything that you would look for except for the fact that it wasn’t making any money. So you have to kind of trust, okay, it’s a great location.

00;09;48;28 – 00;10;06;14
Lloyd Silver
How much is the infrastructure worth? Right. If I had to go and build a new longer map from scratch with similar equipment, what would I expect? How much would it cost to connect to the city? How much would it cost to do the initial build out the add, the electricity and the plumbing and all that kind of stuff?

00;10;06;14 – 00;10;24;24
Lloyd Silver
I mean, there’s value to that. So even if the laundromat is not doing a single dime, which my first one wasn’t, there’s still value. Because for you to go into that location and add that yourself, it’s going to be pretty expensive. So I did acquire it for less than it would have cost me to build from scratch. So that’s how I like.

00;10;24;24 – 00;10;30;03
Lloyd Silver
I think I got a bargain. They made some money off of it. Everybody walked away pretty happy.

00;10;30;07 – 00;10;38;14
Jordan Berry
So yeah, awesome, awesome explanation because I do get asked that all the time of, you know, how do you what do you do with that? So awesome.

00;10;38;24 – 00;11;01;25
Lloyd Silver
Yeah. And here’s why. I mean, there is clearly value and that’s now the model that I like. I would love to find a third laundromat that’s struggling, you know, that’s not super profitable. This is why I got into the business, right? When I looked around, I saw that there was this opportunity. I mean, most of the laundromats that I visited and most of the owners I talk with, they don’t have a marketing background.

00;11;01;25 – 00;11;33;23
Lloyd Silver
Right. That’s pretty unique. They don’t have a financial background like I have. Right. So I try to figure out how I can leverage both of those and bring that’s my advantage. I’m not mechanically inclined. I don’t fix machines. Well, I’m doing my best. But what I brought to the table was my marketing background and my financial background. So trying to take, you know, value a business that’s not generating any income and then leveraging my marketing background to grow it from zero to whatever it is today.

00;11;34;05 – 00;11;36;18
Lloyd Silver
Like that’s what I was looking for at.

00;11;36;18 – 00;12;04;21
Jordan Berry
Yeah, yeah. And there’s a, you know, real estate investing sort of principle like, hey, if you can buy something below replacement value, like you’re, you’re probably getting a pretty good deal. And I think that translates pretty well here as well. Yeah. Okay. So selfishly for the other Laundromat owners listening in on this, I want to make sure we kind of tap into your your marketing genius here.

00;12;04;21 – 00;12;25;01
Jordan Berry
But not. Yeah, I mean, I want to hear some of your story, but I want to make sure we leave some time to talk marketing because, you know, that’s that’s one of the weaknesses of our our industry kind of almost across the board. And but it’s something that I think a lot of people are starting to pick up on the importance of and developing some skills.

00;12;25;01 – 00;12;39;04
Jordan Berry
So I want to talk that. But take us back. Okay. You you buy this laundromat, it’s got no income. And I mean, how are you? Did did you feel like this is kind of a little bit risky or were you pretty confident like, hey, we can come in here and create a pretty good business?

00;12;40;25 – 00;12;54;21
Lloyd Silver
I was confident. I was confident and I worked with you like I did. I not to plug where what you do from the consulting side. But we had a great conversation. You gave me some very sage advice as you have. Why did you.

00;12;54;21 – 00;12;58;04
Jordan Berry
Name your laundry after my advice.

00;12;58;04 – 00;13;24;29
Lloyd Silver
Sage advice? I did. Okay. There is reasons behind the name. So Sage Laundry is the name of the business. There. So, you know, for for me, I didn’t feel like it was super risky. I did the math. You know, we had performance created. One of the great bits of advice I heard from you. I mean, I was talking like three times a day for, wow, what if it does five terms a day?

00;13;24;29 – 00;13;43;04
Lloyd Silver
You’re like, Hey, Lloyd, what if it does two? What if it does a turn? And I have like, I’m a downside. Like, let’s be let’s be practical here. All right? You’ve got a Laundromat that’s starting from scratch. How would it how would you feel if it did, like, a turn or two tops a day? Would you would you be okay?

00;13;43;15 – 00;14;07;12
Lloyd Silver
And I was fantastic. And I looked at it and I wouldn’t be thrilled, you know, I wouldn’t be super happy with that. But I’m like, okay, like, you know, it can survive, right? It’s generating some profit and it’s hitting that point. So I think the financial analysis that I did, I knew I would be out of pocket. You can’t avoid being out of pocket when you buy any business that’s literally not producing a dime of income.

00;14;07;12 – 00;14;25;15
Lloyd Silver
Right. You’re going to be out of pocket. But I did some good projections and we didn’t quite hit those, but we weren’t too far off. But because of the financial projections that I did, I, I felt confident going in that I had the runway and I could get where we needed to be. And we did so yeah.

00;14;26;07 – 00;14;52;16
Jordan Berry
The, I mean, that’s yeah. And I like, I like taking that approach kind of going back to the conservative angle and just taking that approach at least as a consideration and saying, okay, what kind of situation you going to be in, especially in a closed down space where there’s no revenues sometimes, you know, you can do everything right and bam, business is just there like day one because you just set everything up right and all the stars aligned.

00;14;52;24 – 00;15;06;15
Jordan Berry
And sometimes it takes some time to ramp that up a little bit. And so looking at the downside of that now can help give a little perspective on what kind of situation I’m going to be in if it takes a year to get business up to where I hope for. Right.

00;15;06;19 – 00;15;23;28
Lloyd Silver
And and look, I was there the day that we opened and, you know, we had someone drop by early in the day and go, wow, you guys are open. And then were her her jaw dropped because she looked around and saw the work that we had put into it. She came back later, do a load a wash. We had three customers.

00;15;23;28 – 00;15;38;10
Lloyd Silver
That first step like that was day one three. And we were excited when that first customer came in and put quarters in that machine. I mean, that was a fantastic thing for us, but we literally were starting with nothing there. We had to build this completely from scratch.

00;15;39;04 – 00;15;54;16
Jordan Berry
Yeah. Okay. So I mean, when you did open I mean, you’ve you spent a few months like March to May, right? You spent a few months building this thing back up and redoing it. What was the response like when you opened you like day one, week one.

00;15;55;20 – 00;16;15;14
Lloyd Silver
It’s you know, we had, you know, like I said, we had just a couple of people come in on day one, right. So, you know, you you love to think that you can just open the door and floods of people are going to be walking through. Right now. We’re in a busy shopping center. There’s one there are the big grocery store in town is located right next right next door.

00;16;15;20 – 00;16;38;00
Lloyd Silver
There are other businesses that draw some good traffic in. So, you know, ultimately, I think that word would get out. But we definitely needed to prime that pump a little and be proactive in getting the word out that the response that I was looking for and that we got right because we built this intentionally to be the nicest laundromat experience in the town.

00;16;38;11 – 00;16;56;04
Lloyd Silver
Right. There’s certainly better laundromats in other parts of the country. But with where we were, we built it so that we were going to be the nicest. We were going to be the cost and the price later we were going to charge more than other folks. We were fully attended. You know, we had a remodel and a retail.

00;16;56;12 – 00;17;15;17
Lloyd Silver
I wanted to make sure that that was going to pay off. So I was looking specifically for those reactions to I wanted to make sure when people came in that they just didn’t go, Oh yeah, it’s a laundromat. Like I really wanted to see their reaction and appreciation for what we did for that community there, and that’s what we got.

00;17;15;17 – 00;17;35;23
Lloyd Silver
So we didn’t get the financial benefit that day. One didn’t expect it, but I at least got validation. People started coming in, people started coming in saying, I heard you guys are open. I heard it was really nice. I just wanted to see it for myself. They weren’t quite ready to do laundry right. May have been mid-cycle for them, but they started popping by just to look around.

00;17;35;27 – 00;17;46;23
Lloyd Silver
We literally had people just walking through the laundromat and just looking going, Wow, wow, thanks. And that’s what I was looking for. And that was the validation that what we did was the right decision.

00;17;47;06 – 00;17;52;10
Jordan Berry
Yeah. How many of those people you think were your competitors going, Wow, great. Thanks. Yeah.

00;17;52;29 – 00;18;11;26
Lloyd Silver
I don’t think from the beginning. Yeah, I mean, certainly, I mean, I walked into my competitors and looked around as well. But you can tell I mean, I think you can tell when someone is a competitor what it’s truly like. Now, this is truly the kind of person that wants to use a laundromat. You get that sense?

00;18;11;27 – 00;18;15;26
Jordan Berry
Yeah. Well, competitors are going to be looking at things a little differently than pricing.

00;18;16;05 – 00;18;18;19
Lloyd Silver
Customer Yeah, yeah. Well, little things like that.

00;18;19;13 – 00;18;20;16
Jordan Berry
Yeah, yeah. Okay.

00;18;20;16 – 00;18;22;21
Lloyd Silver
So bathroom, but yeah.

00;18;23;24 – 00;18;35;11
Jordan Berry
Okay. So you opened up and yeah, the buzz started happen. Did you do anything beforehand and to like promote it, promote the opening, anything like that.

00;18;35;26 – 00;18;56;19
Lloyd Silver
But we had no promotions. I was going back on on what to do. Should we do like a grand opening promotion? I talked to some people about that and then ultimately my background from a marketing perspective is digital. I know that super well. Like I don’t know the non digital side of things as well. So I try to leverage what I knew well.

00;18;56;29 – 00;19;26;06
Lloyd Silver
So we had our website developed, we had ads ready to go on Google, on Facebook. I had everything that I possibly could have from a digital marketing perspective, like waiting to get turned on. We weren’t sure exactly what date because we’re dealing with contractors and now we were a little bit delayed, but I was ready to turn that on and as soon as I needed that, we put on May one, everything went live and we started to do a heavy promotion from the very beginning.

00;19;26;27 – 00;19;28;21
Jordan Berry
Yeah, awesome.

00;19;28;21 – 00;19;52;07
Lloyd Silver
And I was, I was also okay with that. Like there was sure. There’s the part of me that would love to have seen a huge swarm of customers come in. But we were new to this, like I’m new to Laundromats, none of my employees and worked at a laundromat before. Again, this gets back to the certain expectations that I had and that I wanted to create a certain experience.

00;19;52;15 – 00;20;15;27
Lloyd Silver
I was okay having a slow but steady increase in customers because it gave us a chance to figure things out before the masses started to come. Because you can plan and I had procedures and how to do things, but as soon as people start coming in, throw that out the door, right? They have their own idea of how laundromats should be run.

00;20;16;07 – 00;20;35;00
Lloyd Silver
So it gave us a good sense of of how to really run the business the right way as we grew over that first month. But by the time we got into month two, we started doing quite well on the the self-service side and certainly by month four and five, it was just thriving at that point.

00;20;35;17 – 00;20;48;03
Jordan Berry
Nice. Can I ask like how I mean, you know, so so you had a ramp up period. How long about did it take to to reach profitability, do you know?

00;20;48;16 – 00;21;13;06
Lloyd Silver
Yeah, I mean, from a cash flow perspective, right. Because you have to look at it differently. Profit and profitability versus that cash flow positive. Right. Because profitability can be reached a lot earlier when you’ve got loans, right? Because I did a whole retool. We got a loan from the equipment manufacturer so profitability we can reach pretty quickly. It took us a good year to be cash flow positive.

00;21;13;22 – 00;21;31;19
Lloyd Silver
We were profitable much sooner than that, but we had a large equipment loan that we had to pay off. So ultimately, I mean, it’s cash flow is the only thing that’s important. And, you know, it it took us a good a good year before we were cash flow positive. We were profitable after month six.

00;21;32;27 – 00;21;52;14
Jordan Berry
Awesome. Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate you sharing that because I mean, I think that’s a question that people have a lot, especially if they’re taking over, you know, if you’ve seen the, you know, the the videos on the free laundromats and stuff like that and, you know, yes, you can you can get a space, you know, for free, but it’s not going to be free.

00;21;52;18 – 00;22;00;29
Jordan Berry
Right? Like, you know, it takes time to ramp up and you got to have some capital or at least access to some capital in most situations there. Yeah.

00;22;00;29 – 00;22;20;01
Lloyd Silver
And more than you think, right? I mean, we didn’t think it was going to take what was it, four months. Right. And now my second one, we’re doing a renovation on the one I just acquired in in December. And that contractor is saying that 2 to 3 months easily on that one. So I’m thinking, wow, I may be shut down for three more months on that one.

00;22;20;10 – 00;22;40;29
Lloyd Silver
You’ve got to have the capital to be able to get it there. The alternative is you buy a turnkey laundromat, you’re going to pay a premium for it, but you’re not going to have to worry about these types of things, right? You’re just going to pay more upfront. You’re going to pay one way or another. You’re going to pay for that nice turnkey laundromat, or you’re going to buy something like I did that needed a hefty investment.

00;22;41;09 – 00;22;50;26
Lloyd Silver
And that investment is just not a one time. It was month after month until we actually started to see the customer growth that created sustainability. Yeah.

00;22;52;10 – 00;23;10;04
Jordan Berry
And again, I’m, I’m going to ask the question, feel free to, you know, fluff it off if you need to. But I mean, how did you how did you fund this? I mean, how did you find the acquisition of a, you know, a closed down laundromat? Did you pay for that cash and then finance equipment? I mean, what did that look like?

00;23;11;02 – 00;23;37;25
Lloyd Silver
So I got a great, great deal. Obviously, rates have gone up. Things are more expensive today. The fact that I was an experienced business owner allowed me to get access to capital at a lower at better terms than if I were completely brand new. So even though I was brand new to the laundromat industry, I brought 20 years of business experience with me and that helped me a lot.

00;23;38;04 – 00;24;02;03
Lloyd Silver
I financed as much as I could. I put down a very small down payment because I knew that my cash was going to be needed once those doors opened. I’m fully attended. I’ve got salaries, you know, I’ve got all those types of expenses. I’ve got rent because we don’t own, you know, in our area. It’s it’s not easy to actually have a building in Northern California.

00;24;02;03 – 00;24;23;20
Lloyd Silver
It’s usually by, you know, venture firms and other large institutions. So I wanted to put as little capital down as I could early on because I knew I was going to have to put up capital a month after month for a period of time. So I planned from that from day one. Yeah, that’s I am managing the second one that we just acquired.

00;24;23;25 – 00;24;54;13
Lloyd Silver
I am managing that build out a little bit differently. I am trying to minimize my my cash outlay on that. So we could probably start working on the remodel soon, but we’ve intentionally delayed it because I’ve turned on the marketing engine over there to start building up, pick up and delivery. And I’m just trying to get it to the point where the increase in pickup and delivery is going to cover the cost of that equipment loan, because the equipment loan doesn’t kick off until the equipment is installed.

00;24;55;02 – 00;25;13;29
Lloyd Silver
So if I can push that off for a couple of months and take that time to build up pickup and delivery and get that customer growth, my numbers suggest that I’ll be able to pay for the equipment loan and be cash flow positive the entire time. So that wasn’t my goal. On acquisition number one, but I do want it to be my goal.

00;25;13;29 – 00;25;17;02
Lloyd Silver
And number two, I’m trying to be minimal out of pocket on that.

00;25;17;18 – 00;25;18;28
Jordan Berry
Yeah. Are you past.

00;25;19;01 – 00;25;20;09
Lloyd Silver
Learn some lessons for sure.

00;25;20;09 – 00;25;27;16
Jordan Berry
Yeah. Totally. I mean are you processing that pickup in delivery at the other one or are you just lining it up so that it’s there? Day one.

00;25;28;00 – 00;25;49;11
Lloyd Silver
We’re processing it at the new location, although we know that we’re going to have to shut that down for a few months. So we are prepared to move it over to our original location, which is about a 30 minute drive. So it’s not horrible far enough away that it’s definitely not in a computing area, but not so far that we can’t take things over and process it.

00;25;49;11 – 00;26;13;18
Lloyd Silver
So it’s going to create some headaches, it’s going to create some strain on machine usage, but that’s the only option that we have. And and the reality is I need to grow it pretty significantly to hit my goals of being cash flow positive. So, you know, there’s going to be a huge influx in the first laundromat because of all of the orders have to be processed there in a couple of months.

00;26;14;07 – 00;26;26;23
Jordan Berry
Yeah. I mean, can I let’s stick with that first one here just for a second. I mean, is it fully attended, partially attended unattended? What model did you go with with that one?

00;26;27;19 – 00;26;55;22
Lloyd Silver
The model we launched with was fully attended. The model we have right now is mostly attended. And so I would love to be fully attended, but hiring has challenges. I am trying to find more part time people that can work some of the shifts to be able to be fully attended. But there are times now where we are unattended.

00;26;56;01 – 00;27;18;27
Lloyd Silver
Early on I did not want to be unattended. I live about an hour and 15 minutes away and so not super practical, just hop on down to the laundromat. But if I knew we were going to be shorthanded, I was down there working because I really, really wanted to be fully attended. That’s changed. You know, you give give a year of having to do that.

00;27;18;27 – 00;27;37;25
Lloyd Silver
I eventually got to the point that I was okay with us being unattended for certain parts of the day. So we’re attended most of the time, but there are a couple of days during the week when for about six or 7 hours we don’t have anybody there, but we do have systems in place so that our customers can get help and I can support them remotely.

00;27;38;18 – 00;27;57;07
Jordan Berry
Yeah, awesome. Well, I mean, that brings up another question that I get often. I mean, if you’re an hour and a half from your laundromat, people always you know, you see a lot of people saying, hey, maybe like 20, 30 minutes from your house would be the max. But, you know, a lot of people want to know, can I run this thing further away?

00;27;57;07 – 00;28;13;16
Jordan Berry
I can’t find anything near me or, you know, whatever. Like, can you can you talk to me about what has it been like owning one an hour and a half away? Would you recommend it? Did you have to do anything special because it’s that far away? You talk to us about that.

00;28;13;26 – 00;28;36;26
Lloyd Silver
Yeah. And I did look at laundromats that that were closer and they just didn’t work out. Like I live in the Bay Area. My laundromat is not in the Bay Area, it’s outside of the Bay Area. Bay area is super expensive, but everything was just so overpriced at the time. Still overpriced that for the goals that I had, I had a broad in my search.

00;28;36;26 – 00;29;00;19
Lloyd Silver
So an ideal world. Like I looked at a laundromat that was 10 minutes away from my house. I really, really wanted to purchase that. Like, that was just about six months ago. Deal didn’t happen. If I could avoid being an hour and a half away, I would. If I could move and live closer, I would. But I have other obligations and, you know, other reasons why I need to stay where where I am currently.

00;29;00;19 – 00;29;21;17
Lloyd Silver
So I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it. And I do think you have to put some things in place. It is not practical for for an owner to be what I call semi passive. Right. Everybody everybody believes I mean, not everybody, but a lot of people believe you can get in this business and it can be a passive business. I do not believe that.

00;29;21;17 – 00;29;43;23
Lloyd Silver
Like I never believe that. Never from day one that I think this would be a fully passive business. But I thought it could be semi passive. I could focus on marketing, I could focus on the financial side, the business development side, not be involved day to day. So now what we launched, I was there day to day. I was there for five, six days a week.

00;29;44;16 – 00;30;20;24
Lloyd Silver
I mean, I was there a lot. We needed it and it was good and I appreciated and I got to talk with customers and I got to learn from them and hear them ask them questions and get feedback. That was an invaluable experience. So for me to be where I am now, I had to go through that process of buying the bullet and driving all that way every day for months where I could truly learn the business and most importantly, learn the customers and their needs and understand if you know what was what it was going to take for me to feel confident and comfortable to not be there.

00;30;21;00 – 00;30;42;23
Lloyd Silver
Right. Like I remember early on, I was always pulling out the video like you know, I was always watching video like, you know, now you got to force me to turn on the video. It’s like, Oh yeah, if there’s a real issue, do I look at that video, right? But you know, I had to get comfortable. They’re like, So until you’re comfortable, I think it’s a real challenge.

00;30;42;23 – 00;31;06;25
Lloyd Silver
Living so far away. The key to being able to do this is that I found someone who I hired on day one. It was one of our first employees, if not the first. And he’s grown as we have grown and he’s been promoted into management. I trust him and he’s got keys at the store. When I say keys in the store, I don’t mean just the front door.

00;31;06;28 – 00;31;26;06
Lloyd Silver
Like he’s got keys, right? He can get everything in. Yeah, I’ve got procedures in place and checks and balances. That’s only the smart thing to do. But I cannot pull this off if I didn’t have somebody who was there. He lives about 10 minutes away, who I completely trust and who is taking care of his day to day issues for me.

00;31;26;28 – 00;31;45;12
Lloyd Silver
So if you’re going to be as far away as I am, then you have to accept the fact that you’re you’re going to have to hire a manager, right? You’re going to have to have somebody in place. You’re likely going to pay more, right? Because you don’t want the average person having that kind of a position, in my opinion.

00;31;45;12 – 00;32;04;03
Lloyd Silver
Right. This is somebody who I can really trust and I pay extra for that. So that’s money out of my own pocket. But that gives me the lifestyle that I want. So I’m willing to take less, to have the freedom to be able to be an hour and a half away and not have to worry about things every single day now.

00;32;04;19 – 00;32;14;02
Jordan Berry
So early on, you were there four or five days a week. What about now? Are you still heading over there? Fairly often? What does it look like for you and Silva?

00;32;14;03 – 00;32;38;08
Lloyd Silver
I mean, now that we have the second location, I’m you know, obviously I need to go there a little bit more frequently. First location once a week is is what I’m doing now. It’s to pick up cash, right? It’s it’s you know, I like doing that, but it also just gives me a chance to check in. I change the date and time that I go.

00;32;38;19 – 00;32;59;09
Lloyd Silver
I want to check in with, you know, try to see, you know, who’s working. Are they meeting? My expectation. And so I’m kind of blending the visit to go pick up cash with kind of a drop in know they know I’m coming at some point I’m not exactly sure when, but just to make sure things are going the right way and that all my expectations are being met.

00;32;59;09 – 00;33;24;08
Lloyd Silver
So when I go there, I do give feedback, you know, and ask for things to get tweaked and hey, let’s not forget to do this. So it’s important for me to continue to go, but once a week is all that I’m going. I do spend other time throughout the week working on the business, working on the marketing side in particular, you know, doing business development, looking for other opportunities, but not day to day at the laundromat anymore.

00;33;25;13 – 00;33;57;10
Jordan Berry
Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. And I mean, I think that’s, you know, pretty a pretty typical experience. You’re going to you’re going to be heavy on your involvement early on and that will taper to like once or twice a week. Usually once you get things set up. And I would just throw out there too and maybe you seen this, maybe you haven’t yet, but sometimes it does go in waves where, you know, so for example, if your manager decided to leave or whatever you know, you might have to up your involvement for a little while until you can get somebody else into that place.

00;33;57;10 – 00;34;06;28
Jordan Berry
So it does go in waves, but generally speaking, your involvement is higher upfront and then it tapers down over time and pretty tough.

00;34;07;03 – 00;34;26;10
Lloyd Silver
We had a COVID outbreak. It was down to me and one other person. I was there quite frequently. Yeah, I guess I didn’t want to say no to our wash and fold orders. Right. So like, man, it was it was rough. And there was only a couple of days, but it was not, not a fun couple of days for either of us.

00;34;26;16 – 00;34;30;26
Jordan Berry
Yeah, well, I mean, you’re 3 hours plus in the car, you know.

00;34;30;29 – 00;34;32;13
Lloyd Silver
I was renting hotel rooms.

00;34;32;13 – 00;34;35;08
Jordan Berry
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got to. You got to do that.

00;34;35;08 – 00;34;39;16
Lloyd Silver
So which, you know, financially doesn’t make sense. But, you know, at the end of the day.

00;34;40;11 – 00;34;41;10
Jordan Berry
Short term at least.

00;34;41;12 – 00;34;45;01
Lloyd Silver
Yeah, exactly. I got to do what you got to do to be able to deliver.

00;34;45;01 – 00;35;11;09
Jordan Berry
So yeah. Okay. So you busted this first one open and got to go in. Took a little while to get to profitability, took a little bit longer even to get to cash flow positive. Yeah. Where does number two come in in this scenario? I mean, I feel like you’re just, you know, you’re taking crazy pills over there because you’re starting them from scratch in an hour and a half away.

00;35;11;09 – 00;35;16;13
Jordan Berry
And now you’re looking for another one. How did you how did you find the second one?

00;35;17;20 – 00;35;53;25
Lloyd Silver
Second one I actually found listed online. So that one was online. And I put in an offer that wasn’t accepted. That first one fell through and then I swept it out on the second go around. So and I, you know, I, I do think it’s it things are easier with the first one now, I do feel in terms of being able to be semi passive, being able to take that step back, having two of actually will be easier than one, having three is going to be easier than having to.

00;35;54;01 – 00;36;18;16
Lloyd Silver
I do think that there are some economies of scale, right? You can start hiring at different levels of management as you grow. So it’s kind of a pain to go through the experience. But it is part of my long term vision of having, you know, several different stores. And I think at that point I’ll be able to really take that step back that I’m looking for in the ways that I want to step back.

00;36;18;24 – 00;36;31;19
Lloyd Silver
Right. So I really enjoy the business. I love it. I actually really love the business. But there are certainly things that I enjoy doing more than others, and I think having multiple stores will allow me to spend more time doing those things.

00;36;32;14 – 00;36;57;16
Jordan Berry
Yeah, yeah. That’s yeah, that’s that’s the thing. And, you know, I mean, not that this is anything new to you, but yeah. The, the, the problems don’t go away. They just change, right? At different at different levels. They just change. And you have different levels of management, which takes care of a lot of the sort of tedious stuff that you don’t the day to day kind of running of the business.

00;36;57;16 – 00;37;14;01
Jordan Berry
But it does introduce new problems, right? So but it’s it’s growth opportunity. It’s opportunities to grow both yourself and your employees and your business and all that. So, yeah. Okay. How, how far apart are your two laundromats like distance wise.

00;37;15;01 – 00;37;16;21
Lloyd Silver
Time wise, 35 minutes.

00;37;16;21 – 00;37;21;14
Jordan Berry
Okay. So that’s probably a better way to talk about it in California.

00;37;21;15 – 00;37;27;29
Lloyd Silver
I mean, Miles, I don’t know is probably about 20, about 20 miles, 15 to 20 miles, but it’s a good 35 minutes of driving.

00;37;28;04 – 00;37;41;14
Jordan Berry
Okay. And where so like if there’s like a a string between your house and the two laundromats, are they in the same direction and are they or what does that look like?

00;37;41;15 – 00;38;06;06
Lloyd Silver
Yeah, same direction the second laundromats a little bit further. So and the first laundromat is in a town called Woodland. It’s, it’s, it’s outside of Sacramento. Yeah. Small town, 60,000 just north of Davis. Davis is a big university town. That’s one of the reasons why I liked it very much. Higher. Higher income grade for wash and fold and pickup and delivery.

00;38;06;22 – 00;38;29;17
Lloyd Silver
The second location is right smack in the middle of Sacramento. So I needed a presence there because Sacramento, greater Sacramento is like 1.6 million people. I get is a massive population and I wanted to come in primarily because of pickup and delivery. Like that was my thing. So and I needed a place to process that. It’s a good it’s a good location for self-serve.

00;38;29;17 – 00;38;39;08
Lloyd Silver
But what I’m excited about is having a 1.6 million population that I get to play around and market too and get to grow from. That’s exciting.

00;38;39;08 – 00;38;47;15
Jordan Berry
Yeah. Well, yeah, Sacramento is massive and it’s a great market, but you are a glutton for punishment and you keep going out further.

00;38;47;15 – 00;39;07;06
Lloyd Silver
So yeah, I’m not going to go out probably further than that and I wouldn’t mind getting a location near me still, but you know, at the very least, those two are close enough that the person I hired to manage the first location is going to be able to get over to the second location and take over responsibilities there as well.

00;39;07;13 – 00;39;28;07
Jordan Berry
Yeah Well, right here, right now, I’m going to start a pool and I’m going to say that you are going to end up with one further out and I’m going to put the over under two and a quarter hours away from your house. So if you take your bets, take the over two and a quarter of the under two and a quarter, but that’s more than it’s.

00;39;28;07 – 00;40;01;13
Lloyd Silver
Possible, right? Be cut as soon as you can. I’m very big on process. Right. So one of the things that I’m doing now is I’ve created a training center for our team using using actually like a training course, having videos, having presentations, all of that, you know, having having all of that makes onboarding somebody a lot easier. So as we learn and grow and I’m building out these processes, adding another location is going to be a lot easier than it was before.

00;40;01;20 – 00;40;19;15
Lloyd Silver
And I think it will get to the point that I can I can have a location anywhere, and I’ll have the processes in place to be able to pull that off. I’m not saying it’s all it’s going to be easy, right. But you at least identify those things that you need to do where the challenges are and you’re able to tackle those more proactively.

00;40;19;15 – 00;40;42;28
Lloyd Silver
Whereas the first time I was figuring out a lot of this stuff as I went, right, I mean, I had no experience running a lot or not like I was learning as I went. I talked to everybody I could. I was active in Facebook groups. There are a couple of folks out there. I mean, the industry is fantastic in that there are a lot of people to share and I tapped into that knowledge as much I can to try to speed up my learning process.

00;40;42;28 – 00;40;45;06
Lloyd Silver
But, you know, it was a process for sure.

00;40;45;17 – 00;40;58;29
Jordan Berry
Yeah. All I heard is that you could have a laundromat anywhere. I went to nail that down, some upping the over under to 6 hours, which basically put you down to L.A. and maybe like out to Reno out there and beyond.

00;40;58;29 – 00;41;10;04
Lloyd Silver
So it’ll be interesting. I had the same direction right from where I live now. Reno, there’s a stop between now, so we might have to get somewhere in between there.

00;41;10;04 – 00;41;24;25
Jordan Berry
Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Okay. I mean, you’ve mentioned your excitement about pickup and delivery. We’ve kind of talked around it a little bit. I mean, are you fairly early and are you doing pickup in your first location?

00;41;25;01 – 00;41;31;05
Lloyd Silver
Oh, yeah. We’ve been doing pickup and delivery there for seven months now.

00;41;31;09 – 00;41;31;22
Jordan Berry
Okay.

00;41;32;06 – 00;41;41;15
Lloyd Silver
So washing fold starting today. Tomorrow, right upon launch, we did washing Paul, but it took us a few months before I launched pickup and delivery.

00;41;42;14 – 00;41;47;01
Jordan Berry
Okay. I mean, do you mind telling us, like, how did you get started with pickup and delivery?

00;41;48;17 – 00;42;14;05
Lloyd Silver
Yeah. First of all, I did buy a vehicle. I bought a Honda Element. If you know those little, little boxy Honda elements, you take the seats out, they hold like £600 alone. Fantastic for an operation getting started. Not super expensive. I threw up some logos, those that made it look nice. It was clean, like wasn’t the fanciest thing in the world.

00;42;14;05 – 00;42;40;25
Lloyd Silver
But I didn’t want to go out and spend $30,000. None of them like it. Just that wasn’t prudent to do so. This was prudent. I didn’t want to go hire a driver on day one because that was just more expense that I’d have to eat. So I did carve out time for my friends to play the role of pickup and delivery driver, and that actually was the case until about two months ago.

00;42;40;25 – 00;43;04;16
Lloyd Silver
So my intensive pick up and delivery for like four months, they didn’t other you know, there’s a lot of lugging of of stuff around, but that’s what I needed in order to get that service up and running at launch. And to the point where I felt like I could then devote some specific resources, like hiring a driver. But my, my attendants went out and did it.

00;43;04;26 – 00;43;22;04
Lloyd Silver
I tried to build my shift schedule so that we have some overlap middle of the day. And that’s the time that they got in and they went out and did pickups and deliveries. But ultimately it got to the point that we just outgrew that it was it was just taking too long. So I went ahead and hired a driver and that’s been going well for a couple of months now.

00;43;24;08 – 00;43;35;17
Jordan Berry
And I mean, how long did it take pickup and delivery to start ramping up? What was that? I mean, can you give us, like, a general idea of like what that look like?

00;43;36;13 – 00;44;08;04
Lloyd Silver
Yeah. I mean, we we launched it internally right away. The idea being that, you know, the thought is that people will give you more laundry to do if you go and pick it up. Right. I that’s what I hear from other people that the average order size is larger. And I don’t I don’t know how true that is, but I love the idea of doing pickup and delivery just from a marketing perspective, being able to get our vehicle out there, driving around.

00;44;08;22 – 00;44;31;07
Lloyd Silver
We have a lot of seniors and and senior living areas and residential. I’ll be able to go there. We everybody wears a uniform shirt. It was just a great way of getting out there and doing marketing. It’s a challenge and an opportunity that most people have no clue that, number one, there are companies like most of ours that can do, wash and fall that will actually do your laundry.

00;44;31;11 – 00;44;56;25
Lloyd Silver
And number two, they’ll actually come out and pick it up and do it right. They just don’t know about that. So for me, that was just key. So marketing it internally, getting that word out that allowed us to get on the street right away. And then I launched a massive campaign. So my theory behind marketing is you’re going to pay for it and you’ve got a couple of choices.

00;44;56;25 – 00;45;19;27
Lloyd Silver
You can trickle out how much you pay over a long period of time, or you can bite the bullet and go all in and try to ramp it up. Like as soon as you can. That’s the approach that I took that as a work with everybody, but I invested a larger amount in marketing day one to try to make some inroads and get our pickup and delivery, you know, busy as soon as possible.

00;45;20;09 – 00;45;48;16
Lloyd Silver
So, you know, we got there. I mean, it’s it’s certainly again, it’s a 60,000 person community that’s not a massive community. But our driver is out now three and a half, 4 hours a day. So it’s just a part time position. I have higher expectations in Sacramento, but I mean, that’s 4 hours of solid, you know, sort of pick up and drop offs that they’re doing.

00;45;49;07 – 00;46;10;13
Lloyd Silver
So I’m happy with that. It still has a ways to go in terms of, I think, the potential, but I think that that’s also limited by the fact that we’re having to educate the audience as well, and that gets back into marketing and things that we have to do to really get the word out. It’s Not like there are so many people that are actively looking for a pick of a delivery laundry.

00;46;10;26 – 00;46;21;25
Lloyd Silver
There are more potential customers that have no idea about our service than there are who do like far more. So it’s going to take time to really, I think, make the inroads that we all want to make.

00;46;22;21 – 00;46;31;19
Jordan Berry
Yeah, I agree. And I think I mean, I still think we’re in the pretty early days of the pickup and delivery earlier. A lot of people don’t know that that’s available. Yeah.

00;46;32;04 – 00;46;52;12
Lloyd Silver
No, most people don’t. Most people have no clue. Again, they don’t really they understand that there’s like dry cleaning services out there. But even in terms of basic wash and fold like Mexico, don’t have any clue that services are available. What a great opportunity for us to be able to go out and educate people who want to spend money.

00;46;52;12 – 00;47;05;18
Lloyd Silver
Having us do this service for them. They just don’t have any idea that we’re out there willing to do it. So that’s it becomes a different challenge. We have to educate before we can acquire those customers.

00;47;05;18 – 00;47;42;25
Jordan Berry
Yeah, I agree. And I think that’s a great opportunity. I think that’s why I’m super excited in just a minute to, talk about marketing a little bit more with you. But before we do that, I wanted to ask. Okay, so you’re you’re starting up pickup and delivery at your second location already. And you already mentioned that doing it a little bit differently because you’re trying to get those orders in now so that when you get a new equipment that’s going to help cover the cost of that equipment, is there anything else that you’re doing differently based on what you learned the first time around?

00;47;42;25 – 00;48;06;09
Lloyd Silver
No, not in terms of pickup and delivery. I am well, I am limiting geographically a little bit, but that’s also partially because of Sacramento versus, you know, we can cover women and Davis pretty easily. Sacramento is pretty big. So we would you know, if we open it up to the entire area, we could potentially have stops that were 20, 30 minutes apart.

00;48;06;09 – 00;48;30;10
Lloyd Silver
And that just doesn’t make a whole town upset. So I did limit our service availability, geographic quickly so that we really focused in kind of the core area that surrounds our laundromat. And I think that’s a good place to kind of get started. And so that’s there’s so many potential people there that there was just really no need to start venturing off into the outskirts, off of the town.

00;48;30;13 – 00;48;57;16
Lloyd Silver
So yeah, I mean, that’s one of the thing I did little bit differently, but I’m actually back. We have a driver for our first location. I’m back to having an attendant doing it for the second because it worked well and I know that there’s a crossover. At some point it makes sense to hire a driver. There’s a certain amount of poundage that I’ve been able to calculate where I know when we hit that poundage, I need to have that attendant full time doing laundry.

00;48;57;16 – 00;49;19;01
Lloyd Silver
I can’t I can’t afford to have them spending, you know, two or 3 hours out there doing pickup and delivery. Yeah, but this is all about getting it started. I mean, you don’t start with a thriving service on day one. I mean, you go through some serious growing pains to be able to even reach profitability. So but I think I did it pretty well the first time.

00;49;19;01 – 00;49;22;13
Lloyd Silver
So we’re doing a lot of a lot of the second time as well.

00;49;23;01 – 00;49;42;28
Jordan Berry
Yeah, good. I mean that’ll that’ll that’ll give you a lot of good data as you’re I mean talk about putting a system together and being able to transplant that to new areas more than 6 hours away or less than 6 hours away, depending even if it took the over under and, you know, and being able to do that.

00;49;42;28 – 00;49;50;26
Jordan Berry
So having data from two locations, doing it similar ways and just tweaking things here and there, I mean, that should be pretty valuable information.

00;49;51;11 – 00;49;52;18
Lloyd Silver
Yeah. Yeah, I think so.

00;49;52;22 – 00;49;54;14
Jordan Berry
Which means we’ll have to have you back on.

00;49;54;22 – 00;49;56;07
Lloyd Silver
Yeah, you got to be learn.

00;49;56;10 – 00;49;56;25
Jordan Berry
Here how it.

00;49;56;25 – 00;50;24;04
Lloyd Silver
Goes. And it really is a growing process. I, I do not know everything about a laundromat, like I’m learning stuff all the time, but what’s important for me is I’m documenting the process. That data side is super important. I’m trying to collect as much data as we can. I’m really trying to understand the mechanics of the business from a data perspective, not necessarily from the physical perspective.

00;50;24;04 – 00;50;42;11
Lloyd Silver
I can bring in a fantastic person to fix a machine. I can bring in somebody to understand the business, like the numbers, how things all lined up like that. That’s something that as a business owner, I take ownership of that. So I spent a lot of time trying to understand the business better through data.

00;50;43;29 – 00;51;01;26
Jordan Berry
And I think that’s that’s super valuable. I mean, I think that’s the future of the of the industry. Yeah. All right. So anything else you want to tell us about our about your your two laundromats or your pickup and delivery service? I want to get into the marketing side of things and pick your brain there. Anything else you want to fill us in on?

00;51;02;08 – 00;51;22;01
Lloyd Silver
Yeah, I mean, I don’t think so. Like I said, you’ve got to start when you’re starting from scratch in both situations was I had a basically a startup laundromat and a shell, right? I mean, the second one was doing business, so it wasn’t completely starting from scratch, but, you know, you have to you have to set reasonable expectations.

00;51;22;01 – 00;51;42;26
Lloyd Silver
I knew that this no, we weren’t. Could all of a sudden have a 30 stops on a pickup and delivery route when we opened the door. But you got to get that first one right. So how do you get that first pick up a delivery order and how do you satisfy that and do that profitably? How do you get the first five or ten pickup orders and do that profitably?

00;51;43;03 – 00;52;00;13
Lloyd Silver
You’ve got to worry about that before you can worry about the bigger plans that are, you know, potentially down the line. So I started small, like what do I need to do just to get to this threshold? And I focused on that. And once I did it, I had a plan in place on how do we get to the next one.

00;52;01;18 – 00;52;19;07
Jordan Berry
Awesome. All right. Well, let’s talk marketing. I mean, you know what what you what have you noticed in our industry about marketing and what have you started implementing in your businesses marketing wise? What do you see as being important?

00;52;19;07 – 00;52;39;27
Lloyd Silver
And that’s a super big question. And just also, you know, to be clear, as I get into the marketing side, like we’ve done a well like my first location, I, you know, we certainly don’t have numbers that we get from other people. But based upon what I have seen, I can confidently say that we’re the busiest laundromat around.

00;52;40;02 – 00;53;04;16
Lloyd Silver
Right? We’re busy now. It’s time to get there. But what I did to grow that business, it worked like we can see it, like it brought in customers. We’re the busiest in town. We’ve got the highest ratings in town. So I’m confident that the things that I did that worked worked well. I say it that way because there were things that I did that didn’t work.

00;53;04;16 – 00;53;28;04
Lloyd Silver
Well, is that’s part of marketing, right? I mean, you got to go and experiment and try things and some of it’s going to work and some of it’s not going to work and some of it’s going to work today and not work tomorrow. Right. So you’ve got to be willing to go through that experimentation. And that’s a challenge because I think a lot of people, and not just in our industry, but small business owners, generally speaking, they want to see results.

00;53;28;04 – 00;53;52;22
Lloyd Silver
They want to see, hey, if I spend X amount of dollars, I get a return on that. And that’s what we all want. But it doesn’t happen right away. Like it it’s it’s a process to truly learn how to market the industry and the business. And you’ve got to be willing to go into it with an open mind and an understanding that some of the things that you’re going to do are not going to work that well.

00;53;54;00 – 00;54;17;25
Lloyd Silver
And you have to have the right process in place looking at the data to be able to understand those signals as they come in. Because the key is not that you always have winners, it’s that you identify the losers more quickly and be able to cut off funding those and you identify the winners more quickly so you can start investing more into those types of campaigns.

00;54;18;08 – 00;54;40;09
Lloyd Silver
So to me, it doesn’t make sense to start up and do a ton of marketing unless you’ve set the stage and you’ve got the right data and the right expectations and goals so you understand how things are working together and in context, right? So you don’t want to just go out there and spend money and hope that it’s going to work.

00;54;40;15 – 00;55;05;21
Lloyd Silver
You’ve got to get more granular than that. Like every everything needs to be measured. And that’s something I think most people, you know, most people don’t do. So, I mean, in the industry itself, one of the reasons why I got into it is I don’t think most Laundromat owners, the typical laundromat owner and I will say I don’t think that the typical Laundromat owner is even watching or listening to this podcast.

00;55;05;21 – 00;55;29;05
Lloyd Silver
Right? Because if you’re watching and listening to this, you indentify that you need to learn more. You just by being part of this, have put yourself in a different category you’re willing to grow. It’s not business as usual, right? But the typical laundromat owner does a horrible job of marketing this. The bottom line, the typical small business owner is a horrible job of marketing.

00;55;29;05 – 00;55;49;00
Lloyd Silver
Right. But here’s also part of the problem. That typical laundromat owner doesn’t own a business as much as they own a job. Right. And I don’t mean that in a negative way. They have chosen a path. Right. And I applaud them for this path. They wanted to be in control. They wanted to basically, you know, they wanted to control their day to day.

00;55;49;08 – 00;56;10;23
Lloyd Silver
And they they started a laundromat and it’s paying them a nice income and satisfying their income goals. But that makes some things more challenging, like how are you going to market? Like if you go out and spend money on advertising, if you go out and hire an agency, which I don’t think is necessarily something you have to do, but that’s money out of your family’s pocket, right?

00;56;10;29 – 00;56;34;24
Lloyd Silver
It’s a very different perspective than I think you need to look at it from a business from the business side and say, okay, I’m willing to take a certain amount of money that would otherwise be in my pocket, go to my family, and I’m going to put that back in the business to grow it. So there’s a different mindset, but I think it’s a mindset that most people listening and watching this actually, I think that’s a great thing, right?

00;56;34;29 – 00;56;56;14
Lloyd Silver
There is a shift. Even though I’ve only been in the industry a year and a half, I am seeing a shift in that in that people are being more mindful and they are being more proactive and trying to grow and build a better business for themselves. So I’m excited about that because I do love the industry, but I got into it because best laundromat owners don’t do a great job.

00;56;56;19 – 00;57;08;00
Lloyd Silver
That was my strategic advantage. I could bring those skills to the table and do a better job of marketing than my competition, and I’d be able to win because of that. And so far it’s worked out.

00;57;09;16 – 00;57;23;13
Jordan Berry
Yeah, okay. Well, I mean, I think you’re spot on. I think you’re killer. Killer things to say, right? That would be especially that if somebody is listening to this right now, they’re they’re pretty much elite. I mean, let’s just be real.

00;57;23;14 – 00;57;54;17
Lloyd Silver
They’re like, I really believe. I mean, it’s most people are not taking the time to better themselves. Right. But people that are even active on Facebook groups, I mean, that’s still that’s an initiative that most people actually don’t have. They’re just happy with the status quo. And there’s nothing wrong with that if that’s what makes them happy. But I do think that there are now, because of folks like you and other people who are really willing to share and help others, we’re just seeing the shift in mindset from a lot of people.

00;57;54;17 – 00;57;55;11
Lloyd Silver
That’s pretty exciting.

00;57;56;01 – 00;58;30;24
Jordan Berry
Yeah, I agree. And I think it’s the shift is happening relatively rapidly. Obviously is a pretty big industry and there’s a lot of people like you said, there’s a lot of people in the industry that have not yet listened to this podcast and heard all this great advice and wisdom from other owners. However, I think there’s a there’s a pretty significant shift in the industry happening towards, you know, having a growth mindset and helping each other out towards better, you know, self-improvement, towards learning new skills and new talents or trying new things towards reinvesting in the business.

00;58;30;24 – 00;58;36;16
Jordan Berry
All these things are stacking on top of each other right now, and it’s really transforming the industry. I think.

00;58;36;26 – 00;58;38;14
Lloyd Silver
It is.

00;58;38;20 – 00;58;49;11
Jordan Berry
All right. Well, let’s get a little more granular, a little more specific, if we can. Like what? What types of things are you seeing working marketing wise?

00;58;49;24 – 00;59;21;15
Lloyd Silver
Yeah, so and there are a few things that I think have worked really well for us. Number one is, is getting testimonials and feedback from folks. That has been one of the most important things we’ve been able to do. So we’ve got a know basically a five star rating online, quite a few people. We really worked hard at providing a great service and asking our customers to give us feedback.

00;59;21;15 – 00;59;40;24
Lloyd Silver
And thankfully it was mostly, mostly positive. Almost all of it was positive. And we were able to leverage that and and be able to to create a good reputation online. So to me, that was one of the most important things that we did. But to be able to leverage something like that, you need a couple of things in place.

00;59;41;05 – 01;00;03;00
Lloyd Silver
So I see this question on Facebook quite a bit, like, do I need a website? Right? I mean, we’re a laundromat. Like people aren’t necessarily going to the Web browsing a website. I mean, they’re online, they’re Googling like Laundromat and the me just laundromat like, oh, okay, I’m going to go to this laundromat. So do you actually need a website if that’s your model?

01;00;03;00 – 01;00;27;07
Lloyd Silver
Right. We can we can separate out pickup and delivery from just purely a self-serve operation. I think the needs are a little bit different. But even starting from a just a self-serve operation, do you need a website. The answer is yeah, you really, really do. And here’s why. You may not have people that are flocking to your website to actually learn about what a laundromat is.

01;00;27;08 – 01;00;46;29
Lloyd Silver
They know they make out a lot of mats for years. They just want to find one that’s highly rated and that’s close by. At the end of the day, that’s all they want. But there are so many things now that look to your website in order to learn from it. And if you don’t have one, you’re putting yourself in a really bad position.

01;00;47;15 – 01;01;18;05
Lloyd Silver
For example, just the other day, two or three days ago, Google made an announcement that in one of their ad campaigns, depending upon the features that you select, they are going to start pulling information from your website and displaying that in your ads. Right. So, I mean, we’ve always known that Google would go to a website, even for advertising, and they would look at the Web pages and they would learn about what you would do.

01;01;18;11 – 01;01;41;21
Lloyd Silver
But now they’re saying they’re actually going to pull up. You have a Web page on something with a headline on that page. You may very well see that headline show up in a Google app. Right. So and you may be advertising to try to get people to go to your laundromat. Right? So Google is saying, great, we’re going to look at your website to have a better understanding of what you do and how you’re positioning yourself.

01;01;41;29 – 01;02;05;06
Lloyd Silver
And we’re going to use that information to display it in the ads that you want people to click on just to drive to your laundromat down the street. Facebook does the same thing when you’re running Facebook ads and you put the landing page in. They look at that page and they they understand that page through their algorithm, right through their different intelligence mechanisms they have in place.

01;02;05;15 – 01;02;31;09
Lloyd Silver
And that helps determine the audience they’re going to show that ad to. Right. Again, you may not care that people go to your website and browse it, but places like Facebook and Google are using your website every single day to try to help their customers understand what it is that you do. So if you don’t have a website, Facebook, Google, all that other type of marketing that you do, it’s not going to happen.

01;02;31;18 – 01;02;58;11
Lloyd Silver
It’s not going to happen. Well, they’re not going to have the information that they need in order to be able to serve and deliver advertisements and other promotional activities that you may have. So having a website to me is absolutely critical. I also capture leads even for self service. I do get quite a few people go to our website and we have a we have an offer, get half off their first wash.

01;02;58;28 – 01;03;24;03
Lloyd Silver
I get their email address and they have they go into my funnel and I until I know that they’re at the laundromat and they redeem that coupon, I’m encouraging them to come. And that’s even more important when it comes to wash and form and pickup and delivery. So if we’re just relying on Google and Facebook and third parties to collect the data for customers, and we’re not capturing that data ourselves, we’re missing out on a huge opportunity.

01;03;24;04 – 01;03;46;02
Lloyd Silver
We talked about data before. This is just another example. Owning data is so important and the only way that you can own data is if you have a website where you’re capturing that data yourself, the only way you can have it for any other company. So having a website to me is critical. But next, most important thing is having a Google business profile.

01;03;46;20 – 01;04;09;08
Lloyd Silver
This used to be called Google My Business. It costs nothing to create. There are definitely some tips and tricks to to go in to optimize it and the right way to have a leg up on the competition. But having a Google business profile is a critical thing for every laundromat to have and actually to take it as a nuance.

01;04;09;15 – 01;04;32;19
Lloyd Silver
Most laundromats will have a Google listing. If you go and you Google the name of the laundromat, you’ll probably see something show up on a web results, whether it’s on a desktop or a mobile, that that showed basic information of that laundromat, the name, the address, maybe just basic info. Most businesses will have it will automatically be created by Google.

01;04;32;24 – 01;04;56;11
Lloyd Silver
But if you go in and clean that listing, prove that you own it using a couple of different ways you can add things like your logo, your opening hours, your phone number, your website descriptions, photos, videos, all of this information so that when people actually find that listing online, they get a sense of what to expect. Like, for me, I’ve got all the photos.

01;04;56;11 – 01;05;14;29
Lloyd Silver
We have a brand new interior, we’ve got videos of people. So before they go to the laundromat, they can pull it up and they can actually get a sense of like, Wow, that’s a really nice target. That’s all because of a Google business profile. So for me, having a website is 100% key. Having a Google business profile, absolutely key and important.

01;05;14;29 – 01;05;44;00
Lloyd Silver
If you don’t have both of those, you’re doing yourself a huge disservice. Your costing yourself a lot of money. You can maybe get by without advertising, without worrying about no search engine optimization, without worrying about Yelp. But if you don’t have a website and a Google business profile, you’re just you’re at a huge disadvantage. So those are two things that we ready to go day one and we were really successful having.

01;05;44;02 – 01;05;46;12
Lloyd Silver
So those are a couple of things I’ve got others to do if you want.

01;05;46;12 – 01;06;05;17
Jordan Berry
But do let me interject. Just real quick, because, I mean, I think what you’re saying is I’m like excited about what you’re saying because we don’t hear people talk about this stuff very often in our industry and not too many people will geek out with me about marketing because I don’t know. A lot of people maybe don’t know, but I have a marketing background too.

01;06;05;17 – 01;06;26;00
Jordan Berry
I did marketing for a while. I actually did it for a casino and some other stuff too. Casinos are basically marketing businesses. That’s what they do. And so I love geeking out marketing, but I just want to let people know, number one, I mean, you know, as he’s talking about a Google business profile, that’s something that you can do.

01;06;26;01 – 01;06;45;26
Jordan Berry
Google walks you through it. Very easy to do it yourself and it’s a no brainer. Go do it. Websites that can feel very overwhelming for people. You can totally have people build that. You know, even here, a lot of my resource, we you know, we will build websites for people. However, I just wanted to point out that we have a free course.

01;06;46;14 – 01;07;09;27
Jordan Berry
If you go to the website, go to a lot about university and it’ll walk you through exactly step by step from knowing absolutely nothing, all the way through having a a nice SEO optimized website that, you know, Will. And this, I think is ideal for a self-serve business. We’re doing pickup and delivery. If you’re doing, you know, even drop us.

01;07;09;28 – 01;07;29;24
Jordan Berry
But pick up a delivery for sure. There’s a little more you want to be doing with your website, but if you have a self-serve laundromat, go take that course. It’ll walk you through how to do it. And it even has a template that you can start with. It’s very simple. So I trying to point that out for anybody who’s on the DIY, you know, train there and wants to build their own website but doesn’t know where to start.

01;07;30;06 – 01;07;37;08
Jordan Berry
Go to lot of my resource dot com click on I think courses or a lot about university or something like that. And there’s a website course there you can do.

01;07;37;26 – 01;07;56;24
Lloyd Silver
That’s a great resource. And and I never say I’m I was talking about the importance of a website. I never said that you had to have an amazing website. You don’t have to have an amazing website necessarily. Again, I do think if you’re doing pickup and delivery for doing washing, for drop off complexity, start to add up there.

01;07;56;24 – 01;08;32;12
Lloyd Silver
But if you’re a self-service laundromat, just having a basic website out there is great. Like if you can throw up some actual photos of your laundromat. Now, assuming that you want have code as in your laundromat up there, like I think that would be nice. But again, you don’t even have to buy it. But the information, the words that you have on that page, because it could just be a single page website for a self-service laundromat, that may be all that you need to kind of check the buckets with those other companies to you, you know, the put you in the position to do well and other areas there so it doesn’t have to be

01;08;32;12 – 01;08;33;05
Lloyd Silver
super fancy.

01;08;33;13 – 01;09;00;03
Jordan Berry
Yeah, absolutely. Okay. I just wanted to interject there so. Okay. So we have, you know, wanting to collect reviews and testimonies. Huge right there. And I would say be proactive on that and train your employees to ask for feedback, ask for reviews, remind people to give reviews because people want to remember to give reviews when something real bad and less often when something extraordinarily good happens, right?

01;09;00;03 – 01;09;19;11
Jordan Berry
So if you ask, you’re more likely to get them. So ask because those reviews do translate into dollars. If you know there’s a laundromat that has three five star reviews and yours has 63 five star reviews, they’re probably still going choose your laundromat over the other one. That also has really good reviews, just not as many of them.

01;09;19;23 – 01;09;35;02
Jordan Berry
Yeah. So go ask for those. So we got testimonials. We’ve got your own website and we’ve got a Google business profile. Okay, so let’s talk about what else, what else can we be doing or should we be?

01;09;35;02 – 01;10;07;28
Lloyd Silver
So this next this next point is it’s, it’s not the most super exciting thing in the world, right? But I think it’s the most critical part of marketing and that’s understanding your audience, understanding your customers. And the first question of that is how how many customers do you have? Because if you’re a if you offer pick up and delivery laundry service, you’ve got at least two if not multiple customers, but you got maybe a self-service type of customer that can be very different than pickup and delivery customer.

01;10;08;07 – 01;10;41;26
Lloyd Silver
Right. And your drop offs may be a little bit different. You may have commercial customers, you know, maybe you’re doing Airbnb stuff like they’re different types of customers. So to me, understanding your customer is a critical part because how can you write an effective ad? Or regardless of the platform, how can you write an ad that actually works if you don’t understand the customer that you’re specifically targeting and you’re not writing that ad with them in mind, if you’re generic in your marketing, you will have poor results.

01;10;42;17 – 01;11;07;11
Lloyd Silver
You need to understand the audience and. Everything that you do in marketing needs to be targeting a particular segment of that audience in mind because it is different the way that we write ads for self-serve as customers is very different than pickup and delivery. It’s a very different person that we’re targeting. The demographics are different, the motivations are different, so we tackle them very differently.

01;11;08;06 – 01;11;35;03
Lloyd Silver
Understanding your audience goes a little bit further because you also need to understand, and I’ll use kind of a marketing lingo, the journey somebody takes in order for them to become a customer. So I mentioned this before. Most of our potential customers today have no idea that there’s a company out there that does wash and fold, and they’re happy to come by and pick it up and deliver it for them like they don’t even know.

01;11;35;03 – 01;11;55;00
Lloyd Silver
So we’re starting on one end of the spectrum that we have this massive part of our potential audience that knows nothing at all about our service, our business, and what it is that we do. And as we start moving down that path and then becoming more understanding, we’re becoming more aware of the types of service that we offer.

01;11;55;21 – 01;12;22;06
Lloyd Silver
The way that we approach those people has to be different as well. So Google is an ideal platform reaching people like basic Google ads because there are a lot of a lot of Google ads, but basic Google and Google search ads, people go and maybe type something in search and they get some kind of results. Right. Some of those are called organic listings that that’s where they search and websites so that are paid listings.

01;12;22;06 – 01;12;47;17
Lloyd Silver
Right. That is the ideal place to reach an audience that’s out there specifically looking for what it is that you’re selling. Right. So we can do an advertising campaign on Google and Target people searching for pickup and delivery, laundry or laundry service. Right. That is such a small percentage of our of our total potential customers and only represents the people that are actively looking for a service at that time.

01;12;47;25 – 01;13;08;18
Lloyd Silver
And Google is a great spot to do that. As we start moving down that line and let’s say that we to invest in trying to educate people, that would be a perfect customer for us, but they have no idea that we even exist or that the industry exists or that the service exists. How Do you reach that you can’t reach them on a Google ad, not a Google search ad, right.

01;13;08;18 – 01;13;34;15
Lloyd Silver
They’re not searching for you. Right. But Facebook can be a fantastic place to reach that audience. We can develop ads that can reach people that have no idea that our service exists using Facebook. So understanding your audience will also dictate how do you invest your money? Now, where do I want to target within that spectrum of people completely unaware of who we are and what we do, versus people that are actively searching?

01;13;34;23 – 01;13;59;02
Lloyd Silver
If you have a limited budget, then sure, you know, target people that are actively searching for for your service. That might be the right it might not because it could be super competitive because everybody else is out there spending money on those as well. But if your goal is to reach an audience looking for your service and you’re investing on Facebook, don’t be disappointed if you don’t get a lot of leads.

01;13;59;11 – 01;14;25;25
Lloyd Silver
Like it just doesn’t happen that way. Facebook is reaching a different audience segment, right? So and I’m not saying that Facebook ads are not, but Facebook ads can be a great addition to our marketing strategy. But you need to understand the audience and who you’re targeting, and that’s going to dictate where you want to invest your resources, because not every platform out there is appropriate for that particular audience.

01;14;26;01 – 01;14;42;23
Lloyd Silver
And even within that particular audience, it may not be appropriate depending upon where they are in their journey. Right. So you’ve got to understand that and I know that that starts getting into, I think, a higher level of thinking in marketing. It’s not just about, oh, let me go, go buy some Google ads and go buy some Facebook ads.

01;14;43;02 – 01;15;06;20
Lloyd Silver
But if you want to have good success with marketing, I do think these are things you need to be considering. You don’t have to be an expert necessarily, but If you just sit down and think, well, let me try to understand a pick up a delivery customer. Now, who are they now in a maybe you’re in a college town and that’s going to be very different than you’re in the middle of a city somewhere.

01;15;06;25 – 01;15;26;17
Lloyd Silver
But understanding that customer is going to give you a huge leg up on the competitors that are just out there doing generic of advertising. So to me, before you do anything, you need to understand your customer. Once you do that, everything else becomes a lot easier. We’ve had great success with Facebook advertising. We’ve had great success with Google advertising.

01;15;26;22 – 01;15;46;17
Lloyd Silver
We approach those things very differently. Our goals are different, our audience is different. The ads are very, very different between the two of us. It’s not the same approach. A lot of people in the industry, I mean, every day I look in Facebook, hey, what should I do to get more customers? Facebook ads? And I just want to say, no, that’s it’s not going to work that easily.

01;15;46;28 – 01;16;08;21
Lloyd Silver
If you think you are out there and spend money and get customers from Facebook ads, it’s not going to out well for you. There are reasons to use Facebook, but if your expectation is you throw up an ad and you get a customer the next day, you’re going to be disappointed. That’s not, in my opinion, the best use of a Facebook app, the lots of that.

01;16;09;01 – 01;16;31;15
Jordan Berry
But no, no, I think that’s great information. So I’m trying to put myself in the shoes of a typical Laundromat owner, right. You start talking Google and you start talking about Facebook ads. You start talking about the nuances between the two of them. I’m hearing you say Facebook ads does not equal new customers right off the bat, starts to feel very overwhelming.

01;16;31;16 – 01;16;40;06
Jordan Berry
Is this something a typical Laundromat owner can do or do they need to hire somebody to do it? Do you think?

01;16;40;06 – 01;16;59;28
Lloyd Silver
I I think there’s a lot that you can do on your own. I definitely feel like, you know, we’ve talked about a couple of things. There are resources out there like yours where you can get a website that’s fully functional, that checks off all the boxes and that represents you fairly well. Right. There are resources out there you can get your own Google business profile.

01;16;59;29 – 01;17;25;26
Lloyd Silver
Simple to do so again, there are tips and tricks to really make. Make those five. But you can go out and do that. Google is trying to make it a lot easier for you to do advertising. When I talk about the fact that they’re using your website now to even generate the text that’s in those ads, that actually starts to alleviate some of the responsibility from you in figuring out, well, what’s the best text to put in that ad in the first place?

01;17;26;04 – 01;17;48;23
Lloyd Silver
I Google is reaching a point to say we don’t really care what you think because we know like Google gets paid when people click so they may I have you know suspicions and reservations about Google most people in the marketing world at the end of the day, they do want to generate a click. And if they don’t generate a positive return for their customers as a whole, they’re not going to make money.

01;17;49;05 – 01;18;11;24
Lloyd Silver
So when they do things like this, where they’re taking some of the control away from you, the reason why is because they actually know that they can do it better than the average person. Right? So Google is really trying to do as much as they can to make it easier for the average person, average business owner or average laundromat owner to come in and use some of their advertising.

01;18;12;16 – 01;18;34;11
Lloyd Silver
So I think that you can do it yourself, but I also feel like you’ve got to you’ve got to put some limitations and parameters and you’ve got to pay attention to the data because it’s very easy to wake up one day and figure out that you just wasted a lot of money on something that didn’t work. At the same time, things take time to work.

01;18;35;02 – 01;19;00;22
Lloyd Silver
So if you’re utilizing seeing a Facebook ad or Google ad or any of those types of platforms, you are likely not going to get great results on day one. There is a learning process that all of this goes through. If Google is controlling the the content of your ad, it can’t necessarily understand how to do that perfectly on day one.

01;19;01;05 – 01;19;21;21
Lloyd Silver
But what it does is over time, as people see the ad and they click on the ad and they go to your website and they’re interacting and they’re they’re opting in to things and filling out forms as they’re driving to your laundromat, which they can tell. And Google gets all that information. They start to understand what works and what doesn’t work.

01;19;22;01 – 01;19;45;15
Lloyd Silver
So over time they evolve and they start showing ads that perform better than the ads on day one. And Facebook does it the same way very much about this. And I see some questions about targeting an audience on Facebook. Well, you know, the answer Target a broad audience on Facebook is Facebook figures out fairly quickly what the actual audience should be.

01;19;45;15 – 01;20;19;00
Lloyd Silver
And they start to tailor your ad only show to people that they think are likely to take the action that you’re looking for. So both of these companies are taking an approach where in some ways they’re taking control away from us as advertisers and marketers and business owners. But they’re doing it because they think that they will do a better job of delivering the results than if they leave it in the hands of the typical person, not necessarily the big agencies and big corporations, but they’re making it easier, I think, for people like us to to be able to advertise.

01;20;19;05 – 01;20;44;13
Lloyd Silver
You have to have some trust and faith in them. You have to give it time to work out and iron out those kinks. Let the machine learning actually learn something that takes time. But you can do a lot of that yourself that there are situations where I think having an agency helps. And I think there are other ways that you can you can, you know, grow and learn things to be able to take to it yourself, to the next level.

01;20;44;13 – 01;21;11;05
Jordan Berry
Yeah, I think it’s a great answer. And you know, knowing my audience, speaking of understanding your audience, I know there’s there’s two types of people in this camp. There’s the people who want to invest the time to learn and DIY. And that saves you money. A lot of times if you can learn correctly, I’d say marketing is one of those things where like and you mentioned this already, like you can dump a lot of money into marketing and do it all wrong.

01;21;11;05 – 01;21;15;00
Jordan Berry
And that money is, you know, goes down the toilet. Yeah.

01;21;16;23 – 01;21;17;00
Lloyd Silver
Yeah.

01;21;17;01 – 01;21;32;05
Jordan Berry
Right. So, so but there are people who are on the DIY camp and want to learn to do it themselves. And I’m going to talk about that here in a second. And then there is another camp for people who say, I want to focus on the things that I know that I’m good at and I want somebody to run these ads for me.

01;21;32;05 – 01;22;06;06
Jordan Berry
So I want to ask you about the DIY stuff here in a second. But you know, if you’re in the other camp where you’re just like, Hey, I want somebody who already knows what they’re doing, already has that knowledge and skill, and I don’t want to spend my time learning that skill to do that. I’ll put a link down in the show notes for a done for you marketing solutions to go check that out on the show notes or if you’re on YouTube down below but DIY, if somebody wants to DIY, I’m I’m kind of throwing little softball toss up here for you knock it out of the park here.

01;22;06;06 – 01;22;13;21
Jordan Berry
But if somebody wants to do DIY marketing and doesn’t really know where to start, how can they learn how to head a DIY market?

01;22;14;04 – 01;22;39;11
Lloyd Silver
Yeah. So coincidentally I now have a course that would people. Yeah. Would you just do marketing on their own. Because I do recognize like I mean I got an agency for years and I love businesses that are willing to invest and hire an agency and spend money at an agency. You know, that’s that’s a fantastic approach. But I also recognize there are a ton of people that are just not going to do that.

01;22;39;13 – 01;23;02;00
Lloyd Silver
And I think that that’s okay. In fact, I think that there are a lot that you can do on your own and get really, really good results, like Jordan said, if you know what to do. So I created a course and said, grow your map dot com, grow your map dot com. And the first course that we’ve created is called the longer map marketing bootcamp and specifically for the do it yourselfers out there.

01;23;02;00 – 01;23;21;26
Lloyd Silver
And I think there are quite a few of them. So walk you through step by step how to build and implement a marketing plan. So it’s a course, but it’s being structured as a bootcamp and what’s the difference? I’m not looking for people to come and just watch some videos and read some stuff and never do anything with it.

01;23;22;13 – 01;23;40;27
Lloyd Silver
So we’re doing this side by side along with you. Difference with an agency. Agency does it for you. I’m doing it with you, right? I want I make sure by the time that you get through at the bootcamp that you got a website and we may leverage what Jordan is offering there because that could be a great addition.

01;23;41;06 – 01;24;03;00
Lloyd Silver
You’ve got a Google business profile that if you want to advertise that you’re using Facebook correctly and Google correctly, that you’ve got the data coming in, all of those things, how to get testimonials, how to write good copy for that website. Talk about organic search and how this is showing up in results for free. And I commend the strong opinion.

01;24;03;05 – 01;24;29;07
Lloyd Silver
Our industry is not overly complex and it doesn’t change too often. I think massive change with pickup and delivery. I don’t think that there is going to be a massive change at least in the next year or two in our industry. So I feel like there are a lot of things that you do to get in place now and you don’t necessarily have to spend a lot of time tweaking it over the next like, you know, every single week, every single month.

01;24;29;13 – 01;24;58;03
Lloyd Silver
I think there’s a lot we could do that is more or less set and forget it’s not going to work indefinitely. Right. But it’s going to work now and it’s going to work for the next six months, year, couple of years. So you’re spending a little bit of time to get that stuff up and running. And I think that that’s probably to be sufficient and give you the right platform so you can get back to focusing on the other areas of your business that you want to, knowing that you have a marketing engine in place that’s going to work.

01;24;58;03 – 01;25;21;03
Lloyd Silver
So it’s grow your match.com. And I’m really excited about doing this. I’m taking everything that I learned from an agency 15 years and what I’ve learned specifically doing marketing for my own laundromats now for the last year and a half, and I’m trying to help others do the same. So I’m excited. I think we’re going to get some really good results from that.

01;25;22;09 – 01;25;42;04
Jordan Berry
Awesome. So yeah, check it out in the show notes or down below YouTube and I’ll have links to the done for you solution and the done with you solution which I really love that too. So I’m super excited about that, especially because I think there’s so much big opportunity in on the marketing side of things in our industry.

01;25;42;04 – 01;25;59;26
Jordan Berry
And you know, we kind of talked about pickup and delivery sort of being on kind of scratching the surface of what it can be and probably will be down the line. I think marketing in our industry also, we’re just we’re just barely into it. There’s still not very many laundromats relative, I guess.

01;25;59;26 – 01;26;12;18
Lloyd Silver
Let me ask you a question. If you had a gas ad of all the people, all that that have the right demographics to use pickup and delivery, what percentage of people do you think even are aware of that sort of existing.

01;26;14;07 – 01;26;15;08
Jordan Berry
Like customer wise?

01;26;15;17 – 01;26;18;04
Lloyd Silver
Yeah, customer wise, small.

01;26;18;04 – 01;26;44;15
Jordan Berry
I mean, I feel like I’d be very generous saying 20%. I mean I think it’s probably sub 10% people even know about and I’ve shared this before, but like my tax guy didn’t know about it. He’s been doing my taxes forever. My neighbor who’s got 11 kids and brings somebody hire somebody to come to her house to do laundry, didn’t even know it was a possibility that somebody could come pick up their their laundry and do it and bring it back folded.

01;26;45;12 – 01;26;53;29
Jordan Berry
And these are I mean, these are my people, right? Like anybody should know about. It is like the people that I’m interacting with all, all the time.

01;26;54;03 – 01;27;18;04
Lloyd Silver
Yeah. And I think that’s true across the country. I mean, we have such a small percentage of people who are actually using our services and what a fantastic place to be in and what a great position to be in to grow by going forward. But I think we’re going to see attendance growth in our industry over the next ten years and it’s just it’s right for the taking.

01;27;18;04 – 01;27;39;13
Lloyd Silver
I mean, there are people trying to come in and be a dominant player, but so far it’s a fragmented industry and I do think it’s structured that when you can’t you can’t mail the stuff in, it’s got to be produced locally, right? So I think we’ve got some protection in mine and I think there’s just such a great opportunity for local, local business owners in this area.

01;27;40;05 – 01;28;07;03
Jordan Berry
Yeah, I could not agree more with you. Very exciting. Lloyd, this has been awesome hearing about your journey into this business and how now you’re trying to help you keep moving, keep this industry moving forward and keep us growing, keep us reinvesting in ourselves and our business. And you know, as kind of is the buzz word around the industry lately elevate our our businesses to the next level.

01;28;07;03 – 01;28;33;10
Jordan Berry
So man, thank you so much for coming on again. All the links for everything that we’ve talked about, including the done for you and the done with you, marketing solutions for your business, links to all that stuff will be in the show notes and down below in the description on. YouTube. Lloyd This has been incredible. Can’t wait to have you back on to benefit from the data from your two pickup and delivery startups.

01;28;33;10 – 01;28;37;00
Jordan Berry
And man, thanks for for joining us and sharing all the wisdom you did.

01;28;37;06 – 01;28;37;27
Lloyd Silver
I appreciate it.

01;28;38;13 – 01;29;01;12
Jordan Berry
Yeah, likewise. I hope you enjoyed that episode with Lloyd so much. Good, good stuff in there. We talked about a lot a lot of things that I think will apply to a lot of us in this business. So super thankful to Lloyd for coming on the show, sharing so much. If you are interested in joining his marketing, it’s like a course.

01;29;01;12 – 01;29;23;21
Jordan Berry
It’s like a done with you course. There’s some links down below in the description for on YouTube. Or if you’re just listening on the podcast, check out the show notes on my resource dot com slash show 103 and there’s links for you there. Those are affiliate links, which just means, you know, he gives me a little commission for helping me out promoting this his course.

01;29;23;21 – 01;29;43;12
Jordan Berry
But use it or don’t use it. You can go direct to the website, too, but if it’s going to help your business jump in with that course, that’s what all about. All right. Make sure, again, that you are taking action on something from this show, because that is what it’s all about. We talk about that all the time.

01;29;43;12 – 01;30;07;19
Jordan Berry
So pick one thing, put it in action. Maybe it’s signing up for the course. Maybe it’s checking out diligence, capital investments dot com and jumping into the fund. Maybe it’s going out looking for laundromat deals. Maybe it’s doing something to improve your existing laundromats. Whatever it is, take something and take some action on it today to help you get to your goals much, much quicker if we’re doing that every day.

01;30;07;23 – 01;30;26;24
Jordan Berry
All right. We will see you next week on the lot of our Resource podcast. Peace.