167. So You Wanna Buy a Business? with Keira Hamilton

Jordan Berry [00:00:00]:
Hey. Hey. What’s up, guys? It’s Jordan with the LoanerMed Resource Podcast. This is show 167, and it’s a doozy. So I’m pumped you’re here today because we have Keira Hamilton on the show today. And, listen, I’m just gonna put this one down as an instant classic. So much good stuff. I mean, Kira is awesome.

Jordan Berry [00:00:22]:
She has a ton of knowledge. She’s very well spoken, and she shares a ton of very practical specific things today. So this is one

Jordan Berry [00:00:31]:
of those episodes where you’re

Jordan Berry [00:00:32]:
probably gonna wanna take some notes. You’ve been warned. So we’re gonna jump into that. But real quick, today’s fast lane tip is did you know we have a ton of free resources, downloadable stuff, very practical, tangible things that can help you buy your 1st laundromat or run your laundromat? You can go to the resources tab on the menu and go to guides and worksheets and all the other resources that are in there too and check those out, there to go download for free. Some of them you do need to be signed into the free account. But listen, go go join the community. Sign into the free account. Be a part of the community.

Jordan Berry [00:01:09]:
Get involved here, and that is gonna help you, on your way achieving your goals. That’s the goal. Right? Achieve your goals. So go check those out. And, real quick, just quick favor. If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a little while, I would love it if you’d go to whatever, platform you’re listening on Apple, Spotify, wherever. Or if you’re watching on YouTube, hit the like and subscribe. Maybe leave a comment.

Jordan Berry [00:01:36]:
Tell Kiera how great she is. But if you’re on a podcasting platform, I would love for you to just do a quick rating and review. Helps us us I’m it helps me helps me, provide a better show, and we’re trying out some new things kinda coming up. And I’d love to hear how you like them or don’t like them. But if you don’t like them, man, let me know first before you leave a bad review. But if you do like the show, you get some value out of this, you’re thankful for the guests that come on, and you can endure me, then I would love for you to, just give us a quick rating and review on there. That helps us out a ton. Appreciate it.

Jordan Berry [00:02:13]:
But without further ado, let’s jump into it. Kiara Hamilton.

Jordan Berry [00:02:17]:
Hey, Kiara. How’s it going?

Kiera Hamilton [00:02:19]:
Hey, Jordan. I’m doing well. How are you?

Jordan Berry [00:02:21]:
I am doing awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I’m super excited. Even actually, we were just chatting right before we hit record, and I got even even more excited, about this episode. So appreciate you taking the time coming on, sharing your story, and sharing some of what you’re doing, and sharing some of your wisdom. So why don’t we start with this? Who are you?

Kiera Hamilton [00:02:44]:
Yeah. Well, first off, thanks so much for having me on. I love talking about laundromats and buying businesses, so I’m really looking forward to this conversation. My name is Kira Hamilton. I am a former educator. I taught high school English in the Bay area for 5 years. And through some unexpected career moves, I am now a laundromat owner and an SBA loan broker, which means I help people get financing to buy businesses.

Jordan Berry [00:03:12]:
That’s awesome. Well, I mean, it seems expected to me to go high school English teacher to laundromat owner. That’s a natural.

Kiera Hamilton [00:03:20]:
It totally makes sense. Yeah. It actually does totally make sense when, you know, I explain it. But if you just look at my LinkedIn profile, it seems a little random. A lot of people are like, how’d you get to where you are today?

Jordan Berry [00:03:32]:
Well, I mean, it’s one of the reasons I started this podcast. I was like, because I’m like, this is a weird business that we’re in over here. How did everybody get into this thing? So I was like, I gotta find out more and and talk to some people. So how did you get into what is the weird, but not that weird path to laundromat ownership?

Kiera Hamilton [00:03:51]:
Oh my gosh. Great question. I’ll give this somewhat abbreviated version because it is it is a long journey with, struggle and success and everything in between. But basically, I decided in 2019, actually before COVID hit, I decided in February of of, 2020 that I wanted to leave the teaching profession. I had been teaching for 5 years, and there was so much that I loved about it, but ultimately, it just wasn’t the right fit for me anymore. So without a plan of what I was going to do next, I left the classroom, spent about a year trying to figure out what that next thing was. Kind of randomly ended up working in commercial real estate. I worked as a property manager managing class a office buildings in San Francisco for a couple years.

Kiera Hamilton [00:04:43]:
And that was really interesting work. I actually really liked it. It exposed me to a lot of business skills that I didn’t have. I was, you know, working with budgets of budgets of 1,000,000 of dollars. I was managing engineering and janitorial teams. I was using Excel, which I had previously been intimidated by. It just gave me more confidence with finance and business in general because I don’t have a business background. My master’s is in education.

Kiera Hamilton [00:05:11]:
So I really kind of learned a lot about business from that job. And there was a lot that was was great about that job, but I also had this feeling that I wanted to do something that was mine. I wanted to be more in the driver’s seat, and I didn’t quite know what that was going to look like yet. I come from a background where when I was younger, I didn’t think of businesses as things to be bought and sold. You know, that concept just didn’t really occur to me. I didn’t think of buying a business as a career move. But my husband and I have done a little bit of real estate investing. We bought a 4 unit building in the Bay Area in December of 2021.

Kiera Hamilton [00:05:54]:
And a couple years into my career as a property manager, we were looking to make another investment. And we were initially thinking about investing in more real estate because it was something we had done. We had a fairly good understanding of how it worked and it made sense if we’d done it before to do it again. But at the time that we were looking, it was really hard to find something that was going to cash flow and that just made sense for us. Because I had worked as a property manager, I was I was pretty confident in my property management skills, but a lot of the places we could afford at the time were out of state. And I felt hesitant about putting a property in the hands of a manager that I didn’t know well. And, you know, I had seen through managing our property that there are issues that come up, right? Even real estate is not completely passive income. And I just wasn’t totally comfortable with an investment in Ohio that I wouldn’t be able to drive over and fix the problem for.

Kiera Hamilton [00:06:48]:
So there are a number of reasons real estate didn’t seem like the right move. And in retrospect, I’m really glad that we didn’t invest in our real estate. I can get more into that later. But we started looking at other investment opportunities and my husband was really the one driving it and he was kind of looking at what I what I call the gateway drugs of business acquisition, like ATM routes and vending machine routes. I feel like that’s where a lot of people start because they are, you know, I wouldn’t say passive income. I really don’t think there’s such a thing as passive income in business acquisition, but they’re a little lower lift to get started. Typically, the start up costs are lower. So we were looking at things like that.

Kiera Hamilton [00:07:26]:
And then we kind of moved from there into laundromats. I will say too, I love the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once. Have you seen that one, Jordan? Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:07:36]:
Yeah.

Kiera Hamilton [00:07:36]:
Okay. So then you know there’s a laundromat in that one. I loved that movie. And when we left the theater, I looked at my husband and was like, I wanna own a laundromat one day. And this was a couple years before we bought one. So it was just, like, this silly dream, this joke that I had at the time. But it kind of planted this idea, this sort of, like, romantic notion of owning a laundromat. So we were looking at, you know, it started as how can we invest our money? We were thinking about real estate.

Kiera Hamilton [00:08:02]:
That didn’t work out. So we kind of moved into business and specifically businesses that wouldn’t require us to be there every day and businesses that we felt confident running. Neither of us have a background in, in business. Laundromats are pretty straightforward. It’s just laundry, right? And I’m not saying there’s not complexity to them. There certainly can be complexity and there are problems, but as far as first time business owners, that made sense to us. And so we bought it in may of 2023 and I became the primary operator and here we

Jordan Berry [00:08:38]:
are. I love it. I love it. Okay. Well, we’ve got a lot to unpack here. So going from teacher to laundromat owner is quite the jump. And and Nick, who was on the podcast not that long ago, did the same same thing and hasn’t looked back. Loves it, and and loves kinda all of it.

Jordan Berry [00:09:00]:
So not unheard of, but not super common either. Yeah. You know, as you guys, were looking I mean, you you said your husband’s starting with the gateway. I I love that because I think that that is totally true. Vending and ATM routes and even a little bit the water dispense, dispensing stores.

Kiera Hamilton [00:09:19]:
I see that too. So,

Jordan Berry [00:09:22]:
definitely, I love that being the gateway. And a lot of people kinda, even before they get in there, right, just kinda like you guys, you know, end up going to, you know, a little bit bigger, like a laundromat. Right? Where you’re at a one location and you’re running a business there. What was it that kind of prompted that transition from, you know, your gateway drugs, up to the full fledged addict over here that you are now today? What, what, why, why start looking at Laundromats? Was it cause there, the potential was bigger or what was it that attracted you?

Kiera Hamilton [00:10:00]:
Yeah. Are you like, how did we are you asking how do we move from thinking about things like ATM routes and vending machines to laundromats? Yeah. That’s better. I’ll put it

Jordan Berry [00:10:08]:
than I put it. So, yes.

Kiera Hamilton [00:10:10]:
That’s, that’s a good question. You know, I do think that there was something that appealed to us about having an actual location. And it was interesting because for a while, we didn’t want that. We’re, like, we don’t wanna have a brick and mortar business with a physical location that we’re responsible for. But I think the more that I thought about it and the more that I learned about laundromats, you you mentioned, you know, teachers and kind of how it might seem unexpected on on paper, but you’ve heard of teachers, you know, buying businesses or laundromats before. And there was a lot that I loved about teaching. One thing that I loved, and I didn’t think of it in these terms at the time, but I think of it this way now, is I loved being an operator. I loved running the show.

Kiera Hamilton [00:11:01]:
Like, I love to be in charge. And not just because I wanna, like be bossy, but because I like love creating experiences for people. I loved creating lessons, creating units, finding creative ways for students to connect with material. I really liked running the show. I worked at a summer camp too. I was like a, you know, team leader and groups of kids. And I loved that too. Like, I love being the one to facilitate experiences for people.

Kiera Hamilton [00:11:28]:
And I, you know, that’s what being a business owner is, right? You’re, you’re an operator. And I think there actually is so much from my education background that I bring to being a business owner. I mean, you gotta have people skills because no matter where your laundromat is, at some point you’re gonna have to deal with a difficult person or, you know, someone upset and I can tell you, any difficult person I’ve dealt with at my laundromat has nothing on 14 year olds when they’re cranky. You know? Like, I’ve had my fair share of time dealing with difficult people. Right? So you have to have people skills. You have to be very organized. I mean, I mentioned in our pre chat, I’ve got a 9 tab operations manual that breaks down every part of our business and it’s been really key in training new employees and just keeping myself organized. And you know, those were skills I developed as a teacher.

Kiera Hamilton [00:12:20]:
So I think I actually found that, you know, compared to say an ATM route or vending machine route, which I’ve never owned one of those, so I can’t really speak personally to what that’s like. But this is just kind of, I think, to answer your question, like, how did we get to laundromat over these other things? I think I actually did want something that would be, to a degree, hands on. I didn’t want something where I would need to be there every day because so I did end up leaving my job and I can talk more about that because I know that’s a decision, you know, people weigh. But I did end up leaving my job as a property manager before we bought our LaunchMat. And I was also brokering SBA loans. So I knew that the LaunchMat wasn’t going to be the only work that I did. I would also have this other business. So I wanted something that didn’t demand me being there every day, but I also kinda wanted something that did need me a little bit.

Kiera Hamilton [00:13:13]:
Like, I wanted something that I could put my creativity into, that I could interact with customers, that I could really kinda like get hands on and get some real business skills. So a laundromat felt like an appropriate kind of point on that spectrum. And, again, I don’t think laundromats are passive income, but I do think there’s a spectrum of, like, you have some businesses that are more hands off and some businesses that are more hands on for the owner, and that can depend on a lot of factors. And this particular LaunchMat, because every LaunchMat is different as you know, really hit this sweet spot of, you know, in a typical week, I put in 7 to 10 hours of work, either being in the LaunchMat or working on it remotely. So it has allowed me to really build up a lot of skills in the last year, but it’s also allowed me to pursue other things. I also broker SBA loans. I also compete in Brazilian jujitsu. And those were things that with a full time job, like a typical 9 to 5 are a lot harder to do.

Kiera Hamilton [00:14:12]:
And so the LaunchMat gave me the opportunity to build these skills and do other things.

Jordan Berry [00:14:18]:
Yeah. Okay. Well, now that I know I’m talking to somebody dangerous, I’m gonna watch out.

Kiera Hamilton [00:14:23]:
Well, yeah. Watch out.

Jordan Berry [00:14:25]:
Yeah. I don’t wanna get put in some sort of submission and,

Kiera Hamilton [00:14:28]:
Definitely not.

Jordan Berry [00:14:29]:
Regret my life decisions. Okay. Well, I mean, would you mind talking about because, there’s a lot of people listening who are trying to do exactly what you did, right, which is leave your job and own a business, right, particularly a laundromat. So can you talk about, like, how how you made that decision, to make that transition? What gave you the courage to do that? Because it that’s hard. Right? So many people are afraid to do that, which is totally understandable because it’s scary. Right? So how did you decide to do that? And how did you have the courage to do that?

Kiera Hamilton [00:15:06]:
Oh, that’s a great I love that question, Jordan. I was actually just speaking with someone earlier today about this. So I’ve now made a couple career changes. I’m I’m 31, and I think that’s just it’s more common with my generation. Right? We don’t necessarily work at a company for for 20 or 30 years like our parents’ generation did. And I’ll say my first career change when I left teaching was so scary. It was really hard to make that decision because I mean, I’m still paying off loans from grad school. You know, I had devoted a lot of time, energy, and money to that path.

Kiera Hamilton [00:15:43]:
And I planned on doing it a lot longer. I mean, my grandma was a principal, my mom is a teacher. Ever since I was in high school, I had this idea that this is what I want to do with my life. And it was hard for a lot of reasons. You know, I think one of the biggest reasons it was challenging was so much of my identity was in being a teacher. Right? And in, like, I I really liked that I felt like I was doing something positive being a teacher. It felt like, you know, the time I was putting into it, it it didn’t always, you know, feel like it had an immediate impact, but I was like, education is something that’s that’s good for the world. And so I really identified with being a teacher.

Kiera Hamilton [00:16:23]:
And when I made the decision to leave, you know, it was a year, basically, from the first time I applied for a job to when I got into my next position in property management. And that was one of the hardest years I And that was one of the hardest years I’ve been through because I faced so much uncertainty. And it was it was just a tough time in the job market. I mean, so many places were pausing hiring. There’s just a lot of uncertainty. And I think I really built some mental muscle during that time in dealing with uncertainty. And it was very difficult. I mean, every day I was like, my gosh.

Kiera Hamilton [00:16:59]:
What career path am I gonna get into? When is it gonna happen? It felt like that period of uncertainty was never going to end. So I do think, you know, going through that made my next career transition when I left property management and got into SBA loan brokering and bought a business. I was like, oh, I’ve already been through this before. Right? I’ve already made a career change. Something that made it a lot easier the second time was I learned that I don’t have to personally identify as strongly with my work. And some people do, and and that’s great. I just found that I gave so much of myself emotionally to teaching. I was so attached to it.

Kiera Hamilton [00:17:38]:
I was so attached to it as an identity. It didn’t leave a lot of room for other things. Like, I mentioned I do jujitsu, and I started that during that year of, like, being unemployed and figuring stuff out. I don’t think I would have ever picked up jujitsu as an activity when I was teaching. Because, like, teaching is hard enough. I don’t really wanna go to the gym and get my ass kicked for an hour. You know? That that takes a lot of energy. And so kind of releasing myself from needing to find my identity through my work opened me up to a whole lot of other possibilities of what to do with my time.

Kiera Hamilton [00:18:14]:
And there was also just a a perspective shift on business. I am I’m not someone who has traditionally been attracted to business, I will say. Because I viewed business as, oh, people are just trying to make as much money as possible. And that is the case for some business owners, but many business owners, that’s not the case. And I really like owning a business because I think that it it can be an opportunity to make a positive impact on your employees, on your customers. So I’ve given you a very long answer, Jordan, and I’m forgetting now what your original question was.

Jordan Berry [00:18:52]:
No. I it was great. And you actually answered it despite not even knowing what it was. So kudos to you for that. That was like a lot. It was really skillful. But I was asking you what gave you the courage and and helped you do that? One thing I love about what you said in there is, you know, that the first time you made that career change, it was super scary. And the second time was a lot less scary.

Jordan Berry [00:19:16]:
And I I one of the things that I learned too is, like, you know, so many people are afraid, and like I said, rightfully so, to to make a big change, whether it’s a career change, buy a business, ask the girl out, whatever the change is. Right? You’re afraid to do it, and I’ve been afraid to do it, and and it stops you. Like you’re saying, a lot of that has to do with uncertainty and, and on a lack of confidence. However, you you don’t develop those things unless you actually take the step and do it. And you you learn and you grow. Right? And we can’t grow if we’re not kind of taking those steps. Now, obviously, you want to do it as smartly as we can and make the best decisions we can. But at some point you just got to jump.

Jordan Berry [00:20:04]:
You just gotta make the decision, and do that on yourself. Like, believe in yourself that, hey, I’m making a career change. I don’t really know how this is gonna go. I don’t have much experience in property management, but I’m gonna I’m gonna go do it. I’m gonna go give it a shot. Right? And see what happens. And then after you did that, you had more information about actually making that change and also about yourself, which gives you more confidence to make another change if and when that time comes. I just I I mean, I just love that because you can’t develop self confidence.

Jordan Berry [00:20:39]:
You can’t develop courage without doing scary things and hard things.

Kiera Hamilton [00:20:45]:
Absolutely. I mean, at every kind of big point in my life where there was some big transition or transaction leaving teaching, buying our first home, selling our first home, buying another property, making another career change, buying a business. I will say I’ve never had a 100% certainty that it was going to work out. And how can you if something hasn’t happened yet? Like, how can you have a 100% confidence that you’re going to be great at running this laundromat and it’s going to be the perfect investment? The truth is that you can’t because you just don’t know the future. The future is by definition uncertain. Right? And I think what I’ve gotten better at over time is not necessarily reducing uncertainty. And I wanna be clear. I’m not saying don’t do your due diligence.

Kiera Hamilton [00:21:30]:
Right? I tend to be on the over analyzing, overthinking side of things. And so this advice may not be great for everyone. If you’re, like, on the opposite end of that spectrum, maybe you need to think about things more. But I tend to be the type of person who’s, like, okay, I’ve already asked every question I can think of. What else do I need to ask? Like, how can I get myself to a point where I feel a 100% confident? And I’ve just learned that’s not going to happen because that’s just kind of the nature of making big decisions. I think what’s changed for me is I’ve gotten more comfortable with that. I’ve gotten more comfortable saying, you know what? I’m not a 100% certain this laundromat thing is going to go great. I’ve done all the due diligence that I can.

Kiera Hamilton [00:22:10]:
I do feel pretty confident based on the research I’ve done and based on my skill set. You know, I’m not making this decision frivolously, but I accept that there are unknowns. There are going to be things that happen that I’m not expecting, and there have been. There are going to be challenges that are hard, but I do believe in myself. And I think where I’m at in my life, this makes sense to do, and I’m gonna go ahead and do it. And, you know, to your point, a lot of people don’t move forward with things because of that. I talk to people who are like, yeah. You know, I’ve been thinking about buying a laundromat for 5 years and, you know, they tell all their friends about it and it kinda just always lives as this dream.

Kiera Hamilton [00:22:45]:
And I think at some point, you have to start moving forward. And even if you move forward and you make the quote, unquote wrong decision, however you want to define that. Hey. At least you know this path, I don’t wanna keep going down this. Exit off on the map. Try a different direction. But if you always stay in one place, you’re never gonna know where on the map you do or don’t wanna go.

Jordan Berry [00:23:07]:
Yeah. I I mean, I could not agree with you more on that. Like that, I and, obviously, like, I hear that all the time too. Like, I’ve been wanting to buy a laundromat for decades and you’re like, well, well, why haven’t you? Well, I mean, you’ve you’ve got it. You’ve got to take the action and, you know, listen, you know, a lot of people probably don’t know my story, but when I bought my first lawnmower, I went horribly. I lost a ton of money. And I talk about this all the time. I’ve I’ve gone in a lot of detail about it.

Jordan Berry [00:23:36]:
Lost episode 1 of the podcast, if you haven’t heard it yet. Go if you wanna misery loves company kind of thing. It’s a miserable story. Because I lost a lot of money and made a lot of mistakes and and all of that. But, man, I learned a ton for 1. I grew a ton, for 2. And I’m like a decade down the line now, and I’m like, man, despite how awful it all felt in felt like it was going and how like, much of a failure I felt like. And I look back on the last 10 years and I’m like, yeah, it’s been pretty good considering.

Jordan Berry [00:24:12]:
You know, like, I feel pretty good about where I’m at right now despite having gone through all that and probably more to the point because I went through all of that. So, you know, if if anybody’s out there listening who’s afraid to take some action, to make a move, something like that, You know? Hopefully, you can take some solace in in both of our stories here where, you know, sometimes you just gotta take a leap. And, on a long enough time horizon, tends to work out if you don’t quit.

Kiera Hamilton [00:24:43]:
Absolutely. I mean, I mentioned that year where I was unemployed and figuring out my next move, that was one of the hardest years. I was, like, legitimately depressed at certain points during that. But looking back, you know, I think if it had been easier, like if I had just gotten another job immediately out of teaching, there would have been so many lessons I would have missed out on. And I don’t know if I would have ended up where I am today. I, you know, could have had some other great paths, but like, I’m so, enthusiastic about where my life is right now. And I do attribute a lot of that to the lessons I learned during that really tough time.

Jordan Berry [00:25:19]:
Yeah. Exactly. Awesome. Okay. I’m gonna actually this is unconventional for the episode, but I wanna actually pause for a second. I just wanna mention, number 1, that you you have a podcast. Right?

Kiera Hamilton [00:25:33]:
Yes. I do.

Jordan Berry [00:25:34]:
What is the name of said podcast?

Kiera Hamilton [00:25:36]:
Yeah. So it’s called, so you want to buy a business and it’s focused on ETA, which is entrepreneurship through acquisition, which just means buying businesses.

Jordan Berry [00:25:45]:
Yeah. Awesome. So I wanted to point that out. So go, check that podcast and also your YouTube channel, which is Kira_hamilton

Kiera Hamilton [00:25:54]:
Yep.

Jordan Berry [00:25:55]:
On YouTube. And, and also LinkedIn. We’ll we’ll get to that again, at the end. But LinkedIn over there where you can connect with Kira also. Listen, Kira does SBA loan. So if you’re looking for an SBA loan, connect over to Kiera. Okay. Commercial over.

Jordan Berry [00:26:12]:
I don’t really throw commercials in here very often, but there you go.

Kiera Hamilton [00:26:15]:
I appreciate it. I just wanted

Jordan Berry [00:26:16]:
to make sure everybody heard about that because that’s pretty cool. I’m excited about your podcast.

Kiera Hamilton [00:26:19]:
Thanks. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:26:21]:
Yeah. Okay. So going back to it, did you decide, okay, we want to buy a laundromat or did you come across a laundromat in your search for a generic business? And how did you, how did that whole thing come about and how did you end up finding the laundromat that you bought?

Kiera Hamilton [00:26:38]:
Yeah. Kind of a funny story. So I don’t remember exactly. I think by the time we found our laundromat, we were looking at laundromats specifically. And we looked at a number and a lot of them we said no to simply because of the neighborhood that they were in. So we live in Oakland, which is across the bay from San Francisco, And there were a lot of laundromats in the East Bay where I was just like, there’s a problem at 9 PM. Am I gonna be comfortable going over to that laundromat to fix it? And if the answer was no, then we didn’t buy it. Because I think that, you know, you can face a lot of problems based on the neighborhood and just based on your comfort level with being there.

Kiera Hamilton [00:27:22]:
Right? So our our search was geographically constrained and then it was also of course constrained to what we could afford. Think we found the listing either on biz by seller biz quest. And the reason I say it’s funny is because man, okay. I wanna say up front. I know there are good business brokers out there. I have worked with them. They’re, they’re business brokers who do a good job. So I don’t mean to, I don’t

Jordan Berry [00:27:49]:
mean to, I don’t mean to be. I have, I am, I am a laundromat broker, so I feel like I can just slam us over here. Cause there are so many bad ones for sure.

Kiera Hamilton [00:27:58]:
They, there are a lot of business brokers who are tough to work with. So what had happened was we had found the laundromat, we ended up purchasing and we had called the broker and just happened to get him on the phone and learn the name of the launch mat. And then from there he ghosted us. Multiple calls, texts, emails, all that stuff. So, you know, whatever week goes by and we’re like, we are going to lose this business. So we just reach out to the business directly, ask to speak to the owner and started the conversation that way. If we hadn’t gotten the name of our laundromat from the broker, there’s a really good chance we would have never bought this laundromat because obviously, you know, listings are anonymous. So we would have just been, like, calling random laundromats in San Francisco.

Kiera Hamilton [00:28:42]:
So we did end up with just a certain amount of luck because I think it was only like 2 months from when we decided, Hey, we want to buy a laundromat to when we ended up actually submitting an offer, which, you know, there’s just some luck involved there. So yeah, we found it online. We got lucky with the broker situation and, happy to go into whatever details from there would be interesting to discuss.

Jordan Berry [00:29:05]:
Yeah. Well, I’m pretty sure I know who the broker was that you were working with.

Kiera Hamilton [00:29:10]:
A lot of people do. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:29:12]:
Yeah. Which is funny. But no, I mean that that’s kind of the thing, right? So like I have a lot of consulting clients right now who, you know, we’re trying to find laundromats for them and I’ve got a couple where they just found them, like within the 1st month or 2. They just found the right one, got an offer accepted. Bam. There you go. But there’s, you know, a lot of people not I know just not just consulting clients, but a lot of people are just having a hard time finding those deals. And part of it just kind of goes down to number 1, are you doing the things you need to do to find 1? And when did you buy this one?

Kiera Hamilton [00:29:51]:
In May 2023 is when we closed.

Jordan Berry [00:29:54]:
Okay. So, yeah, a little over a year ago. And now in today’s market, at least right now in a lot of markets around the country, you can’t only rely on solely just looking, you know, through bizjungle.com or whatever the biz, something called biz, biz quest, bizbuy, bizbin, all biz everything. You can’t rely solely on that a lot of times. Or if you do, like it’s just gonna take a long time and you gotta be a little more proactive. But the real question is, and I’m asking for a bunch of people out there right now, how did you get the broker on the phone the first time? So many people are like, I can’t get a broker to call me back or email me back or anything.

Kiera Hamilton [00:30:38]:
I really wish there were some hot tip I could offer there, Jordan.

Jordan Berry [00:30:43]:
We just called him and happened to get him on the phone,

Kiera Hamilton [00:30:43]:
you know? But I will say just to get him on the phone, you know? But I will say just generally, I I do know that brokers get a ton of calls, and there are a lot of tire kickers out there. You know, there are people who have been thinking about buying a launch mount for 5 years, and they’re curious. And the truth is, like, they’re not gonna do it. And brokers know that. So I do think you do need to differentiate yourself in some way. You need to be willing to show proof of funds if that’s what someone is asking for. It would be really helpful to have an SBA personal financial statement filled out. If you do plan to use SBA financing, you know, I think Is

Jordan Berry [00:31:20]:
that something you could help with?

Kiera Hamilton [00:31:22]:
Definitely. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:31:23]:
Definitely. Softball I was talking about.

Kiera Hamilton [00:31:27]:
Yeah. So

Jordan Berry [00:31:28]:
I think on LinkedIn? Is that

Kiera Hamilton [00:31:30]:
That Keur Hamilton on LinkedIn. Exactly. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:31:32]:
Okay.

Kiera Hamilton [00:31:33]:
So I think you do need to go into conversations prepared, you know, and I think you need to show that you have an a realistic understanding of what it’s like to own a laundromat. And that’s I mean, that’s hard to really get before you’ve bought one. But I think doing your research is important because, you know, if I were a broker and someone called me and they’d never owned a business before and they had a full time job and they were like, I have a full time job. I’m looking for a source of passive income. I wanna buy a laundromat. That’s that’s red flags to me. Right? Because one, laundromats are not passive income. They do require, I would say, the amount of work varies depending on if it’s full serve or self serve.

Kiera Hamilton [00:32:11]:
Right? And you can run a laundromat with a full time job. I’m sure you’ve had people on this podcast, but it requires a lot of thought. It requires thinking through how am I gonna respond to problems. And so you need to show that you’ve thought about that stuff when you call a broker. I think you need to show like, okay, I have an understanding of, the types of questions to ask, which I can, can get into more. And I I’m serious about this. This is the amount of capital that I have. This is how much time a week I have to put into this project.

Kiera Hamilton [00:32:41]:
You know, this is a little bit about my background. So just understand brokers get a ton of calls and a lot of those people aren’t serious. So you do need to differentiate yourself somehow.

Jordan Berry [00:32:52]:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it’s I think that’s great advice, there for sure. And, you know, just filter it through, you know, brokers only get paid when deals go through. So you need to convince a broker you can make a deal go through. You’ve got the knowledge. You’ve got the capital lined up. Doesn’t always have to be your capital, but you’ve gotta have capital lined up.

Jordan Berry [00:33:13]:
And you have got to have the ability to make a decision and follow through with it. And if you can convince a broker of those things, you’re more like I won’t say you’re super likely, but you’re more likely to get a call back there. The other thing I’ll say too is, you know, listen, I know you’re a good person and you’re coming from a good place. I will say not every broker would say, you know, Oh, red flag. I don’t know if this is going to be a good fit for you because I’ve seen what I’ve called brokers who set up what I call laundry mills. And that’s basically where a broker will set sell a laundromat to somebody having a pretty good idea that they’re not gonna succeed. So then in a year or 2, they get to sell that laundromat again. And I’ve seen that happen multiple times.

Jordan Berry [00:33:59]:
So just something to kinda be aware of. And I I hate that, obviously, and I hate that that happens, but it it does. So don’t you know, I guess, my one piece of advice here would be, you know, if it’s your first time buying a laundromat, especially, you know, just don’t do it alone. Find another owner, you know, get on the forums, get on the Facebook groups, whatever you gotta do, hire a consultant, whatever, help you go through that product. Have an SBA lender who has knowledge in, in the business, something to help you kind of go through that. So you know what you’re walking into.

Kiera Hamilton [00:34:35]:
Yeah. I mean, I hadn’t heard of that specifically brokers doing that. Cause that just seems, I don’t know. That doesn’t seem ethical to me. I I also really don’t like that. And, you know, one of the reasons I started making content about laundromats is because I do think there is misinformation online about what it’s actually like to own a laundromat. I think people are trying to sell courses. People are trying to sell laundromats.

Kiera Hamilton [00:35:00]:
And I do see this notion of laundromats as passive income. And I think people get really excited about that. And honestly, I understand why. Like, so many people are working jobs that they don’t like. They’re being underpaid. They’re just looking for some way to better themselves, better their family, get ahead, create generational wealth. I don’t fault people for wanting to look for passive income strategies, but I just don’t think that’s the reality with LaunchMats. And I want to be part of explaining to people what it’s actually like.

Kiera Hamilton [00:35:34]:
I still think they’re great investments. And when you look at the number of hours that you need to put into a launch map potentially compared to other businesses, I think like you’re making a lot more per hour than some other businesses. Right. But there are problems. There are problems with any business. And I think, you know, we can go more into this later with due diligence, but I think if a broker or a seller is not willing to tell you what the problems of the business are because there are always going to be problems, that’s a huge red flag.

Jordan Berry [00:36:03]:
Yeah. I I agree. I agree with all of that, really. Everything that you said. So, okay. So you found this on Biz Quest or whatever.

Kiera Hamilton [00:36:17]:
The Bizizz. Yep.

Jordan Berry [00:36:18]:
Yeah. And, and you ended up, you know, going, you know, straight to the seller and all that stuff, but you got it done. Can I ask, like, how much did you buy it for?

Kiera Hamilton [00:36:30]:
Yeah, definitely. We bought it for $190,000 and we financed it with a loan from a family member. So the sellers were only taking cash offers. So we do have a loan. It’s, you know, we’ve got favorable family rate and terms on it, but we use that in order to make a cash offer.

Jordan Berry [00:36:50]:
Yeah. Which is great. I mean, I, you know, I do I do a webinar almost every week and, you know, one of the questions I get asked about a lot is financing. Right? And one of the best sources of, potentially depending on the situation. Right? But one of the best potential sources of private money would be loans from from family and friends. And in certain cases, they can even lend out retirement funds in their retirement accounts. You know, go through a professional if you’re gonna go that route. But there’s, there’s a lot more money out there than you think.

Jordan Berry [00:37:20]:
And so there’s lots of different ways to finance these things.

Kiera Hamilton [00:37:23]:
Definitely.

Jordan Berry [00:37:24]:
That’s awesome. Okay. So you bought it. Take us to like, take us to like day 1. How were you feeling? Was were things like what you expected in terms of what it was like to actually now have all the bucket full of keys that you get or, like numbers wise, was that what you expected? All that. Tell us about right when you first opened.

Kiera Hamilton [00:37:47]:
Yeah. So when we closed on the business, I was there every day for 14 days straight. I was there, you know, from morning until evening because I really wanted to understand how the business operated. Now, understand how the business operated. Now, since then in a typical week, I’m not there every day. I think I mentioned I typically spend 7 to 10 hours a week, either physically there or working on it remotely. But in the beginning, and this is why when I talk to a lot of people who wanna buy Launch Mats and some of them have full time jobs and they wanna keep their job, which I do think there’s a way to make that work. There are people who do that, but I tell them, you know, I was there 14 days straight.

Kiera Hamilton [00:38:28]:
I’m for me, I’m glad that I left my 9 to 5 job because it just ended up being a better situation for me. But I think in the beginning it’s really important to understand how the business runs so that you can run it more remotely later. Like I think if I didn’t have this really strong base of understanding operations, I wouldn’t be able to to run it in the way that I run it now. So I would say that, you know, there was nothing glaring where I was like, oh, this is completely outside of what I was expecting. It was basically what I was expecting. But part of what I was expecting is that there were going to be unexpected things that came up. And because I went in with that mindset, when unexpected things came up, I wasn’t shocked by it, you know? But like one challenge we had was, it was either 1 or 2 days after we closed. I’m driving across the bridge into the city and I get a call from the sellers who are going to be training me that day.

Kiera Hamilton [00:39:25]:
And they’re like, the employee just put in her notice.

Jordan Berry [00:39:28]:
I was

Kiera Hamilton [00:39:28]:
like, Oh my gosh, there’s one main employee. And we really had wanted to keep her. She had been doing a great job, but she put in her notice. And so, you know, immediately I was putting up an ad on Craigslist interviewing people. We ended up finding someone fantastic. But that meant that I really needed to learn the operations. And I think this is just really the truth. When you have a small, small businesses, there are not a lot of layers between you as the owner and your labor force, right? It’s like us and then we have 2 employees.

Kiera Hamilton [00:40:01]:
And so I think that’s something that people really need to understand, particularly if there’s a wash and fold component. If there’s not that like you might still have an attendant, but that changes things a little bit because you know, if an employee calls out sick, I really care about my orders still getting done on time, getting done in a quality manner. I don’t think that the service I’m providing should change because of an employee issue, right? Like people are still paying for the service. They’re expecting to get a certain thing. I want to provide that. So, I mean, there are days when I’ve just completely rearranged my schedule because I needed to go in and cover for someone. Like I mentioned in our pre chat, we actually had another podcast day we were planning to record and that day I had an employee call in sick and I was like, you know, emailing you 5 minutes before, Hey, I got to go into my laundromat. And that’s just the reality.

Kiera Hamilton [00:40:48]:
I’ve canceled plans with friends. I’ve put off trips because you do need to be present to a certain degree with the laundromat. So in the beginning, you know, I was there a lot physically and honestly it did feel a little overwhelming at times. And I had to tell myself, I was like, Kira, like you’re highly educated. This is just laundry. You can figure it out. Like you were a teacher and being a T I think that’s one of the, one of the hardest jobs. Right? It was like, you manage 40, 14 year olds at the time.

Kiera Hamilton [00:41:19]:
You can figure out this laundromat. But, you know, I just say that so that if there are people out there who like have bought a laundromat and felt overwhelmed in the beginning, you’re not alone. It can be a lot to learn just learning. Like, I mean, I knew how to fold clothes, but I didn’t know how to fold clothes. Well, Right. So I was like learning how to do that. I was learning how the changers worked, learning how the machines worked, really getting to know the operations as they were. And I did plan on making changes in the future, but it was really important for me to understand what the sellers had been doing and be consistent with that.

Kiera Hamilton [00:41:54]:
Like, I I don’t think I made any real noticeable changes for at least a month because I was like, there’s a reason I bought this business. Right? There’s a lot of stuff I liked about it. I wanna understand what they were doing and why they were doing it. And I wanna do it long enough that when I make a change, I have a good reason for it. I don’t wanna just come in and start making changes immediately before I understand why their current procedures were in place. So, yeah, that’s what it was like in the beginning.

Jordan Berry [00:42:24]:
Yeah, that well, that’s I totally get the overwhelming feeling is when I when I bought my first one, it was, like, simultaneously overwhelming and underwhelming. I’ll say that. Actually, honestly, I mean, I’m just thinking about this right now. Like, it was kinda like having a baby. Yeah. We had a baby. It was like super overwhelmed. I was like, who is letting me drive this baby home unsupervised with no instructions whatsoever right now?

Kiera Hamilton [00:42:52]:
Mhmm.

Jordan Berry [00:42:53]:
Right? Like and and then you’re like, well, actually babies are kinda boring. They just mostly sleep and eat. And, like, that’s pretty much all they do for a little while. And but still overwhelming for some reason. And having a laundromat was kinda similar where I was like, who is letting me operate this thing and be in charge of the lawn you know, like the place that this community does laundry. But also I don’t really know what to do. Like, what do I do? People are just doing their own laundry. Like, what do I do? So I totally get that.

Jordan Berry [00:43:25]:
When you bought it, did you what was it, did it have, like, a drop off? Was it self serve? What was the sort of the the business model that you bought into?

Kiera Hamilton [00:43:37]:
Yeah. So the sellers we bought it from had owned it for less than a year and they had bought it. Basically, it was a zombie mat. I don’t know all the details, but I think they actually bought it from the landlord. Like I think it had been abandoned. And so they renamed it, you know, got a new Yelp page up, all that, put some new machines in and then added a wash and fold service. So when we came in, wash and fold service was already there. They were using Sense, you know, for their pickup and delivery.

Kiera Hamilton [00:44:05]:
It integrates with Uber and DoorDash to do that. So the infrastructure was really already there. And I think really what we’ve done in the last year, we have grown it mostly through, I think, customer retention and through raising prices. But I think really what I focused on is operational efficiency. Like, there was no 9 tab Excel sheet that the previous owners passed off to us. A lot of stuff was, like, writing stuff on a piece of paper and text messages sort of thing. So, yeah, that infrastructure is already there.

Jordan Berry [00:44:41]:
Yeah. What do you do you have any idea or do you have any sense of like for the business, how much was self serve versus, you know, wash and fold?

Kiera Hamilton [00:44:53]:
Yeah. I don’t remember off the top of my head what it was like when we bought it. I would guess the breakdown was similar to what it is now where about 50% of our revenue is from self serve, about 50% from wash and fold and dry cleaning. And out of that, about 75% is verifiable through card payments. So only about 20% of our revenue is in cash. And I think that’s, you know, significant because I I do think that this is changing over time. But traditionally, laundromats are cash businesses. Right? And that can end up being challenging when you go to buy a laundromat.

Kiera Hamilton [00:45:29]:
And it really depends on the sellers. I mean, unfortunately a lot of owners don’t prepare to sell and, you know, the biggest issue I’m sure you’re aware of people run into is you’re under reporting cash on your tax returns. So then you’re trying to sell it and you’re going, Hey, I want to value this based off the P and L, but you look at the tax returns and it doesn’t match. And if you’re trying to get an SBA loan, that’s a problem. Right? And even if you’re not, I would still be skeptical if I were working with a seller who was working that way. Ever since we’ve bought our laundromat, we’re going to sell eventually. I don’t know exactly when, and I didn’t know when we bought it, but I always have approached it from the perspective that one day I’m going to sell. I’ve kept very clean records.

Kiera Hamilton [00:46:10]:
I report every cash dollar that we make on our tax returns. 1, you know, I think that’s the right thing to do, but 2, I think you should always be thinking ahead to a sale so that you don’t get caught in a situation where you want to sell. And it’s hard to because you’ve made some poor decision decisions with your record keeping. So I do think over time, laundromat acquisition hopefully will get easier and smoother because we are seeing the rise of card payments and more revenue can be verified. But yeah, to answer your question, that’s the, that’s the breakdown of the revenue.

Jordan Berry [00:46:44]:
Yeah. Yeah. And I, I mean, I’ve been, I’ve been saying owners are leaving money on the table left and right by skimming. It’s, it’s like tripping over. What is it? Tripping over dollars to pick up nickels or whatever? Yeah. The same is. I always butcher all the same. But, you know, trying to skim off the top.

Jordan Berry [00:47:01]:
But, you know, the reality of it is in in my view at least is that there’s plenty of legal tax advantages for owning a business like a laundromat that you don’t really need to skim off the top. So I’m I love that you’re doing that. And I think more people are doing that and seeing the value in that. And I think, you know, even though, you know, the majority of laundromats are still coin based, more and more are becoming some sort of digital payment system. That’s more trackable, verifiable, and should, like you said, be making things easier for us going forward to to verify how businesses are doing, which is can be a challenge. Okay. So you you, you know, kind of bought this thing. How did you come up with your I mean, you’ve mentioned a couple of times now, and I’m gonna I’m gonna ask I’m gonna put you on the spot here in a second.

Jordan Berry [00:47:53]:
But, you know, you’ve mentioned your 9 tab manual. How did you come up with that? And then maybe if you’re willing, could you share what the actual 9 tabs you don’t have to go into a whole lot of detail on all of it, like, what they actually are.

Kiera Hamilton [00:48:06]:
Yeah. Totally. So how did I come up with it? I think it probably started I definitely didn’t have it from the beginning, but I think it started because we have we have had a few employees over time. And, you know, you can make different decisions about how to hire people. Right? The approach that I have taken is I would rather have a really high quality employee for 6 months and then train someone new, then, then have someone who’s not as good of a fit for a longer period of time. So for example, like, you know, one of the last employees we had, he was here for about 7 months. He was a college grad, you know, was kinda in between his next career move and grad school. And so this was a great place for him to work.

Kiera Hamilton [00:48:52]:
He was like overqualified to work at a laundromat, but it was a good fit for where he was at this point in his life. And people can make different decisions with hiring. That’s just what I’ve decided to do. So I think it was probably when I was training a new employee that I was like, okay, I wanna have a breakdown of how our wash and fold system works. And I think this just comes from my experience as a teacher. You know, people learn in different ways, so I want to show them how to do it. I want them to hear verbally. And then I also want them to have something to refer back to for when I’m not there.

Kiera Hamilton [00:49:23]:
If they’re like, oh wait, what did Kira say about this? Let me look at the spreadsheet tab. If I still have a question, then I’ll reach out to her. It also became a way for me to communicate with employees. So I’ll just pull it up and explain to you what the tabs are. So the first tab is the team updates tab. And the reason I have this is because I really don’t wanna be texting employees when they’re not at work unless it’s like a schedule, like, can you work Saturday sort of thing. Right? So I created this team updates tab so that even if I’m out of the house or something and I’m like, oh, I just saw that this thing that I want our employee to know tomorrow, I’ll just go on my phone to this Google sheet and leave a note. That’s like, hey, for Brian’s order, be sure to blah, blah, blah.

Kiera Hamilton [00:50:04]:
And then the, the routine is they come in the morning, they look at the orders to do for the day. They look at this spreadsheet that’s on our tablet and they see notes for me. They leave their initials that they’ve read it. So it’s a good communication tool and a way that I can like immediately get an idea down without texting an employee when they’re not working. So the first tab is my team updates tab and then I have my shifts and payroll tabs. So I have the next month, who’s working what hours, the payroll dates, when they need to send me their hours. Then I have our tagging procedures. So tagging is so important when you’re doing wash and folds because you don’t want to mix orders up.

Kiera Hamilton [00:50:44]:
Right? So I have a very specific way that we tag things. And so I have a spreadsheet tab that breaks that down. I won’t go into all the details about this, but if someone comes in and they have a foreign phone number, like a non US phone number, it annoyingly doesn’t work on the software that I use. So there’s like a different procedure we have to use for that. So I have a breakdown of that. I have our cleaning schedule. I have a whole overview of our wash and fold procedures, our dry cleaning procedures, weekly orders and how those work, and then a weekly schedule. And then I guess I have one more that’s just kinda like an other section for notes.

Jordan Berry [00:51:24]:
Real quick on is, is this like an actual, like Google sheets or Microsoft Excel spreadsheet spreadsheet? Or are you doing this actually in the software?

Kiera Hamilton [00:51:34]:
No. This is just, a Google spreadsheet. And then on the tablet that we use, we’ve got, like, a few things there kind of ready to go, the Scent software and then this spreadsheet. So and, again, this is all stuff like, I didn’t I didn’t teach my employees by just saying, hey. Read this spreadsheet. Right? I think it’s very important to teach actively, but this is just a good reference and a good way for me to communicate with them.

Jordan Berry [00:52:02]:
Yeah. I love that. So are they going, like every day start a shift? Are they clicking through the 9 tabs or do they have you’re checking that first one to get their updates and periodically checking the other ones? How does that work?

Kiera Hamilton [00:52:18]:
Yeah. So they’re just checking the first tab daily. I mean, they might be looking at the others daily, but I’ve just asked them to look at the 1st team updates tab daily and to put their initials. And then the other ones are just there for reference. I want, I want my employees to feel as much autonomy as possible because most of the time they’re working there and I’m not there. Like I might see an employee maybe once a week, every couple of weeks. And I, I do stay pretty accessible by phone. Like employees will text me occasionally or call me with questions, but I want them to have as much autonomy as possible.

Kiera Hamilton [00:52:56]:
And so I think this is a good way for me to provide some extra support. And so they have something to refer to to see if that can answer their question before they call me.

Jordan Berry [00:53:06]:
Yeah. Alright. So we’ve got team updates, shifts and payroll, tagging orders. What do we got next?

Kiera Hamilton [00:53:15]:
Foreign customers. Oh, this is a different procedure for that. Yeah. Our cleaning schedule, our wash and fold procedures, our dry cleaning, our weekly orders, our weekly schedule.

Jordan Berry [00:53:27]:
Awesome.

Kiera Hamilton [00:53:27]:
And then just another tab with kinda like other notes that I keep, like when we had our main lines jetted, when I replaced a gas valve, things like that.

Jordan Berry [00:53:37]:
So those are more notes for you to keep track of kind of routine maintenance type of stuff. And

Kiera Hamilton [00:53:45]:
Yeah. And I, I could be better about keeping a specific maintenance log. I think that’s something that I could improve on. But yeah, that’s what I’ve got in this tab right now. And I like having everything in one place. I’m not like clicking 10 different places in my drive for it.

Jordan Berry [00:54:03]:
Yeah. I love that. I’ll I mean, I love having that there just in just right there on the, you know, on the tablet that they’re using for their their software, the the wash, dry, fold orders and all that stuff. And having that reference there makes it super clean, super easy, and everybody knows exactly where to go. It’s all in one place. It’s beautiful. It’s beautiful. Did you start it from scratch or did you pick stuff from different places, or what’d you do?

Kiera Hamilton [00:54:31]:
Yeah. No. I started it from scratch. You know, I think that’s something I learned teaching. I’m there are, I’m sure, great resources out there, but something that I found teaching is sometimes when I would take someone else’s template, it actually ended up being more work for me to adapt it into what would work for me. And if I have a specific vision about how I want something to be, I find it just easier to start it from scratch.

Jordan Berry [00:54:55]:
Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Okay. So you have sort of put put this thing together. It sounds like you’ve gone through a couple of employees trying to figure out, you know, get a good fit and then, you know, just turnover happens, at this wage rate, a lot, and that’s just part of the game. I mean, do you feel like, you know, a little over a year into your experience, how are you feeling? Are you feeling like this this has been good? I’ve learned a lot. Are you feeling like I’m ready to, like, tackle the whole earth? How are you feeling right now just in terms of, like, owning owning this business for a little over a year?

Kiera Hamilton [00:55:36]:
Yeah. Good question. I feel great about this investment that we made. I think I said earlier, it’s really felt like a real world MBA and not to dismiss MBAs at all. I’m sure there’s a ton of value that people get from them. But I do think that there is something particularly special and useful about actually doing the thing, you know, like actually running a business. And I’ve learned so much from that. And I’m, I’m really excited to buy a larger business one day.

Kiera Hamilton [00:56:11]:
I think, you know, what this has taught me is that I can do it. And if I hadn’t bought this laundromat first, I don’t think I would have just been like, oh, I could buy a $2,000,000 business. Like I wouldn’t have had the confidence and I wouldn’t have had the capital for that probably at the time. But when we sell our laundromat, we’re going to be selling for a profit and we’re going to walk away with the cash to make a down payment on an SBA loan for, you know, I just kind of throw 2,000,000 out there. It might be a little more, it might be a little less, but I feel like we’ve really built the skills necessary to run a larger business. And I really enjoyed running this laundromat. I will say, you know, I don’t want to do it for forever. And I think that’s okay.

Kiera Hamilton [00:56:57]:
Like there are, you know, certain parts of my life that don’t fit in to this particular investment. Well, like we live in Oakland hitting traffic, going into the city. It should be like a 25 to 30 minute drive if there’s no traffic, but that is not, not the reality of it. And so, you know, I don’t love the commute, especially if I do need to go in more than one day a week. That can be tough. And I do really think this business needs a local operator, you know, and my husband and I would really like to travel for extended periods of time. We may end up moving to Southern California. So I don’t think this business is going to be the best fit for me for forever.

Kiera Hamilton [00:57:39]:
But during this time that I’ve owned it, I’ve learned so much and I’ve had the opportunity to really personally grow in ways that I wouldn’t have without this. So I just feel like the experience that I’ve gained is really so much more valuable than the money that I’ve earned and the business is profitable. I will say it’s not my only source of income. Our SDE is around 80 ks. And if that were the only money I’m making, like that would be tough in the bay area. And so I do like to be like upfront with people about that, that, you know, if you’re buying one laundromat, I don’t know if that can completely replace the income from your job depends on the laundromat. But yeah, I would say just the experience I’ve gained in and of itself has been incredibly valuable.

Jordan Berry [00:58:23]:
Real quick. Well, first of all, there are for sure, laundromats that can and and also depending on what job you have and what income you say, you can.

Kiera Hamilton [00:58:30]:
Sure. Yeah. That’s so true.

Jordan Berry [00:58:31]:
Sure. But in in the Bay Area, it’s a little tougher. But I’m glad to hear that, you know, their thoughts have come into the light side down here in California. You mentioned I just wanna just so everybody’s on the same page. You’re talking about seller discretionary earning or SDE. Could you explain you said 80 k SDE. Could you explain what that is? So we’re all on the same page here.

Kiera Hamilton [00:58:53]:
Yeah, definitely. So seller discretionary earnings are common way that businesses are valued and you’re typically going to see that more on the smaller side. Another common way businesses are measured is through EBITDA. That tends to be larger businesses. They’re very similar. They have a couple differences, but they’re essentially the same concept, which is basically, you know, if you’re looking at 2 businesses to buy, you want to be able to fairly compare them. And if you’re just looking at the net income, that’s not necessarily going to give you the most accurate view. Because for example, if you have a loan on a business, you can legally write off those interest payments on the loan in order to reduce your taxable income.

Kiera Hamilton [00:59:44]:
But you as the new person coming in, you may not have a loan on the business or you may have different terms. That expense that the business is writing off is not necessarily going to apply to you. So that’s why we do things called add backs, where we add back a certain list of, you know, like verified acceptable expenses in order to get to a seller’s discretionary earnings. So for example, we do have a small interest payment on a loan for 2 machines that we have. So I take our net income and I add that interest payment back because that’s not going to apply to, a new buyer. You can also add back certain taxes and discretionary expenses. So for example, I pay for a bookkeeper. I was doing bookkeeping myself for a while, and honestly I could still be doing it.

Kiera Hamilton [01:00:32]:
I just don’t wanna spend the time on it anymore. So I consider that discretionary expense. It’s not the same thing as utilities. You don’t need a bookkeeping service in order to run the business. So I’m adding that back. So the SDE is the net income plus verified add backs pretax.

Jordan Berry [01:00:49]:
Awesome. I will say too, just by I mean, I look at 100 of deals a week pretty much. And, you know, just make sure the add backs are legitimate. I just see owners trying to add back all kinds of stuff.

Kiera Hamilton [01:01:06]:
Here too. Yeah. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [01:01:07]:
SBA side of things, you see that, also.

Kiera Hamilton [01:01:10]:
Yeah. And I I think that’s something that, you know, if you’ve never bought a business before, it’s really important to understand how they’re valuing it and make sure that you understand how those add backs work. And if, you know, let’s say you’re coming from real estate, the way that real estate is valued, it’s different than how businesses are valued. So just making sure you educate yourself and you ask for some type of breakdown. And I think that most sellers provide this or most brokers provide like an SDE worksheet that’s explaining how they got to the SDE, what they’re adding back. And it’s really important to look at that and understand how they’re getting to that number because most likely they’re valuing the business off that number.

Jordan Berry [01:01:48]:
Yeah. I I think most might be a little strong, but hopefully you can get an SDE worksheet from

Kiera Hamilton [01:01:55]:
You should be I believe best practice is to provide that, but that’s my opinion.

Jordan Berry [01:02:02]:
Is good. Yeah. I it’s just I I mean, I think the state of our industry right now specifically when it comes to selling and buying laundromats is just, it’s not great. And a lot of sellers won’t provide things like tax returns or bank statements or they’ll say, okay, I’ll give them to you, but nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Here’s how much it really makes. Right? And which we talked about earlier. And so it’s, there’s a lot of messiness in here. And I would just say like, and as somebody who has experience here, it is really easy to go wrong buying a laundromat.

Jordan Berry [01:02:41]:
Particularly if you don’t have good records like you’re keeping, which is the case, The vast majority of the time of deals that I see, there’s not great records. So just tread carefully. That’s all I guess I’m trying to say. I mean, you’ve mentioned real estate and businesses like Laundromat or maybe something else down the line. I mean, I guess you’ve kind of already tipped your hat in this direction already, but, like, real estate investing versus businesses, how do they compare and which do you what are you preferring right now, I guess?

Kiera Hamilton [01:03:16]:
Oh man, you will not catch me buying any real estate anytime soon. I can, I can tell you that for sure? And look, there are people who are very successful in real estate. Obviously I’m not saying that it’s an investment strategy that doesn’t work. However, I have just found, like you mentioned, we own a 4 unit building. We bought it in December of 2021. And then we, we own a business and I’ll say with the particular investments I have in my experience, I have found a lot more control in business acquisition than in real estate. Now I will say it, that level of control does come generally with more work. I don’t put 7 to 10 hours a week into managing my property.

Kiera Hamilton [01:04:01]:
There have been times where it has caused a lot of stress and taken up a lot of my time, but I think, you know, with business, because you are putting an effort, I think it’s a lot, it has been a lot easier for me to actually see returns on that. So we bought our 4 unit building in 2021. We paid 1,450,000 for it. It’s now worth less. You know, we had one realtor tell us it was worth 1.2, and that’s not because of anything we’ve done. That’s the market of the Bay area. And the truth is there’s not a whole lot I can do to improve that value. Right? Like, there are certain things, you know, if I were going to sell, if we had higher rents or something, like, maybe an investor would take that into account.

Kiera Hamilton [01:04:47]:
But when you just look at how real estate is valued, a lot of it is based on comps. What are other buildings of similar type selling for in this area? And I just don’t have a control over market conditions. Right? I also don’t have a control over rental laws, and I wanna be clear. I am pro tenants rights. I am pro you know, I’ve been a renter in Oakland and I’ve had a shady landlord. Like, I think there should be protections in place for people. Absolutely. But we ran into this really tough situation where we had a tenant.

Kiera Hamilton [01:05:18]:
He he actually came with the building from the previous seller, so I didn’t select him. He stopped paying rent in December and, you know, we were really trying to work with him to, to avoid the eviction process. And, you know, lesson learned is honestly, maybe we should have started it sooner because, you know, there were there were months he had been late, and I was like, I really wanna work with this guy. I wanna figure out, you know, if we can avoid, evicting him. And it it just didn’t work out, unfortunately. And so it took until May for the eviction process to go through and between the rent that we lost ended up being quite a lot of money we had to put into cleaning the unit up because it was left in really terrible condition. It was like $25,000 total that we lost in that. And there were points in that where there’s literally nothing we can do.

Kiera Hamilton [01:06:07]:
I mean, we got an attorney, we did, you know, followed followed the book. And there were times when it was just like, we’re waiting to hear back from the courts. Right? And it was really frustrating to not have that sense of control, especially when we were evicting for a just cause. It’s like you signed this lease, you agreed to pay this money. We’ve been trying to work with you. That’s not working out. You’re still not paying. And you know, we’re not, we’re not going to get that money back.

Kiera Hamilton [01:06:32]:
And so that was frustrating. Now with a business, I’m not to say, not to say there aren’t regulations in business. Obviously there are, but I, I think that I found it easier to respond to issues. If my utility costs go up, I can raise prices the next day. Right. I have that ability now, whether or not that’s a good idea would be another question, but like I can, and I have made small price increases over time and actually no one has commented on it because they’ve been small enough that people don’t really notice. But I found a lot more control in business acquisition and just a greater return on our investment. I mean, when we bought a for any unit building, we put in about 400 ks cash to close that could have been 2 laundromats, right? Like the amount of money that it took to buy a laundromat was a 190,000.

Kiera Hamilton [01:07:20]:
And when I think of both the money we’ve made and the experience that I’ve gained, I’ve found it to be a lot more valuable than real estate. Now this really depends on the market you’re in. You know, you could buy in a place and you get lucky and the market goes up and it’s a fantastic investment. But just speaking from my own experience, I found real estate to have less return on my investment, have more legal challenges and overall just feel less sense of control.

Jordan Berry [01:07:48]:
Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, those are real, right? Those are like real, real life. And thank you by the way for sharing numbers. Cause that that’s always kinda helpful to do. I know sometimes it can be hard for people to share those numbers, but, appreciate you sharing the numbers. And, you know, what’s, you’re right. I mean, I love the control that you have over business.

Jordan Berry [01:08:12]:
Right? Like, if you needed to if you need for whatever reason, like, you needed to drum up more business, you could decide, you know, hey, we’re gonna we’re gonna really ramp up our wash, dry, fold. We’re gonna go aggressive, literally knocking on doors. Like that’s something that’s free that you can do with your time. Like if you had to do it, you could go generate more income. Right? You could add a pickup and delivery where you go out and drive. Like, if you had you got in a corner. Right? And you had to do something. Like you said, with the 4 unit, there there’s really not anything that you can do.

Jordan Berry [01:08:49]:
You just kinda have to wait. I do wanna point out just real quick, one little caveat that the valuation of real estate is different when it’s considered, residential real estate. Right? So 4 units or less. The valuation method actually becomes pretty similar, when it’s commercial real estate, actually. But 4 units or less is where there is a there is a difference, in how they’re valued and you don’t really have a lot of control. And even in commercial, you have less control, over commercial real estate than you do a business as well. There are things that you can do to force that appreciation sometimes in commercial real estate, but less less so than if you have a business. Easier to go drum up business or shouldn’t say easy.

Jordan Berry [01:09:35]:
It’s not easy, but you have the capability of drumming up business if you need it or you want it, when you are running a business there.

Kiera Hamilton [01:09:44]:
And the other thing I’ll say is the customer concentration. Right? We have a 4 unit building, 1 tenant isn’t paying. That’s a much higher customer concentration. If I have a wash and fold customer who doesn’t pay me one, they’re like 1 amongst many And 2, I can just not do their laundry again until they pay me. And maybe I’m out like a $100. Right. But it’s a much, much smaller deal than not getting a rent check.

Jordan Berry [01:10:09]:
Yeah. It’s not 25 grand. Although I will say, you know, just for you specifically is I had a condo in the Bay Area on the peninsula, and we bought it for what we thought was an astronomical price of $530,000. 2,008 hit, and it dropped, and we were underwater. And 2 years later, we, we’re relocating back to the promised land down here in Southern California and sold it for what we bought it for, 200 or $530,000. So it bounced back at least a little. And then 2 years later, it was worth 1,200,000. So who knows what that thing is gonna be worth next week for you.

Jordan Berry [01:10:50]:
It could be 700,000. It could be 6,000,000. We just don’t know.

Kiera Hamilton [01:10:55]:
Yeah. And I mean, that’s, that’s the, that’s the positive side of things, right? Is sometimes then the market works in your favor and you’re like, I don’t have to do anything and it’s just worth more. And like I said, there are people who are very successful with real estate. In my experience, I’m I’m buying another business.

Jordan Berry [01:11:12]:
Yeah. That’s that’s great. I mean, and that’s that’s kinda what goes back to, like, what we’re talking about earlier. Right? You, like, gotta do some stuff to find your path. Right? And it you don’t find your path by sitting here and thinking about your path for too long. You gotta do that. You gotta think about it and make good decisions, but you really only find your path after you start walking down it, in in

Kiera Hamilton [01:11:36]:
Absolutely. And, like, I don’t regret buying the property. Right. Because you know, time will tell how this investment turns out to your point 5 years from now, we worth a lot more. Like we were, the plan is to hold it. Right. It was a buy, buy and hold. So I don’t regret it, but I’m just using the information I’ve learned from the experience to guide me in my next step.

Jordan Berry [01:11:58]:
Yeah. That’s great. I mean, that’s a great mindset to have too. And it’s hard it’s hard to have when you’re coming fresh off of a messy eviction, and you’re looking at Zillow, and you’re like, oh, oh, you know, this is not what I was expecting. But kudos to you for having that. I got a couple other questions I wanna ask before we wrap this thing up. Number 1, I just thought, you know, because you did it not that long ago for 1, but also because of your being an SBA loan broker and seeing businesses and talking with people who are buying laundromats and that kind of stuff. Can we just can we talk due diligence a little bit? We’ve talked about how hard that can be.

Jordan Berry [01:12:36]:
But what, what have you learned about due diligence? What tips do you have?

Kiera Hamilton [01:12:41]:
Great question. I love talking about this. So, you know, I talked to a lot of people who who wanna buy Launch Mats and, you know, have 1 on 1 conversations with people, and a lot of people wanna know about my laundromat. And I’m a very open book as you can see. I talk about financials. I talk about operations. So I’m basically, like, ask me anything about my laundromat. And I think it’s, like, a good practice for people who wanna do due diligence to be like, okay, let me practice asking questions to a current laundromat owner.

Kiera Hamilton [01:13:09]:
And I feel like a lot of people overlook some really important things in laundromat due diligence and are are focused on some things that I think are less important. And it was interesting in 2 calls I have this week with people who are interested in LaunchMats. The first question each of them asked me was how many machines do you have?

Jordan Berry [01:13:31]:
I get that so much. I’m like, I don’t even know how many machines I have.

Kiera Hamilton [01:13:35]:
It honestly takes me a second to answer. I’m like, 5, 6, 7, 13. Okay. Yeah. And, you know, I think, like, I’m not saying you shouldn’t know about the machines. If you’re buying a laundromat, you should have an equipment list with each of the machines. You should do due diligence on them. I’m not saying don’t ask about that, but I think there are a lot more important questions to ask than how many machines do you have? I think the 2 biggest areas that I see people overlooking, and I want to say upfront, like, obviously you should look at P and L’s.

Kiera Hamilton [01:14:09]:
Obviously you should verify revenue like that. I feel like goes without being said and not to say there’s not nuance to that, but I think what people are missing is 2 things. And that’s 1, the seller. What is the seller’s vibe? And I know that might seem like a silly thing in the context of a very official business transaction, but I think that it’s really an overlooked component. Because in the due diligence process, if you are working with someone who doesn’t have good intentions, it’s possible they’re going to hide something from you. Right? And either they may be successful in hiding that. You don’t find out until much later or you get a month or 2 into due diligence. You find it out and now you back out of the deal, but you’ve maybe lost out on some due diligence costs.

Kiera Hamilton [01:14:57]:
You’ve lost out on your time. You could have been pursuing another acquisition. Right? And I think that, you know, I’m not saying you need to go out there and do a background check on the seller, but I think like, you know, something I picked up from teaching is I feel like I can get a pretty good read on people. Like, when someone is being transparent, when someone is being forthright with information, when someone is being responsive, I pick up on those things. And I’m like, okay, you seem like you’re a trustworthy person. Right? And if I were buying another laundromat or really any business, if someone was not responsive, if they were not, you know, willing to share information, if they weren’t willing to tell me the problems of their business, those would raise red flags for me. And even if the business looked great on paper, I would really think twice about buying it because you can’t do a good deal with a bad actor, right? There’s only so much you can find out during due diligence. You’re never going to know a 100% what it’s like to run a business until you buy it.

Kiera Hamilton [01:15:58]:
And I think you really need to develop trust and rapport with the seller. So that’s the first thing I think people are overlooking is what is the seller like? What is your relationship with them? The second thing that I think people are overlooking is just the operations of the business. And I think the question really is what are the problems of this specific business and how will I address them And really, how am I going to operate it day to day? A lot of people a lot of people ask me questions about my machines. They ask me questions about my utility bills. And again, I’m not saying don’t ask those questions, but a much better question to ask would be, like, how much capacity do you think your machines have? If you wanted to grow your wash and fold service, is there the space to do that? Right? Is there enough downtime in your machines that you could grow it? Another great question to ask. Tell me 3 problems you’ve dealt with in the last month as an owner. If someone can’t tell you 3 problems they’ve dealt with in their business, they’re they’re lying to you. Every business has problems.

Kiera Hamilton [01:17:08]:
I can think of 5 that I’ve dealt with in the last month. And not that they’re anything like terrible or significant, but it’s like little things come up. And I think people really overlook that. And you know, when I talk to people who want to buy launch mats, I’ll ask, I’ll be like, okay, you have a full time job. What’s your plan for if a problem comes up on a Tuesday and they’ll be like, oh, I’m going to have the employee deal with that. Like, okay, what if your employee can’t fix it? I’m going to have a manager deal with it. And I’m not saying don’t delegate. You have to delegate.

Kiera Hamilton [01:17:39]:
As a business owner, you can’t be doing everything all the time. Right? But I think if you are going into it with this mindset of I’m going to have other people fix my problems, I don’t think that’s the best mindset to have. If you’re buying 1 laundromat, first off, I I think it’s less likely that you’re going to be able to afford a manager. If you have a portfolio, that changes it. Right? But basically having someone, like, on call for all hours that your laundromat is open to deal with problems, if you wanna be a responsive owner, it it’s tough to find the cash flow for a high quality manager. But 2, again, I just think there’s this mindset where if you’re not thinking through like, okay, if an employee calls out on a Tuesday and I’m at work, what’s my plan for how to address that? Like, I think you’re going to run into a lot of problems when you buy it. So seller, you need to consider them their personality, how well you work together and also day to day operations. I think it’s a lot more important to ask questions about that and the problems the current owner has faced then, then the machines, right? How does your pickup and delivery system work? What happens if a driver doesn’t show up? What do you do? You know, how do you train your employees? What are issues that you see customers having and how you, how do you respond to them? Like, how is this specific laundromat? Cause every laundromat is different.

Kiera Hamilton [01:19:01]:
How is this specific laundromat going to fit into your life as it is? Will you need to make any changes in your life? Right? Like I chose to leave my job. I’m really happy with that decision. Some people might choose to keep their job. Great. But you are going to think about like, you know, you said buying laundromat is kind of like having a baby. I don’t have any kids yet, so I can’t personally say, but I have thought that before. Right. I’ve been like, this is great preparation for having a baby because it’s like, okay, who’s gonna watch the laundromat right now? Like, who’s gonna deal with this problem? And so I think you have to recognize, like, it is a significant investment to make.

Kiera Hamilton [01:19:38]:
Your life is going to have to change if you wanna do well at this and just being realistic about what you are and aren’t willing to do.

Jordan Berry [01:19:45]:
Yeah. I I I love that. Yeah. Cracking me up. I was like literally laughing when you were like people ask me how many machines I have and I’m like, people are so obsessed with number of machines. Yeah. People are like, is this good or bad? There’s 42 machines. And I’m like, I actually don’t I don’t even know what size space 42 machines would fit in.

Kiera Hamilton [01:20:06]:
Yeah. It I will I am gonna just hot take the number of machines doesn’t matter. And here’s why I say it doesn’t matter. The revenue matters and the amount the machines are being used matters. If the machines are literally running all day, right, then that tells you your revenue is pretty maxed out unless you raise prices. Right. But you can’t like, grow your wash and fold or add a wash and fold if the machines are maxed out. But it doesn’t really matter, like, the number of machines.

Kiera Hamilton [01:20:36]:
You should understand how often they’re being used generally, and you should understand the revenue. But, yeah, I don’t really understand why people are, so stuck on the number. I think they’ve probably seen some YouTube videos that tell them that’s important.

Jordan Berry [01:20:49]:
Yeah. I, I my camera just shut off. I don’t know, but we’ll keep rolling with it. But I agree. Like, just crack me up that you hear that all the time too. Yeah. I feel like, even though the camera’s out, I feel like we would really be missing out here if we didn’t talk financing, for saying that’s really one of the biggest obstacles to overcome for a lot of people of how do you actually buy these things. So can you talk I mean, you you utilize some private funding, which is great.

Jordan Berry [01:21:22]:
And yeah. I don’t know. Maybe you could share a little bit of your experience about that. What that was like? How that was? But also, obviously, SBA is a is a potential financing tool. So maybe you could talk about SBA in the context of laundromats because there’s some challenges with that as well, but some also great opportunities.

Kiera Hamilton [01:21:41]:
Definitely. So I’ll say, you know, I was in a very privileged position to be able to get a loan from a family member. Not everyone has that opportunity. So I feel very fortunate that the opportunity was available to me. If not, we would have explored SBA. But like I said, I don’t think it would have worked with the particular LaunchMat that we ended up buying. But I will say like, if that is an opportunity available to you, I would definitely explore it and see, you know, who is willing to invest in you out of the people that you know, you can also definitely use an SBA loan to buy a launch, Matt. Like you said, there are some challenges to it.

Kiera Hamilton [01:22:17]:
And I think the number one challenge that I’ve seen is the cash nature of the business, either so much of it is cash that it becomes difficult to verify or owners are under reporting. And that’s an unfortunate reality when owners don’t prepare to sell. So, and, I mean, that can be the case with a lot of small businesses, not just laundromats. Right. But I think those are the issues you run into. And, you know, you mentioned earlier, it can be hard to get, get documents and I’m always surprised because my opinion is if you have signed an NDA, I’ll give you my tax returns. Right? If you wanna redact your social security number or whatever, fine. But I feel like if you sign an NDA, you can you can see everything.

Kiera Hamilton [01:22:57]:
You don’t have to submit an offer before you can see my utility bills and my tax returns. But a lot of brokers and sellers wait until an offer is signed to share some of the most important documents. But if you can get ahold of those tax returns, compare them to the P and L specifically the revenue and the expenses, are they matching up? Right. And if they’re not, that could cause an issue. Now, if they’re a legitimate ad backs, that’s a different story. But like you said, we see some wacky ad backs out there, people who are, you know, brokering loans and selling businesses. So comparing those documents is is important. With an SBA loan, you know, I think something that’s great about it is it can have a very favorable structure.

Kiera Hamilton [01:23:40]:
So you may only need to come in with with 10% cash injection. It does depend on the cash flow. And I do see, you know, a recent change that was made to SBA that a lot of people are excited about is technically you can source the cash injection from a seller note. Right? So you can come in with 0% down. And I see people advertising this on YouTube, but I’ll say in my experience, not every lender is willing to do this. Right. And typically when lenders are doing that, it’s because the buyer has direct industry experience. It’s not a deal they’re going to offer to everyone.

Kiera Hamilton [01:24:14]:
So I just want to set realistic expectations for that. If you don’t have any experience in the industry, it’s more likely you’re going to need to come with 10% down or maybe a 5, 5 split. You come in with 5%, 5% seller note. I think it’s very reasonable to ask for a small seller note in any business acquisition. 5% is pretty common for SBA. You know? Of course, it is possible to get a 100% seller financing, and that’s something else that I see a lot on YouTube. Like, how to buy a laundromat with $0 And are there people who have done it? I’m sure there are people who have done it. Is it the norm? And should you expect that? I don’t know about that.

Kiera Hamilton [01:24:51]:
Typically sellers wanna have some level of cash walking away from the deal, right? They may not, you know, wanna wait 5 to 7 to 10 years to get paid back. So involving some level of seller financing is smart and you can always negotiate for that. But I think it’s reasonable to expect 10% down. Another option that I’ll give though a good, non SBL alternative is a personal unsecured loan. Now these are more expensive. So for example, the lender I work with interest rates are like 9 to 15%, which is more expensive than SBA. SBA, you know, prime plus if it’s a really good deal, maybe 1 more likely prime plus 2 to maybe 3. Right? So it’s more expensive and there is usually a fee after.

Kiera Hamilton [01:25:37]:
But the great thing about these is that, there are lenders who will offer an unrestricted use of funds, meaning you can do whatever you want with the money. And because it’s a personal loan, they’re not looking at the business. They’re looking at your personal income, your expenses, your DTI, your debt to income ratio. Now, what I will say though, is that if you are using a personal loan, because SBA is not a good fit for you, you just need to ask yourself why SBA is not a good fit because let’s say SBA isn’t a good fit because lenders are like, P and L’s don’t match the tax returns. We can’t get comfortable with the revenue right now. If that’s the case, I wouldn’t recommend just rushing and being like, great. I’m just gonna get a personal loan because I wanna get the deal done. Right? Like you need to find a way to get comfortable with that revenue yourself.

Kiera Hamilton [01:26:25]:
But let’s say, I don’t know. Let’s say like you’ve got a family friend who’s selling a laundromat. And for some reason it doesn’t appeal to SBA lenders, but you’re like, I can get behind this. I trust this person. I’ve been able to verify the revenue, but there’s some reason it doesn’t work for SBA. And I’m okay with that reason. Then I think a personal loan could be a good way to circumvent that because they’re not going to look at the business financials. Right? So whatever concern an SBA lender has isn’t necessarily going to apply if it’s specifically about the business.

Kiera Hamilton [01:26:57]:
Now you do need to have the debt to income ratio to make that work and you shouldn’t ignore what SBA lenders are telling you. If they have concerns, you should think about that and be like, okay, this is what they’re telling me. Can I get comfortable with that problem? And if you can, then that’s a good option. You can also do 401 ks rollovers. To be honest, I don’t really do those as much. I work with, an organization that does, but you can take retirement funds and, and use them to buy business. So yeah, those are a few of the financing options.

Jordan Berry [01:27:28]:
Yeah. And, and so thank you for sharing all that. I mean, that’s already like a lot of tools in the tool belt to help people buy, but really you’re only limited by your own drive and your own creativity when it comes to financing any any business or any investment, really. There like I said earlier, there’s a lot of money out. Like, it’s crazy how much money is out there. Go go on here. I did this the other day just randomly. I was on Zillow.

Jordan Berry [01:27:57]:
I’m always, like, looking for I don’t know. I don’t even know what I’m looking for. But anyways, I was on there and I was like, I wonder how many $10,000,000 plus houses are in a state like Arkansas. And there’s a lot of $10,000,000 houses in Arkansas. And you don’t think of that in Arkansas. The just shows you like there’s so much money out there. And a lot of times people are just looking for places to put it to generate a return, a pretty safe return at that. And you can find that money if you are driven even if, you know, even if for whatever reason you can’t qualify for an SBA loan or whatever.

Jordan Berry [01:28:36]:
But I love your caveat of, like, if a lender is telling you no, take that seriously. It doesn’t mean the lender is always right. And I found that lenders tend to be very conservative, a lot of times, which is not a bad thing. And they’re just protecting their assets, and you need to protect your assets too. But but that doesn’t mean they’re always right. Right? So if you hit a brick wall one way, it doesn’t mean stop. It means overcome the obstacle if there’s an opportunity there to do so.

Kiera Hamilton [01:29:10]:
Yeah. Absolutely.

Jordan Berry [01:29:11]:
So,

Jordan Berry [01:29:13]:
Kira, this has been awesome. I wanna, first of all, thank you again for coming on and making time. And even, you know, after you hit your obstacle of the employee calling out and having to reschedule, overcoming that obstacle and being here today and sharing, so much there. I wanna give you an opportunity though one more time to, number 1, let people know how they can connect with you, whether they wanna talk shop with you, talk laundromats with you. They just wanna kinda network with you, or if they’re looking for SBA options, they need to talk to somebody who’s knowledgeable about SBA and laundromats. What’s the best way they can get in touch with you?

Kiera Hamilton [01:29:53]:
Yeah. Absolutely. Well, first off, Jordan, I wanna say just thank you so much for having me on. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. And, you know, one of the reasons I started creating content recently and going on podcasts like this is I really want more people to see business acquisition as a possibility for them. Not to say that it is what everyone should do with their life. Right? It’s not the best fit for everyone, but as someone who never thought I was going to own a business, right? Thought I was going to be a high school English teacher for forever. I am living such an unexpected and wonderful life and I want to show other people what possibilities there are.

Kiera Hamilton [01:30:27]:
Not to say that it’s easy. I am not one of those people you will find on YouTube talking about passive income and buying launch mat for $0 right? Like there are obstacles, it’s challenging, but I want to show people how to get through those obstacles and realistic ways that you can move in this world. So I really appreciate having the platform to educate people and share my experience. And if I can be helpful to anyone in any way, I definitely want to do that. Especially people who are making a career change or who don’t come from a business background, don’t see themselves as business people. I’ve I’ve really had a whole journey with that myself. And if you’d like to connect with me, LinkedIn is a great way to do it. Kira Hamilton.

Kiera Hamilton [01:31:06]:
Kira spelled keira or YouTube, Kira_hamilton. I’ve got a 3 part series on YouTube on how to buy a business, and it is directed towards people who have not owned a business before, maybe who have never thought about buying a business. So it’s really an introductory course. I’ve also got some more laundromat content on there. And like you mentioned, I also broker SBA loans and something that people don’t know about SBA loan brokering. This might not be the case for all SBA lenders. Sorry, all SBA brokers. But basically how it works is I work with people who are looking to buy a business and I connect them with a variety of lenders.

Kiera Hamilton [01:31:41]:
So I have a wide network of SBA lenders, but the cool news for my clients is that I’m paid directly by lenders at close. So there’s actually no fee to a client to utilize my services is essentially free services to get your SBA deal shopped around and to find the best option for you. I love working with people for whom it’s their first time buying a business, people from unconventional backgrounds. So if you’re listening and you’re interested in buying a business, definitely reach out. LinkedIn is a great way to find me.

Jordan Berry [01:32:12]:
And real quick one last time. Yeah. Go, go subscribe to your YouTube for 1 and go connect with her on LinkedIn. But last time, what is the name of the podcast that you got out there?

Kiera Hamilton [01:32:24]:
Yes. So you wanna buy a business? You can find it on my YouTube channel and on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. It focuses on the ETA journey, entrepreneurship through acquisition. So people who have bought businesses or people involved in the business buying process.

Jordan Berry [01:32:39]:
Awesome. Alright. Go check out Kiera and all of her stuff. She is rocking it over there. And, Kiera, thank you again for coming on. And thank you for being so open and transparent with, your journey and your story and your numbers and all of the above in your in your experience, in this business. I appreciate it a lot. I know a ton of people are gonna, love this episode and and love hearing from you and wanna connect with you.

Jordan Berry [01:33:04]:
So hopefully, you don’t get too bombarded, by fans. But I appreciate you coming on. Thanks so much.

Kiera Hamilton [01:33:11]:
Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. This is great. Alright.

Jordan Berry [01:33:13]:
I hope you love you know, I don’t even hope. I know you loved that interview with Kiera. She is great. She brought she brought just so

Jordan Berry [01:33:20]:
much good stuff, today.

Jordan Berry [01:33:22]:
Like I said, instant classic, episode right there. So that your challenge for today is to pick something from this episode and put it into practice. Now I’m gonna be honest with you. There was so much good stuff in there. It’s gonna be tough to pick one thing. If you can do more than one thing, do more than one thing. But one is the standard, the minimum, the bare minimum. Do one thing this week.

Jordan Berry [01:33:48]:
Put it into action. That’s gonna help you propel you towards your goals. So huge shout out and thank you to Kiera for coming on the show, sharing so much good stuff, helping us all out in our next phase of wherever we’re at in our journey in life here. And, hey, check out the news episode coming out on Friday and every Friday is brand new. We’ve just launched our last one this last fry our first one this last Friday, and, those are ongoing. And, also, if you’re listening to this and you have some news, that’s relevant to this industry, whether you are a vendor or an owner. Hey, send me an email news at laundromat resource.com, and we will get that featured in the news episode. All right.

Jordan Berry [01:34:33]:
Alright.

Jordan Berry [01:34:34]:
We’ll see you next week. Actually, we’ll see

Jordan Berry [01:34:35]:
you on Friday before next week, for the news episode. Peace.