This is a sponsored post by Cents. Find out what Cents can do for your laundry business here. All reviews and opinions expressed in this post are based on my personal view.
Starting a laundry pick-up and delivery business can feel overwhelming. Whether you currently own a laundromat or not, the idea of buying a van, hiring drivers, managing routes, maintaining margins, finding customers, and all of the other things involved in starting a laundry pick-up and delivery business can feel overwhelming. It’s a lot to take in.
What if there was an easier way to get started that would allow you to scale up your business without venturing into the unknown too soon? There is! And I’m going to tell you how you can do it right now!
Starting a laundry pick-up and delivery business doesn’t have to be difficult. New technology in the laundry industry allows you to partner with 3rd party service providers, such as DoorDash, to allow you to offer laundry pick-up and delivery without having to manage the logistics side of the business. Utilizing this technology can allow you to focus on laundry, what you do best, and let someone else worry about the logistics.
Starting a Laundry Pick-up and Delivery Service
The video below is a webinar I hosted with panelists who utilize DoorDash to help them run their laundry pick-up and delivery service, as well as Alex Jekowsky, the CEO of Cents, a company dedicated to helping laundromat owners grow their businesses and who brought the integration with DoorDash to the laundromat industry.
Challenges of Starting a Pick-up & Delivery Business
One of the benefits of owning laundromats is that they are simple businesses. Customers pay you, the owner, to use your equipment to do their own laundry. Adding a drop-off service to your laundromat adds another component to your business that needs to be systematized and managed, but it remains a relatively simple business still.
However, once you add a pick-up and delivery service to your laundromat business, you are adding multiple layers of complexity to both your systems and your management needs. Laundry pick-up and delivery really is like a separate business from a self-service laundromat, only they utilize the same assets. Laundry pick-up and delivery is typically a logistics company.
The logistics side of the business is what prevents a lot of laundromat owners from offering a pick-up and delivery service, even if they already offer a laundry drop-off service. Purchasing vehicles, hiring drivers, coordinating driver routes, and more demand time, effort, and investment that many laundromat owners simply can’t, or don’t want to, invest.
Simplifying Laundry Pick-up and Delivery
What if there was a way to expand your laundromat’s radius of influence and offer pick-up and delivery service to potential customers without the time, effort, and investment of building out the logistics side of your business? What if you could operate your laundry pick-up and delivery service exactly the same as your drop-off service? You’ve probably guessed by now that you can do exactly that. But the question is, how?
Cents, a leading laundromat software solution, just announced a native integration with DoorDash, along with their other partners, to be able to offer on-demand laundry pick-up and delivery through existing logistics companies such as DoorDash. This will allow customers to schedule a pick-up and delivery through DoorDash and DoorDash will take responsibility for dropping off customers’ dirty laundry with you and delivering it back to the customer once you’ve cleaned it. It can function similarly to any other laundry drop-off customer.
This integration removes the responsibility of the logistics side of the business from your plate and allows a 3rd party logistics company like DoorDash to do what they do best. It also allows you as a laundromat owner to do what you do best.
Now laundromat owners can significantly expand their radius of potential business through the pick-up and delivery of both commercial and residential clients without the upfront investment needed to start a pick-up and delivery service. Laundromat owners can use this as their sole pick-up and delivery option, or they can utilize it to help jumpstart their pick-up and delivery business. Cents is able to grow and expand with customers as their business grows and evolves.
Scaling Your Laundry Pick-up and Delivery
Another option for owners who have an established pick-up and delivery business, or who utilize the gig economy integration of Cents to grow a substantial pick-up and delivery business, is to utilize gig workers to expand into new territories and gather data on the viability of new geographies.
Expanding a pick-up and delivery service to a new zip code can be difficult since you may not initially have enough business to justify the costs of sending drivers to that area. However, utilizing services such as DoorDash can allow you to explore the potential of different areas without the capital investment upfront to service that area in-house. It can also let you build up a customer base that can eventually support an in-house route to that area.
Flexibility in Utilization
As you can see, having the option to use only gig workers, using both gig workers and in-house drivers, and using only in-house drivers to build a laundry pick-up and delivery business are all options available to Cents clients. And the ways to utilize 3rd party logistics companies with your pick-up and delivery business are only limited by your business imagination.
If you’re looking into starting a laundry pick-up and delivery business and want to try the easy way before making a big investment into that part of your business, try Cents and see how they can help you with your business.
