Tripling Your Laundromat Business in 2 Years with Nick and Sarah Macken

Jordan Berry [00:00:00]:
Hey. What’s up, guys? It’s Jordan with the Laundromat Resource Podcast. This is show one eighty nine, and I am pumped you’re here today because listen, if you wanna learn how to triple your laundromat business, this is the episode for you. Nick and Sarah Mackin are spilling all their secrets on how they did exactly that. And in fact, I’m so excited about it. We’re gonna jump right into it with Nick and Sarah right now. Nick and Sarah, how are you guys doing today?

Nick & Sarah [00:00:28]:
Good. How are you doing? I

Jordan Berry [00:00:30]:
just live in the dream over here. Living the dream. You know, I’m not in my man cave. Like, it looks like you guys are in the man cave over there.

Jordan Berry [00:00:39]:
Yeah. But,

Jordan Berry [00:00:39]:
you know, otherwise, I’m good. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:00:42]:
How are

Jordan Berry [00:00:42]:
you guys doing?

Nick & Sarah [00:00:44]:
Good, man. It’s a beautiful day here in South Carolina. Sunny and 70.

Sarah Mackin [00:00:49]:
Finally, awesome. Good weather now. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:00:51]:
Yeah. Started to warm up a little bit. I don’t know, man. I don’t know how it was for you guys, but I’ve I’ve been watching, you know, the weather just kind of across the country all winter, and it’s been looking like it’s been freezing everywhere. Mhmm.

Jordan Berry [00:01:02]:
So

Jordan Berry [00:01:02]:
I don’t know if you guys caught that too or if you guys are south enough to Yeah.

Nick & Sarah [00:01:06]:
We had a nice little break. Like, two weeks ago, it hit 81 of the days and got shorts on, sweating again. But

Sarah Mackin [00:01:13]:
We did get our snow, but luckily, it melts by 11AM, so we’re good to go after that.

Jordan Berry [00:01:17]:
Okay.

Sarah Mackin [00:01:17]:
Okay. Tumbling required. No.

Jordan Berry [00:01:19]:
Just enough time so the kids can’t make it to school and everybody can stay home.

Sarah Mackin [00:01:23]:
It might be windy that day, so you gotta cancel school.

Nick & Sarah [00:01:26]:
So we’re doing transplants too, so we’re not used to them canceling school for flurries like that. Yeah. No.

Jordan Berry [00:01:34]:
Yeah. Just transplants from where, out of curiosity?

Nick & Sarah [00:01:37]:
New Jersey. Okay.

Jordan Berry [00:01:39]:
Okay.

Sarah Mackin [00:01:39]:
South Jersey. Just to clarify.

Jordan Berry [00:01:41]:
Okay. Oh, oh,

Sarah Mackin [00:01:44]:
oh, oh.

Jordan Berry [00:01:45]:
I love it. The Jersey war. Well, hey,

Jordan Berry [00:01:47]:
super excited to chat

Jordan Berry [00:01:48]:
with you guys today. Thank you for taking some time to come on. Share your experience, share your wisdom with us. Why don’t you give us a little background on who you guys are, and then we’ll jump into how you got into this business.

Sarah Mackin [00:01:58]:
Okay. I think I’ll start off. So I actually am in the insurance industry. I’m an insurance broker on the commercial side. So I, have my business management degree, went to Rutgers University, in New Jersey, and I manage a large book of business in the real estate niche. And we were really looking into I’m sure Nick will get there and dig into it further, but we were looking into just different streams of revenue. We were originally going down the real estate path, rental properties. We’re both pretty handy, mostly him.

Sarah Mackin [00:02:35]:
Started that off. We both grew up with that. Our families are very handy. We renovated our first house, full gut job, and went from there. It’s something we enjoy and like to be a little creative, but I’m not gonna take the credit away from him. He does

Nick & Sarah [00:02:48]:
most of it. Yeah. So I’m Nick Mackin, and, I’m a firefighter for, shout out to the Hermo Fire District, greatest fire district in the Old Midlands of South Carolina. I did that for a while as a volunteer in Jersey and I worked for the utility company, last ten years before we moved and worked on the gas and electric side there. And, like Sarah said, Handy did a lot of our own stuff and houses we’ve owned and help other people and things like that. But, you know, just general blue collar work is what I’ve done most of my life. So I don’t have the the cool credentials like this one has.

Sarah Mackin [00:03:28]:
Good.

Jordan Berry [00:03:31]:
As somebody’s gotta somebody’s gotta carry the heavy loads, and then somebody’s gotta carry the heavy load, you know, in the mind. That’s right.

Sarah Mackin [00:03:38]:
You know? That’s how it works out. We balance each other out in that.

Jordan Berry [00:03:40]:
That’s right.

Nick & Sarah [00:03:41]:
You can yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:03:41]:
Yeah. Yep. That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. You think of hard work to do, and then, Nick, you

Sarah Mackin [00:03:47]:
He does. Go and do the hard work.

Jordan Berry [00:03:48]:
Yeah. This is this is great. I like this setup already.

Nick & Sarah [00:03:51]:
Nick with the puck. It’s kinda That’s right. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:03:56]:
Exactly. Awesome. So, I mean, it sounds like you do some stuff with real estate, and, you know, all that. But how why laundromats? I mean, I sound like you’re looking for cash flow opportunities and stuff, but how’d you land on laundromats?

Nick & Sarah [00:04:09]:
So we’ve always talked about so I’m I’m, like, in the stars dreamer kind of thing a lot of times. So when since I was a kid, I’ve always said like, oh, man. I wanna run that. Or we go somewhere on vacation. We’d see this business somewhere. I’d be like, man. We should put that in our hometown. And, so we’ve always just wanted to we we thought we’d do rentals for a while.

Nick & Sarah [00:04:28]:
It’s like we’ll get a duplex or get a house and we’ll rent it out. And that was the plan for a little while. And then, we both liked to listen to podcasts. So we were listening to one one day in the car and they were talking about, I think it was Cody. It was Bigger Pockets, I think. Right?

Sarah Mackin [00:04:44]:
Yep. It was.

Nick & Sarah [00:04:44]:
And they were doing Cody Sanchez, and I forget the guy’s name. So she was talking about acquiring small businesses versus rentals. And they kinda went back and forth with that stuff, and we had never thought about buying a business. Mhmm. We had thought of that because in in my mind, you need a million dollars. Oh, you’re gonna buy a business. You need a lot of cash or whatever. And we just figured rentals was more achievable for us.

Nick & Sarah [00:05:08]:
So as they went back and forth with it, it just seemed like a possibility. And then, you know, of course she hit on laundromats at one point, which I never thought of. I used them a handful of times growing up when the washer would go out or something. But it I mean, like everyone catches you with passive income.

Jordan Berry [00:05:28]:
Right?

Sarah Mackin [00:05:29]:
Which I ask because they’re now, of course, everyone in the industry knows it’s not passive. So It

Nick & Sarah [00:05:33]:
makes money while you’re sleeping. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:05:36]:
Boring business. Yeah. Passive income. You’re like, wait. Yeah. I wasn’t bored. Like Yeah. I don’t I remember ever being bored.

Sarah Mackin [00:05:43]:
No. We like to call it flexible income. Yeah.

Nick & Sarah [00:05:47]:
But, so we we kinda hit on that, and then we started looking into laundromat stuff. And I think I found like a little book I bought on Amazon about it and then searched podcasts one day and found your podcast. And that kinda started the whole thing really is digging into the industry. So

Sarah Mackin [00:06:08]:
Mhmm.

Nick & Sarah [00:06:08]:
And then we started this by selling, looking up stuff. This was while we’re in in Jersey. We started looking for laundromats up there in our area. And that’s kind of the road started that way.

Sarah Mackin [00:06:20]:
Yeah. I I guess it overall is probably two years of researching. If you get to know us, we both research a lot, especially this one to the umpteenth degree.

Nick & Sarah [00:06:29]:
He was yeah. We called him about machines.

Jordan Berry [00:06:32]:
Oh, yeah. We we’ve yeah. We’ve, we’ve been through that. Yeah. I love it.

Sarah Mackin [00:06:36]:
Yeah. So, I mean, it’s a it’s a good thing. It’s a good thing. So you know what you’re getting into and are prepared as much as you can be anyway. Yeah. So, yeah, we really just went from there. And once we moved to South Carolina, got settled a little bit, continued our search down here, and Nick really hit the ground running. I’ll put that on him.

Sarah Mackin [00:06:55]:
Did the in person visit, sat and washed loads of laundry there, took notes, made contacts, and a lot of networking. He’s mister social butterfly, so he could talk the pain off a wall.

Nick & Sarah [00:07:09]:
Yeah. So we started out, we would take, just went on Google Maps and I found, like, 30 laundromats within, I don’t know, maybe 20 miles of where we live. Thirty to forty minute travel was the most we were gonna do. And, made letters, just like everything, like, off one of my resource. Like, get it make the letter, edited that, put a little flare on it. Like, hey, you know, we’re family. I’m a fireman. We have kids.

Nick & Sarah [00:07:38]:
We’re looking to buy a business. Blah blah blah. And, I have a bunch of letters. I go to laundromats, try to talk to an owner. Ninety percent of the time, there’s no one to talk to there or a number to get contact with people. Pet peeve of mine. Put I I don’t understand not putting any information up to talk to people. If someone has a problem, they should be able to get a hold of the attendant, the owner, someone.

Nick & Sarah [00:08:05]:
Have I think I don’t know if it’s a pride thing with people or you’re not proud of what your store, but put a number up, take a phone call. That’s that’s all people want is a little little bit of talking. But we did that. Sorry. I went off on a test today with that. But, But, gave out letters, talked to a couple people. Some people just said, no. They’re not interested in selling them.

Nick & Sarah [00:08:26]:
And fine. We don’t I don’t badger them. And but I ended up running to an owner who was selling. He had two stores and he was selling, one at the time was gonna sell the other one down the road. And, the price he was talking about was out of our range. But he did hook me up with Bill Gilbert, who’s the distributor for, Dexter in our state. They just recently sold to Southeastern Laundry. But when Bill had a distributorship, it was SLM.

Nick & Sarah [00:08:55]:
So he made an introduction and got talking with Bill, and Bill kind of became a mentor for us.

Sarah Mackin [00:09:01]:
Not kind of. He definitely did.

Nick & Sarah [00:09:03]:
Yeah. I shouldn’t say that. He’s not and gave us so much like information. Helped us walk us through things and, so that’s how we got into that. And, we ended up actually the store we ended up buying I went into one of their stores to do laundry. We ended up seeing on BizBuySell. We didn’t know it was for sale because we couldn’t get in contact with anyone there. But that’s how we found it and then reached out to them through that Mhmm.

Nick & Sarah [00:09:30]:
Their broker. Yep.

Jordan Berry [00:09:32]:
Awesome. Okay. So, I mean, listen, you guys, I love this. Number one, I mean, you did a lot of good research looking around. Was the, was the relocation to South Carolina? Was that planned or was that something that because it sound like you were looking in Jersey?

Nick & Sarah [00:09:49]:
Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:09:50]:
And I’m like, Oh, what happens if you would have found one up there? Does that, you know what? Yeah. And so was that a plan relocation or was that just something that kind of came up and then you guys relocated?

Nick & Sarah [00:10:00]:
Yeah, it was. I would say it was. It was not like a long term

Sarah Mackin [00:10:04]:
plan thing. It was like a month’s

Nick & Sarah [00:10:06]:
worth of a plan.

Jordan Berry [00:10:07]:
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That counts

Sarah Mackin [00:10:08]:
in my book. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:10:09]:
Yeah. That might be a long term

Nick & Sarah [00:10:11]:
for me. I don’t know. But that took place. It was all during the pandemic. So a lot of people left the Northeast during the pandemic. So I always called like, we run through a lot of people down here from New Jersey, New York, Connecticut. And I always joke about, like, it it was the great escape from the Northeast, you know, in that time. But

Sarah Mackin [00:10:29]:
And to add to that too, we’ve always loved the South. We’ve wanted to live in the South.

Nick & Sarah [00:10:33]:
We vacationed down here. Mhmm.

Sarah Mackin [00:10:35]:
And, of course, obviously, COVID had terrible things that happened occurred, but the positive, it didn’t my job went remote, stayed remote. So it did give me that opportunity to then begin exploring other ideas of actually moving south like we wanted to and alleviate that hiccup of having to find a new job.

Jordan Berry [00:10:56]:
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you guys relocated and then kinda hit the ground running. What was the timeline like from, like, when you when you relocated and settled and started looking to when you actually got your laundromat?

Sarah Mackin [00:11:12]:
All within the first year. So we moved here in January and then the back of a year of that year. And by the following February, we closed, but we started our due diligence process in November. Okay.

Nick & Sarah [00:11:27]:
Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:11:28]:
Right over the holidays.

Sarah Mackin [00:11:29]:
Yeah. That’s how you

Jordan Berry [00:11:30]:
guys want to celebrate.

Sarah Mackin [00:11:31]:
Y’all just kept going. We were doing

Nick & Sarah [00:11:32]:
a coin collections in December. Yes.

Jordan Berry [00:11:34]:
Yeah.

Nick & Sarah [00:11:35]:
Yeah. And we

Sarah Mackin [00:11:37]:
have two little ones. So mix Christmas and that the holiday chaos with that. There you go.

Jordan Berry [00:11:43]:
Everybody’s getting quarters in their stockings this year and dryer sheets. Okay, awesome. So you said you found this one that you ended up getting on a biz buy sell or one of the business sites that you said?

Nick & Sarah [00:11:57]:
Yeah. I think it was biz buy sell. They had it listed there through a broker and they actually had two stores. They were selling both or three oh, yeah. Well, it’s two or three. Two. It was a dry cleaner with a laundromat. They had a separate laundromat and then they had a drop off location in the town we live at for, dry cleaning.

Jordan Berry [00:12:16]:
Okay.

Nick & Sarah [00:12:17]:
So they were trying to sell the whole thing and it had been up for a little while. But we put a bid in like on a whim. We couldn’t afford the whole thing, but we asked them if they’d carve off the standalone, laundromat.

Sarah Mackin [00:12:30]:
And the reason that was more appealing to me, my business brain came in, of course, that we actually were lucky to purchase the property and not just lease location. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:12:38]:
Nice. Yeah.

Nick & Sarah [00:12:39]:
Because the other one’s in a strip center where the dry cleaner and laundromat is, so there’s a lease involved and stuff there. Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. So the real estate is

Jordan Berry [00:12:46]:
huge. Mhmm. Yeah. You just bypass that. Is it like a stand alone building?

Sarah Mackin [00:12:50]:
It is. Yep. And it’s one block off Main Drag of a really cute downtown and less than a mile is the college on the same street.

Jordan Berry [00:13:00]:
Nice. Okay. Well, I mean, what kind of, well, okay. I wanna go back and talk about due diligence here in a second. But what kinda what kinda condition was this in? Was this like a good performing laundromat and the real like, the building was in good shape, or did you have to do work on it? Or what? How how was it when you went to buy it?

Sarah Mackin [00:13:22]:
So the building itself was in good shape. We went through the umpteenth degree of inspections as even had all the lines scoped just to make sure if there’s gonna be any hassle down the

Nick & Sarah [00:13:32]:
road. Smart.

Sarah Mackin [00:13:33]:
Especially because where we’re at is, an older town, a lot of historical things. So we wanted to make sure we were aware of all the infrastructure that we needed to know in case something up down the road were to pop up. We at least knew what kind of piping and things like that were going to be going on and size wise as well of the drainage. So the building was in great shape. I’ll let you dig into the rest.

Nick & Sarah [00:13:57]:
So, like, so the building

Jordan Berry [00:13:59]:
The dirty work. The heavy lifting’s coming. Yeah.

Nick & Sarah [00:14:02]:
So the building is 2,400 square feet, but they had it divided in in half because back in the day when, the guy who bought it from John, his father had started the dry cleaner and stuff like that there. Okay. We had it was a it’s a storefront glass front building. It’s like a rectangle. It goes back deep. So they had it kind of divided into three sections. They had the wind the glass front was where you drop counter come drop your clothes off. Behind that was a wall.

Nick & Sarah [00:14:29]:
The wall was where they stored racks of clothes. And then eventually they put another wall in behind that and decided that they put laundry equipment back there to do something with the rest of the building. So from from the street side, when when we looked at buying the building, they had just put junk in the front because they stopped doing the drop off there. There’s junk. There’s a motorcycle, there’s a bed frame, there was a dresser. So when you look at it from the front, just look kind of like a closed building. But if you drove into the parking lot on the side of the building, you could see there was another entrance and it said cool laundry above it.

Sarah Mackin [00:15:06]:
Where that yeah. The actual entrance to the laundromat is actually on the side left hand side of the building. So you don’t even know that there is another entrance. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:15:15]:
Okay. Did you get to keep the motorcycle?

Sarah Mackin [00:15:17]:
No. We did ask, but no.

Nick & Sarah [00:15:20]:
All right. Nothing already

Jordan Berry [00:15:21]:
got excited. Laundromat and a motorcycle like,

Nick & Sarah [00:15:24]:
oh, yeah. Giant safe. It

Sarah Mackin [00:15:25]:
doesn’t come safe. Yeah.

Nick & Sarah [00:15:26]:
Giant old bank safe that we had to roll out on steel tubes and everything to get it out. Oh, jeez. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think when it

Jordan Berry [00:15:34]:
Sounds like a sounds like one of those old Milner washers. I tried getting those suckers out, and those things are like,

Nick & Sarah [00:15:41]:
There was doubt. We weren’t gonna get it out, and we were like, I

Sarah Mackin [00:15:45]:
We’re gonna deck turn it

Jordan Berry [00:15:46]:
into some type

Sarah Mackin [00:15:46]:
of round it.

Jordan Berry [00:15:47]:
Or put a plant on top of it.

Nick & Sarah [00:15:49]:
That was honestly the plan at one point because we tried for a while to get it up, and then, we found some guys who are willing to move it and take it and they had a whole system to get it off the ground just enough to start moving it.

Sarah Mackin [00:16:03]:
And you actually could no longer get it open. So we told them whatever’s inside of it, you can have it.

Nick & Sarah [00:16:07]:
Yeah. That was part of the thing. If you mind I don’t know. Maybe there’s thousands of dollars in it. I don’t know. I’m pretty sure there’s not, but that was the thing. If you find something, it’s yours. Yeah.

Nick & Sarah [00:16:17]:
Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:16:17]:
They probably made, like, a YouTube I’ve seen some, like, YouTube videos where they’re, like, cracking safes and what’s inside?

Nick & Sarah [00:16:23]:
Yeah. I think I’m pretty sure they told me when I took it to the junkyard, it was like 2,200 pounds or something. Oh, there’s quite a bit.

Jordan Berry [00:16:32]:
Yeah. But big, big, big boy. What what what kinda condition were the machines in that were in there? Are they were they older? Were they newer?

Nick & Sarah [00:16:43]:
Yeah. So they were all deck it’s all it was an old Dexter store, and they, they were 16 years old at the time. They were 18? No. They’re eight. I thought they’re 18 when we got rid of them. Maybe 18 years old then at the time. They weren’t in terrible people.

Jordan Berry [00:16:58]:
I believe Sarah. I just wanna

Sarah Mackin [00:17:00]:
I’m gonna She’s a

Nick & Sarah [00:17:01]:
better person. She’s a better member than I do.

Jordan Berry [00:17:03]:
You’re the muscle, man. I Yeah. I gotta go with the brain on this one.

Sarah Mackin [00:17:07]:
Yeah. See how he knows how this duo works. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:17:09]:
That’s right.

Nick & Sarah [00:17:10]:
I give, like, one one little bit of pushback on my arm. She’s like, okay. Yeah. But, yeah. So 18 years old. They weren’t in terrible condition. There were quite a few that were out of service. But, like, if you look past, like, the dirt and some things like that, like, it it wasn’t bad.

Nick & Sarah [00:17:28]:
It wasn’t terrible. It was definitely like a zombie mat, but not I don’t know. It’s not one of the worst zombie mats I’ve ever been in. But it definitely needed work.

Sarah Mackin [00:17:35]:
TLC. That’s what it is. Some TLC, a few parts, clean it up real nice. For a little while there, people thought they were brand new machines because we had them shining and running well.

Jordan Berry [00:17:46]:
Yeah. That’s how you know it’s real bad is when you just clean the 18 year old machines and people are like, are these brand new? And you’re

Sarah Mackin [00:17:54]:
old. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:17:55]:
Your grandma probably used them.

Nick & Sarah [00:17:58]:
And we had to get in our part of the contract from due diligence was they had to have everything up and running, and it had to last for two weeks after we signed and took over. Mhmm.

Jordan Berry [00:18:08]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s pretty that’s pretty common. That’s a good contingency to have in there if you’re looking to buy, you know, a store. Just having those machines up and then having some sort of, you know, timeline on the back end, too. Because I’ve definitely seen owners or sellers, like, do some janky things to, like, make them run until that store closes. And then once it closes, they just kind of crumble.

Jordan Berry [00:18:33]:
So that’s good. Did you did you keep the store? I’d still wanna go back to due diligence. Don’t worry. But did you keep the store divided up how it was, or did you open it up? Or, like, what are you doing with that space that?

Sarah Mackin [00:18:49]:
So we’re actually

Jordan Berry [00:18:49]:
motorcycle garage.

Sarah Mackin [00:18:51]:
Motorcycle is our main piece. No. Yeah. We’re actually

Jordan Berry [00:18:56]:
Free rides for the kids.

Jordan Berry [00:18:57]:
It is. Motorcycle. Yeah.

Sarah Mackin [00:19:00]:
In our children’s area.

Nick & Sarah [00:19:01]:
Yeah.

Sarah Mackin [00:19:02]:
We’re actually coming up on our two year anniversary, and we’ve done it in stages. So if you wanted

Nick & Sarah [00:19:08]:
Yeah. So the first year, it was still divided. And I started we just demoed that whole other side. Took everything out, gutted the whole thing, the flooring. And then once we got that stuff out, we started drawing up plans for what it would look like when we’d open the whole thing up. I built an office out with a new storage and cleaning area and, went from there. And then when we had the office and stuff done, we had contractors come in and, we ripped the wall out. We closed down for a week and we ripped the dividing wall out, did all new flooring across it, put a drop ceiling in and tied it to the other side’s drop ceiling, and installed new lighting on that side.

Nick & Sarah [00:19:52]:
And,

Sarah Mackin [00:19:53]:
So before that dividing wall came down, it was it was a lot of it was prepped.

Nick & Sarah [00:19:57]:
A

Sarah Mackin [00:19:58]:
lot of electrical work was done. All the demo was done. Half of the drop ceiling was done. We really once that wall came down, it was strictly just tying the two rooms in together, but we had everything prepped and ready to go so that we could be closed for as little amount of time as possible. Yeah.

Nick & Sarah [00:20:13]:
That was a fun time chasing all the electric wires in the ceiling that went to who knows where and

Sarah Mackin [00:20:18]:
Some that did nothing.

Nick & Sarah [00:20:19]:
Stuff that was just up in the ceiling that was hot. You know what I mean? So

Jordan Berry [00:20:22]:
Oh, yeah.

Nick & Sarah [00:20:23]:
Yeah. There’s always a fun time when you’re demoing stuff.

Jordan Berry [00:20:26]:
Yeah. You got hot wires floating around and lint drifting through the store all day every day.

Nick & Sarah [00:20:31]:
That was the other big the amazing amount of lift that was just above the drop ceiling and stuff like that. Crazy. Actually, almost had a a fire in there one time. The fire department got called because it smoked out. They had there was so much lint behind the front of the dryers and in those boxes in the back. Yeah. When he started to smoke, the fire department got caught. Nothing caught on fire, but

Sarah Mackin [00:20:55]:
That was early on.

Nick & Sarah [00:20:56]:
Yeah, that prompted us to then, we called Bill Gilbert. Hey, what’s the maintenance for one of these things? What should we address right now? And it was pop them off and clean those lint boxes out back. And when we did that, I took out, I don’t know, three trash bags worth of lint outside of those machines. And a lot of these, he was already starting to brown where it was getting to the point where it wanted to light off.

Jordan Berry [00:21:17]:
Cash. Yeah.

Nick & Sarah [00:21:18]:
Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:21:19]:
Yeah. I mean, I’m a little disappointed you didn’t just take care of this thing. You know, the fire, the fire thing. This is what you.

Nick & Sarah [00:21:26]:
Yeah. So what you do, man, this

Jordan Berry [00:21:28]:
is what you do

Nick & Sarah [00:21:29]:
with, with my stuff that’s going to catch on fire.

Jordan Berry [00:21:35]:
Yeah. Okay. And when you when you kind of open the stuff up or you’re opening stuff up, are you did you or are you adding like more machines or what are you doing with the space?

Nick & Sarah [00:21:45]:
So initially, we put in Sarah’s big thing was the kids area. That was one of her main objectives was to put a nice spot for the kids.

Sarah Mackin [00:21:51]:
So Well, first before that. So when we first took over before even taking that wall down, the the largest two washers were the 60 pounders at that time. So we they’re obviously the most used. So we quickly installed two more of those. We did have two brand new Dexter’s sixty pounders put in within the first two months of owning. Yeah. And that was just so we could get things moving a little bit more. But as soon as the wall came down, it was really it was so crammed.

Sarah Mackin [00:22:21]:
I wish we had, like, pictures that we could show you.

Nick & Sarah [00:22:23]:
It was just very tiny.

Sarah Mackin [00:22:24]:
There was no seating. Everyone always sat in their cars because there was there was some seating, maybe, like, two smaller benches, but there was really nowhere for anyone to go, especially kids. And then when kids are bored, that’s when you’re gonna lead to accidents and things turning into chaos in your store.

Nick & Sarah [00:22:39]:
Kids walking on top of your machines.

Jordan Berry [00:22:41]:
Mhmm. In the machines.

Sarah Mackin [00:22:43]:
Hit the carts.

Nick & Sarah [00:22:43]:
Got lots

Jordan Berry [00:22:43]:
of things. Carts. Yeah.

Sarah Mackin [00:22:46]:
So anyway, when the wall did eventually come down, that was a big focus was giving everyone more space to move about, giving them that folding space further away from the machine so that flow can continue while everyone is continuing others are folding. And then also adding our children’s area so kids can be a little more occupied while they’re everyone has to do their fun job of laundry.

Nick & Sarah [00:23:11]:
Yeah. The the two textures we put in were the express models and, This

Sarah Mackin [00:23:16]:
is a good learning one.

Nick & Sarah [00:23:17]:
Yeah. This is a good one. Core drill your concrete in your store people to make sure you can support 200 gs high spin hard mount stuff. We found out we couldn’t. So when I’d be demoing the other side and those things would get up to 200 gs’s, you could feel it shake across the store. So

Sarah Mackin [00:23:34]:
We had to turn them down to a hundred.

Nick & Sarah [00:23:36]:
All the way down. So we paid extra for those machines and

Sarah Mackin [00:23:37]:
couldn’t use them. Yeah. To the extra for those machines Mhmm. And couldn’t use them. Yeah. To the full capacity anyway.

Nick & Sarah [00:23:43]:
Yeah. We done we’d incrementally just keep turning them down about 20 g’s. I think that’s what they do. And we ended up just taking them all the way down because the vibration and the noise they make was it was just it was annoying to me. I’m sure it was anointed customers.

Jordan Berry [00:23:57]:
Well, yeah. And it probably would have caused a real big problem down the line.

Nick & Sarah [00:24:00]:
That’s what I was worried about. The actual the rest of the concrete around it and vibrating and cracking and all other things around them.

Jordan Berry [00:24:07]:
Yeah. These are these are just kind of the things that you don’t know if you don’t know. Right?

Nick & Sarah [00:24:15]:
And

Jordan Berry [00:24:16]:
then good.

Nick & Sarah [00:24:17]:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s just you assume you assume, like, they poured concrete. It’s gotta be four, six inches everywhere. Even when we did our retool this year in the last year, we found out it was thinner in spots than than that area was.

Sarah Mackin [00:24:36]:
Which is surprising.

Nick & Sarah [00:24:37]:
Yeah. So you just you never know. So, you know, do your due diligence on that stuff. And, because we had talked to and we’re we’re jumping. I’ll get to that when we talk about the retool. But there’s other lessons even during that to to pass out. But Yeah.

Sarah Mackin [00:24:51]:
And of course, not a deal breaker. Just something to be aware of, especially when you’re gonna be doing remodeling and retools.

Nick & Sarah [00:24:57]:
Yeah. But, what else did we do there? We redid the the bulkhead. We redid that and we put butcher block on for the folding area that was on the backside of the bulkhead before we opened it up. We did some improvements like that and put, our how we call it our house rule sign, which just has, hey, this is what, you know, how you do things here. And then at the bottom has my name, my number, Sarah’s name, and her number. Quite large. And people really appreciated that. And then when people Little things.

Nick & Sarah [00:25:27]:
We’d see them in the store, we always introduce ourselves and I always take them over the side and say, look, this is the sign right here. This is my me, my number. Call my wife if you can’t get a hold of me, but please call us if you ever have a problem.

Sarah Mackin [00:25:39]:
Mhmm. You

Nick & Sarah [00:25:39]:
know, you’re not I always tell people when you come here, you’re not supposed to have an issue. We want you to have good good a good time, should be able to relax, get those clothes clean, and then have a great day.

Sarah Mackin [00:25:49]:
Mhmm. Mhmm. And of course, when we first bought, we did a a refresh, repainted. I know. We brains is escaping. Refinish the changer.

Nick & Sarah [00:26:02]:
Oh, yeah. We had, Like brains. Like a wrap company come out and wrap the it was a standard American, like the blue old school looking change. We had them wrapped Yeah. Like with our design on it. Mhmm. Just something different. Yep.

Nick & Sarah [00:26:12]:
Little things like that.

Sarah Mackin [00:26:13]:
Little touches that people actually you know, a lot people pick up on everything. I don’t we don’t like to dismiss, like, oh, no one’s gonna notice. They don’t care. Every little detail that we have changed over the two years, everyone has noticed it. And they all come out people will always come up and tell us they appreciate that we care and are making an effort and constantly trying to give them a nice space. Mhmm.

Jordan Berry [00:26:35]:
Yeah. That’s huge. And it’s true. And, you know, in one of the things that we do, with, you know, like our clients and stuff is we do what we call an outside eyes audit, where we, you know, have people come in who aren’t our normal customers and aren’t us and somebody that we can trust are gonna tell us like it is. Right? Because sometimes we just we don’t notice those little details anymore because we see them every day. They don’t really bother us or, you know, we’re not using the space like customers are using the space. Right. So getting that feedback from customers or doing something like an outside eyes audit, you know, is huge, to to illuminate some of these, like, little details that you wouldn’t notice and and you maybe you don’t even think matter that much, but like you said, people notice.

Jordan Berry [00:27:25]:
Yeah.

Sarah Mackin [00:27:26]:
So two points to that, actually. So even as we’ve taken pictures over the since we purchased the laundromat, you notice things in pictures a lot more than you do in person because you’re used to seeing it every day. Then when you see a space in the picture, like, oh, we didn’t finish that.

Nick & Sarah [00:27:42]:
Mhmm.

Sarah Mackin [00:27:43]:
Another thing that we did during due diligence because we’re already under contract, we were gonna close in a couple weeks, Actually, went in there and well, he did and asked the customers, the existing customers, what they would like to see or what they would like changed here. What would make their experience better? And we had our own laundry list, went through things that we saw, and then we still got more feedback from them on top of it, and it was great.

Nick & Sarah [00:28:07]:
Yeah. And I wanna say everything on that list, I think we actually ended up doing. Mhmm. It was more cards. It’s too dark outside at night. Cameras. Cameras, the folding tables. So it was a, I have the list somewhere.

Nick & Sarah [00:28:20]:
I have a book from when I used to go out and when I scout. I take this one book and I have all the notes in it. And I think Teresa, right? Yep. She’s still customers of our there now. We talked to her quite a bit and but yeah. Stuff we had written down and then we asked customers the same thing.

Sarah Mackin [00:28:35]:
And it’s interesting too because the woman he brings up, Teresa, she’s actually a business owner herself. Mhmm. So it’s she had that her whole family runs their own businesses, a different type, different industry niche. So it’s fun just having those conversations too, because she’s like, oh, well, did you think about this from this point of view and this? Even a little outside of specific to customer use of the laundromat, it’d be like marketing and all kinds of ideas. So it’s been interesting getting to know everyone over the years. Mhmm.

Jordan Berry [00:29:02]:
Yeah, that’s pretty cool. And, you know, that’s, you know, you’re you’re lucky to have a customer who’s kind of thinking that way. Like most people aren’t thinking that way. Right. Like a business owner. And, you know, it’s really cool to be able to get into, you know, conversations or just be around other people who get business even if it’s not our specific business. And because we just think different. Right? And then we’re looking at different things and brainstorming different ideas for ourselves and Yep.

Jordan Berry [00:29:31]:
You know, stuff comes up that was like, oh, this have you considered this? Super cool.

Sarah Mackin [00:29:35]:
And you get excited, and we laugh sometimes. Like, oh, yeah. You get excited, like, bouncing the ideas off of each other. Even though it’s a completely different niche, it doesn’t matter. Some things are the same across the board. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:29:46]:
Yeah. Totally. Okay. I wanna go back backpedal a little bit. Maybe we can come back to this, here in a second. But can we go back and talk about due diligence? Yeah. What, you know, first of all, let’s start here. You know, was was this laundromat, like, performing? Was it making money when you bought it? Was it something that you had to, like, make to make money? Or what where was it at kind of in that spectrum?

Nick & Sarah [00:30:12]:
So I think it was profitable. So one, it was hard because they had the financials together from the two laundromats with the dry cleaners. So they had to try to separate themselves. So it wasn’t a a clear picture the whole time either. But, they were making money when we did, coin pulls. We did coin pulls for six weeks. And, we were also I pulled your sheet off the website that does the the water, the coin pull. I think those are two main things

Jordan Berry [00:30:46]:
on there. Water analysis. Yeah.

Nick & Sarah [00:30:48]:
Yeah. The water analysis with the and then we had the coin collection on top of that. So, we did that and then we compared them to their utility bills to make sure, like, what they were doing with their water usage versus what we’re seeing with their water usage was similar. And, they I mean, they were it wasn’t it was profitable. Like it would cover for the loans that we were out to take out. It would cover the loans and make a little money. But it wasn’t like killing it. You know what I mean? It wasn’t this, you know, knockout of the park lawn or bad.

Nick & Sarah [00:31:19]:
It was an average thing.

Sarah Mackin [00:31:20]:
Mhmm.

Jordan Berry [00:31:21]:
Yeah. Okay. So how did you I mean, it sounds like you you did some of these kind of standard stuff. Any other, like, takeaways from sort of the due diligence period? I mean, you mentioned you did coin collections, water analysis, on the place. Any anything else you guys are doing for due diligence?

Nick & Sarah [00:31:42]:
Standard stuff.

Sarah Mackin [00:31:42]:
Standard stuff. But we so we this being our first experience, we did have a real estate agent, and then we, of course, had an attorney. The attorney, obviously, in my opinion and probably most, is essential. Them being more than just a paper pusher, luckily ours was, and went to the umpteenth degree to check everything that you could think of, found some issues that we weren’t aware of, and it it delayed closing a couple of times Yeah. Things with the state that needed to be taken care of. But thank god we had that in our corner because Yep. The other side wasn’t even aware of it. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:32:24]:
Yeah. Yeah. And I’ve I’ve seen that happen lots of times where, you know, sometimes listen. Let’s just be real. Sometimes there’s malicious things that sellers are doing or hiding or you know? And and it comes out like that. But, you know, a lot of times stuff comes up that the seller is not even aware of and you wouldn’t even know to look for if you don’t have, you know, somebody like a lawyer in your corner who’s looking in the places that you wouldn’t even know to look for things you wouldn’t even know to look for. Right. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:32:58]:
And and that’s that’s huge, right? Because if you miss if you miss something like that is got the potential to make or break your your business owning experience. Right? Or maybe you don’t even own the business when you think you do or, you know, or real estate, stuff like that. That can happen and and does happen, when you try to kinda DIY that stuff. So, kudos to you guys for getting people in your corner.

Sarah Mackin [00:33:26]:
Thank goodness. And by no means was do we believe that there was malicious intent? We have a great relationship with the previous owner. It was a family run business then. I think Nick mentioned his father before him owned it and started it. We still talk to them to this day. Yeah. I just think it was something that slips through the cracks.

Nick & Sarah [00:33:44]:
Yeah. That’s all. And they were I mean, they’re great people. I’ve been calling for a while. And I couldn’t figure out something with the machine. I’d call him and he’d help me walk through fixing something and

Sarah Mackin [00:33:55]:
Or a couple of times even when parts were on back order, he had some on hand.

Nick & Sarah [00:34:00]:
Gave me a part. Yeah. Mhmm.

Jordan Berry [00:34:02]:
Did he did they end up selling that other one too, or they still have that one?

Sarah Mackin [00:34:06]:
Still have it. They still have it. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:34:07]:
Yeah.

Nick & Sarah [00:34:10]:
But, no, they were good. I mean, they gave us him and his wife her wife’s a sweetheart too. They gave us a bottle of champagne when when we closed at

Jordan Berry [00:34:16]:
That’s awesome.

Sarah Mackin [00:34:16]:
It was really nice.

Nick & Sarah [00:34:17]:
Yeah. I mean, really nice people. So very fortunate, that we had that interaction, you know, with the seller.

Sarah Mackin [00:34:24]:
So Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:34:26]:
Yeah. Cool. Okay. So you went through that due diligence process. You did it over the holidays. I mean, do you recommend that or do you not recommend that? Was it was it

Sarah Mackin [00:34:35]:
a big deal? A positive thing because December supposed to be one of your most busiest months. So we want to see what it’s like going in the store during your busiest time and how it’s handled. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:34:46]:
Yeah. Awesome. Okay. And then, you know, over the last couple of years, has business grown? Has it stayed pretty steady or, like, what’s that look like for you guys?

Nick & Sarah [00:34:59]:
Yeah. So over the first year, we, doubled what they were doing off we we calculated. We doubled business. And, we’re on on the verge of almost tripling it now after the retool.

Sarah Mackin [00:35:16]:
Mhmm. So the first year, what? 50% increase?

Nick & Sarah [00:35:20]:
Yeah. 50% increase. No. No. Being a %. Yeah.

Sarah Mackin [00:35:25]:
Again, tired. It’s all dead.

Nick & Sarah [00:35:27]:
But yeah. No. But it’s been it’s it’s like every time we did a phase, like, when we first took it over, there was a jump. When we opened the store up, there was a jump. And, like, Rachel, now there’s been a jump. So it’s trending up, and that’s all we could ask for, really. So

Jordan Berry [00:35:46]:
Was this something that you anticipated when you bought it? Like, did you think, hey. There’s there’s potential to double business here?

Nick & Sarah [00:35:54]:
I didn’t know that was I know I know I thought we could be we could do better than what they were currently doing. Mhmm. I didn’t know what the actual numbers would turn out to be, but I felt like there was, you know, there was more meat on the bone out there to get.

Sarah Mackin [00:36:08]:
Yes. Definitely didn’t expect where we are now, as far as growth. So that’s a positive. I mean, that’s great. Mhmm. But like you said, we we knew there was more potential. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:36:19]:
Okay. So you can’t just go around saying, oh, yeah. Like, we, like, doubled business, and we’re casually on the verge of tripling business here. Like, what what do you what were the things that you guys did? What like, do you feel like you know what you did to double business and triple business?

Sarah Mackin [00:36:39]:
In my opinion, it’s the basics. Be extremely friendly. Be like, hold yourself accountable. Hold yourself to a higher standard. A lot of things that we heard in the beginning of, oh, your customers aren’t gonna care. Oh, that’s gonna go missing. Yeah. Like, so much negativity.

Sarah Mackin [00:36:58]:
Yeah. And I said, hey. You might come across that. We might. Absolutely. But I feel is if we come in with a higher standard and these are what our expectations are and this is how we wanna present our business and be a part of our community, I think people are going to appreciate that more. And honestly, we’ve had so many interactions with our customers that are like, we’ll laugh because they might not know we’re there now that the store’s opened up. There’s a little area you can’t see at the front if someone comes in the side door still.

Sarah Mackin [00:37:26]:
They’re like, hey, that wasn’t like that when you got here. Clean up after yourself. Like people holding each other accountable, which is really nice. So Yeah. And it is a smaller town, which I think helps us in that aspect. People want a nice clean place to come to, a friendly place. One of our big things, especially Nick being the social butterfly, When you walk in the store, we want you to feel comfortable, welcome. Oh, you’re running into Joe you haven’t seen in months.

Sarah Mackin [00:37:54]:
Oh, it’s so great to come across we run into every all the time.

Nick & Sarah [00:37:58]:
It’s really nice to see when people haven’t seen each other for a while and they sit and they kind of catch up while they’re waiting for a laundry to get done. The goal was to build the community, the nicest laundromat, the nicest, I should say the nicest place to come and do your laundry period.

Sarah Mackin [00:38:15]:
Someone recently referred to it as it’s really a community hub that people look forward to coming to now.

Nick & Sarah [00:38:20]:
Which is

Sarah Mackin [00:38:20]:
And I was like, wow.

Nick & Sarah [00:38:21]:
That’s like the best compliment with you. Yes. That they feel like this is a place to be and and to do, know, not only getting washed on, they’re gonna see someone or Mhmm. If they’re gonna run into us or one of our, attendants there. They’re friendly. I treat it like if if you were coming to my house, I open the door, come on in. Like, I ask you, hey, how you been? We do the same thing there. We treat it as if you were coming to our home.

Sarah Mackin [00:38:44]:
Mhmm.

Nick & Sarah [00:38:45]:
And then, you know, there was good reaction from that because they weren’t used to that in the other laundromats, you know? Mhmm. Goes back to, like, what I said in the beginning where you can’t get ahold of the owner or sometimes it is the owner, they won’t tell you their name.

Sarah Mackin [00:38:57]:
Well, we had that. That’s why he brings that up specifically.

Jordan Berry [00:39:00]:
You know? Mhmm.

Nick & Sarah [00:39:01]:
But you should wanna take care of it. If someone had a problem there, it was personal to me.

Sarah Mackin [00:39:05]:
Mhmm.

Nick & Sarah [00:39:06]:
Like, alright. What was it? And they could be as mad as they want and I get it. But I tell them all the time, I said, we’re all making right. I’m not gonna fight. That’s the other thing. I never fight over quarters. Let me give you a free wash. Let me let me pay for the dry today or whatever.

Nick & Sarah [00:39:21]:
Other clothes aren’t dry yet or something. What it doesn’t matter. They they didn’t get hot enough. I take care of it. Mhmm. I take care of it every time. I don’t fight over that with with with the customers. Now we kept track of when people would call us and if we bend modem something or something like that, we have a list.

Nick & Sarah [00:39:37]:
So we knew if someone was just constantly calling and doing that and had a pattern, we only we only had that maybe once. Yeah.

Sarah Mackin [00:39:44]:
Once or twice.

Nick & Sarah [00:39:45]:
Yeah. But and then they would tell their their friends who come there, oh, man. I had a the dryer didn’t or washer didn’t work right. I got on the phone with Nick, gave me my refund or called the attendant who lives down a tree. He came back and started took my clothes out, put them in the next washer, started it. They tag we always tag machines too. That was a big thing before we retooled. And then we’ll do it now if there’s an issue.

Nick & Sarah [00:40:06]:
But if we knew there was an issue with the machine, we immediately put a tag, said out of service on it. So that no one else could use it. And then we didn’t keep running into problems. Mhmm. But yeah. But, like, customer service is is number one. And I take that I mean, we do that at the fire department. Everything’s referred to these are our people.

Nick & Sarah [00:40:24]:
These are my people. We take care of our people. And I do that there. Mhmm.

Sarah Mackin [00:40:29]:
So

Jordan Berry [00:40:29]:
Yeah.

Sarah Mackin [00:40:29]:
Customer service, cleanliness, safety. Safety is big, especially with daylight savings time when it gets dark out even at 04:00 in the middle of the day. Mhmm. We’ve had the electric the utility company come back out like, hey. This light is way too dark. We need it. We need this replaced. We need another pole.

Sarah Mackin [00:40:45]:
We need lighting up here. Number one. There were cameras before. We just increased it. Every inch of the property is covered inside and out.

Nick & Sarah [00:40:54]:
Mhmm. And we could communicate through them, make them buzz or make a noise or something like that.

Sarah Mackin [00:41:01]:
Mhmm. Talk them through to you. Yeah. Mhmm. And I just feel like in the beginning, there was a lot of negativity that people were saying, well, you’re gonna get this. You’re gonna get that. Of course, you are. It’s business.

Sarah Mackin [00:41:14]:
You of course, you are. Learn to work through it. Work past that. Pivot. Try to turn that experience different. A lot of people of course, our area is different. We’re not in the middle of a city. But, yes, we there you would come into issues with homeless people.

Sarah Mackin [00:41:33]:
We address it as it comes up. None were really that difficult, situations. We only had one that we had to call the cops to address because it just was getting worse and worse, and was ruining property. But other than that, it was pretty nothing that was unmanageable. Yeah. And then

Nick & Sarah [00:41:52]:
we do things like we keep, fruit snacks on hand all the time. We give fruit snacks out to kids. And we tell your tenants to give fruit snacks out to kids or if we’re filling the vending machine and like kid will walk over, I just give them stuff out of the vending machine. Yeah. Things like that. Or a lot of times we’ll just offer the customers water or something, you know, because you get to know your regulars who will be in there and we’re opening up that machine. I’ll just we’ll give out drinks or whatever.

Sarah Mackin [00:42:16]:
Holding doors for people when their hands are full, trying to get in and out, helping. We just were in there yesterday. A younger mother was in there with two kids, one in a car seat, another is a toddler, and she’s pregnant. And her baby had been crying. You could tell she was being flustered. We’re like, hey. Let us help you. We’ll help carry your stuff to the car.

Sarah Mackin [00:42:33]:
You know, just things to us that are being a good person. Yeah. Just help help other people out. Go that extra step.

Jordan Berry [00:42:42]:
Yeah. I mean, it it really reminds me the the customer service bit. I mean, it sounds like you guys are just crushing that part of it. That probably just a huge I mean, obviously, like, cleaning it up, making it safe is all a huge part of it.

Nick & Sarah [00:42:53]:
But I

Jordan Berry [00:42:53]:
think that

Sarah Mackin [00:42:54]:
Service, I think that set us apart for sure.

Jordan Berry [00:42:55]:
Yeah. That customer service I mean, it just, you know, I’ve I’ve got back on my, audible bookshelf, unreasonable hospitality. Yeah. It sounds like right up your alley where you’re just, like, kind of going above and beyond. And I mean, you are and you aren’t. Right? You’re, like, just kinda being good people. Right? It’s Mhmm. It’s really not like anything crazy.

Sarah Mackin [00:43:16]:
Pocket science, so I feel bad. And so I was like, what are you doing? I’m like, be nice to people. Be nice.

Jordan Berry [00:43:22]:
Yeah. But helpful. Yeah. But, I mean, listen, it’s it’s easier said than done. Like, you know, it sounds like maybe previous owners or other owners that you’ve talked for you, I mean, you kinda just mentioned some of the comments that you’ve gotten, about like, it’s really easy to get jaded, you know, when somebody takes advantage of you or when somebody you’re like trying really hard to be nice and accommodate people and provide a good experience And somebody wrecks your machine or tries to break into your coin box or graffitis you’re building or, you know, like whatever, like all those things. Right. It can really deflate you and frustrate you. And, like, you’re investing money by, like, retooling and stuff, and then somebody, you know, stuffs the washer and it breaks the door lock or I don’t know.

Jordan Berry [00:44:14]:
Whatever.

Nick & Sarah [00:44:14]:
Like Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:44:15]:
You know, a thousand different things.

Sarah Mackin [00:44:17]:
Yeah. I think to that point, it has been helpful that there’s two of us. Because when I’m up here angry, irritated alright. You gotta step in. I need a minute. Yeah. And vice versa.

Jordan Berry [00:44:28]:
Like As the muscle or as

Jordan Berry [00:44:30]:
my social butterfly? That’s Which one?

Sarah Mackin [00:44:32]:
Have this conversation because I I’m too angry. Yeah.

Nick & Sarah [00:44:36]:
Yeah. When it’s helped with that, we never go, like, our our default is not to, like, go on attack mode with stuff like that. Like, you catch more flies with honey. Right? So and then people are always like it’s very easy to like change someone’s demeanor when you meet them with kindness or a little compassion, a little empathy for something. Not always. No. And sometimes you gotta be tough, but

Sarah Mackin [00:44:59]:
Well, and sometimes you just sometimes you’re gonna have really angry people.

Nick & Sarah [00:45:02]:
Yeah.

Sarah Mackin [00:45:03]:
Okay. No,

Nick & Sarah [00:45:04]:
no. Overall, it hasn’t like, we haven’t had it that bad with the customers and some of the bad experiences we’ve had and sometimes we’re just like, all right, well, we can’t please everyone. And then if they’re gonna complain about everything, then just go somewhere else. I don’t want you as a new customer.

Sarah Mackin [00:45:19]:
That’s been our other thing. You aren’t gonna please everybody. That’s fine. If you’re so unhappy, that’s okay. I understand. Sorry if we couldn’t help you. There’s one down the street. There’s another laundromat down the street.

Sarah Mackin [00:45:31]:
I don’t know what to tell you. There’s only so Yeah. One person two people can do.

Jordan Berry [00:45:36]:
Yeah. Well and sometimes the, you know, the the headache is not worth the whatever revenue you might get from somebody Right. Sometimes it’s not worth it.

Nick & Sarah [00:45:46]:
I mean,

Sarah Mackin [00:45:46]:
this in the nicest way, but I don’t want a customer that’s like that. Then I don’t want you as a customer because you’re just angry all the time.

Jordan Berry [00:45:53]:
Well, and it sounds like you guys are working really hard on building this in the environment, right? Like, that’s that’s really what I’m hearing is that you’re working hard on building the environment and all of like the cleanliness, the safety, the friendliness, like all that stuff is like environment building, right? And when you have somebody or people who are perpetually negative, perpetually complainers, they’re going to complain about something always, which there’s just, unfortunately, there’s just people like that. And, and, you know, like Nick said, like sometimes those can be the best people because if you meet them with kindness, sometimes it just snaps them out of it and turns them around and they become big, huge raving fans of yours. Right. But sometimes it’s just how they are, you know, and and if you’re creating this environment, that’s really positive. I mean, I wrote down like it’s a community hub that people look forward to coming to. Like, you said that. You said somebody told you that. Right? Like and and if that’s what you’re really trying to create, you’ve also gotta be protective of that.

Jordan Berry [00:46:54]:
Right? And and not allow people like I like the House Rules thing, right? Like not allow people to behave in a way that’s going to threaten that environment that you’re working so hard to create. Now it’s, you know, it’s easier said than done. And it is it gets very emotional sometimes when people are violating that because you’re working so hard to build it. And like you said, it can be helpful to have two people, somebody else to chime in or to tap in when you’re just like,

Sarah Mackin [00:47:27]:
it’s like we do for kids

Nick & Sarah [00:47:28]:
here. Yeah. Yeah,

Jordan Berry [00:47:29]:
exactly. It’s what it’s like.

Nick & Sarah [00:47:31]:
Oh, it’s a good work.

Jordan Berry [00:47:32]:
That’s really what it’s like. It’s like having little kids sometimes where you’ve got to just manage your emotions as best you can. And when you can’t, like somebody else has got to come in and step up.

Sarah Mackin [00:47:43]:
Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:47:44]:
But no, I mean, I love sort of that cohesive. And I don’t know. I’m not even sure if you guys have been thinking about it this way or not, but like this kind of cohesive plan that you guys have to create an environment, for your customers, which kind of rolls naturally into I mean, you guys have mentioned that you retooled. Questions about that, like how did you know when it was time to retool and what was that experience like retooling?

Nick & Sarah [00:48:12]:
We always knew it would had to be done eventually. I you know, it was just repairs were going up. We got tired of dealing with the, the, coin jams in the actual washers and dryers and cleaning those things out and adjusting them, and then it still would have a problem. Like, someone called me the next day. I’m like, I just took that one apart and cleaned all the lint out, scrubbed it down. Replaced the coin mechanism. Yeah. Replaced the coin mechanism in the thing.

Nick & Sarah [00:48:39]:
And, that was the biggest I would say probably we got calls about the most was some issue with the things taking quarters. So it was either invest thousands of dollars in putting in all new changers in in those machines or, you know, the ones with the, you know, ion, whatever they are, the tech did instead of an actual mechanism anymore.

Jordan Berry [00:49:00]:
Or Yeah.

Nick & Sarah [00:49:01]:
But that was thousands and thousands of dollars when we knew we had to spend money to retool anyway. And we had saw a little little bit like kind of a window into that whole retooling thing with the two new machines. We saw like because they weren’t next to the old ones. We had to put them all the way down the end of the row. So people had to look and go down there. But what we saw was people ended up they would see those new machines. They migrated to them immediately. And then those new machines that are all the way at the end of the store, they overtook the old 60 pounders in sales.

Nick & Sarah [00:49:31]:
Mhmm. Alright. So we have a little glimpse into new machines. People want them. They will use them more. And we got a little more business too because we had a couple extra machines in the store. But, we just kinda knew. And I think like into about a year into it, I had started like looking at machines.

Nick & Sarah [00:49:49]:
And then about six months from the retool, like I really started calling. We had, we looked at HIPH, Dexter, Continental and Electrolux. And I was pretty set on Dexter, for a while because we had such a great relationship with Bill and his company.

Sarah Mackin [00:50:06]:
And the equipment we had. Yes, it was old, but it was still performing great. Right.

Nick & Sarah [00:50:09]:
Yeah. So we had a good experience.

Sarah Mackin [00:50:10]:
My extra point mechanisms.

Nick & Sarah [00:50:11]:
And they had an excellent service tech.

Sarah Mackin [00:50:14]:
Mhmm.

Nick & Sarah [00:50:15]:
Shout out to Travis. Excellent service tech. And a cool guy. He walked me through things over the phone. I didn’t always have to schedule me. Let me watch when he’d work on things. So, I know you guys talk about the distributor relationship a lot. It’s and that’s really important because that Mhmm.

Nick & Sarah [00:50:33]:
That really helped us make these jumps in our business. Mhmm. So that’s kinda where we were. We looked at them. We looked at them. I looked at them and I looked at them. And then, we would go to I went to Charlotte to look at, touchscreen because we had a criteria. We wanted touchscreen because I just feel like that’s where everything is going.

Nick & Sarah [00:50:53]:
That’s where cell phones have gone, computers to everything’s touched. So we want touch screens. We wanted higher spin out on the washers. Some type of remote control so that because we operate a lot of that still remotely. The doors are remotely through the cameras.

Sarah Mackin [00:51:13]:
Now we have laundry works.

Nick & Sarah [00:51:14]:
Yeah. Now we have laundry works too, but we wanted as much remote control as possible because we don’t always wanna have to be at that store. We’d like to take vacation, things like that. You know? I I think those were the three big criteria. So we went to Charlotte and looked at stuff and, other spots in South Carolina and talked to the owners. All those distributors were good. They put us in contact with other owners to talk to on the phone and they arranged for us to come meet on things like that.

Sarah Mackin [00:51:43]:
All the standard things, we just actually went and did that did it all Yeah. And networked. It was a huge You know?

Jordan Berry [00:51:49]:
Awesome.

Nick & Sarah [00:51:49]:
I enjoy going to these other stores anyway. So it’s not been looking at laundromats. So to me

Jordan Berry [00:51:54]:
True laundromat owner.

Nick & Sarah [00:51:55]:
Yeah. So

Sarah Mackin [00:51:56]:
If we’re on vacation, we stop at firehouses and laundromats. Yeah.

Nick & Sarah [00:52:00]:
But, that’s how that whole process started. And then it just took a while. We laid the store out and we weren’t planning on doing it last December. We this time period right now, spring of this year was when we were thinking, I will this is when we’re comfortable. We’ll do it. We had a phone call with you guys talking about so I get analysis by paralysis sometimes.

Jordan Berry [00:52:24]:
I would say our phone call was basically Sarah saying

Nick & Sarah [00:52:27]:
This is my I will get you to so

Jordan Berry [00:52:30]:
Help this guy make a decision. Yeah. That was that was the essence of the call, Sarah saying. Help this guy make a decision.

Sarah Mackin [00:52:36]:
Tell him yes. That’s the

Nick & Sarah [00:52:37]:
So we had late, gotten down the Continental, and Electrolux. And just short story, we couldn’t put the Dexter, touch controls in because they were 200 gs. We don’t have the concrete to support that, which comes Yeah. Back from the first time we put the express machines in. So we couldn’t I couldn’t I really couldn’t narrow it down. We had a phone call with you guys and ended up talking with Electrolux and which was a great decision. The the team from there, Chris Brick and, Nick Mallard, that team and did the install. Those guys are awesome.

Nick & Sarah [00:53:11]:
Amazing. Super, I mean, responsive, quick with everything. Nice pea just nice people to work with. And, Chris came down, did a we did a came down, looked at the store, gave us a layout. We went through numbers and then we also talked about, projections, which was another big thing because none of the other distributors did sat down, did like a projection thing with us. Sat down, looked at our numbers and then came up with a game plan like, alright, so when we put these in, we need to capture this many more customers. We’re gonna increase the prices to this amount and projected like this is the kind of income we should be looking at to cover this note. Mhmm.

Nick & Sarah [00:53:53]:
Which was huge to us because no one had done that with us yet. And that was a question we’d had. So whoever we were gonna go with before we like signed the paperwork was gonna be do all that with us. Because, like my weakness as a business owner is kind of some of that that end of the business stuff. It’s I have to look into that more. I’m not the I don’t wanna say not financially good. But like I don’t know about projecting things. It’s all stuff I’ve learned along the way with this business.

Nick & Sarah [00:54:20]:
So having someone sit down and talk you through all that was huge.

Jordan Berry [00:54:24]:
Mhmm. That’s huge. Yeah. Massive. Massive. Massive. And and, yeah, I I was surprised because I got a when we talked, you were like, okay. I’m thinking, like, spring, you know, time, which, you know, we’re recording this, and we’re maybe on, like, the very front end of spring here.

Jordan Berry [00:54:42]:
But, so I was like, Okay, well, I can put you in touch with some people and, you know, have some conversation. And then I got an email, like, not that long later saying, Hey, they put in, they put in machines. And I was like, Woah, what? Awesome.

Nick & Sarah [00:54:55]:
But I don’t know

Jordan Berry [00:54:56]:
who talked to talk Nick into doing this this quickly, but, you know, kudos to them, whoever it was.

Nick & Sarah [00:55:02]:
It makes a difference on, like, who you are and you interact and, you know, how you present.

Sarah Mackin [00:55:07]:
On, like, our gut feeling and the relationship and how we interact with anybody that we work with, because we are looking for long term partnerships, long term

Nick & Sarah [00:55:16]:
Yeah.

Sarah Mackin [00:55:16]:
Relationships so that, like, we’re we our goal is to continue to grow, open more stores, and we want a partner that can continue to do that with us and be another extended support arm for us.

Nick & Sarah [00:55:28]:
Yeah. Stories with other distributors where, like, they’re not supportive or they didn’t really do that well when they said they oversold them equipment and

Sarah Mackin [00:55:36]:
and Or unresponsive. That’s a big pet peeve of mine. Unresponsiveness drives me crazy.

Jordan Berry [00:55:42]:
Yeah. Welcome. Welcome to the industry. Everybody over everybody listens is like, oh my

Nick & Sarah [00:55:46]:
gosh. That’s right. I guess

Jordan Berry [00:55:47]:
this is your nightmare then. Yeah.

Nick & Sarah [00:55:51]:
Yeah. But then Well,

Jordan Berry [00:55:53]:
yeah, I was gonna say, like, you know what? What I think was really good about that is, you know, as as we’re kind of talking about replacing machines and you’re like, Yeah, we’re kind of there. Like, we need to do it. We’re thinking about spring and, why I’m glad you ended up doing it. And I’m curious to see if this has played out well, but why I’m glad you ended up doing it earlier than spring is, you’re kind of just losing revenue, like all the time from like when we talked to spring, whenever in spring you were planning on doing it, like you’re kind of losing revenue by not by not replacing the machines, earlier. But I’m curious, like, did it is it I mean, it sounds like it is, but is it playing out that way, for you where business has grown? And like, I’m curious, are you on the path to those numbers that they projected out for you or, like, how is that playing out for you?

Sarah Mackin [00:56:47]:
We are actually. So a little bit behind the scenes details. So we were fully coin operated. Four months into ownership, we did install pay range, which was a good interim solution because we were not financially prepared or convinced on LaundryWorks. Nothing against LaundryWorks at the time. We were just new and still had a lot of processing, and I’m like, we’re not ready for that yet. We still have to figure out just how to run it.

Nick & Sarah [00:57:12]:
And it’s a lot of capital, but I mean, it’s not they’re not cheap systems either. Right. So it’s it was just capital also too. We didn’t we didn’t have the time after buying the business.

Sarah Mackin [00:57:20]:
Right. And so also, I mentioned previously, we’re a smaller town. So in my opinion, some people are harder to change their habits of not using coins. And I’m emotionally attached to some of our customers that I knew I was very nervous they would not come back, and he’s laughing because I wanted to be hybrid. Yeah. We had many conversations with, other laundry other laundromat owners who were either hybrid or, fully carved, no coins, to try and make our our decision. In the end, we did go all Laundry Works, zero coins. It’s been a great transition.

Sarah Mackin [00:57:59]:
We again, because we are very customer focused, we we do have three team members that are huge. We love our team that’s in place, and we’ll actually be growing and adding another one in the next two weeks or so. But our team members are a huge part of our success too. And they know, quickly touching on if we have customers or someone’s upset, they know our approach to things and know that we back them up a %. And, hey, I’m like, hey. It’s not worth arguing over $3. Yeah. It’s not it’s fine.

Sarah Mackin [00:58:32]:
Mhmm.

Nick & Sarah [00:58:32]:
You know

Sarah Mackin [00:58:32]:
what I mean? Like, at the end of the day, we’re not we don’t wanna lose a customer over $3. Yeah. Anyway, so when we did switch over to LaundryWorks, we were fully attended. We, right now, are only partially attended. But to help with the transition and because we knew it was gonna be a big difference for people to not use quarters, walk through the, whole system, it’s been great. We’ve received a great response. Every my hairdresser actually goes, to our laundromat to do her linens, when they have people come in town. She’s like, it’s like a Dave and Buster’s, but for laundry.

Sarah Mackin [00:59:07]:
Nice one.

Jordan Berry [00:59:08]:
That’s awesome.

Sarah Mackin [00:59:09]:
I thought that was a great, comparison. So we’ve gotten a lot of people

Jordan Berry [00:59:12]:
in the back.

Sarah Mackin [00:59:13]:
There has been a couple of times where people were like, no, no, no. I don’t know how to do this. And they go to leave. Thank goodness we’re either there or an attendant. We’re like, please, just give us one second. We’ll help you. We’ll show you through it. We’ll go through, a wash and a dry.

Sarah Mackin [00:59:26]:
If you don’t think your clothes are cleaner than they were before coming here, then before like, with our old machines, we’ll give you your money back. And every time, they’re like, this is amazing. Yeah. Look at this. So customers have been very happy. Sometimes you just have to convince them, like, hey. Just give us a chance. And Yeah.

Jordan Berry [00:59:44]:
You didn’t lose any friends?

Sarah Mackin [00:59:47]:
I think we did. I don’t know. We’re gonna ask around. We talked about it yesterday. I think there’s one that I’m very attached to. I don’t think they come anymore, but we’ve received a lot more customers.

Jordan Berry [00:59:59]:
Yeah. Yeah. I do. New friends. New friends.

Sarah Mackin [01:00:01]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [01:00:04]:
No. It is tough. I mean, you know, that that’s a question I get asked all the time is, what do I do? Do I do coin? Do I do hybrid? Do I do go full card? And that that means a hard decision to make. And, you know, kudos just knowing you guys and Nick, you specifically. Kudos for making that decision and go I know. Yeah. Yeah. And going full full card system, that’s a that’s a tough decision to make.

Jordan Berry [01:00:29]:
I mean, going back like, if you if you had to go back and make the decision all over, you’re making the same decision, would you go hybrid? What what’s your thought on that?

Sarah Mackin [01:00:38]:
I would absolutely stay the same and go full cart.

Nick & Sarah [01:00:41]:
Yeah. Even now, like, when we we’re always looking for another store, that’s the one of the first purchases that we made. Because Laundry Works. We’re switching it to Laundry Works immediately. Mhmm. And it takes so much burden off the owner of collecting jams, unnecessary maintenance things. Mhmm. You can and you can monitor their systems actually.

Nick & Sarah [01:01:00]:
You can monitor so much remotely and the detailed reports you can get out of it. You can see when that store’s busy or slow or

Sarah Mackin [01:01:07]:
in Which helps with a lot of different business decisions, not just what type of machine is doing the best, not even just that. It helps with staffing. It helps with marketing. It helps with everything. Being able to have that information at your fingertips, and it saves you so much time. And as the person who did not wanna get rid of the quarters, the amount of time it takes to do our collections, I laugh now. The first time I did it, I laughed. I was like, wait, I’m done? That’s it?

Nick & Sarah [01:01:33]:
I’m like, yeah, just pop that box out. Take that cash out. Why not? Say goodbye. I was

Jordan Berry [01:01:38]:
like, wait.

Sarah Mackin [01:01:39]:
Just stick the card here and we’re done.

Nick & Sarah [01:01:40]:
Because we always What

Jordan Berry [01:01:41]:
do I

Nick & Sarah [01:01:41]:
individually by machine. So weigh everything out. We knew exactly how much each type of machine was doing by turn and

Jordan Berry [01:01:48]:
Yeah.

Nick & Sarah [01:01:48]:
And it would take an hour or so, you know?

Sarah Mackin [01:01:51]:
Now it’s Yeah. Five minutes. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [01:01:53]:
No. It’s funny. Like, I’m I’m going back to, like, my very first week of O and N, my very first laundromat, and I didn’t have like I ended up using accounting scale for my quarters when I, you know, when I bought that first laundromat, I didn’t have anything. And I didn’t even I didn’t even know that you could weigh in like what? Like, I forget what it is. Like, $100 is like 20 pounds or whatever it is. Thousand bucks. I don’t know. I don’t remember.

Jordan Berry [01:02:17]:
But I know any of that. And so, like, the first week, I counted the quarters.

Nick & Sarah [01:02:23]:
Like, I

Jordan Berry [01:02:23]:
counted counted, like, individual quarters. I can’t I don’t like like hours. Like, this takes so long. Like, what is and then I and then I realized, like, okay. I can get accounting scale. So I got accounting scale, and I was like, oh, that’s so much faster. But even that, you know, like and then go into, like, a Laundry Works type system or, you know, whatever it is, you know, and and just really streamlining it, is makes that collection so much better. But it’s just funny.

Jordan Berry [01:02:51]:
I was just kinda, like, laughing at myself of, like, that first week where I’m, like, counting, like, piles of quarters.

Nick & Sarah [01:02:57]:
Before I figured out, like, there was weights for x amount of money, I had it by grams, and I would do math. Like, alright. I had weight. Buying this weight by grams. And I had the longest. I would use a whole note page, two note pages of math. That’s how much money we made. Then I was like, Oh, wait a minute.

Nick & Sarah [01:03:15]:
Someone has done all this work already.

Jordan Berry [01:03:20]:
Yeah. It’s so funny, man. But yeah. In in, like, I think we’re getting to that phase now in our industry where we can kinda laugh at that stuff. There’s still people doing that, obviously, like plenty plenty of people weigh in coordination.

Sarah Mackin [01:03:34]:
Whatever works for you works for you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Jordan Berry [01:03:36]:
Totally. But we’re going to that point now where it’s like, oh, I it literally takes me like thirty seconds to collect now and I have all the reports, so I know how much money is there, you know, and all that stuff. So Top of my

Nick & Sarah [01:03:49]:
phone, we look at what the store is doing for the day. Oh, yeah. This has been a good Tuesday, you know. It’s picked up. This is a little higher than what we used to do on Tuesdays, you know. You know? And it helps you change conversation from, oh, man. The store is doing this much. Now it’s like, alright.

Nick & Sarah [01:04:02]:
We need to move people from the weekend to the slower days. Because our tenant will call us. He’s like, Yeah, I’m telling people to wait. Yes. Because my machines are gone. Tell them to wait. They got two minutes on this machine. Wait, I’ll move you over.

Sarah Mackin [01:04:11]:
He does. Thank goodness.

Nick & Sarah [01:04:12]:
Yeah. Dean’s amazing. Yeah. He’s our weekend assistant, tenant. He’s he’s good. He’ll stop people from walking out the door and be like, Just wait. Wait a minute.

Sarah Mackin [01:04:19]:
He’s watching the time on the machine.

Nick & Sarah [01:04:21]:
He’s like,

Sarah Mackin [01:04:21]:
this one has two minutes. Hold on. Yeah. Before you another store, it’s gonna be done.

Nick & Sarah [01:04:25]:
Yeah.

Jordan Berry [01:04:26]:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome. And I mean, first of all, like, kudos to you guys. That’s a good problem to have

Sarah Mackin [01:04:31]:
Yeah.

Jordan Berry [01:04:32]:
When all those machines are spinning. Mhmm. But a problem nonetheless. Right? And it’s it’s something to, like, address. Like, you don’t want you got it. You want to try to kind of find that balance. Right? It’s like we don’t have machines tied up too long, but we don’t have too much downtime either. Yeah.

Sarah Mackin [01:04:49]:
Exactly. So that’s kind of where we are now, is learning I don’t know how to say it, the mechanisms, the behind the scenes of changing people’s habits of everyone going to do laundry on Sunday. Like, hey, he’s just getting people to shift days of the week, and then we’ll be good. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [01:05:08]:
Yeah. And and incentive I mean, you can incentivize that too. Right?

Sarah Mackin [01:05:11]:
Exactly. And that’s what

Jordan Berry [01:05:12]:
Especially when you have something like a LaundraWorks or a system like that. It makes it really easy. It’s a little tougher to do if you’ve got coins. I remember trying to do that early on too for a little while where I was trying to get people off the weekends, and I’m like, oh, like, every Tuesday night, I’ve gotta change I’d like manually change the machines to a different price. And then Wednesday night, I’d have to change it back or like just like some of the stuff I had to do early on. And part of it was I just didn’t know what I was doing. And part of it was that we just didn’t have that capability back in the day to to do some of the stuff that especially now that you can do with some of these, you know, digital payment systems that we got, on the market. One of the things you’ve mentioned a couple of times now, and I’m kind of curious, like you’ve got.

Jordan Berry [01:06:01]:
Let me back up. So when people ask me, like, hey, what do I need to make sure that I succeed here? You know, I. I inevitably say, like, hey, I mean, customer service. Yes. But in terms of like what you need, you need the right technology to help you and you need, most importantly, the right people to help you. Right. And so you’ve mentioned your team multiple times and you’ve kind of bragged on them. And I want to give you an opportunity to do that a little bit more.

Jordan Berry [01:06:27]:
But like, how did you find your team? Like, one of the questions I get asked by laundromat owners most frequently is how do I find good people to help me with my business? And I got a client right now. He’s in New York and he’s like, I’ve got two people. One of them is, like, a little iffy. And so I’ve got one solid person. And if she ever leaves, I don’t even know what I’m gonna do, and I can’t find, like, good people. But how did you guys find your good people?

Sarah Mackin [01:06:57]:
Don’t get us wrong. We went through the same hassles. We’ve had interview scheduled. People don’t show up. Honestly, it’s just

Nick & Sarah [01:07:04]:
Which is a new thing. So I we I never had to interview people, really.

Sarah Mackin [01:07:09]:
He did not believe me. Yes. There was

Nick & Sarah [01:07:10]:
a point in more for her job. So the first time we well, so we inherited one employee when we took the store over. She was the night cleaner. She had been there for years. And eventually just kind of came to a differing of opinions on things and we just parted ways. And, so then we had to hire. So, I did it for I think we were

Jordan Berry [01:07:32]:
Real quick. I don’t wanna I’m sorry to interrupt you, but I just wanna say something about that because I see that happen a lot, especially if you’re taking over a lawn or mat that doesn’t have as high a standards as you have. And when you try to raise those standards and implement things to elevate the experience of you know, your customer at your store. A lot of times what I find happening is that the old employees either end up leaving or you end up having to ask them to leave, for lack of a better way because for a couple of different reasons. Like, number one, they’re just not used to operating at that standard and or not capable of doing that. Or the other thing is that they’ve been doing less work in getting their paycheck for doing less work. And now we’re saying, hey, we need you to up your game a little bit here. We need you to open doors for people or smile or greet people or, you know, clean a little better, a little more thoroughly.

Jordan Berry [01:08:37]:
Here’s the new cleaning regimen or whatever. And there’s a fight there that happens, and that is just super common that I see that happen. I’ve had that happen. Something that happened a thousand times before. So I just wanted to point that out that, like, that’s something that’s a common experience there, especially if you’re coming in and trying to sort of elevate the business to a new level and operate it at a higher higher level there. So sorry to interrupt you, but I just wanted to say that.

Sarah Mackin [01:09:10]:
Right on point. Absolutely. And and honestly to that, she had been there so long that I think that held us back from certain decisions that had to be made or standards that needed to be changed over the time to get us to where we would like want it to be. Love her to pieces, wish her the best, but sometimes it’s just not a good match.

Jordan Berry [01:09:34]:
Yeah. It’s not the right fit.

Nick & Sarah [01:09:35]:
Yeah. And that’s all that was there. So then I we Sarah put it all out on Indeed, and, I cleaned in the interim. And, so she schedules, what, like, five interviews one day. Mhmm. So I’m like, alright. Well, I’ll pull on Main Street. A block over is Main Street.

Nick & Sarah [01:09:52]:
They got a nice coffee shop. I’m like, this we’ll meet up there. I said, we’ll sit there. I’ll interview them thirty minute intervals or whatever.

Sarah Mackin [01:09:58]:
And back then that we also were not the building wasn’t open, so we had no space to actually interview them at our location.

Nick & Sarah [01:10:04]:
Yeah. We didn’t have that front section or it was all being demoed then. So I didn’t wanna bring people in there and it’s, like, creepy, kind of dark stuff.

Jordan Berry [01:10:13]:
Right. Yeah.

Nick & Sarah [01:10:14]:
There’s dry wood thrown everywhere, wires hanging out on the ceiling.

Jordan Berry [01:10:18]:
You’re a little shady looking too.

Nick & Sarah [01:10:20]:
Yeah. So Oh, but, so we got a coffee shop and, I got coffee and waiting. The first two or three don’t show up. It’s like an hour. I’m just sitting at the coffee shop and one lady shows up. She was an hour late and she shows up. I’m like, okay. I’ll interview you.

Nick & Sarah [01:10:41]:
And then, no one else shows up again for another half hour. And then one person shows up. And I don’t think we hired anyone out of that batch. No. So

Sarah Mackin [01:10:52]:
The funniest thing was just his phone call after because he his mind was so blown. He’s like, I don’t understand. I was like, what do you mean you don’t understand? That’s just how that’s what’s happening. That’s what people are trying to explain and why it’s so hard to find a good team. You just have to grit your teeth sometimes and Yeah. Dig you bear through it. It’s unfortunate.

Nick & Sarah [01:11:12]:
I am naive too, so I’ll put that out there.

Sarah Mackin [01:11:16]:
I

Nick & Sarah [01:11:16]:
could be Well,

Jordan Berry [01:11:17]:
maybe maybe you were naive, but This laundromat will beat that naivete right out of you.

Nick & Sarah [01:11:22]:
They were like, oh, I’ve always showed up for an interview. I’m sure everyone does that when they get an interview. No. No. It doesn’t happen.

Sarah Mackin [01:11:30]:
No.

Nick & Sarah [01:11:31]:
So the next time we go through this again, I’d tell her, do it at the laundromat. I said, I’m going to be there working. I’m throwing drywall up. I put two chairs in a drywall office that’s rough frame. Then we had an old desk that was over there. We still have it because it’s an old school, it’s cool desk.

Sarah Mackin [01:11:48]:
It’s from the previous owner, from his dad. I like the history and the story that comes with it. We’re keeping it. It’s an

Nick & Sarah [01:11:52]:
old desk. So I was like, nope. I was like, I’m not wasting my time again. I have stuff. We have to get this thing open. Then we I interview him in there and I just say, hey, sorry about it. But and I tell him the back backstory. We were doing it at the coffee house.

Nick & Sarah [01:12:06]:
No one showed up, and I got stuff to do. So we’re gonna do it here. And then we hired Dean, out of that round. Sebastian.

Jordan Berry [01:12:16]:
Was that was that another Indeed lead?

Sarah Mackin [01:12:19]:
Yes. So

Jordan Berry [01:12:20]:
Dean from Indeed.

Sarah Mackin [01:12:21]:
Yes. Exactly.

Nick & Sarah [01:12:22]:
Yeah. Okay.

Sarah Mackin [01:12:22]:
Yeah. So I stick with Indeed personally because you will get hundreds of applications. I cannot track emails and phone calls and Facebook messages and Indeed message. No. You wanna apply? Here’s the Indeed link. Put it on there, please. That’s how you organize it. I don’t like having it from five different area.

Sarah Mackin [01:12:40]:
It’s too much. I have to keep it organized, streamlined so I know who we’re talking to, who’s actually responding. It’s a much better system for us.

Jordan Berry [01:12:47]:
Yeah.

Sarah Mackin [01:12:49]:
And the other thing too after that first batch of people mostly not showing up, I tried to weed through the candidates with questions. Don’t just submit me a resume. I need to see some kind of initiative. No. It’s not a fancy, shiny job, like, career, but I need to see that you made some kind of effort because then I don’t even expect you to show up to the interview otherwise.

Jordan Berry [01:13:13]:
Right.

Sarah Mackin [01:13:14]:
So I try to weed I do try to weed through candidates asking actual questions and seeing what their responses are gonna be, not just submit your resume.

Jordan Berry [01:13:22]:
Yeah. Or if they do respond.

Sarah Mackin [01:13:24]:
That and that’s my point. If they don’t respond, then I don’t even bother. Yeah.

Nick & Sarah [01:13:28]:
Yeah. Yeah. The and then two, if they ask questions that are on the posting, it means they didn’t read, so we also don’t interview you.

Sarah Mackin [01:13:37]:
Correct. Yep. Attention to detail. Yeah. Attention to detail. But

Nick & Sarah [01:13:42]:
we ended up hiring one or two people out of that round. Mhmm. And Dean, we are attending on the weekends. He works, we’re not fully attended. We’re just attending on Friday nights and Saturday, Sunday during the busiest times of the day. And Dean does that and he’s been awesome. Dean’s a people person.

Sarah Mackin [01:14:00]:
Yes.

Nick & Sarah [01:14:01]:
Another man who can talk paint off a wall. So and he grew up in the area, so he knows a lot of people who come in there.

Sarah Mackin [01:14:07]:
Yes.

Nick & Sarah [01:14:08]:
But he’s super helpful. Picks up, laundry baskets, carries them in and out. Great guy.

Sarah Mackin [01:14:13]:
Mhmm.

Nick & Sarah [01:14:14]:
Yeah. And then, the cleaner was Sebastian, a young guy. Just wanted a a job for a night, a couple hours here and there. And he’s been great too. Super reliable. And he was doing it seven days a week at one point. And, for after I think he did that for about six months. But we’d always ask him like, Hey man, when you’re ready, You don’t want all the hours.

Nick & Sarah [01:14:35]:
I get working every day gets old. Let me know. We’ll hire someone else to split these hours with you. And about six months in he’s like, Yeah yeah. I could use a break. I’d like to only work. And we came to an agreement. And I I always asked him, like, you’re here first.

Nick & Sarah [01:14:50]:
This is your job. Tell me how many hours you want. How many days do you wanna work? Tell me the days. Do you want Monday through Thursday? He’s a younger kid, so I’m sure he likes to go out and do things. So and then we posted for Friday, Saturday, Sunday night cleaning. And the third time we did that, I think everyone actually showed up to the interview.

Sarah Mackin [01:15:11]:
Mhmm.

Nick & Sarah [01:15:12]:
So, like, Sarah’s weeding of people has worked out.

Jordan Berry [01:15:15]:
You’re like, dang it, man. I can’t get my work done now. Yeah.

Sarah Mackin [01:15:18]:
You did. You said, man, I have the projects planned today.

Nick & Sarah [01:15:21]:
I’ll tell you, it was funny to see the look on her face because the one day I have jeans and there’s drywall stuff all over. And I’m literally taking off my gloves like, hey. Yeah. I’m Nick. I’m gonna interview you today.

Jordan Berry [01:15:31]:
And it’s like,

Nick & Sarah [01:15:33]:
alright.

Sarah Mackin [01:15:34]:
But now we do have a great team in place. And what’s big for us too, recognizing what they do for us and that we would not be successful without them. And like Nick is saying with Sebastian, like, not when you’re ready. It was more like, hey. If you ever change your mind and don’t wanna work every day, please just communicate with us. Don’t quit. Like, we love having you a part of the team. We’ll make it work.

Sarah Mackin [01:15:56]:
Just have that open communication with each other. That’s gone a long way too.

Nick & Sarah [01:16:01]:
Yeah. And then we try to do a call on Thursday or Friday. Normally, we’ll call each person individually and ask them. Because I don’t we don’t always see them between my work schedule, and Sarah. So we don’t always run into the people who work from us all the time. So we do a call once a week. How you doing personally? And at the store, do you need anything? You know, is there some things maybe you’ve thought of that would work better at the store? You know, we try to give them input and buy in to, you know, the place and what they’re doing there.

Sarah Mackin [01:16:29]:
So Yeah. Our latest hire, she’s been with us for a while now. She’s just the last one that we hired. Christie has been amazing. Mhmm. Amazing. So we were already doing well, but when she came in, she just put the extra touch on everything. So much organization.

Sarah Mackin [01:16:44]:
I’m like, I love you. I love you.

Nick & Sarah [01:16:46]:
I called Sarah. I said, you should see I said, I think Christy just organized this whole cleaning closet. It looks awesome in here.

Sarah Mackin [01:16:52]:
Yes.

Jordan Berry [01:16:54]:
Bringing the bringing the female touch into the team there. Yeah.

Sarah Mackin [01:16:58]:
I appreciate you. This is amazing.

Nick & Sarah [01:17:00]:
Yeah. So we end up, like, we gave her a bonus. She did so well. Like, we gave her a bonus within the first couple months of her being there. And

Sarah Mackin [01:17:08]:
And we’ve done that for the others as well when there’s something that they’ve done above and beyond. Yeah. Just that we noticed makes a big difference. All of it.

Nick & Sarah [01:17:17]:
Yeah. We tried to do it like a holiday bonus, Christmas, Thanksgiving time, we do a bonus. And, this year, we’re we are doing we go out next week, I think. We go out and do a, company dinner where we take them and their significant other out for dinner and hang out for a little bit.

Sarah Mackin [01:17:33]:
No business talk. It’s just, like, to socialize.

Jordan Berry [01:17:37]:
Yeah. That’s fun. That’s fun. You know? And, again, it’s like, environment architecture. Right? Like I

Sarah Mackin [01:17:43]:
got it.

Jordan Berry [01:17:44]:
Creating that environment with the team and then also filling your team with people who are helping you, who have your vision of the environment you want to create and like create that. Like, that’s it’s awesome. I mean, that’s that’s the key, right? That’s that’s the formula. But it sounds like until you got that team together, you guys were the ones doing the dirty work. Is that how it went down?

Sarah Mackin [01:18:10]:
Yes. Yeah. So Nick is like I said before, he’s definitely the hands on one, the handy one. But don’t get me wrong. I’ve now learned my way around a Dexter washing machine and dryer. I can fix it. You should see how many people are like, are you okay? Because I’m on top of them with the tops off and they’re fixing it. And they’re I’m like, he’s on shift.

Sarah Mackin [01:18:25]:
I gotta figure it out.

Jordan Berry [01:18:26]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah Mackin [01:18:27]:
I’m like, no. I’m good. I got this. Yeah.

Nick & Sarah [01:18:30]:
She’d call me and, like, I’d walk her through, like, Hey, you got to take that drain or something stuck all day. You got to get on the floor and open this up and take that boot off. There’s something in there.

Sarah Mackin [01:18:39]:
And thank God for YouTube. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [01:18:42]:
Yeah. Yeah. YouTube University is amazing. Amazing. Well, I hope. I hope, Nick, that you’re saving some of the security camera footage of her getting.

Nick & Sarah [01:18:51]:
I’m sure I can

Jordan Berry [01:18:52]:
get dirty. Yeah.

Nick & Sarah [01:18:56]:
Yeah.

Jordan Berry [01:18:57]:
I just. Yeah, that might just be YouTube gold right there.

Sarah Mackin [01:18:59]:
Yeah, that’s true.

Nick & Sarah [01:19:01]:
Yeah. Put that on the channel. Go viral. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [01:19:05]:
Yeah. That’s awesome. Yeah. Well, listen, I mean, you guys are doing an awesome, awesome job, you know, just putting your business together, putting the team together to help you kind of build that business. What’s, what’s on tap for you guys in the future? Are you looking for new locations? Are you still kind of getting settled in here? Did you decide that one was enough? What’s what’s the plan here?

Sarah Mackin [01:19:26]:
So we are actually there’s two things moving. We’ve been looking for our second location for quite some time now. We’ve looked at a few, just trying to find the right fit. So that, and we’re officially formally launching our wash, dry fold. So I mentioned adding a new team member soon, so in the next two, three weeks. We’re launching it April 1. Our existing employee, Christie, that I mentioned, that’s something she’s interested in running with, so she’s going to head up the wash, dry, fold. And our we’re back filling her cleaning positions for Friday, Saturday night.

Sarah Mackin [01:19:59]:
So we’re gonna continue to grow the team and grow the business, and hopefully we don’t really have a location number, store number in mind. Nick mentioned it not that long ago. It’s if it’s a good opportunity, then we’re interested.

Nick & Sarah [01:20:12]:
Every good opportunity would take. Yep.

Jordan Berry [01:20:15]:
Yeah. Well, and I I mean, I like the, you know, I always recommend, like, if you’re gonna try to scale your business, right, scale your business with what you have, right? So if you’re planning on adding lost, dry, fold or pickup and delivery, like maximize that business, like you’ve already got this asset and there’s room for growth, like grow it and obviously, like, keep an eye out for other opportunities along the way. But once you’ve kind of maximized that opportunity, that’s a really great time to go out and proactively, you know, hunt down that next opportunity because now you’ve got this whole system built out that you can just transplant. I mean, obviously, there’s nuances to locations and stuff, but, but you’ve got the framework, right, to work with and go out and build that out again. So that’s awesome.

Nick & Sarah [01:21:02]:
It’s nice now because the store is to the point now where I don’t have to go there on all my off days from the fire department where Mhmm. I feel like now I can start going out, looking at stores, and go back to, you know, recon stores and stuff like that. So

Jordan Berry [01:21:16]:
Yeah.

Nick & Sarah [01:21:17]:
Yeah. But But Sarah has always been looking online. She always looks online for stores and we do

Sarah Mackin [01:21:21]:
Contacting people, networking. Yeah.

Nick & Sarah [01:21:24]:
I tend like we were just talking about this the other day. I said I’ve been so focused on like the stores like 90%. There’s a couple little things to do. And I was like, Yeah, I feel like I got a couple of things to hammer out there. And she’s like, I’ve been looking for stores. I was like, Yeah. I was like, I’ve been looking for stores. I was like, Wow.

Nick & Sarah [01:21:40]:
I was like, I said, I’ve been so honed in on it’s right there. It’s at the cusp. Get these couple of things and all right, Now I’ll look, but it’s good that she’s been doing that because I’ve been Yeah. Focused other words.

Sarah Mackin [01:21:51]:
And that again, that’s just why it works. Like our brains work differently. You run-in that direction. I’ll run-in this one. We’ll keep growing.

Jordan Berry [01:21:57]:
Yeah. It’s power of the teamwork. Right? And that’s that whole, like, one plus one does not always equal two. Right? Sometimes one plus one equals a whole lot more than two. And it sounds like you’ve got that sort of synergy going where, you know, I have this tendency to, you know, I get excited about new stuff and I start new projects and I’ll look for new businesses and all, you know, whatever. But that means that a lot of the times, that means that lasts, like, 10% of any project that you need to finish, like, never gets done or I’ve got to be like real intentional or that that last 10% takes as long as the first ninety percent, you know, like that kind of thing for me. And then my wife is always like, Why are you starting that? You still have to finish this. And I’m like, Oh, well, that’s kind of boring now.

Nick & Sarah [01:22:44]:
So. Yeah. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [01:22:49]:
Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, like, yeah, we bought a house one time, just like a fixer upper house. And then I was like, I found this other house, you know, and I’m like, Oh, look at this. And she’s like, We we just bought like a fixer upper house. I’m like, Well, yeah, but like, that’s in my mind, like, that’s done already. Like, we already did that. Like, that’s, you know, I’m

Nick & Sarah [01:23:09]:
ready. We did

Sarah Mackin [01:23:10]:
the same thing. Bought, like, a fixer upper. It’s fine. I’m focusing on this retool now that we weren’t gonna do till spring, but this is what I’m doing now.

Jordan Berry [01:23:17]:
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I like your style. I like your style. Right. That’s good. I got a couple more just like kind of general questions for you before we wrap this thing up.

Jordan Berry [01:23:29]:
Number one is like. You guys have learned a lot. You’ve grown your like you’re nearly tripled your business, which is insane. But for somebody who’s ready to get started, and trying to maybe find their first lawn or mat, what’s your best piece of advice for them?

Sarah Mackin [01:23:50]:
Go ahead.

Nick & Sarah [01:23:51]:
So I would tell people, two things. Go out on the street and look at laundromats. And see what’s out there in your area. Sit in them. Talk to the people. You know write down you know what’s going on in there. The prices. Do your homework on that stuff.

Nick & Sarah [01:24:12]:
Cause you’ll see things. Look for where you would improve it. So you can start game game planning stuff. But then also have it in your mind what you want it to look like. In in my mind, my store I say it should mine, ours.

Sarah Mackin [01:24:28]:
You’re fine.

Nick & Sarah [01:24:30]:
I always had it was like Listen, Nick.

Jordan Berry [01:24:32]:
We know we know whose store it really is. Yeah. That’s fine.

Sarah Mackin [01:24:35]:
I’ll just let it happen.

Nick & Sarah [01:24:36]:
But I always had this my store looking like, you remember that show Fixer Upper with Chip and Joanna Gaines?

Jordan Berry [01:24:42]:
Like that style?

Nick & Sarah [01:24:43]:
I always wanted my water mat to feel like kinda like that ish style. Like this fun like not fun place, but this clean place. Looks slick on the inside. Like it felt at home when you were sitting in there. When you actually felt comfortable. So that was like I always had that as the end goal. So when I went to these places, I go, okay. I could see that’s what this is gonna look like or I couldn’t.

Nick & Sarah [01:25:04]:
Or, you know, I mean, you you come out, you go, and this is kind of a this is a badder area that I wanna work. Badder area. A bad area and I don’t we always talk about that too was if it’s too rough of an area, what I want to say are going down there at night too was the other thing. So but there’s a lot of stuff to incorporate with it. But get out, get inside the laundromats. It sounds good on TikTok and clips, but but there is a lot of work to it. But it It’s time flexible.

Sarah Mackin [01:25:32]:
Right. Time flexible. Yeah. But to that point, a lot of work, but it’s a lot of work that, in my opinion, is necessary to learn the basics. You gotta get involved. Mhmm. Get in the nitty gritty, and then you know what you wanna do and not do. Mhmm.

Sarah Mackin [01:25:47]:
And my advice would be a sponge. Network and be a sponge.

Nick & Sarah [01:25:50]:
Mhmm.

Sarah Mackin [01:25:50]:
Take the good, bad, the ugly, and then do what you wanna do. Follow your gut, your intuition, but listen to everyone’s advice. Everyone there’s people that have been through it. So a lot of people that have been around, find those good connections and build those partnerships and relationships because it’s all it’s all about networking and relationships.

Nick & Sarah [01:26:09]:
And take in these podcasts like this one, listen to Dave’s. Waleed’s got a YouTube thing. But I always call it like this was my college education was. I listened to all these podcasts. The Yours, I listened to all I think I’ve listened to all Dave’s. But then I reached out for all this content and took that in. And I would take notes on episodes. When I went to these stores, I knew what to look for.

Nick & Sarah [01:26:34]:
Like, how, old were these machines? I could look at the serial numbers. I’d take pictures of them and then I’d go home and Google. Oh, these machines are 25 years old. I don’t we knew we had to retool this if we bought it immediately or other things. Look at the lighting. You know what I mean? There’s a there was a lot of tidbits you picked up and took notes on, and then I applied it when I went out to the stores. Mhmm.

Jordan Berry [01:26:54]:
I only recommend listening to Dave’s after he brought on Carla. That’s what I’d say. You can just skip all the ones before he brought Carla. No. Just kidding. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jordan Berry [01:27:04]:
And I I love that, those two kind of pieces of advice that you have of, like, you know, get in there and visit some laundromats. You know, a lot of a lot of what I do with my consulting when I’m talking with people who are trying to buy their first one is trying to make things more concrete for people. Right? You know, people are, you know, people have these fears or people have these ideas or they don’t really know, you know, kind of what to do. And your advice, Nick, of like, Hey, get in there, go go look at a bunch of laundromats, take notes, you know, pretend like it’s yours. And what would you do with it? Like, try to make this a little more concrete because when it’s it’s all just kind of up in your head, but you’ve never done it before and you don’t really have much experience, it’s all made up. Like, you don’t know, right? And so actually getting out there, getting in the world and trying to make this stuff a little more concrete for you, is it’s going to go a long way when you do find that right one. It’s going to help you figure out, like you were saying, like, what am I looking for? And is this going to be a good deal for me when you when you find specific laundromats, right? And when you’ve looked at a bunch of them, it’ll help you figure out like, oh, this kind of area is not the kind of area that we want to be in or this layout is not a layout or whatever it is, right? It’s not going to feel homey. So I think that that is huge.

Jordan Berry [01:28:30]:
And then, Sarah, your advice of, like, the networking and being a sponge and soaking these up, right? Like, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel here, right? There’s people, who are succeeding doing exactly what you want to do. So finding those people who are succeeding, you know, hearing their game plans and then making it your own, you know, and all that. My only my only caveat, I think you guys probably agree with this too, is that, you know, also kind of know who you’re taking advice. There’s just there’s a lot of platforms. You kind of alluded that on, like, the TikToks and stuff like that, right? There’s a lot of people out there, which I think is a good thing, net good thing, net positive of a lot of people sharing a lot of stuff out there. But sometimes you don’t know who it is that is sharing the advice, and sometimes the loudest people are people you may not want to take advice from. So just, you know, that’s my only word of caution. But by and large, like, yes, like, go out there and network be a sponge.

Jordan Berry [01:29:28]:
There’s something to learn from everybody, even if, you know, they’re not. That’s

Sarah Mackin [01:29:33]:
what you don’t want to do.

Jordan Berry [01:29:34]:
Yeah, exactly.

Nick & Sarah [01:29:35]:
That’s a

Jordan Berry [01:29:35]:
good way to a good way to put it.

Nick & Sarah [01:29:37]:
Thing. Honestly, when you watch people do things that, you know, I don’t wanna do that, that’s huge. I mean, because I don’t could change your your course. You know what I mean?

Sarah Mackin [01:29:46]:
Well Yeah. That’s a good point. Point while when you’re speaking with everyone, there’s so many I haven’t come across anyone who hasn’t wanted to talk about it that’s in the industry. Like, you become obsessed, honestly. Yeah. And you once you’re talking to people, it’s easy to tell. It’s easy to tell who who to take advice from and who to not.

Jordan Berry [01:30:06]:
So Yeah. Yeah. Especially I mean, it’s the same thing, right, of, like, going to visit laundromats and stuff. Right? It’s like the more people you talk to, it if you’ve never talked to anybody, you’re just the first person you talk to is gonna make a lot of sense to you probably. But the more you talk to, the more you’ll be able to sort of pick out, okay. This is probably good advice. This is probably not good advice. Yeah.

Nick & Sarah [01:30:27]:
Thing too when I go to these stores, you could tell who was taking pride in their store and those were the owners. Even if they didn’t wanna sell that store, I still wanna talk to them because they had a good product, and I wanna have a good product.

Sarah Mackin [01:30:39]:
Who was the guy that we connect there was a guy an owner. Yeah. He I don’t remember his last name. Probably. That owns a store, wasn’t gonna sell or already had it lined up with to sell to someone who was running wash dry full. Wealth of knowledge. He wanted to share everything. It was great.

Sarah Mackin [01:30:52]:
So Yeah. Even though no. It didn’t end up in purchasing of that laundromat specifically. We made connections. That’s how I think that’s how we met Bill

Nick & Sarah [01:31:01]:
Gilbert. Yeah. He put us in contact with Bill.

Sarah Mackin [01:31:03]:
Yeah. Like and you just keep having those conversations, and it just keeps going. It’s great.

Nick & Sarah [01:31:07]:
Yeah. Every trip out could have, like, a little nugget of gold. So Mhmm. Just keep throwing them in the treasure chest. You know?

Jordan Berry [01:31:15]:
Love it. I’m gonna have to go get a treasure chest first.

Nick & Sarah [01:31:18]:
Oh, man. You got it in Hawaii. Sounds

Jordan Berry [01:31:20]:
like that’s true. That’s true. I buried out on the beach out front.

Nick & Sarah [01:31:27]:
I

Jordan Berry [01:31:27]:
got one more sort of general question for you before we wrap it up. Now that you own and you’ve nearly tripled your business, I mean, we’ve already kind of talked about this, and I got a pretty good idea what you’re going to say. But do you have like a one best piece of advice for somebody else who already owns who’s like, hey, I want to triple my business. What’s your best piece of advice for other owners?

Nick & Sarah [01:31:52]:
Put your customers first. You know, build your business based off your customers as long as it’s financially viable. You know, it’s not going to put you upside down but we’ve always based decisions off making everything better for the customer. Mhmm. You know? I mean, believe it or not, you do things that made us more convenient for us too. But that was always the focus was the customer first, their experience, and, you know, and then we’d ask them how it went.

Sarah Mackin [01:32:20]:
Yes. Feedback.

Nick & Sarah [01:32:21]:
Yeah.

Sarah Mackin [01:32:21]:
The other thing I would say is come in your existing store or future store with clear eyes. Look at it as a brand new person. You’ve never been in there before and what would you change? Because it helps you pick up on little things like we’ve

Nick & Sarah [01:32:32]:
discussed before. Helps you pick

Sarah Mackin [01:32:32]:
up on little things before you might not see your notice every day, and it helps to improve that experience for your customers.

Jordan Berry [01:32:42]:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that that’s really like those are the things that you built. That’s the back you built your business on, right, of those customer service, getting that customer feedback, you know, keeping that notebook and basically checking all those things off and doing all all of the suggestions. Right? And and seeing it with clear eye. Like, that’s that’s what you built your business off of. And listen. I mean, it’s paying off paying off in a big way.

Jordan Berry [01:33:09]:
Right? And guess what? It’s gonna translate super well to that wash, dry, fold business. We’re talking about a little bit on the q and a yesterday or the day before, whenever that was. Yeah. And you guys getting ready to launch that. You know, my only piece of advice is April Fool’s

Nick & Sarah [01:33:27]:
Day.

Jordan Berry [01:33:27]:
Hey. That’s when you’re gonna

Nick & Sarah [01:33:29]:
launch it. Like

Sarah Mackin [01:33:30]:
But it’s a good marketing tactic. I already got a spin for it. It’s fine. You’ll work out. Hey.

Jordan Berry [01:33:35]:
You know what’s funny is, ironically, I’m pretty sure this episode is scheduled to come out that same day. So

Nick & Sarah [01:33:40]:
There you go.

Jordan Berry [01:33:41]:
Something special something special happened in that day.

Sarah Mackin [01:33:44]:
There you go.

Jordan Berry [01:33:44]:
Something special happening. I love it. Well, listen, you guys are awesome. Thank you. And, you know, we didn’t even mention this. And, I want to, like, double thank you. This originally, we were supposed to do this on literally on New Year’s Day was the original day, and I had a family emergency come up. We had to reschedule it, but I loved it.

Jordan Berry [01:34:03]:
You were like, let’s kick this year off the right way. And I was, like, so psyched about I was kind of I apologize for having

Sarah Mackin [01:34:09]:
to No.

Jordan Berry [01:34:10]:
No. Reschedule it.

Nick & Sarah [01:34:11]:
But I was we get it.

Jordan Berry [01:34:12]:
I was so psyched about that. Just your, like, attitude with it of, like, let’s get after it. New Year’s Day. And, you know, that get after it attitude was contagious. And this whole episode is just that’s kind of shown through, and it’s it’s infectious. So I appreciate you guys coming on.

Sarah Mackin [01:34:27]:
Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Nick & Sarah [01:34:28]:
Yeah, man. Appreciate you. Appreciate this platform. Absolutely. Really helped us out. So not just brown nosing, but appreciate you, Daniel, and all those guests. And and I’m

Sarah Mackin [01:34:36]:
totally got people come on. Take it. Keep going. Keep going.

Jordan Berry [01:34:39]:
Go ahead. Yeah. Go ahead.

Nick & Sarah [01:34:40]:
Everyone who’s come on and pass their knowledge on, it’s it’s been huge for us. So, you know, thank you.

Jordan Berry [01:34:45]:
Yeah. Well, that’s what I was gonna say is, like, listen. It’s this this I I get a lot of credit. I just try to like pass that right on by because it’s really like people endure my little rants and tie rates. But it’s really because, you know, you guys and everybody else who’s been on the podcast and who’s coming on the podcast has decided to, you know, like none of us are like getting paid to be here sitting and doing this here. Like, this is something you guys are are saying, Hey, we want to help other people. We want to share our story, we want to share experience. So it’s all because of you guys who’ve who’ve come on and done that.

Jordan Berry [01:35:19]:
So really, really appreciate it personally. But on behalf of, you know, everybody who’s gonna listen to this and watch this, you know, thank you guys for for coming on and sharing such good stuff. You guys are crushing it. I hope you continue to crush it. I know you will continue to crush it, and, we’re gonna have to have you back on after your wash, dry, fold, creates, good havoc on your business. You’re gonna have to solve new problems because you got so much business.

Nick & Sarah [01:35:46]:
So we’ll have a millionaire. Big money.

Jordan Berry [01:35:51]:
Big money. So Dave and Carla, Lonermat millionaire. We got Lonermat billionaires in the house over here. What’s happening? South Carolina is going. I love it. Well, again, thank you guys for coming on and look forward to doing something again in the future with you guys and hearing how the progress is going.

Sarah Mackin [01:36:06]:
Alright. Sounds great. Thank you. Take care.

Jordan Berry [01:36:09]:
You too. Alright. There’s almost too many good things in this episode to put into action. But listen, you gotta pick at least one of them and do something. Alright? Go do something to further your goals, progress towards what you’re trying to accomplish here. Do that today if possible. If not, do it this week before the next episode comes out. You gotta put in the action to get some results that you wanna see in your life.

Jordan Berry [01:36:35]:
So get after it. Nick and Sarah have handed you on a platter about a thousand different things you can do. So pick at least one and get out there and do it, and we’ll see you next week. Until then, crush it. Peace.