- The latest trends with laundry pickup and delivery
- How the founders of Curbside Laundries applied their laundry expertise to pickup and delivery software made just for laundromats
- Pickup and delivery success stories
- Two BIG pitfalls to avoid. One of which can cost you 25% of your gross revenue, the second can impede your business’s growth
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Transcript:
Hello, welcome to the State of the Industry with Laundry ‘Matt’, we’re going to be talking about four different things today. Number one is the state of the industry. What is happening with wash and fold and pick up and delivery across the country today? The second thing we’re going to be talking about is our story of how we started off at Super Suds our family laundromat, and how my brother grew, the in-store wash and fold and the pickup and delivery numbers to numbers of can’t believe. And then how we got into the pickup and delivery software business. As a result of our personal experience. Third, we’re going to be talking about our customer’s journeys because our success is wonderful, but what’s even more gratifying is that we’ve been able to help so many of our customers achieve such financial success, and we want to share those stories with you. And lastly, how to make the most of this opportunity. There’s a lot of stuff happening, and we want to make sure you stay focused on the prize. And finally, this episode is going to run a little bit long, but future State of the Industry podcasts should be about three to five minutes to have a one golden nugget in there, maybe more. But something where you know that if you invest three or five minutes, you’re going to have a great takeaway that helps you further succeed. What you’re looking at here is the state of the industry. What you’re looking at is the gross income at Super Suds for pickup and delivery only. For those of you who are listening to this episode, let me tell you what’s on this chart. This is the gross income for Super Suds over the last five years. It starts off five years ago in 2017, the average income was about $10,000 a month in wash and fold. Then in 2020, the average income for wash and fold and again, this is just pickup and delivery was just shy of about $40,000. This year, it’s close to $80,000. So, in the last year we’ve seen a doubling of pickup and delivery. The numbers were already big at $40,000.
Now it’s just ridiculous at $80,000. So, you could see, even before the last year, things were still progressing a lot. It went from about $10,000, then the next year was about $15,000. The next year was about $20,000 on average. And then it went up to $40,000 and now it’s at $80,000. So, we’re seeing exponential growth. So, this is about a five-year span, and you could see the tremendous growth and pickup and delivery and industries across the country are going bananas and especially with laundry. So, we just happened to be at the right place at the right time. And so many laundromats are experiencing just tremendous success. This is what’s happening. If you want to follow the money it’s in pickup and delivery. You know, before COVID maybe a few people, a lot of people did pick up and delivery or Prime and they just have different expectations with ordering stuff.
But now everybody’s doing it. It is not a secret to have food delivered to you to have your laundry picked up. All these types of cultural changes are happening fast, and it’s not too late to get into it because the market is growing faster than we’re able to keep up with the market. So, there’s just tremendous opportunity because there’s more customers doing this. And I had somebody, I was talking to somebody on the phone, who’s like ‘Matt’, we’re doing really, well. And I know he is, but you just keep telling everybody about pickup and delivery. He’s minding his own business, making a fortune, and I’m out here telling everybody to look there’s gold over here. And this is gold and it’s just so gratifying to be able to help so many different people tap into this. So that’s the State of the Industry. If you want to know what’s happening, the biggest shift of revenue like revenue opportunities, it is pickup and delivery. And it has been for years, look at the growth. So as far as our story, that’s Laundry ‘Aaron’ on the left and that’s me Laundry ‘Matt’ on the right. And we start off at Super Suds, still doing it, but we’re doing the software full time. We’ve been able to hire managers to manage the laundromat, and now we’re just dedicated to helping other people achieve success. On the right-hand side, you could see our gross income over time. So, my brothers started helping at Super Suds in 2010, you could see it’s almost like a hockey stick slope of increased revenue. That’s because of him creating a strong web presence for the laundromat, growing wash and fold. And, but things got a little bit difficult to manage because there wasn’t any software to manage the wash and fold process. And if it was out there, we would have bought it. We tried different systems out there, but we knew if we wanted to continue growing, we needed software to manage the process and make it easy for people to schedule pickup and deliveries online. Over here, you could see on pickup and delivery. What a lot of people don’t realize is when you do pickup and delivery, the order sizes are double. When somebody brings wash and fold into your laundromat, they’re giving you about 20 pounds on pickup delivery it’s closer to 40 pounds on average. On the right-hand side, you could see it takes a lot of room for storage and, but people will make room. We have 1500 and 1800 square foot laundromats doing really, well. And they find the space. But before software, we had no idea where all the clothes were. It just went all in the back room and customers had to find their own clothes in the back room. So, we developed a whole bunch of different things to track orders, both when we’re laundering it, when the customer’s picking up their order and everything is now organized. So, we developed three different things. One is the laundromat point of sell, which not only helps you at the register, but it tracks every single order from beginning to end and even acts as a customer relationship management system, notifies the customer when their laundry is complete and ready for pickup.
Second, we have the pickup and delivery app. So customers could schedule their pickup and deliveries from their phones, makes it super easy. And third, we developed a laundromat website designed to help your web to help your laundromat rank and get customers online. And so, we now know more about software than we ever did. And we know more about making websites for laundromat than most website companies, because they don’t know about the laundry industry, we do. And the top right that’s the first time we sort of hit the market in a sense, or we presented our offering to the market. And so that’s at the clean show in 2017 in Las Vegas. And we had just a very modest 10 by 10 booth. And we were jam packed for three straight days, crowds where people came back and came back and came back and they said, we’ll come back when you’re no longer busy, but we were busy the whole time. And it was just, it was amazing. The market, was just ready for something like this because they had similar issues as we did. And they knew that this pickup and delivery was a wave, and they needed some way to manage the process. And down below you could see a photo from New Orleans. And that was a clean show in New Orleans in 2019. And again, for three straight days were jam packed and we had major manufacturers come by and say, what is going on in this booth? Because they never seen a crowd like that. And so, it just feels really great, just we’re in the right place at the right time. And we just continue reinvesting and reinvesting in our software, making it cutting edge and meeting the needs of actual laundry owners who are doing this. So right over here, what you’re looking at is again at Super Suds, this is our wash and fold numbers for both pickup and delivery and in store. This chart shows both 2020 and 2021 for wash and fold in store and pick up and delivery. Last year, we averaged about $50,000 per month in wash and fold and pickup and delivery. This year, we’re at about a $100,000 and it’s on an upward trajectory. So, we started off last year, around $40,000, ended up near $60,000. This year, we start off at about $70,000 in wash and fold and now we’re just right at about a $100,000 per month.
And look at that growth, the message here should be, how do I get into this? If you’re not doing pickup and delivery right now, you should be. And there are, there are a lot of people who don’t even have a laundromat who realize there’s money to be made here. And they were building websites and they were saying their laundry service. And some of them get become very, very, very successful. But you, if you have a laundromat, have a huge advantage because you already have a laundromat. You’re going to rank better than somebody without a laundromat and so there’s no time like the present to get into this. So, when there’s sun make hay. Over here, this is one of our clients who’s been with us for three years. So, this customer started off three years ago at about $2,500 a month in wash and fold. One year later, he’s at about $10,000 a month finishes up that year at $15,000 a month and this year he’s doing over $25,000 a month. So, he went from about $2,500 to $25,000 gross within three years, I guess, two years, you know, two years later, he was at $25,000 and keep in mind, it took us a while to hit these numbers. And now we have clients who are hitting these numbers a lot faster than it took us. Cause we were at it for like 10+ years. And now we’ve got clients in three years hitting really, really good numbers. Here’s somebody else. He started off at about $1,500 a month, gross in wash and fold and pick up and delivery one and a half years later, he’s at about $18,000 a month. Just incredible over 10 times. And what is it going to look like in 2022 or 2023, these customers to do a pickup and delivery are loyal. They love the service, and they don’t want to go back to doing their own laundry. So, you want to capture these customers while they’re looking for the service. Here’s another customer, he is making about $2,000 gross. Now he’s getting close to $8,000 just one year later. Those are huge, huge numbers. So as far as percentage of growth, that’s fantastic. Here are two different customers who are in a similar trajectory in January, they’re both at about $5,000 a month in wash and fold. And now in July, just six months later, they’re now both at $20,000 a month.
And think about what that does to the value of your laundromat. If we’re perspective buyers, looking at you and they see the growth and it’s all documented. I mean, you could drill down to any month to down to the order down to the day. I mean, and these are real problem a lot of laundromats have when they go to sell us, how do you verify income with wash and fold and pick up and delivery? This, these are real numbers, and the trends speak for themselves. And again, what are these guys going to be making next year? It’s life changing. So, here’s another customer, this is one of our clients who was at, who was at about $20,000 a month in wash and fold just last year. And this month he’s at about $45,000 in this month is looking even better. So, his business has over doubled in one year.
Now there’s more and more people doing pickup and delivery than ever before. And it just keeps growing. So how do you make the most of this opportunity? Number one, you need to own the customer. That’s number one. If somebody comes up to you and says, hey, we could offer pickup and delivery and you can make all this extra money laundering clothes for us. Just say no because you want to own the customer. So, it’s under your brand. You want to build up your wealth, not somebody else’s. You spent $500,000 or a $1,000,000 on your build out. And for somebody off the street to come up to you and say, hey, I love all those machines you got and great job training all your employers. I’d like to tap into that. And why don’t, you know, give me, you know, 25% or 50% of your revenue because I’m providing the customer. There’s no way. You’re the one who invested in the laundromat. You took the risk. You need to collect the reward. On the other part, if another company comes in and wants you to do the work, guess where those customers are going to be? They’re going to be right by your laundromat. So, you are handing the most precious people over to your competition, because those are the customers you should be owning. And instead, you’re giving them to somebody else and they could send promotions to them, and they could add the flip of a dime, send them to another laundromat. Bottom line, you want to build your own wealth. Just don’t let somebody take advantage of your capital investment. And number two is you need to go with an experienced partner. Somebody who’s actually doing it. Somebody who’s in the laundry business, not the tech business. See during COVID a whole bunch of businesses shut down and guests who stayed open, laundromats. So, there’s a lot of.com money that was looking at our industry and saying, hey, how can we make money off them? Because they stayed open and so we’re recession-proof we’re pandemic proof. And so, there’s a lot of.com money coming into the industry that doesn’t know the laundry business. So, if somebody out there is recommending, oh, you could have Uber pick up your clothes. That’s a big red flag that maybe they’re just telling you what you want to hear, because how great would it be to get into laundry and pickup and delivery and not have to hire a driver or get a vehicle or B, they actually believe it works. Either way, that’s not ideal. So, we have a proven model and believe me, if we could have just gone and outsource driving to Uber, we’d be doing it. But to add that much extra money to every single order, it’s just not feasible in my opinion. Finally, I hope that you subscribe to this. If you’re listening to this on YouTube, please subscribe. If you’re listening to it on a podcast, hit subscribe. It really helps us out. And if you’d like more information, check out curbsidelaundries.com. We’ve got videos on there about how to get started and pick up and delivery that go into depth. How to do the marketing, how to do all these different things. I really appreciate your time and any feedback, feel free to send to matt@curbsidelaundries.com. Thank you.
