Complimentary Business Activity

There are a number of coin laundry owners that offer janitorial services doing commercial and office buildings. They use the machines in the laundry to do mops and rags. All that is needed is enough space to store the cleaning equipment, and enough office space to handle the phones and paperwork. There are also operators who offer maid service to their local community. This seems to work very well in upscale retirement areas. Check cashing service and ATMs are becoming more common in coin laundries too. In many areas, the type of ethnicity and economic status represented by coin laundry clientele often appreciate having these kinds of services offered. The laundry owner benefits as well from the extra cash these services bring in. Perhaps the latest type of business designed as a profit center for coin laundries is a computer module for customer use as they do laundry. It is also a nice baby sitter for customer’s children playing games while parents do the weekly wash. Particularly in small rural towns, the laundry is also a site for catalog sales of clothing and other items that can be purchased there without making a drive to a larger community. Some operators sign up for Amway and similar sales groups and do their selling to laundry customers. One laundry near the border has a coin operated photo booth for those who need passport photos. Another has a local taxi service that is run from a coin laundry. The attendant gets the phone calls and radios the pickup order to the laundry owner who drives his own taxi cab. There are ice cream parlors, cafes, small appliance repairs, delicatessens and bars that are adjacent to laundries and owned by the laundry owner. There it is. If you can imagine it, and it’s doable, then you can probably get it done out of your coin laundry. There must be a thousand ways to plan for additional cash flow in 2008 and beyond. All you need to do is find an idea that can work, plan for it, and then get it done. We couldn’t say it if it wasn’t true, and we never get tired of telling the story of what we feel is the most diversified laundry ever. One enterprising barber inherited an old style gas station, located in a rural community. The station had been closed for some time, and he soon realized that the property would be tough to sell, so he decided to make the best use of it he could. He opened a barber shop in the office -portion, and also began to sell gas to tourists. He added a counter filled with candy, and became a notary public when he found there wasn’t one in the community. He tried to rent out the station’s service bays for storage, but was unsuccessful. So he decided to find a business that would fit in. He heard about an old coin laundry that lost its lease in a nearby town. He worked a deal with the owner and moved the washers and dryers to his service bays. He did most of his own electrical and plumbing work, and thus became a coin laundry owner too. In a year or so, his business was really booming, but he kept expanding. He added a rack to sell magazines, put in mail boxes for rent with a phone answering service for those who rented the mail boxes. They do laundry and drop off cleaning too. When he’s away, the barber shop and notary are closed. His wife or a part time worker handle everything else. They never have more than one person working there at any time. In some ways this is the most diversified laundry on the planet. It would be almost impossible to duplicate this situation, but it serve as an example of what one can do to make any business more successful by diversification. A long time ago, in the heart of a great big city, many laundries built all around that city were of a similar design. It was an early day design with one row of back to back washers down the middle, and the dryers -facing one another in the rear. The heater room door was across the back wall. One came in this laundry, walked down the one side or the other, then between the dryers to knock on the heater room door. An eye hole opened and you were asked to identify yourself. When the door opened to allow entry, it was a bookie joint. Ticker tapes, black boards and a few unsavory characters with bulges under their suit coats, just like in the movies. There were real people doing their normal laundry in the front while bettors were being laundered in the back. When you met the coin laundry owner, he admitted to “renting out” the back space to a friend of his Italian cousin. It was an almost perfect cover. Once upon a time, in a midwestern city, a newbie to the laundry biz was being shown around by an old timer. They were looking at the towns laundries and eventually stopped at one. Nothing odd or unusual about its design. The odd thing was the laundry had three attendants on duty. The one older one appeared to do all of the work. She was very busy. The two, younger, more attractive ones, after brief chats with male customers often took them into a back room. A short while later those customers came out and left, trying hard to look casual. Those going to the back didn’t seem to bring wash to be done. You can guess what was taking place on the bundles in the back room.