Alex Smereczniak

I know a lot more about venture deals and how to structure things and had really good mentors early on that give us advice on what to look out for, liquidation preferences and participating non-preferred equity and all this stuff that goes into it.

So we had this tweener stage where we couldn't buy a laundromat yet, but we needed something because we were outgrowing the quality of which the laundromat partners could provide.

So we started moonlighting, hiring our own staff to go into other people's laundromats when they weren't busy.

Yeah, and they loved it.

They're like, yeah, now I don't have to do anything, and I'm generating revenue that I would have never had otherwise because you're bringing a customer base that would never step foot into a laundromat.

It's mostly affluent, dual-income households.

um and now you're running so you're running you're not competing with them because like they said they're never stepped foot in you're running the graveyard shift i'm assuming is when you're graveyard but then also monday through friday you know people who are using a laundromat they're working jobs you know so they're not doing laundry at 11 a.m on a tuesday morning for the most part and so we had some off hours in the day but mostly at night after 9 10 p.m so graveyard um and were those all in leases you were doing at this point

Yeah, so we would pay basically rent.

We'd rent out space.

It was an asset utilization play though.

They've got assets that aren't being used.

We can produce goods and services out of them.

We did that for eight months and it allowed us to really perfect our process of how do we hire people, train them, build technology around tracking.

We were tracking everyone's garments and scanning machines and measuring everything and getting everyone very efficient.

We actually, we realized turnover is a huge issue for a lot of retail businesses.

We're like, all right, what does this group of people want?

What excites them, what motivates them?

People, oh, pizza party, this, that.

I was like, they don't care about that.

Everyone does this.