Alex Smereczniak

I was running in, grabbing people's dirty clothes, putting them in my 2006 Jeep Liberty and driving them off campus to the laundromats.

and the guys that ran it were graduating i was like this is incredible this could work at duke chapel hill vanderbilt i want to buy it and they're like all right we're going to sell it for 28 000 my jaw hit the floor like this is the most money i've ever heard of i have two grand saved up

I wasn't in the business school yet because you had to do two years of general.

So I went to the business school as an 18-year-old, started knocking on finance professors' doors.

I want to buy this business.

I don't know how to.

I have no idea how to do it.

And they're teaching me about discounted cash flow analysis, seller financing.

As an 18-year-old, I'm getting this very hands-on, tangible learning

that's when a light bulb went off for me it's like i don't need to go do this path that i feel like partially my family but mostly society has kind of pushed on me of like get good grades in high school so you get into a college and then you get good grades there so you get your fortune 500 job and do that for 40 years and then die i was like this whole entrepreneurial i'm learning way more i'm enjoying it i would have ownership i would have say and control over what i'm doing but i'd just be learning so much faster

So I ended up buying the business with two partners.

We pulled together 11 grand and then did seller financing.

So there were four of us.

There ended up being three.

So I learned early on about picking the right partners, not just because they're convenient.

I'd rather work with three very different partners.

people instead of three of me.

And so one of the, two of those guys were, you know, another me and one of them wasn't and another one wasn't.

Mine was like the finance strategy, putting the deal together.

And then like big partnership sales type of, type of things.