A $29 ticket. A $999 customer.
A tag went on the wrong bag. The ticket was $29. The customer is worth $999 a year. Two kinds of minutes, and the one you...
Read it →Real numbers from one laundromat.
Including the ones that proved us wrong.
We own Super Kleen Laundry in Lake City, Michigan — population 5,000. Self-serve, wash-dry-fold, delivery and commercial accounts. Every figure we publish is measured on our own floor, and when we get one wrong we publish the correction too.
A tag on the wrong bag
$29 carrying $999
Thirty-five to one.
washdryfoldschool.com
What we send
One email. One number, worked all the way out, off a real floor. Four we have already published:
9×
We were wrong about our own store by nine times. Our model said folded drop-off returned $300 an hour of labor. A stopwatch on one order said $34. The whole error was one figure — we had handling at 5 minutes. It is 45.
38¢
Our sign says $2.35 a pound. We collected $1.97. Nobody discounted anything. Almost no operator has ever divided their laundry revenue by their laundry pounds — and the number that comes out tells you what business you are actually in.
35
Thirty-five pounds an hour is not a speed. You cannot get there by telling somebody to fold faster. It is four orders run at once — and you reach it by starting later, not by moving quicker. That costs nothing.
80%
We ask businesses what they do with their mop heads. Around 80% say yes. It is the one item in the building nobody is defending — and it is a route, not a customer, which is the part that decides whether it pays.
The playbook in one picture
Don't build it on your home washer.
$500 a week at $2.35 a pound is 213 pounds. Here is what washing those pounds takes in each place.
Your home washer
32+ hrs
of machine time for 213 lb
- Loads18
- Evenings6 a week
- Volume3× a household
A laundromat floor
1 afternoon
for the same 213 lb
- Washersfour 50 lb
- Roundsone
- Machine timeabout 1.2 hrs
- Foldingabout 3.5 hrs
At home, the machines are your bottleneck. On a commercial floor, your hands are. You can hire hands.
Start where you are
Four ways in
Free
The playbook
Don't Build It On Your Home Washer — how to start wash-dry-fold on somebody else's commercial floor.
Get the playbook →The tools
Price a job, compare where the washing happens, and run the monthly scorecard on your own numbers.
See the tools →Send us your numbers
Reply to any issue or write to us with a figure from your own floor. We'll run it with you — the best ones become the next email.
Write to us →The videos
Every number worked out on camera, on the floor where it was measured.
Watch on YouTube →How this is different
One store, one town, one payroll report. Not a survey, not an industry average, not a guess. When something is modelled rather than measured, we say so in the email.
No, and you should not. We are on a well, our sewer is unmetered, and our market is five thousand people. Our job is to show you the method so you can measure your own. Nearly every email ends with the two minutes of work that gets you your version of the number.
We publish the correction. The labor model was wrong by nine times. The water was never free. We guessed our biggest number and missed by a quarter. Those are three of the most useful things we have ever sent, and they are all mistakes.
Read one before you subscribe
Every issue stays up. Go and read one, then decide whether you want the next.
The overtime is the cheap part.
A 32-hour work week would cost us $3,792 a year in overtime. Avoiding it would cost twice that.
Read it →The best thing I do isn't written down.
What you celebrate is what you replicate — unless it only lives in the air. Pricing praise, notes and checks off our own floor.
Read it →One number a week, off a real floor.
No highlight reels, no hype, and no pretending we have it figured out. Reply to any issue with your own figures and we will run them with you.