Dave Menz Takes Self-Service Laundry to the Next Level

CINCINNATI — Dave Menz spreads his passion for laundry business ownership well beyond the walls of his stores, sharing with others in the self-service laundry industry his thoughts and ideas about lifting what can be a commodity business into the realm of premium service.

Multi-store owner Dave Menz has been in the self-service laundry industry for 12 years. He’s also an author and industry consultant. In Part 1, we learned how Menz’s involvement in laundry ownership and management has evolved since his arrival in 2010. Now, let’s continue.

FALLING DEEPLY IN LOVE WITH SERVITUDE

The experience gained from fixing up his first store taught Menz that his revenues grew in direct proportion to his improving the business.

“As I did that, my profits grew, and as I reinvested the profits back into the business, the community appreciated what I did,” he says. “They would go tell other people in the community, ‘Wow, you should go check out Queen City Laundry. It’s got a new owner and they’re fixing it up, doing things different.’”

He installed new equipment, changed operating hours and shifted from unattended to partially attended to eventually fully attended.

Getting back to the three ownership phases he mentioned in Part 1, during his first five years, he was “obsessed” with buying “zombiemats”—three in all—and fixing them up into plain-Jane laundromats. “I didn’t know that’s what I was doing, but that’s what I was doing. Trying to not make them horrible,” he laughs.

What he fell in love with was the concept of servitude. Menz was several months into laundry ownership when a teary-eyed single mother of three who lived nearby approached him in the store one day.

“She came up to me and gave me a hug,” he recalls. “She said, ‘Thank you for fixing up our laundromat.’ I’ll never forget that as long as I live, because that was the day I realized the impact that revitalizing a laundromat had on a community.”

‘FROM GOOD TO GREAT’

“In the next five years, I wanted to take my business from good to great,” Menz says about his evolution as a laundry owner. “Over the first three, I kept investing all the profits. I call it keeping my hand out of the cookie jar. I took the bare minimum to be able to support my family and everything else went back into the business.

“You wake up three or four years later, the same four stores are significantly nicer than they were. We invested in furniture, in air conditioning where they didn’t have it. We invested in the beginnings of layers of management to keep people accountable, and training and empowering our team.”

Menz had borrowed roughly $3.5 million to get his stores to the point they were and by year eight, he’d paid back some but still owed most of it.

“I thought, ‘I can keep doing this to 10 or 15 or 20 stores,’ which is what I thought I would do at one point, ‘or I shift my focus to how can I generate more revenue, which will allow me to serve my community in a better way from the four stores that I have.’ That required kind of the third shift for me, into this service-based economy.”

OPTIMIZATION COMES INTO FOCUS

Menz knew he couldn’t grow his stores’ demographics, so it became about optimizing his facility and getting the most out of the equipment he had.

Operationally, he decided to capitalize on a growing trend by offering drop-off laundry pickup and delivery. Meanwhile, he turned to some friends who were successful entrepreneurs outside the laundry industry.

“I had always kind of obsessed over my next level and what that looks like,” Menz says. “I couldn’t see anyone in the industry who could help me figure that out. So I went to these entrepreneurs. Most of them are restaurateurs.”

Through lunches and meetings, these business owners asked about his laundry equipment, specifically how much it cost him to purchase, what vend price he charged its users, and how many times a day the equipment is being used.

Based on those factors, Menz’s mentors pointed out that his machines were only being used 10% of the day. “Horrific” was one description of that usage, he says.

The point of buying commercial business equipment, while expensive, is to wear it out as quickly as possible, they told him, not to make it last.

“They helped me understand how underutilized our industry is,” he says. “And that helped me to understand that we, as an industry, need to attack this differently. If we keep doing what we’ve been doing since 1940, we’re probably just going to stay where we are, which, in my opinion, isn’t good enough.”

In Tuesday's conclusion: Value proposition, and finding one’s desired service level