1st Post in 18 Months!
Wow, has it been that long? A lot has happened. Obviously. But I think most of it doesn’t need to be said. We are all going through the same thing. A Pandemic that is destroying jobs and small businesses. The good news is Feather Laundry is still here and I still have a 3 months runway. But I would be lying if I said we aren’t struggling. The first 3 months of COVID really decimated us. Sales dropped 40% and we lost a lot of cash quickly. We went from 17.5 transactions per day in February to 9.3 transactions per day in April. It was brutal.
The last few months have been OK. We were breaking even, things seemed to be picking back up. I keep telling myself if I can make it to the other side, I’m going to come out of it like a rocket ship. Then, the last 3 weeks, a massive drop in sales. Which is one of the motivations behind this post. It’s always nice to write and get your thoughts in order.
So yeah, things are not looking good. November and December are traditionally the 2 worst months of the year for our industry, so these next couple of months are going to hurt.
Here are the key internals right now:
That Net Profit graph is not up to date. The cliff at the end should be twice the size. I just haven’t updated my accounting for September and October yet. The bottom line is, at the pace I’m going, I’ll go out of business in about 9 months, and I don’t have any faith in the economy getting better.
If you’ve been keeping up with this series then you know that the grand scheme was to create a cookie cutter model of a laundry store and replicate it in multiple cities. And I was on my way. February was insane! For the first time we did $31k in sales in one month and it was a short month.
The last time I posted here was May of last year, and that was the month that sales increased by more than 50%. Then we were just on fire for the next 9 months. It was so crazy. And I’m so glad I got a taste of it because now I know what to expect when the pandemic is over. But I have to make it there.
I have been weighing all the factors for the next step. Not just the next step to Feather Laundry but the next step to becoming wealthy in this environment. I think I could double the current revenue by opening another Feather Laundry location but I don’t have the cash for it, and this is definitely not the time to go into more debt.
The truth is I’ve already made a decision as to what to do next. This post is just an explainer on how I came upon that decision. And it’s going to feel like it’s coming out of left field. I’m going to open an Oil Change shop.
What?
As I said, there are a lot of factors going into this decision, the most important of which are time, money, and circumstance. One important thing that has happened in the last 18 months is that I moved into an apartment directly above my store. It’s so awesome. I wake up, I go downstairs, I’m at work!
I have a great deal, and a great relationship with my landlady. I’m now the building manager for the strip mall and she gives me a great deal on rent. Furthermore, she also owns a big warehouse right behind the strip mall. We’ve been trying to rent it out since last year and we finally got a decent tenant to rent half of it about a month or so ago. The other half is still sitting empty. And we’ve had some bad experiences with tenants.
Also I have a handyman who is good with repairs of all kinds. He renovated my apartment, put new flooring in my store, and has fixed multiple issues with my car including the AC.
There are other smaller factors. There used to be a mechanic shop in that warehouse which makes it easy to get a Certificate of Occupancy since the function of the building is not changing. I have an Autozone across the street where we can run and get the parts we need for cars quickly, which means less wait times.
The funny thing is I don’t have a clue about working on cars. When I was a teenager I once tried to replace a headlight in my car. I jammed my finger so hard I thought I’d broken it. That was the first and last time I worked on a car.
But the thing I learned and have really taken to heart about entrepreneurship is that there are few fundamentals and everything else is tangential. The 2 fundamentals are customer service and profit. If you can get those 2 things right you give yourself the best chance at success. And they feed into each other. The more profit we make, the better our customer experience becomes because we put that money right back into the business.
My talent is customer service. I feel like I can make any company successful so long as I am the face of that company. So it doesn’t matter that I don’t know anything about oil changes. I didn’t know anything about the laundry and dry cleaning business when I started either. As long as I treat the customer with extraordinary generosity and empathy, and keep expenses less than revenue, I feel like I can be successful. And that’s exactly what I plan to do.
This story is part of a series documenting the journey of a Dallas startup called Feather Laundry. For your reference here is the Table of Contents for the series.
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