A Glimpse at the Big Picture
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.
I’ve been spending so much time working for my business that I haven’t had much time to work on my business. I am at the point where I’m outsourcing a great deal of the laundry because of lack of time. It is a balancing act between deliveries, doing laundry, administrative duties, and my personal life. I’m caught up in a hurricane of activity and I find myself looking for and cherishing time off. I don’t want to get burned out. I’m in it for the long haul.
Today I decided to take a moment, take a step back, and look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal and what is the best way to get there?
What I see in my mind eventually is this: a multi-city business based on the model built in Dallas, which consists of a central laundromat where the laundry is done, and a few pick up and drop off locations around town which transport the laundry to the main center for processing.
Without a doubt, somewhere along this road an infusion of capital into the company is absolutely necessary. The question is: when? I want to be careful about going after capital too early, and more careful about going too late.
My goal is to reverse engineer the ideal model I described above, and move through each stage continually without getting bogged down. I’ve broken the stages down to the role I will be playing at the time. For example, I started doing all the laundry and driving myself. That was stage 1. Now I’m almost exclusively driving, and only doing the laundry myself when it’s slow, to save on margin.
So I went from laundry doer, to delivery driver. The next step in the chain as far as my own role is store manager (drawing on my experience working in the pizza industry). But a store manager requires a store to manage. Opening the first store does not necessarily require capital. I could conceivably grow the business to enough positive cash flow to cover the rent and utilities of the first store. I would be operating at maximum capacity as far as my own time and ability to cover the work, but it is within reach. I estimate this to be about $6.5k to $7k revenue a month. I think I could get there by the end of this year.
Now the question is should I? If the infusion of capital is absolutely necessary at some point, wouldn’t it be best if that point was right now?
This is a crazy and counter-intuitive answer: No. I’m weary of cash infusions because they create a sense of safety. They take away the pressure and I know myself to know I work well under pressure.
Besides, I haven’t proven anything yet. I haven’t even proven that I can achieve positive cash flow month after month. In my mind, it’s a few months too early to be chasing outside capital. I need to focus on finishing the foundation of the business and getting it to the point where it supports itself.
What I’m saying is I don’t yet have the leverage that I need to ask for capital. I would have to spend even more time and energy on chasing capital precisely because it’s too early to do so.
That puts me on a path of organic growth. The ideal timeline is getting into a store by late summer. In the meantime, focus on growth.
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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