CCI Drive Time
CCI Drive Time is a practical, no-fluff podcast you can listen to between sales calls—real conversations about CCI products, the laundromat business, and how to sell smarter while you’re on the road.
CCI Drive Time
Distribution Is Stewardship: JD Dixon on Service, Scale & Staying Close to the Customer.
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
JD Dixon has never taken the conventional path—and his journey into the laundry industry is no exception.
In this episode of CCI Drive Time, Steve sits down with JD, owner of National Laundry Equipment in Nashville, Tennessee, for a wide-ranging conversation about nearly two decades in laundry distribution, operating laundromats, building a service organization, and navigating an industry that looks very different than it did when JD entered the business in 2008.
Along the way, JD draws lessons from private equity, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, British naval history, artificial intelligence, and his own experiences as a business owner. While the stories occasionally take the scenic route, they continually return to one central idea: great distribution is about stewardship.
JD shares why he believes the distributor plays a critical role between manufacturers and store owners, particularly when customers are investing significant portions of their savings into a new business. He discusses the importance of local knowledge, strong manufacturer support, listening to customers, knowing when to push back—and sometimes having the courage to tell a customer that a project simply shouldn’t move forward.
Steve and JD also explore the increasing consolidation of laundry distribution, the challenges facing independent distributors, the economics of running a full-service organization, and why service and support may ultimately be more important than the brand name on the equipment.
JD also explains how owning laundromats himself has changed the way he advises customers. Having experienced the financial pressure, construction headaches, operational challenges, and occasional 2:00 AM problems firsthand gives him a perspective that can’t always be learned from a spreadsheet.
It’s an unconventional, candid, and story-filled conversation about what it means to be a distributor—and why having someone personally invested in the customer’s success still matters.
Welcome to CCI Drivetime, the podcast for vended laundry distributors. I'm Steve with CCI using your drive time to cover laundromat trends, payment systems, and practical topics you can use in the field. Today I sat down and had a very unique and interesting conversation with JD Dixon over at National Laundry Equipment, uh, headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. Um, I have known JD for many, many years and had the pleasure to work with him uh over that period. Uh it's an unconventional, candid, story-filled conversation about what it means to be a distributor. Um, it was you know really great to talk to someone that obviously cares very much and is personally invested in the customers and the store owners that he does business with. Um, and so I know you'll enjoy it as much as I enjoyed hearing it. Without further ado, here is JD Dixon. JD, great to see you, sir.
SPEAKER_00Good to see you, my friend. It's really good to see you, Steve. You know, I I really appreciate you and your family. You guys are been really good friends for a long time. Thank you for letting me do this.
SPEAKER_01Well, the feeling is absolutely mutual. Um, I am looking forward to our conversation this afternoon. We were chatting for a few moments before I hit the uh the record button about it being Friday afternoon, and uh it's a good time to have these conversations before the uh the the pre-weekend uh service calls start to show up. Uh so we we'll we'll get to that, but we'll we'll have a little fun here and talk some shop in the meantime. But but yeah, thank you as well for uh being a part of this. Um you know, just trying to you know elevate distribution and and and and share good ideas and see how we can uh participate in uh making this industry better for everybody. And obviously it starts with the store owner and the retail customer, but the distributor is a big layer of it, it's a very complicated layer of it. And of course, we've got all the manufacturers as well, CCI included, so we we'll we'll we stay involved in that. But I want to learn a little bit more um or I want everyone to learn a little bit more about national laundry and kind of how you got instant in it.
SPEAKER_00You know, I know 2008-ish, I think, is when you guys it was February 1st of 2008 when I when I when I took over. Um and man, that that's a whole story in and of itself. I did not grow up thinking I wanted to sell washers and dryers. Um I was I was gonna be a veterinarian, and that's what I was going to do, and um I ended up not doing that. Um I had good grades in college, but I didn't have vet school level grades in college, and I went back and was taking some some some classes and stuff like that, and I was kind of going down that path, and um, you know, I was doing other things. I actually worked in a um um molecular biology lab doing some incredible stuff with a a a principal investigator, PI, who was um holy smokes, talk about a smart group of people. I got to work with a uh PhD from Beijing um lab and one from Turkey. And uh, you know, this was at Vanderbilt, and and and the level of um just investigation, uh, it was really cool to watch how they did that. I graduated with uh you know a biology degree that was kind of on the molecular side, and and and I know this is weird to say, but it was kind of the path of least resistance for me because I was fascinated in it. And something that you're fascinated with you sort of remember, right? Yeah. And so, you know, it's not that I'm a very smart person, I'm not. I just really enjoyed, for some weird reason, learning why bodies work on the cellular level. I actually met my wife that way because um yeah, I was a senior and she was a senior and she was going to be a nurse, which she is now. She's she is the brains of the outfit. Uh oh, yeah, she's a heart transplant nurse. Been at Vanderbilt for many, many years. Oh gosh. I think she went to Vanderbilt 2023, maybe. Um, started on the floor, worked her way up, you know, and now she's part of the premier heart transplant team in the world. Um they do almost as many heart transplants as there are days in the year.
SPEAKER_01That's amazing, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, uh, yeah. So, anyways, but she uh she lived a floor above me, and I, as a microbiology, well, a uh molecular biology major, I had already had all of the stuff that was covered in microbiology, but she was getting a pre-med, and so she had microbiology, so I didn't really want to go to class. So I figured out she was in my class. So a couple nights a week I started going up to her apartment and borrowing and copying her notes, and uh that's how we met. And then, you know, a few years later we're buried and things happen. Yeah. Here we go. And uh then I, you know, I kind of after not figuring getting into vet school, I was kind of lost for a little bit and got into retail, ran some retail stuff. Um, just because I'm a hard worker, I I started working for a guy who had uh you know some fishing stores and ended up you know as a young man kind of running them for him. Um and um you know I wasn't a particularly awesome employee. I was a young man, and young men are tend tend to be uh young men.
SPEAKER_01Young men, I was gonna say.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. No, I mean we got a lot on our minds, and like our future is really not part of that. Yeah. Um, you know, we hadn't figured out the whole you know legacy stewardship idea yet, which is where we're going, by the way. Um, because distribution is stewardship. That's what it is. And if we don't see it that way, then we are absolutely failing, right? We're failing ourselves, we're failing our customers, and we're failing the future in this in this industry. Um, we are not owners of businesses, we are stewards, and and we're stewards of a proud legacy of people that help people make a lot of money. Back to this uh, you know, whimsical story, I guess. Um I ended up going to business school, um, got a job with a little boutique private equity outfit in Germany because um um one of the uh who's a great guy, one of the the principals in that private equity group got a um got a uh MBA the same time I did at at the Owen School of Vanderbilt and then um um you know he we got along real well and he liked me and so you know he brought me into his business and did that with him a little while and then uh he really um through a couple of specific moments he really encouraged me to try to go find something on my own and do it and he you know would help me and all the things. Great guy named Tobias Waltell. Um he runs a con he runs a couple companies now, I think several. He's uh um just a fantastic guy over there in Germany. Um got a family now and everything, like all of us.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but but talk about stewardship, a guy that you know you work for and he is encouraging you to become entrepreneurial. That's amazing. I love that.
SPEAKER_00Correct.
SPEAKER_01Wow.
SPEAKER_00And um I always remember that, and and you know, I try to help my employees kind of think the same way, right? Um and you know, a lot of the way we pay folks and stuff like that, like we like ideas, we like hard work, we like creativity. Um and so we're always kind of trying to figure out how do we improve this process we have. And I gotta be honest with you, like I've been doing this now 18 years and I'm kind of out of ideas. All my ideas come from other people, you know?
SPEAKER_01Like most of the best idea you had was hiring creative people, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and and you know, sometimes like working harder is not the answer. Like, hey, you know, there's a tool on the market that it does this for you. Holy smokes. We've really dove into the AI uh situation, and we're able to do things that I never imagined we could do. It's so cool, so it's so awesome.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's a it's an excellent. Like a scalpel in the hand of a surgeon. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00You're like, scalpel is a great tool, but you don't want JD doing surgery on you. You want one of my wife's bosses doing that.
SPEAKER_01That's right, that's right.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, like if you do a financial model with whatever AI version you got, you need a finance guy to kind of look at it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00By the grace of God, I have that education from Owen, and so I know like if it feeds me some information, uh, I'm like, yeah, let's look at this again and this and this and this. And and generally you can massage it through your prompts so that you get something really, really good, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's like a research assistant, but you still have to have some real eyes on it, you know what I mean? Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And uh and it can get it can lead you down into a lot of trouble. But at the same time, if you know a little bit about what's going on, um, you can end up taking an afternoon and building a financial model that would you know take a you know a real deal financial analyst weeks to do.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's easy.
SPEAKER_00And it's it's uh it's a it's a fantastic tool, but it's a tool, it's not a therapist, my friends. We all will talk to whatever and say, you know, XYZ, uh, what do I do about this and everything else? That's not but it is a yeah, it's not a marriage counselor.
SPEAKER_01It is amazing uh how many ways you can leverage this. So I guess it's good to whether they're all good ideas or not, there seems to be no limit on what it will answer, right?
SPEAKER_00I remember my uh in business school, my game theory teacher was like, do not use what you learn in this class in your marriages. That was like game theory in marriages. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, this does not apply to everything in your life. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So, anyways, um working for Toby and and that outfit, I uh uh started looking at businesses and I only had $50,000. Like now fifty thousand dollars in 2007 was and at this time, so I was also handling canines for FEMA. Um and um I was doing a lot, you know. Um I uh you know really wanted to serve after 9-11, 9-11 having my senior year of college. Um it was a you know, it was kind of our COVID, our Pearl Harbor, um, as an ex ennial, if you will. Like that was a pivotal moment in my life. And um, you know, everybody kind of wanted to join RFTC or be in the military or somehow served this cause that all of a sudden we learned existed, right? And whether it's right or wrong and everything else, you know, is to be discussed. But we, you know, we really felt that way. And um I, you know, I have a genetic kind of situation um and uh military was not interested in me, and um that's why I did not join the military, right? And and it was actually a really, really good thing. But I um, you know, I have a lot of friends from uh the RTC program in in in um at Furman University where I went that are still in in the service and doing very well. Yeah and uh but yeah, so so I was working for Toby and I only had fifty thousand dollars and you know, based by sell.com was a thing back then, even then. Sure. Um sometimes the internet would would go down because a Bronosaurus would, you know, walk over the lines, but we had it. And um um man, uh I I looked at a palette company, I looked at all these other things, and you know, I had Toby helping me and all this other stuff, and fifty thousand dollars even back then didn't buy you anything. And I walked into National Equipment Company, and there was uh kind of a little old man, a little old lady. The Juanita's still alive, she's she's doing great. Um Roy has left us, um, unfortunately. Um a typewriter, um, a yellow pages ad. Yeah, and a ledger book that went back to 1947 that was handwritten.
SPEAKER_01Oh my gosh.
SPEAKER_00Right? Yeah, and I was like, well, there's one thing I know about this business is I can afford it.
SPEAKER_01One of the criteria were just jacked off.
SPEAKER_00Here comes the MBA, you know. I'm a private equity guy, I can do anything, and I can't do anything. I didn't know anything. I didn't know anything about the industry. I didn't, I was like, it's business, is business, whatever. Yeah, well, let me tell you that lady that I mentioned before, Stephanie Dixon, my wife is uh, as far as I'm concerned, the most special human being on the planet. She it was five years before I got a paycheck. She didn't leave me, she didn't complain. You know what she did? She paid our bills for five years. You know? And without that support, um, and a lot of providence and a lot of grace from above, uh there's no way I would have made it, even in the market that I was in, which was a much easier market to succeed in, in 2008, this the distribution market and the market uh for the laundromat owner was incredibly fractured. If I remember correctly, at the time, less than four percent of laundry owners e owned more than two laundromats at the time. Um this was a one laundry per person picture industry, yeah. Industry. Um and really distribution a lot of times was well, I got a tuck couple of technicians, and you know, I'm gonna quote some top voters. And um, you know, I mean, I remember when the F1 reader came out, and it was the most amazing thing on the planet. I mean, and yeah, it was a brilliant product, right? And even though you had to hit the minus sign for enter, yeah. Explaining that to customers was kind of thing. But but I tell you, man, like it was a fantastic product and and and just the the robust nature of it, and then figuring out all right, so we know credit cards are important, but how do we do this thing where the fees don't eat us alive? And um, how do we do this thing where it's you know it's safe for all this data? And and you know, how do we do this thing where we can afford to put you know 60 or 70 readers in a store? Like all of this stuff is stuff that you know people like Steve here had to kind of figure out, and and you know, they did a great job. Um, and uh, you know, he's got a a variety of products now that are all fantastic and and you know you know a little bit of a of a shameless plug. I just want to tell you like this this is about support. And if you want support, CCI is very tip top of the list. And I mean, I can tell you I have three laundromats, and I you know, it's always Friday afternoon when you have a disaster, right? Yeah, little things that happen during the week, but it'll be Friday, you know, 455, and everybody leaves at 5 on Friday, and you get a call that's like, you know, the boiler just burst, or you have a fire, or you know, I mean it's that's how it is. So, anyways, my satellite access port goes down. Um, we call Steve's company. Um we get we you know we get somebody who's very willing to stay and help us, and you know, it's ticking past five o'clock, and he's like, Well, you want to try this and this and this, and I'm like, Man, you know, I've done this for a long time, and I've got my absolutely amazing service manager over there, right? And I'm still here in the office kind of managing the problem from here, and he's he's on site because my guys are all either in different places or they're gone for the weekend. So, anyways, um Randy's there, and uh Randy, by the way, ran all of the uh maintenance for 7 Eleven in North America before he came here. He's one of the most really amazing um uh hires that National has made this year. We're we're changing everything to try to support the customer better because that's the only way we can survive. Right. We have to, and and honestly, you guys deserve it, right? You guys are out there running your businesses as well as you can, and you can't do that if there's no way to get a service guy on the weekend. Right. You know, now I have to incentivize my guys to work on the weekend, like that's not easy to do. Um, but you know, we've we've created like an emergency service plan that you know a laundry owner, whether it's OPL or laundromat, they'll pay a little more, but you know, that extra money actually goes straight to that tech, and so the tech's super happy to go, you know.
SPEAKER_01Um yeah, you were you were telling me about that, and that is the most one of the most creative things. You're talking about you run out of creative ideas. I think you have a pretty good idea, you still got a few good ideas left in.
SPEAKER_00Okay, all right, that was Randy. All right, you're not taking a good thing. I'm not taking blame for that. Well, that's really creative, and I think that you know as as you can Mike, uh Mike Roas, my new general manager, um, he ran um uh uh out in Arizona ran uh a massy Ferguson John Deere dealership, which you know that's serious business out there dealing with real industrial equipment, right? Um that's that's real deal. Um, so I'm really lucky to have those two guys. Um, you know, I've got a I've I've got a a great and growing uh staff of service guys. Um Jessica in the front office here is just doing really well. Um she is uh she she she I I I kind of liken her to my she she's kind of my bulldog. Um like I carry you know before I hired her, I carried like $40 or $50,000 a month in receivables, and now I carry like eight. Awesome. There you go. Um and you know what? She she's really uh down to do anything. We had a customer call in and I've got a massive we do chemicals as well. I got a massive group of you know people coming in. I'm out of chemicals. I know I miss you know, we have protocols for all this where they're supposed to tell us, and you know, like our cans you can see through, and so when you get low and all the things. So I know I I messed up and everything, and we didn't have anybody to get them chemicals today. And Jessica, she's like, I'll take them.
SPEAKER_01Awesome. Oh, team players, gotta love it. Oh man, uh yeah, my favorite thing in the world, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, uh, and and and I gotta plug Emily too. She runs my laundromats, and and ever since she's um taken that, and I'm not running them anymore, uh, she's doing it. There it's so much better to run. Like she is uh she's amazing.
SPEAKER_01So yeah, I'm so lucky. I I think you're you're a great example of an amazing founder, meaning you build the the core of what you expect to be done, but then it's okay to finally let go and let these people shine in their particular areas and allowing employees to come up with ideas, allow them to shine and do something for a customer just sets your your mind at ease that you've made the right decisions in these hirings. So yeah, kudos, kudos to you for finding the right people and uh yeah, kudos to them for doing the right thing. Well, I'd I'd I'd love to ask you a couple questions.
SPEAKER_00Mike Rose is is is is a big part of that. He's yeah, he's doing all the hiring now and everything. And I have this problem where like I hire somebody and I'm like, this person's great. And then it's like, well, actually they're Charles Manson. You know, they're not so great.
SPEAKER_01Well you've got then you've got the right team to do the uh the due diligence after you fall in love with them. You've got someone doing a little due diligence. That's good.
SPEAKER_00Oh man.
SPEAKER_01So um I'd I'd love to talk a little bit about kind of how you've seen things change over the years. So, you know, great, great explanation of kind of how you kind of come to be national laundry, but now it's been now we're here in 2026. You know, you've been you've been doing this for 18 years. You know, what what would you say is the biggest change from an industry that you that comes to mind from those early days to what you're seeing us seeing now? And you can take any direction, whether it's what you deal with with the investor, whether it's something with the manufacturer, something just with the the business climate. What comes to your mind?
SPEAKER_00Well, um I'm a longtime uh mixed martial artist in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and I kind of see things in belt ranks a lot of times. And Brazilian jiu-jitsu is really special because there's no real objective way to reach black belt. It's all very subjective. It's based on your coach, it's based on the your lineage, and uh, you know, generally it takes 10 or 12 years to achieve the level where you're handed a black belt and that means whoever your professor is, that means they're comfortable with you teaching what they taught you. Right? That's like a PhD.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And and so, anyways, um I can honestly say that now I am a multi-degree laundry black belt, and when I met Steve, I was maybe a blue boy.
SPEAKER_01I love it. I love it.
SPEAKER_00Steve grew up in the industry, and he had the benefit of you know a fantastic mentor with his dad, and he has a brother who's great, and his son's in the industry now doing a great job. Yeah, and um, you know, um, it took I had to make a lot of mistakes, right? Um but I also there's there's a few of us, Ralph Daniels, Frank Denunzio, um, you know, there's a few of us left that were not laundry people before we got into the laundry business. And um I really appreciate those guys, by the way. If either of you watch this, I love you guys. Thank you for taking my calls. Um compared to them, I'm tiny, and but those guys love to help me whenever I need the help. Um and then Frank, Frank's son, Frank Jr. is is just brilliant. I mean, he's a really smart guy. Um but uh and then you know Ken Martin's now on my staff, and and Ken's been in the business 50 years, and and I mean he like I bounce stuff off of him all the time. It's just amazing to have a guy who's like you know, what would we would consider a coral belt, you know, okay working for me that you know and a coral belt is a red and black belt, and there's only like a handful of people in the world that have these things that you know have achieved. I think I think you have to be a black belt for like 27 years to achieve that. Like yeah, yeah, it's something that's unachievable for me as a Brazilian jujitsu person, you know, unless I am still I mean I might be in my 80s, right? Yeah, it's so uh anyways, um I can without a doubt say that I am now pretty capable in the business. I would give myself a less than 10% chance to succeed in today's market if I were to try to do what I did in 2008 today.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um coming into a very fractured business, which is actually why I was drawn to the business, it wasn't quite that chaotic. I was looking for a company that was so underground nobody even thought about it. Super, super unsexy. There were no podcasts, nobody cared about coin laundry. I mean, basically, nobody had any idea there was money to be made here. This was a thing that, you know, you just somebody had in the town, and it was kind of well, you didn't think twice about it, you know?
SPEAKER_03Right.
SPEAKER_00And I, you know, I want to be careful saying this because I don't condone mob activity, but one of my criteria actually when I was looking at uh businesses was I kind of wanted something that had mob ties historically because they were really good at finding cash-heavy businesses that had very light regulation, right? Um, and you know, you had uh what was it, Dutch-made laundry all over the United States that was, you know, very mob run, and you had all these other laundries, and so that intrigued me. Well, why would these guys, who maybe for the wrong reasons, got into really, really good underground businesses, why would these guys be so interested in a legitimate business? And one of the reasons why is it's got great margins, it's not at all regulated. At the time, the government didn't think twice about you, they never even walked into your facility, and you are kind of left alone to do whatever you want to do in there, right? That is not the case now.
SPEAKER_03Sure.
SPEAKER_00Um, so you had that, you had the fact that it was super fractured. Um, you know, I looked at the market, and Michael Davis is a really good competitor over at Star Distributing. He did built really great stores, had a fantastic track record while he was working. He you know, he sold out to Alliance now. Um they're doing those things over at his uh his his old business. They've moved out of the building that he owned and they're somewhere else now, and uh, you know, whatever. Um and then um um, you know, there was really nobody else, right?
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Well I had like Tennessee and Kentucky, and I had Rim Company and Robert E. Moore was still in charge of it. They're killing it, but they're away the heck up in Versailles, forever away. We had uh Southern Automatic uh with uh what was his name? Um well it doesn't matter. He was a fantastic guy. Um I can't remember.
SPEAKER_01Uh yeah, old yes, I know. Yeah, I remember him too. He was a really sweet guy. Yeah, I'm trying to remember his name too. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00He was in Atlanta.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And then you had Craig O'Dell, who's kind of recently exited, and but he was like like Robert Moore. He was OPL, and then every now and then he popped up in the laundry business, you know. And uh man, like that was it within hundreds of miles.
SPEAKER_03Right.
SPEAKER_00You know, and um, and I'm not saying it was easy, it was really, really hard. And I ate cheese sandwiches for a long time. Um I did. I mean, and and you know, I actually had this toaster that I bought at Goodwill that I had in the uh, you know, one of those like little oven toaster things that I had in the office, and it caught fire one time. Um because I think I paid like eleven or twelve dollars for the thing because that's what I can afford, right? So um um, you know, it was hard, but with hard work and just continuing to push and continue to push, and then Jason Fleck, God bless him, he's at uh Laundry Lux now, and he's by the way, another shameless plug. Um, we're doing a uh um laundry summit here in Nashville. There are already 476 people coming. We're doing it with uh with Laundrelux. Um, Jason does a great job with that. It's gonna be fantastic. I think I'm gonna be speaking, so you guys will get to hear me ramble on online.
SPEAKER_01I just did one of those events this week in San Francisco. They do a great job. They really pull people in. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I think this is the biggest one ever so far by RSVP. Like 476 people already, and it's gonna say you got time to go. Like originally we're gonna have it here at my place, and then Jason. Oh no, yeah. And then, you know, uh yeah. So, you know, we're we're scrambling now, looking for a venue that can hold, you know, five or six hundred people plus vendors, plus all this other stuff. It's gonna be cool. And then in November, uh National Equipment ourselves, we're gonna have an open house. And we're on open house. Yeah. We're already having to scramble for a venue there. We're already having to, but we'd love to if you're seeing this and you're near Nashville, October or November, there you go, you'll see all this stuff. Man, come meet us. We'll we'll have a good time. Um I'm not gonna not gonna push you into thing, anything you don't want to do. Um the um the market is now dominated by massive, massive, massive corporations. And the when when Alliance was owned by the teachers union, they launched Customer One and they immediately came out with the Galaxy Control. They had the A and B micro control. And I don't know if you remember, Steve, but they had some of the worst bearings on the planet. Like a speed queen bearing was going to fail. You would put in a launder mat and you would have a significant amount of bearing jobs. And do you know I don't do bearing jobs anymore, right? And one of the main reasons is Alliance, uh, well, first of all, Dexter, to their credit, they started marketing. We've got this bearing that's like money.
SPEAKER_01It is massive, yeah.
SPEAKER_00And our bearing, you know, you can you can like go and and and it'll it'll it'll run one of those giant things that like uh tumbles gold ore out of like, you know, the rock of Alaska. You know what I mean? And and and so Alliance was like, hmm, maybe we better have a real bearing. And they got the triple lip seal bearing, and then they launched customer one with Bruce and all those guys, and they focused on supporting the distributor, and they launched uh what was it for it was ALSU. You remember?
unknownYep.
SPEAKER_00They launched ALSU and they I took every single class in ALSU. I was one of like 25 people in the entire nation that had taken. They made it through all of them. Yeah, even the sales classes, the service classes, everything. I mean, they were amazing. They still have Alliance University, which is still fantastic, although they pulled back a little bit of that. Um But what it was was we are going to teach our distributors how to support the laundry people. Yeah. They it took them a while, but they dominated the market. And they dominated the market with really professional, really good distributors, and they for a lot of ways gave me the education that I need, you know, to be able to educate new laundry owners. Yeah, now things have changed since then. There's new market, there's new equipment, there's all this stuff, right? The Galaxy Machine was fantastic. That control is still kind of out there in different ways. Um, it's a great control. Um, you know, I'm a big believer in the touch screen. Some people don't like it, they think it's gonna gray out, all the other stuff. Um it, well, you know, this is all semantics. If you if you if you like buttons, it's fantastic, right? Yeah, easy easy to program all the stuff. Um at the same time, Waskomat uh Waskomat came out with the compass control, they started being more and more involved in distribution because they had moved completely away from distribution for a while and then they moved back toward it seeing that hey, this works. Um they came out with a custom with the with the with the compass control, which even though I don't think it hit the market as well, um that's very different. Yeah, it's a fantastic control, but it is very different. It reminds me of an Apple product, you know. Like it's it's got like a wheel and a button.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, to get used to it, yeah. But it was a good idea. It just took a little had a little learning curve on it, but it was very functional.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, oh fantastic control. And I mean, even in and I'll tell you, in Kentucky, you know, like you'll go to these small towns and see Launtermass full of Gen 3 and Gen 4 still at Washington. Yeah, right. I mean, it's crazy.
SPEAKER_01Uh longevity, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then um um um then we started for you know, uh it was 2015, I think, when I started hearing the rumblings. And then 2016 things got serious. Um, Henry and EBI started buying up distribution, and uh Lions in particular got really worried about uh negative pricing pressure, yeah. Um which is understandable. Um Mike Shabe is the head honcho of Alliance Laundry Systems, and I've spent some time with him, and I personally think that he's a pretty daggum good dude. I mean, he's uh nice guy, um, he's running a business, uh he's doing what he thinks is right. It's different from what I would like to see. Um and then you start having almost like um you know, for you MBAs out there that have looked at all these cases, you know, you almost have kind of the uh the old private practice roll-ups and the dentist roll-ups of you know the 90s. Um and I don't know, like if you got an MBA in the you know, before 2010 or 2012, you know, especially before 2009 when everything we learned in finance is now illegal. Um I remember taking classes like, hey, these are credit default swaps, these are the way of the future. What was the way of the future until we about killed the world?
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um yeah, and you can blame the MBAs for that. We did that, so yeah, we'll just go ahead and say you're welcome. Um but anyway, um they don't work. Yeah, they work for a little while, but not for very long. You get a bunch of frigate drivers, and when I, you know, I mean, like um I I'm a really weird guy, and I'm really into the history of uh brigate British frigate captains, um you know, around the time of the Revolutionary War, a little bit before, a little bit after the War of 1812. These guys were the rock stars of the British world. They were more or less government-ordained pirates. They were driving vessels that had the capability of multiple um batteries, multiple infantry batteries worth of heavy guns, right? They were super fast, and honestly, a lot of their orders were hey, cruise around and cause trouble. Right? And then you'd get then you'd get the guys that were driving the ships of the line, and those guys had a lot of regimented, you know, these are the 70, 100-gun massive ships. These are the regimented guys that, you know, would get into battle, and like, you know, Lord Nelson and those guys. You probably heard a lot about, you know, I mean the British and sailing, great studies. If you want to learn about leadership, there are some phenomenal examples and some terrible examples. But they were able to get people to do things that are just unbelievable through you know, through leadership and through teamwork. And the thing about a crack frigate, what they called a crack frigate, like a crack frigate could do everything faster. And there was a time when a British frigate could get off three broadsides for every uh French broadside that would return. And it has nothing to do with British naval command, it has everything to do with the captain of that small vessel was able to lead those guys and do difficult training so much so that they could do superhuman things. Right?
SPEAKER_03Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um if you're going to try to drive a frigate like you do a ship of the line, then all you gotta do, all you got is a tiny ship of the line. I don't think I don't think that a massive organization cares about somebody buying five or six hundred thousand dollars worth of laundry equipment. Feels that way. Right? But if national laundry equipment, you know, has got, I don't know, five or six of those going on at one time, like we can stand on the line between you and the manufacturer and say, look, we're not putting up with this price increase. We need a price adjustment. This is going to you know cause my customer to work you know forever for the bank. And by the way, I do understand that you're looking at profitability numbers, but what I'm looking at is somebody who's literally giving me their retirement fund and saying, I trust you, will you help me be the steward of this in a correct way? And if I don't respect that and treat that as an amazing level of responsibility and something that I should lose sleep over, then I am failing that person, right? And and um there is no big company on the planet that sees things that way because they have a whole bunch of MBAs that are really good at crunching numbers that say we need to do this, we can get you know 0.3% more you know, you know, percentages on our on our profit.
SPEAKER_01You know, if you know what there's I I I gotta stop you because what you just said in a in a in a really creative way, and I love it, is you just you just you just defined what distribution is from its heart. And what I in and in just this idea that there's gonna be these big manufacturers that have to, and they have to be there because they're the ones that have to make the massive investments in all the tooling and the RD, and they have to, they have these massive um you know technology uh layers. They have to build because we need these products to sell. We need we need that. But what ultimately can get lost as those companies continue to grow and and develop new things is this connection to the guy that's gotta buy it and not just buy it, but the guy who's got to operate it and is very likely investing everything he has. And and and that disconnection is where the distribu the distributor fits in because and you're invested in that guy's success because one, you start to get to know these people, right? I mean, I know you're you're very close to some of your customers, but not just that. Yeah, see, but but then you go and say you you're now on partnership with them because your their success means your success. And obviously, we're all here to make a living, and you know that if you help this guy get there and you stand by him and you represent him and you act as that liaison to whichever manufacturer that you know we're working with, that when he's successful, he's gonna build with you again. And and when it's time when the time is right, and he's gonna come back to you for that. And that is what I you know, you've just really summarized that in a way that I think I think we all know this, but until this moment, I'm I'm listening to you carry on about this story about the frigates and all this stuff, and then it finally comes back and I'm like, where are we going? Where are we going with this? But you know, it it's really a great way to kind of describe how the distribution layer of this um is a critical piece to it. You know, the distributors don't make anything. You know, we're not the manufacturers of things, we're we're the facilitator of these things. But without the facilitator, then you have a manufacturer just dropping a piece of iron on someone's front lawn and saying, Yeah, it washes clothes, go figure it out.
SPEAKER_00Well, I can I can tell you this. I don't, you know, those of you who have not yet built a laundromat, yeah, I love my general contractor friends and I love my plumber friends, and I love my you know mechanical friends, but boy, they need me.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Because uh more and you know, more things require things that they're just not used to doing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And we need them and they need us, and the good ones don't do a whole lot without calling us and being like, Hey, we think we can save a few dollars if we do this. And sometimes we're like, hey, that's a great idea. And sometimes we're like, Yeah, well, if you do that, this is what's gonna end up happening. And by the way, it's gonna do one. And like I won't install my equipment if you do that, so let's not do that. Right. So um, you know, and it's uh you know, it it is it is there are a lot of steps, right? Um, one thing Steve and I talked about in the beginning is at the very beginning, you want to find somebody that you like. If you're gonna build a laundromat and you've never done this before, you want to find somebody that you like and somebody that you can do business with, and you really you really develop a relationship with that person um and their sales team, and you start the process and you are very, very patient um with the process. Because um one of the problems with giant, especially publicly traded outfits is they have to meet earnings or numbers, or else analysts get angry and it greatly affects their ability to borrow money. If like some analyst somewhere says, Well, you know, they said they were gonna do this and they weren't able to do it. I mean, for a publicly traded company, that is a terrible, terrible thing, right? So there is a whole different level of let's do things because of numbers and not let's do things because of the human behind the numbers.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um there's, I will tell you, I have a fantastic customer who I may actually sell him one of my launder mats because we're struggling to find him a location now. And I hate doing that because there are months when the only thing that's keeping national laundry equipment alive is laundromatrice. Because it's a Easter famine business, and after a while you just run out of cash, and you, you know, your your profit and loss looks like we're doing great. And then you're like, why do I not have any money in my bank account? Uh and another shameless plug. Uh go to my website, nationalunrequipment.com, click about, and there's 200 and something articles. And a lot of them are like, How do I do this thing where, you know, my accountant's giving me a PL or QuickBooks has given me a PL and a balance sheet? How do I do this thing where I know actually how much cash I have? Like, how do I do this? Right? And uh the majority of people that open lawner mats are brilliant people and they're really good at whatever they did before. Um, but maybe like some of the basics of you know how to do some of the stuff they're not so good at. So if you if you want a lot of great education, um uh it's it's a blog, but basically it's a lot of articles that articles, yeah. I have AI right for me, but believe me, like a surgeon with the scapel, I'm a tool. I'm not just I don't have AI just write stuff, right? So I put in all the parameters, I go in, I fix it, and I actually spend a lot of time on these. The most recent one, we had an ice storm um back in February, and um it has actually sort of loosened some connections in a lot of um our infrastructure, like the big infrastructure, and so we're seeing a lot of dirty power. So we see fluctuations in voltage and we're seeing a lot of issues with inverter drives.
SPEAKER_01Interesting.
SPEAKER_00Right. It's taken us until now, and one of my brilliant favorite customers, a guy named Columbon Filio of all washed up, he took his little, he's got this little device and it talks about it in the in the I'll I'll let you read the article. Um but um and Steve, if you don't mind if you put it up there so people can click it, that would be great. But um he put this little device that his insurance company gave him for free for his house into his wall socket, and he was like, Holy cow, my voltage is all over the map during this course of the day. So he calls up NES, our local uh Nashville Electric Service and our local utility, and he says, Hey, I'm getting these weird readings. Uh, can you help me? And they came and brought a real deal like three-phase meter thing that they put on it for free. And they were like, Whoa! And they fixed it for free.
SPEAKER_03There you go.
SPEAKER_00Um, and so you know, instead of going and paying however many thousands of dollars it is to replace an inverter drive over and over and over again, yeah, right of the problem.
SPEAKER_03Sure.
SPEAKER_00Um and and I mean this, and so I wrote an article about that because Colin called me and he's like, JD, I just found this out, you know, and and it was fantastic, right? And so this is something that all across the nation, and we need to know if we if we're having a an issue with multiple machines, it's probably not the machine. Something else is going on, right? Let's figure out a way to get to the bottom of it, right?
SPEAKER_01Um nothing more nothing more frustrating than having the finger pointed in the wrong direction, but you can't see what else is happening. So, you know, having this outside factor that was invisible until somebody came up with an idea, like, well, maybe we can check something else. I love that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And of course, my technicians are trained. They're like, they go, yeah, drives bad. Man, that's weird.
SPEAKER_01Oh, maybe we had a bad run of inverter drives. I don't know.
SPEAKER_00You know, like uh it's that's not that's that's that's larger than what we can expect these guys to do, right?
SPEAKER_01So yeah, yeah. Interesting. So I'm curious. Um you know, you talked about owning stores. You have you guys have three you have three stores and you operate. And how has, you know, when I talk to different dealers, is there's a there's kind of a mixed uh feeling uh across some distributors of whether or not they think it's a good idea for a distributor to also own stores? Does it feel like you're competing with the people you sell to? Now we have manufacturers that own stores. I mean, it's like really gotten all over the place. I'm curious, how do you position yourself as a distributor and I also own stores? Because we we own stores too in Chicago, and you know, we we we're in the same position. A ton of stores in your business. They do, yeah. Like a lot of them.
SPEAKER_00Um that's a great question. And it's an old question.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yep, yep.
SPEAKER_00Um, and me particularly, I built three stores in small towns where I don't have anybody competing in those small towns. Um and one of those stores in Ashland City, Ashland City's got like 5,500 people in it, and that store is kind of my retirement plan. In fact, I recently signed a 30-year lease there. Uh yeah. Um, so you know, if if I ever get out of distribution, which you know I may be forced to do, we've got massive, massive corporations doing it now. Yeah, and I don't want to be for all you MBAs that read all these cases out there, you know, I don't want to be, you know, Bob's hardware store.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00You know, sure, sure. Um, because I can circle the drain and circle the drain and circle the drain and run out of money. Yeah. And that's not fair to my lovely wife who paid all my bills for five years. And it's not fair to my son and my daughter, who are getting started in the world. And it's not fair to my employees who would just get fired and no longer have a job. And it's not fair, so I don't know where all of this is gonna end up, right? I may be I may have to I may look at this and say, you know, uh this is instead of instead of paddling on a lake, now I'm paddling upstream and the current's getting really, really strong. And um I don't have plans now. I was telling Steve, I've had four kind of attractive offers on my business. I'm 47. Um I'm not I don't know. And and what you guys don't really know, like when you say attractive offers, they're not that great. Distributors are not real profitable, right? We use the distributorship to do other things that are profitable. Um the the idea of having a really, really profitable distributorship, it's hard, right? And it's getting harder, you know. Um and I'm not saying this is a labor of labor of love. No, we make money, we do, we have to. Um, but this isn't a business where we're super crazy profitable. Uh, you know, we we operate on on for small business thin margins, and we operate on heavy expenses and building things like routes and all these and training employees and having vans and having the insurance to cover you know employees who do dangerous things, and so for every dollar you pay them, you pay the state 11 cents for workers' comp and and um you know having software technology that can help these guys go from one thing to another or help them diagnose problems, and I mean, like by the end of the day, you know, like uh money just goes out as fast as it comes in, and when you're working on thin margins, it it it it really becomes a cash sort of um problem, right? So again, you know, you you look at your PL and you're like, holy cow, I made a lot of money. And then you put your balance sheet up there and you look at both of these things and you're looking at this going, where's the money? You know, I didn't really make all that much money. Thank God I have a route and I have a chemical business and I have uh, you know, because yeah, you know, so um but no, and and and I'm not saying poor, poor pitiful me or anything like that. I'm just saying it's changing. And I recently heard Jordan, um, you know, the Lawner Matt Resource, he's a good dude. He did a fantastic podcast on this. Um Jordan said that your local distributor is either going to be bought up by a conglomerate or they will be excellent. And there's no other choice. And there will be some excellent distributors who just because of local market situations have to be in this group simply because man, like you know, like going back to frigates, um you could be there was a guy named Cochrane who was an amazing frigate driver. I think he got a post-captaincy in his 20s, which was crazy. And he uh uh he ended up getting into British politics and really losing his he he was a nut, but as a frigate driver, he's amazing. But he sails into a bunch of you know 74, 120 gun ships that want to sink him and they're gonna blow him out of the water. It's not gonna work, right? Um and then going back to the hardware example, like every NBA everywhere studies the local hardware guy who's doing everything right, he's got a great business. Um bang. Home depot, bang, lows, bang, ace hardware. Can't compete.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_00Um, it failed. My first business out of business school. We were actually I was working with a bunch of guys to try to roll up uh outdoor stores to compete against like RAI and stuff like that, and that was kind of our business model, and we had this little outfit and we were trying to raise money and all this other stuff, and we never got anywhere with it. But it, you know, it was based on this. Like at the time, you had all these little mom and pop outdoor stores that had no buying pro no buying power, you know. They could say, hey, we need a little bit of a discount on our North Face jackets, and North Face would say, Yeah, you bought a hundred thousand dollars from us last year, screw you. You know, this is not gonna happen, right? And um, you know, so the the idea of um of kind of being the last man standing is terrifying when you have less and less and less power in the face of these massive ships of the line. Right? At the same time, they can't go as fast as me, they can't turn like I can, they don't have knowledge of the local area that I have. And honestly, like they will spend so much time chasing this one little thing of technology that may or may not work, like I'll beat them every time using AI and you know, using the ideas that my customers bring to me because I unlike uh the big guys, I actually kind of listened. Right? Um, every distributor everywhere has always been frustrated with manufacturers because we say, hey, if you did this, it would be awesome. And they kind of like to tell you this is what you're going to. Am I wrong?
SPEAKER_01Like, no, no. And and again, I was just gonna reiterate what you've already, I think, you know, and in in your way, have described this other very important piece of distribution, which is being the listening, the sounding board. And I think that you have just clearly identified that you listen to your customers so that you can make improvements, whether it's ideas, whether it's suggestions, and you use that to incorporate and improve national laundry. And I think what you're what you're hopeful for is that that that same kind of relationship can be had with our manufacturers because you're just passing it along. Because this is what you see, and and it feels like there's resistance there. When you see the new improvements come out, all of the idea meetings that were had, you don't see any of the stuff maybe that was that was maybe presented when if they asked for suggestions. Uh, you know, that's a big if if suggestions were asked, were any of them actually implemented in there? And as a manufacturer myself, we get lots of suggestions for things. And certainly I understand we can't do everything right away, but I can tell you that everything gets written down because you got to put it somewhere. And then when we when it's the right time to pick up new things, we go and reevaluate. And I'm just like you, CCI is is just like you, is that many of the great things that about our product didn't come from my head. They came from customers' ideas. One of the biggest promotional programs we have in our systems came from a customer in Southern California who said, What about this? Have you ever thought about it? Oh, that's kind of cool. Let's try that. And it's still one of the biggest programs that we offer and one of the most popular marketing tools we have in. That's Wash to Win on the Laundry of the Points program. I mean, it's, you know, it's like, you know, it's it's you know, it was we basically put a fancy brand on it, but it was ideally his idea, you know, and and he was instrumental in curating that from the beginning. So, you know, I'm I'm certainly not too proud to keep my eyes open for good ideas. And um, you know, I I just I did a talk, we talked about Jason, you know, um over at Laundrelux. I did at one of his events, and I spoke at one in LA a few weeks ago, and I admitted that when credit cards and laundromats first started to become a thing, I wasn't really on board. I thought I was, you know, I'd been doing it longer enough to say cash is what we use here. And really, who's gonna use a credit card in a store? But I was wrong, you know, and so now we build great credit card products, but you know, and and that's really one of the one of the big moments where I said, I don't have all the great ideas. And what's gonna be great about CCI and our businesses is being open to look to the ideas of everybody that we service and trying to find a way to make it work for everybody. You know, some people have great ideas that are very specific to their market, but that doesn't mean there's not a good idea inside there that could be broadly used in many places. And we just have to be kind of open-minded enough for that. That's that's that's great advice.
SPEAKER_00Well, you asked me a question that I didn't answer. You asked me about operating laundries and being fishing with my customers. So none of my laundromats are in company.
SPEAKER_01Or competitive areas, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Laundromats are hyper local, right? Um, I'm gonna make a bunch of enemies here, but those are the the franchises. I personally, as an MBA with a finance background, I don't understand why you would buy a laundromat franchise because national marketing is not helpful. But like if you feel that there are other support levels that help you, then it's perfectly a fine thing to do. But if you find a good distributor, they're gonna do everything a franchise is gonna do for you. By the way, and they're not gonna take six or seven or eight percent of your revenue at the end of the day, you reach and you tell a guy like me that's been around for a while and be like, yeah, that's a great idea, or no, that's not a great idea.
SPEAKER_03Right.
SPEAKER_00Um and then there's the other thing, so you know, I in 2022, after a lot of hard work, I actually was a middleweight um IBJ JF Pan-American World Champion or Pan American champion in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
SPEAKER_01Wow, congrats.
SPEAKER_00Uh yeah, and I didn't get there by myself.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I have a coach who is also a former Pan American champion. Um, I've not ever really I've gone fairly deep at Masters Worlds, which is like worlds for old guys. And in jujitsu, if you're a master, that means you're older than dirt.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um, but um, you know, it's still really tough. Um, you know, you get a you get a bunch of middle-aged dads that can really throw down. But uh I, you know, and I had a boxing coach. I boxed for a long time too, um, which is a very dumb idea. Those of you young people watching this, don't box. It's like drugs. Like I don't know, when Steve and I were growing up, they had this this is your brain, and they showed an egg, and this is your brain on the boxing too, huh? Oh man, it's it's the worst. Like I'll probably forget that I even did this podcast here about 45 minutes ago. Anyway, um he and his name was Jerome Coffey, and he he's a big he was a he was a really, really, really good boxer. You can look him up in the 80s. He was um, I think Ring Magazine number one footwork guy, like big guy. Um little guy, but big name, right? I think he he fought at a really small weight class. Um, but um it's really hard to effectively do you know, effectively counsel someone in something that you don't uh do or have never done. Because it's really easy for me to read articles, it's really easy for me to talk to them people, but unless I actually feel the stress, and unless I actually have put the money on the line, how can I say to a new laundry owner, man, I know you feel like this laundromat is going to break you. I know you're putting a ton of money out, and I know none's coming in, and I know it feels like this is forever. But I want to tell you, in six months, I'm gonna be your best bud.
SPEAKER_01We're gonna have a very different conversation.
SPEAKER_00Love this. And then in two years, you're gonna be asking me, can we do this again? And then we're gonna go through this thing all over again. Yeah, because I've been through it three times, and the third laundromat I was cool about, even though I hadn't got into a war with the local town because I don't know, but I think the uh my competitor in the town was a um he had a really, really dirty, gross, you know, zombie mat. Yeah, um he was on city council, I think, and so they made it really, really a little influence here.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Oh man, every time I would complete all the tasks, all of a sudden they would come up with a new list, uh I ended up meeting with the mayor. And he was like, well, you know, I campaigned against this, and I was like, well, that's funny because like all I want to do is open my business. Can I please open my business?
SPEAKER_01Please.
SPEAKER_00Uh but the first two laundromats I built, I promise you, uh, if you asked me, you know, during the installation process when I'd spent a ton of money and I'd sign these leases for ridiculous amounts of money. You know, you monthly it doesn't sound like that much, but when you look at 10 years of however much your lease payment is, and you start doing that math in your mind, and you're like, I personally guaranteed this lease, I can't afford this, right? Your um There will be a moment where you are really unhappy about the decision you made. And it really, really helps to have that person come and sit in this office right here. I have a couch right over there. Just sit there and just let them talk, man. Because I've been there. I've been I've done it three times. And I can say, bear with me. This is gonna work. I have a long history of building successful laundromats for people. I wouldn't do this unless I believed in you and I believed in the location. In fact, I have a fantastic investor working with me now. We were gonna do a laundry in a small town. We had a lot of the preliminary stuff done. We had stamped plans. And I don't know if you've had plans drawn recently, but holy cow! Like I remember when plans were like an afterthought. Now, like you gotta finance these dad young things. Like this everything is really expensive now, right? And it's not it's just the way of the world right now, right? Um, anyways, this poor fellow. He the this town had plenty of water to actually run the laundromat. That wasn't a problem. But when he went through the permitting process, the town discovered that laundromat or no, whether or not this is built, uh they don't have enough water to fight fires per IFC, International Fire Code. So they're like, okay, Mr. Future Laundromat owner, you want to build a business in our town? Here's what you're gonna do. You're going to pay to upgrade the water main. And it's gonna cost this. And you look at it and you're like, okay, that's not terrible. And then I start actually doing some research and talking about everything, and it's like way more expensive than what they said it was gonna be. And I had to sit down with the guy and say, man, we have spent six months on a project together. And by the way, like this is a problem for national laundry equipment's cash flow, too, because we were kind of expecting this to happen. Uh let's not do this thing.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. That's a tough one.
SPEAKER_00You know?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. But you know what? That's but that's the other place that you fit into is knowing when it's time to say no to something. And you're not going to get that from uh from an organization that just needs the just needs the dollars. They just need the dollars, the MBAs, as you call them, just need the just need the dollars, and it doesn't matter how the dollars get there.
SPEAKER_00I mean, and it's because they don't ever see the human being. The human being never sits down on the couch, right?
SPEAKER_03Right.
SPEAKER_00And and God bless their sales team, because um if you are on the sales team for a massive company, you know, you don't make X, Y, or Z quota, and you're out.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. They're in a tough pot, tough spot, yeah.
SPEAKER_00You don't, I mean, like they talk about incentivizing, and it's different. Like, hey, I'm gonna hold this carrot in front of you, and then hey, I'm gonna hire 30 sales guys, and I got room for three. And you know, like there's that Batman movie with um Heath Ledger. Man, best Joker ever. Uh God rest his soul, unbelievable actor. But I remember this one thing where he like there was this big fight or something, and there were these two guys, and he breaks a pool cue and he throws it down, and there's these two dudes, and he's like, Well, you know, we've got a small but growing organization, we only have room for one of you. And then he walks out, and like the other guys right. That's that's the feeling you get from the scene, right? One of them's gonna win, and one of them and and go on to work in Joker Enterprise or whatever, and the other one is gonna die. Yeah, and um a lot of my customers come from corporate America, they're trying to escape that. They're trying to move into something where, yeah, there's a lot of stress. Like, don't get me wrong, anybody that tells you the laundromat business is mailbox money, they are telling you a lie. Um, this is a business you will be required to run it. There will be times when you do not want to be doing this thing, and you will be doing it, and sometimes it'll be two in the morning and you will have somebody yelling at you because they did something stupid, and you just kind of have to stand there and take it. Um, by the way, call the police, don't get in a fight.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, good good advice. Well, you know what I'm hearing what I think what I'm hearing from you on that question, though, is the fact that you are willing to take the same risk, you're willing to make the same investment, you're willing that to experience the same worries that a would-be investor of you know, to invest with you and invest in your in your in you know, in your in your concept, you know, in your in your project with them goes a long way beyond just the fact that, yeah, you could someone might consider that to be a competitor, but if you're but if you're moral about it, like you said, and you're very selective in your locations. I I also agree that one of the best ways to learn about this business, not everyone has the ability to open a laundry that's a distributor, but if you do, that you will have a different level of um respect for the business, but you will also you'll sell more equipment, not because you did things wrong, but because you did things right and that you know what the right things are. And yeah.
SPEAKER_00You can speak from a you can speak from a place of having been through the emotional roller coaster of starting an asset-heavy, yeah, low single sale business. Because when you go down there and you're like, man, I'm spending one point whatever million dollars on a project, and you know, my average sale is not much.
SPEAKER_01A lot of those. It's a lot of $20 transactions if you're getting $20 ahead. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And and like, and you know, Steve and I are Exennials, and back in the day, like you're looking at $1.75 transactions.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, right, right.
SPEAKER_00Um, Steve, I want to tell you, like, I did rip my and and uh Phil, if you're out there, earmuffs, um, my uh standard changer rep, who I dearly love, I ripped my changer out of my Lebanon store. Everybody told me I was crazy. The store got knocked down, knocked over, like somebody broke in and broke into my changer a couple times, and I got done with it. And I ripped my changer out of there, and everybody told me I was crazy. And do you know? I saw a dip in revenue for about a month, and revenue actually started going up after that because a lot of the folks that were kind of hanging around to see if they could borrow money on off of somebody else. Um, that even if not, look, even if you have good attendance in there, an attendant, if you are doing the correct things and they were actually working while they were there, you know, it is not impossible for somebody to come in and do nefarious things without them seeing that, right? You can't expect you can't expect one person who's tasked with a lot of things cleaning, helping customers, doing all of this stuff, to also make sure somebody's not going to go into the bathroom and do drugs. Right. It's it is an impossible job. Yes, you you should you should have your laundry attended. It is almost necessary nowadays. I mean, if you're in a tiny town that, you know, your local waffle house has a sparkling clean bathroom, maybe you'll get out of it. Right. The truth of the matter is um you it's uh yeah, attendants save a lot of headaches, right? Yeah, but you can't expect them to also be perfect and to be able to do all the attendant things and to also manage all of these customers, especially on a Sunday afternoon. Holy smokes, it is crazy in there, right? Um and there's some great products. Um, and I know CCI is involved in all of this where you can actually manage who uses your bathroom. Super important thing to do. I'll tell a quick sort of macabre story. We started managing access to our bathroom uh March of 2024 because January of 2024 across three launder mats, we narcanned four people. Oh goodness. Um and I'm in small towns, I'm not like like Lebanon, Dixon, Ashland City. Yeah, drugs are there, but it's not a and these are attended stores. Drugs are there, it's not a uh, you know, this is not like what you might deal with in Chicago. Yeah. Um, and we I'm a believer, look, look, like we're gonna have Narcan there, and my attendants are gonna know how to use it. Right? Wow. Um and you know what, since 2024, you know how many people we've narcanned? Really? Now I did recently, my Dixon store, I did recently change the light fixtures out. The light fixtures had a little space in there. Okay. I had to change them out to super narrow LEDs, and I did find some needles, uh, some syringes up there, so somebody had been kind of harboring some. I do feel all kinds of um mercy for people who have drug addictions, and there's a whole lot of reasons why. And I'm not I'm not out, you know, but you have to manage this in your store. If your store is a place where your local sing single mother can't bring her four kids and do laundry.
SPEAKER_01I was gonna say, we got mothers and children. We have to yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00That that is the person that you build that laundry for. Everybody else is cool.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00But your your mom, who's just trying to make it through her day, she's the one that you do everything you build the entire location for, right? And so if you can't build a safe location, then that is um you don't do it, right? And part of that, unfortunately, in today's market is the spaces where you don't want to follow people, um you need to at least manage who goes in there, and that means you know who is in there, how long they're in there for, and when they went in, right? And just because they know you know these things, you know, a lot of times you're still gonna have a problem every now and then. Every if you if you have a public space, you're gonna have issues. But if you if you if they know that you know these things, then they're a lot less likely to you know feel like that's a safe place for them to do these things, and so they'll find other locations, right? Yeah, another thing that you can do is eliminate cash.
SPEAKER_01Thank you very much.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you don't have to eliminate it, but you know, you got cash in a kiosk and it's in one spot right over there, right? People are putting in $20 bills and they're not putting in fives, because you know, there's very few people that, you know, like if it yeah, and and God bless them, like I don't don't think that I'm anti-panhandling and all this other stuff, but but fewer people hand out $20 bills, they usually hand out ones and fives. And you know, like and and and these folks know this, and so if your place is not a place for them to come and, you know, even if they get kicked out, maybe they get and you know, I it's really hard. I mean, it like as a Christian, I really feel like it's it's really hard not to just embrace a community and and and bring them in. And and I kind of tried to back in 2014, and I really paid a price because the good people that I helped ended up it ended up being local knowledge that, hey, this guy's a good guy, and he'll let you come in and get out of the rain and all the other stuff. And then the next thing I knew is I had a heroin problem in my laundromat. Um, and so you know, there's some mistakes that that I made that I can speak directly to that somebody that has never done it before maybe would would not be able to. And I can sit and listen to you talk about the emotional cost of what this thing you are doing is, and I can say, you know, I've been there. It's hard. You know, I lost sleep. I thought that I was an idiot. I know now on the other side that they were the best decisions I ever made to build these three laundry pads. So you can trust yourself, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I like that.
SPEAKER_00And if you do the right thing and you find somebody who's going to really care about you moving forward in the business, and somebody who's been around for a while and has seen some things and they clearly have a group of people that you can talk to that will tell you that yes, this person is going to say do what he says and he's going or she. I I'm saying he because I'm he. But um then uh then then you know, likelihood is you're going to be okay, right? Loner and I still don't fail with great regularity, right? Um and but a lot of the reason for that is you have a lot of folks like like Steve and his brother and and his dad and me, and the way Ken Martin was when he was running a store, and you know, Ralph Daniels, goodness gracious, what a great dude. He runs a massive distributorship and also one of the kindest, nicest guys in the world. Daniels Equipment Company, if you're in the Northeast, um like I I think a lot of them, right? Um but um you know as a store owner, that's actually a much more important decision to make than am I gonna buy Speed Queen or Hitch or Waskomat or Dexter or let me clue you in. They all wash clothes. Right?
SPEAKER_01Big secret, yeah.
SPEAKER_00They all have five-year or five-year durable parts, three-year parts warranty. Some of them have a little bit better, some a little worse.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00The support all depends on whoever the local person is. All of them.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00They are too big to be able to have the luxury of um focusing on you, the laundry owner, who made up one half of one quarter of one half of one quarter of one half of one quarter of their revenue last year, or even worse, five years ago.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um, and the person that sold you the equipment, by the way, is probably not even there anymore. Because this was a job. This wasn't a life.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00Um amazing.
SPEAKER_01Well, you know what? I think, you know, again, you've you've put you've put it in much more elegant way than I certainly can of valuing where where we add where we add value, you know, how we add value to this. And you know, I mentioned it to you when we before we got started. The whole goal behind me starting this podcast was to remind ourselves and to remind those who are maybe trying to get into the business, whether you're a distributor, whether you're your new manufacturing partner, and understanding that this is a there's a there's a group of individuals that make up this industry. It is a manufacturer, there's a distributor, and there's a store owner. And if we want to add the retail customer in there, and I think there's a good layer that you can talk about that too. We talk about the community. Ultimately, they they're the ones that actually make all of this work at the end of the day. But all of those pieces need to participate, and they need to participate. They can't just be there. They got to participate in the ways that I think you've talked about in order for it to work. In order for a laundry to really be successful, those pieces all need to be there. And if if if we cut out layers of that, then what we're gonna find is more disappointing businesses. We're gonna find that that record that you talked about about laundries not surviving or about laundries being so successful and rarely failing, we're gonna see that change. You know, people that are putting locations, that are adding stores to locations have no business of having locations, whether it's because you gotta add, you know, you gotta put a half a million dollars to improve a water service, or whether or not you put it in a place where there's not enough people close enough to find you, there's lots of reasons why things work. It's that distributor, it's it's people like you that understand the neighborhood, understand the demographics of the area, understand what has worked there before, what has not. And I think what you had mentioned earlier, more importantly, what is likely going to happen to that area because you're aware of the community. You know where people are moving, you know where people are moving out of, you know, you know, you being in Nashville, my goodness, my son moved to Nashville a year ago, or a couple of years ago, excuse me, and the growth just in a couple of years in Nashville, us going down to visiting. I and now last time I've been in downtown Nashville and not seen us, you know, another skyscraper, another, you know, building going up, the people moving to Nashville, you know, it's changing. You know, and those neighborhoods didn't always have million-dollar apartments in them, you know.
SPEAKER_00Well, my wife and I, you know, I mean, the the little we had like a little one of those little townhouse things that was real narrow and had two little floors. And man, like what we paid, you I bet you we paid probably a quarter. And it was small, you know? And you had these little stairs, and you had a bedroom and bathroom up there, you know, and you had a little kitchen in the back, and and you know, we we lived there a long time. And um you know, I don't I mean that place now would be paid probably four times a month what we paid.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And uh, you know, I'm a sixth generation Nashville. Um so you're right, I've seen Middle Tennessee change in ways I never expected, you know.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and and that's happening in a lot of places too. This is and it's probably not new, this idea that the population moves, and I mean like the the demographic moves, I'll say more or less. You know, we get more people coming to this city and less and some move out of this city, people don't leave in Illinois like crazy, you know, or whether it's the politics or whatever else, and they move to other places.
SPEAKER_00It's gonna see what I hear with uh more wealthy people moving in is is is tax structure. Yeah, since he doesn't have an income tax, it's right, yeah, it's really really attractive for wealthy people, um which it makes sense, right? Sure. So uh and then how less like Republican and Democrat, but but how is the business of the state run? Run. You know, yeah, and there's a lot of different uh ideas on that, and they're all valid, you know. Like we fight and argue, and Republicans fight and Democrats fight, and all these other organizations fight, but the truth is we all have fairly valid points. It's uh you know, but right now it seems like the you know, the the Floridas and the New New Hampshire, right? New Hampshire, um Tennessee, you know, there's several states that don't have an income tax, and that seems to be pretty attractive. Yeah. Um you know, we have high sales tax because of that, but it is wonderful that coin laundries don't have sales tax.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's great. Well, JD, you know what, we've we've gone over a lot of stuff here and I think, you know, I was I when you I got it I gotta give you a lot of props because as we started this conversation, you are a great storyteller. And I'm like, where is this story going? It's like, what are we talking about here today? But you you did a really a great job of of taking, I think, just a wealth of experience outside of the laundry and putting it in perspective, your own personal, you know, passions, obviously, that you have through your um, you know, whether it's through your your martial arts or your your your love of frigates and that whole, you know, kind of I I just I just love the way that you've kind of put that into perspective and how you've leveraged the ideas of these things into kind of how it's shaped you into running your business. And you've really done a great job, I think, of of describing what distribution means. And this is exactly what I was hoping for. So I think we're gonna wrap it up here, but this has been a great conversation. I appreciate it.
SPEAKER_00It's going to infuriate most of people, and I do recognize it, but I do want it to be understood by your listeners who are out there operating laundry equipment, you know. Yeah, like if we continue to go down this path, you know, cutting out the middleman, so to speak, by getting rid of distribution is not going to end where you think it's gonna end. You're not gonna get cheaper equipment, you know. MSRP is going to be protected. That's what's gonna happen, right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So um yeah, you know, we're we're telling the same story here, and uh, you know, I think that's in on the wall.
SPEAKER_00That's what we're doing.
SPEAKER_01Yes, there you go. That's what it is. Yeah, yeah. I appreciate it.
SPEAKER_00And it's it's not their fault. Yeah, they are incentivized to do that in a certain way. They're not on that's not their fault. They're not bad people, they're great people, they're making decisions based upon the requirements that are put on them, right? Right?
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00And and again, if you and I are one quarter of one half of one percent of their revenue from five years ago.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's yeah, I understand. I think all we can do is um try to educate, uh, bring these things to light so we can do a better job of what we are good at. And I think our businesses will be good. I I I I realize there's a lot of pressures. You've described those pressures. There's plenty of competition. Competition's not new, uh, it's not gonna go away, but I think there is a place for the full service distributor that wants to see their investors succeed, and uh you're a great example of that.
SPEAKER_02So thank you, JD. Thank you very much.
SPEAKER_01You are we all are, but that's how we learn. JD, thank you very much. Appreciate you, and we'll we're gonna we're gonna catch up soon. Look forward to your events coming up here in the fall.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, man, always. And uh, and Steve, I love you and your family. Thank you, man, and um keep doing it, man. You guys have always put out a fantastic product, and the number one word is support. Um and the thing that I look for when I look for some a manufacturer to represent is that word. How are you going to support my customers? That's what I'm interested in. Um this man right here puts his money where his mouth is, and he has a situation where if it is Saturday night and you have a disaster and you call CCI, you'll go to an emergency support thing, and they will be able to help you. They may not be able to get you what you need right away, but it'll be faster than you can imagine. I I am recipient of that, and um um I'm not just saying this because I'm on his podcast, I'm saying it because it really is like CCI's good company. And um, and and I I I really appreciate being able to represent them. So thank you, man.
SPEAKER_01Cheers, JD. Thank you, man. Take care.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, man. God bless you. See you later.