SPEAKER_01 0:00

And our next speaker is considered to be a leader in that field in our industry. And so I I would like to introduce to you Steve Marcinetti, who is the uh president of Card Concept Incorporated. Steve, come on up. I've known Steve for I've actually worked with his dad a long, long time ago, and they're just like Laundrelux, a multi-generational family company that has helped innovate and lift this whole industry in terms of technology. So let's give Steve a hand.

SPEAKER_00 0:37

Thank you, Jason. Appreciate it. Thank you, everyone, for uh sticking around for this. Um if anybody's been in the room next door, you'll probably notice that it's pretty much packed with technology companies, uh, just table after table after table. So um my focus is gonna be mostly on the payment side of technology because there's a lot of ways we can look at at technology. Um is there a clicker? This one here? Um so um so I'm gonna focus on payments, but there's a there's a lot of layers to this. Um but a little bit about me before we go further, just so I can set a little uh understanding of where I'm coming from, is I've been in the business for 27 years. Um started CCI in 2000 uh with my my brother and my father. Um we're also store owners. We've owned as many as seven locations at one time. We've bought and sold over the years and currently uh operate three locations. So we have a little bit of a unique perspective from a technology perspective is that we're active operators and we design things that we think owners and operators want to use in their businesses. And over that last those those last 25 years, uh we've been able to um get 4,500 locations equipped with some kind of technology. So as we kind of go through this, I'm gonna be kind of leaning in on some of those experiences. Um I do want to share, um, you know, Jason talked about my father being in this business since the early 70s, and he taught my brother and my sister and I a lot about this industry, and there's a lot about this business that has not changed. And but there is an environmental change that is happening where I think technology really fits in well to help deal with the change in the environment. But the core business of the laundromat has not changed. Um, for example, this is a convenience business. That means that everything that we do here is to make the chore of doing laundry more convenient than where they're doing it now, right? We don't make anything, I'm sure you've heard some of this already in this room. We don't make anything. We're just gonna shift where they're doing their laundry to hopefully where you would like them to do their laundry. And the way you do that is by making it more convenient than where they're doing it now. Okay, and so we're gonna keep that in mind as we think about some of the technology that's available here. Um, again, this term has probably been used already today, is that we like to consider laundromats to be somewhat of a utility company. We buy sell you we buy utilities at one price and we sell it at another through gas, water, and electricity. And we're gonna talk about how technology is gonna help you maintain uh the profit that you think you should earn that when you opened or when you built that store. Labor. So not every store is attended, but many of them are, and so labor can be uh just flexible labor options that you might want to introduce in the store, and technology can help you manage that labor. We'll talk a bit about that. And then um costs continue to rise. I think all of us are certainly aware that everything costs more money today than it did yesterday. And I'm gonna show you how uh try to explain to you how the technology can help you mitigate some of the risks associated with that. But let's talk a little bit about um some of the other essential pieces of laundry, which is about customer loyalty. And there was the panel up here really talked well about operating a laundry, and really what we want to do is not only provide the convenience that store owners are expecting, but provide um make sure we get the loyalty in return from them. All right, so being is that this is a very high upfront cost you know investment. I mean, I don't know if any of you knew what you were getting into when you walked in here to find out what a laundromat's gonna come, but million-dollar bills have been kind of tossed around the room a few times. That's that's no joke. And if you are capable and able to put that kind of money into a business, you want to ensure that you're gonna get the return in loyalty from the community around that. And so leveraging a loyalty card system as an example is one of the ways you can try to encourage loyalty to come back to you. Somebody that it puts $10 on a loyalty card and only spends six of it and then is gonna come back to use the rest in their next visit, that's a loyalty to return. And we need to not forget about that. So when you're making these massive investments, how are you gonna ensure the best chances of a customer returning to you? And one of the ways is through a loyalty card system. The other thing that you can do is again, we talked about we don't make anything, and that laundry is a habit chore. I say this every time I've done this talk, my wife will only do laundry on Monday. If she misses a Monday, we're waiting to the next Monday. That's just the way she likes to do it, and I'm not getting in the way of that. Okay, some of you may have similar habits about when you do things. You may drive to work the same way every time you go to work, and it doesn't matter, that's just the way you go. So when you think about opening a new store or buying an existing store and wanting to improve the business there, you are going to have to change some habits. They are going to somewhere to do their laundry today. What are you gonna do to change that habit to be you? It's gotta be significant. And I'm gonna challenge you that using the technology and maybe a payment system is one of the ways that you can encourage a change in a habit. Maybe, for example, you might do something that we do in new stores called double your money. I don't know if he's talked about that yet today, but when we open a new store, we double whatever they put on their card. If someone puts $10, we give them $20. If you put $50, we give them $100. If they put $100 on their card, we give them $200. Now, it's an amazing program. It is very expensive, but it is an amazing program because when you think about it, if I can get somebody to put $100 on a loyalty card, where else are they gonna spend that $200? Only in that store. It's really important to remember that. And that $200 is gonna have them come back next week and then the week after that. And what we're doing as they come back to spend off all of this free bonus money they've gotten is we're changing their habits. So it's really important that we think about ways to encourage people to change their habits. And then we'll talk a little bit about time. So, of course, time is the most precious commodity we all have, and we want to make sure that part of the convenience we offer our customers is that we can in you know improve the time commitment in doing their laundry. But and and and there's been lots of examples of of how that can be done. I want to talk about your time. It's likely that you're in this room learning about laundries is because you have a thought that this is somewhat of a passive business. That term gets passed around. I'm gonna change that term for a second. But that I'm gonna say it's a flexible time business. You can kind of choose the kind of time that you want to spend, but the more you put in, the more you're gonna get out, and there's no way to avoid that. But you can use the technology to give back some of the time that you would normally have to invest in a business if you did not invest in, let's say, a payment system. So really important there. All right. So we're not gonna be just talking about how tech is gonna make you more modern, we're gonna talk about how it improves some of these various aspects of control. We'll talk about pricing, efficiency, the visibility, and the um profitability of that store. So let's talk about pricing first. Talk about this being a utility business, basically you're buying gas, water, and electric at one price, and then you're selling it at another. But any of us that owns a home or pays any kind of utility at home knows that that gas price per therm, that per gallon price, that per kilowatt charge changes month to month. It's usually based on demand. So I'm from Chicago. In the summer, our electric bills all go up, not just because we're using our air conditioners more, but that demand raises and the costs go up. In the wintertime, when we fire up our furnaces, the natural gas price goes up. And so we have this variable cost in utilities. Well, in a traditional coin-operated store, it can be quite difficult to adjust your vend prices to align with your costs. Okay? And if you can only change your vend prices in 25 cent increments, you are maybe unlikely to make that change right away when you need to. So that means if your prices only went up 5% and you have no way to really increase your prices uniformly 5%, many store owners just don't make the change. So instead of having a 30% margin in profit, they make a little bit less. And then the change happens again and they make a little bit less. And then another change happens and they're afraid to make another change now, or maybe it's become too late. I heard we've heard the term zombie mat already. I think it's been tossed around here in the last few minutes. That's how a zombie mat is formed. We stop reinvesting in our business. Every laundry you've ever been to, how dirty and crummy it used to be, used to be really nice. Even the worst ones used to be nice. They were fresh, they were clean, they were bright. And what happened is that people didn't reinvest in them. And it's one of the reasons is likely because they didn't change their Ven prices in line with what their costs were. So when you add a payment system, you have the ability to be flexible in your price and adjust your prices in penny increments. So you think about it, I can go from a $5.25 wash, can be $5.31, $5.32, $5.33. And not only can I make the price change very fast, I can do it within two minutes, the entire store, is I can adjust that price with less visibility to the consumer. Think about it this way: um a big 80-pound machine in uh Chicago might be eight dollars, probably more, actually. That's 32 coins. It's a lot of quarters to pump in a machine, literally hold in your hand and pump 32 quarters into a machine. If I change the price to $850, they're counting, they're not counting eight dollars, they're counting quarters. One, two, three, four, five, and all of a sudden it's two more quarters to start that same machine. There's a really high visible recognition that the Venn price has changed. We very rarely actually hear it perfect here in Vegas, we don't put cash down anymore. Everything is cards and chips, and it eliminates the perception of the money. And we can do something similar in the laundromat where we can kind of eliminate the change perception. So I can go from $8 to $8.32, and the perception of that change, it's the same push-pull, it's the same tap of a card, it's the same swipe of a card as it was the last time they were there, when they were there. And ultimately at the end of their visit, it cost them a an extra couple dollars to do their laundry. But the visibility on it is very different than them having to get more change out of the change machine. It's it's huge. The other thing is the change in revenue. So if anybody is looking to acquire an existing store, maybe that's coin-operated, and you're thinking about, well, I'm gonna invest in some technology, that's a really good, that's a really good idea because what we can show you is that if you just raise your Ven prices as part of a change, let's say by eight cents, nine cents, when you add up all of the turns that a laundromat will do over the course of a a day, a week, a month, and add nine cents to every one of those, you're gonna see a significant increase in your bottom line. Way more than what that investment's gonna cost you. So separately from just maintaining the margin that you expected to make from the beginning, you can use the small penny incremental changes to help you invest in the technology that's there. Anyone done a proforma on a new store? So if you haven't, Bruce, you know, if when you get in this business, one of the things you're gonna do, and everyone's done a great job kind of explaining this business, but when you're ready to make a commitment and you look at a location, you're gonna do a some kind of pro forma, business plan. And it's gonna say how many machines there are, what you expect the Ven price to be, how many, what the hours of operation are gonna be. You're gonna try to imagine everything that it's gonna cost for you to operate that store and what the potential revenue is gonna be based on how busy you are. And that's that's a that's the question: how busy are you gonna be? Are you gonna be at 20% capacity, 15% capacity? There's all kinds of metrics that we can help give you some confidence that a location is worth the investment. And generally these performers are all done in 25 cent increments. And what we can show you when you have the flexibility of the penny is that you take the best performer that you have, the one that you trust the most, and let's add nine cents to all the Venn prices. Do you think you're gonna lose any customers by charging nine cents more? Unlikely. And you will be shocked at how much more revenue that same location at the same capacity will generate. So important. All right, let's talk about efficiency. We this is a peak period business. What I mean by that, that means that you are going to be busy at certain peak times. Obviously weekends and evenings, because that's when people are not working. So what you can use the technology for is to help spread some of that out. So what we like to do in our stores, same thing the gas stations do. When we have a holiday weekend come up, what happens to gas prices? They all kind of creep up a little bit because everyone's getting on the road. When the demand is high, you raise the prices. When the demand is low, you can lower your prices. And the technology that I'm talking about allows you to very seamlessly make those adjustments based on demand. So that you can maybe get someone that does have a flexible work schedule to come in on a Tuesday instead of taking a machine up on Saturday. Because you are gonna have no problems filling the store on weekends when people are off. What you're gonna have a bigger challenge is is filling the store Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday when people are working. And although I don't think that you're gonna be able to give them a much of as much of a discount to take a day off of work, you can maybe you know target those with a flexible schedule to come in during those those slower periods or maybe in the evenings during the midweek. So um so that's important. Peak periods. What is your time worth? Again, we talked about how much time do you want to spend in this new business? Are you working today? You're gonna quit your job? You're gonna quit your job? Good. Then this is a great business to be in. But maybe you don't want to quit your job yet. Maybe you want to have this and work your job. Well, the technology is gonna make that possible. It's gonna keep tabs on things when you're not there, it's gonna empower your employees. We'll talk about that. The technology is gonna give you time back and collections. Do you want to go to every machine three times a week and empty coin boxes, put them in buckets, go back to the change machine, and then repeat that every three days? Or do you want to go to one place once or twice a week, pull all the cash out, and go to the bank and make a deposit? Or better yet, maybe have half of that be all come in through credit cards. And you don't have to collect it at all. Okay? And then lastly, when we talk about efficiency, is the efficiency of promotions. So I know there was a a pretty significant conversation up here about what happens if a store moves in across the street, what happens if a competitor builds a new store within my range? Well, I would argue that if you're gonna make the kind of investment that we've talked about here, that you you make an investment in technology, maybe for no other reason than to equip yourself with the tools needed to compete. What are you gonna do that's unique? Are you gonna offer some kind of promo and encouragement? You're gonna offer them loyalty points, discounts, coupons, and all of that is enabled through the technology, through a payment system. So we mentioned labor. Obviously, fewer collections, I kind of beat that up a little bit already. You're gonna collect from one central place, you're not gonna have to pull coins from a machine any longer. That is a huge time saver. I can tell you in my and our family stores that my brother and sister and I own, none of us collect any of the money. It's all done by employees. So, although we you can do it, but we're busy, we have other jobs, and these laundries are have been around for 20 years at this point, and we have a trusted employee do all of the collections and go right to the bank. He knows that we know exactly how much money is in every of those machines every week. So there is no reason for him to think that he can take any of that. That's the other reason Zombie Mats form too is trusting people and then they become a silent partner. Okay, so having uh having a little control over that is uh is critical. Uh time management is also another way to deal with labor. So if you are going to be um attended, all of your employees can clock in and out on the system. The system can manage the things that they need to do during a shift, so it can say, hey, it's time to empty the lint traps, it's time to clean the windows on the front of the store, it's time to change the furnace filters at the end of the month. The technology can help you schedule and remind your staff when things need to be done. Again, so that you don't have to do it and keep track of it yourself. And one of the things that I like the most from a labor perspective is actually something that is probably the most impactful thing for your employees is giving them empowerment to do things during a course of a shift. Probably the most common thing that someone's going to ask your attendant about is they lost money on a machine. I put my money in that machine and it didn't start. I want my money back. One of the toughest things about that, particularly in a coin store, is you have no way to validate whether they actually put money in that machine. You're both staring at a machine that's not running, but you don't know whether or not they actually paid for it. Maybe very difficult to tell. You put a payment system in, you'll know whether they've paid for it or not, whether it started or not, it's very easy. And so it empowers the employee to make an accurate decision about how to deal with that. And you together the employee and the customer can walk up to, let's say, a kiosk and review the activity on their card that says whether or not they actually lost money on a particular machine. And they can say, Yep, it looks like you did. It looks like it didn't start. Let me start another machine for you, no problem. Or we can say, you know what, it doesn't look like that machine took your money. Let me help you start another machine with your card. So this empowerment is great. And it's not so much what what I see in stores where people get in trouble is that you have an employee that is loyal to you. They're protecting your business, and a customer claims that they lost money on a machine, and so they're willing to fight that customer until they get their way. And it's not the customer that they're arguing with that's the problem, it's the rest of the store watching this unfold and getting a bad taste about what this store is about and how they deal with customer service issues. So having the ability to empower your employees with tools that they can help with this is massive. Visibility. So obviously, if you are going to put in a system like this, you're gonna have full visibility of all of your revenues, the machine starts, which cycles your customers like to choose, how many customers have come in on a specific day, how many cards were dispensed, how much float did you generate on a particular day? What's the average spend of a customer? All kinds of valuable, valuable data points that you can use to make changes in your store or plan for the next one. Uh equipment mix changes is a big one. Which are the most popular machines? Do you need to raise the vent prices on those machines? How often do they choose an extra option, an extra cycle? Are those priced appropriately? Uh peak period visibility, we've talked about that. But there was also a mention about buying an existing store that maybe doesn't have great books. Is the visibility around a payment system is going to make your business worth more money? I realize there's Maybe a little bit of a of an idea that this idea that you know it's a cash business and it is it is a cash business, that removing some of the visibility is good for you and your business. But I would guess that if you're gonna make the kind of investment that we've talked about here and keep it for however many years, that someday you may want to sell it. Because you've done a lot of work and you've built it up and you've made it very valuable and you want to get uh the top dollar that that business is worth. Well, it's gonna be difficult to do that if you can't prove what it does. And it's not so much that you might not convince the store owner that's gonna or the investor wants to buy from you, but the finance company that's gonna loan him the money to do that is not gonna take your word for it, oh yeah, it does more than this. They want to see it, they want to prove it. And so when you invest in technology like that, you're basically protecting the value of your business when the time comes someday to sell it. Customer convenience. We talked about store owner convenience. I would have to imagine that nearly every major employer, and even not even major employer, pays in some way by direct deposit. And so we we we you know, 20 years ago we we had a bigger argument about eliminating coins and people, oh people love to pay their coins, they don't want to use a car, they want they love coins, they love coins, and I always used to shake my head and I'm like, does anybody get paid in coins? I I I don't think nobody gets paid in quarters. And when you think about what the convenience of this is, if I do get paid by direct deposit and my store only takes quarters, then I'm gonna go to the bank and make a withdrawal or go to an ATM machine, pay a fee to get $20 out of the ATM. I'm gonna take that $20 bill, put in a change machine, get $20 worth of quarters, take those quarters, go to a washing machine, put 32 of them into a washer to start that machine. Then me and the owner, I'm gonna go grab those same quarters, I'm gonna go put them back in the change machine and take the cash out of it. We're talking about the convenience is just backwards here. A customer now can just take their debit card and walk right up to a machine and start it. Does it get any more convenient than that? No. Or maybe they just go to a kiosk and they dispense a loyalty card with that same debit card or Apple Pay or whatever payment method that you want. We have to make it convenient. Do not be sold on the idea that my customers will only pay in quarters. It's not true. Okay? Now, are there examples of locations that maybe quarters make sense? Maybe. I I won't say that it's a hard and fast rule, but I would say that in most cases, stores will do very well without quarters. If you need to transition slowly from quarters to card, we have some strategies to help you do that as well. Maybe you don't want to do it all at once. I just prefer to rip the band-aid off and just do it. But there is more than one way to handle that. We already talked about it. 32 quarters going in a machine versus one tap of a card, the speed of the transaction is huge. And one of the things that you're going to look at in that performance how many turns per day can you get out of a machine? Well, if I can eliminate the time it takes to pump 32 quarters, 40 quarters into a machine, don't forget, they don't all go in perfect. Sometimes they get returned to you. You're putting in the first 10, one gets returned. Put in three more, another one gets returned. It's not quite as simple. One gets jammed in there. Okay. But if we can just eliminate that with a tap of a card, we can speed up that transaction and get the next customer in faster. And then mobile payments. Um, I mean, I'm an old school guy, I still carry some cash, but I do find myself using my phone more and more and more to pay for things. And so there's somewhat of an expectation that we need to be able to accept the type of payments that people want to use. And certainly the generation that's coming up now, my kids, maybe yours, they're basically using their phones to pay for everything. So having that option is going to be critical to the next generation. Okay. I thought it would take a second to just share some of my observations over the last 27 years, 4,500 stores of the patterns I see of successful store ownership. So not so much about just technology, but just some observations that I've seen working with a lot of people. And I'll tell you that the most successful store owners out there adjust their ven prices often and early before it's a problem. It is critical that if you want to make, if you want to get in this business because you like the idea of a 30% profit, then keep it. Don't let the water utility change that. Raise your ven prices. Nearly every other business out there raises their ven prices with costs, and you're going to find as you continue to explore this industry that laundromat owners are so hesitant to raising their prices. And I think it's all well intended because this is a community type thing. We are close to our customers. We see that some of them struggle, but we have to stay in time with inflation, we have to stay in time with that we're doing this because it's our livelihoods as well. You can do a good job for them and charge them fairly at the same time. But if you can't repair a machine because you're not making enough money, you are not doing anyone any good in that store. If you decide that you're not going to change the light bulbs because you can't afford to, you're building a zombie mat. You're going to cause yourself a problem. So change your Ven prices often. Eliminate or reduce coin. I think I've explained the importance of that. But the most successful people out there have most of them have eliminated coin. But at the very least, if you're afraid to do that, let's reduce the amount of coin that you're taking through some kind of tech product. Use technology to manage your systems, manage employees, manage your books, manage your ven prices, empower employees. We've talked about that already. And keep things simple. What I mean by that is do not get in their way. You're gonna see a lot of fun stuff in the other room if you haven't been there. All this technology, all these really interesting things that the technology can do. But if you are getting in the way of someone actually getting their laundry done, we have failed. So try to keep things simple. Don't make them do backflips just to pay you. Don't make them do weird things just to be a part of a program. Keep things simple. All right. And I'm also going to show a little bit of caution or share a little bit of caution with you that I've seen uh more recently because information about this industry is much more available than it was 10 years ago. We'll blame social media and the internet for that. Make sure that you remember that's a peak period business. And what I mean in this slide is that when you're designing a store, you might find that a distributor might present you with an equipment mix that seems like it's too big for the location. It's got a lot of machines in it. The space supports it and they put a lot of equipment in it. And when I talk about peak periods, remember we build the stores for Saturday, Sunday, and evenings. If you can't handle the volume that you're gonna generate those days, then you are not gonna make the income that you expected from that store. So if you walk into one of my stores on a Wednesday at one o'clock, there's what one person in there. It's 6,000 square feet. I got one person doing laundry on a Wednesday at 1 o'clock. But that store, you can't even walk in there on Saturdays and Sunday. So we build it for that. So don't be disenchanted by the idea that you have this very large location if the demographics support it. We build them for the peak periods, not for Tuesday afternoons. We build it for Saturday and Sunday in the evenings. Okay. I might get a little flack for this, but self-service and full service laundry, full service, I'm talking about fluff and fold, pickup and delivery, they are two different businesses. Now you can be in both, but they are two very different businesses. If you are attracted to this business today because you want that flexible time, you are interested in the self-service side of this business. If you are excited about doing people's laundry and picking it up and delivering it to them and dealing with all the things associated with that, and there is a profit to be made there, then full service is for you. But if you are going to build a wash, dry, and fold business, you may not need a laundromat. You may need a retail space, you may need a commercial space if that's what you want to do and make your money that way, because you don't need to pay retail rent to do wash, dry, and fold if that's what you're interested in. For me, if you want to own a laundromat, make sure that that laundromat stands on its two feet as a self-service business first. And if it's successful there, then by all means, if you want to go into the full service business, do that. But you've got to realize that's gonna take a lot more time, commitment, energy, and money. And I mean, perfect example on this stage of people that have been very successful with that, but all of them shared that it's an extra effort. It's gonna be a much bigger investment in your time and your energy. So I like to say crawl, walk, run. Start with a self-service laundry, get your feet under, understand the business, understand the time commitment that that layer is gonna be, make sure the business can stand on its own that way, then do some wash and fold. They come and get it, they come and pick it up. If you like that and you you see that you're able to earn business there, then great. And then finally, if you want to take the next route, then think about pickup and delivery and go that route. I am not here to talk you out of any of it, but I think that when we look at this business, some people get really excited about all the full service layers of it, and there's no reason not to be, but the self-service business and the full service self-service full service business are very different businesses. Okay, it's not passive, it's flexible. I think I've been down that road. Local expertise is more valuable than social media media expertise. Um and what I mean by that, not that you can't get advice online, is trust the people that are in your neighborhood. Trust the ones that have done business in your community. They'll know that those customers don't cross those tracks. They know that the people that live in these buildings will not drive across this intersection. It's just the way the neighborhood has been always. They know that the community that used to be there, that was a strong self-service, has started to be pushed out and they're moving into other parts of the area. The local expertise of a distributor should be your best weapon. I'm glad that on the last session we had some pretty good advocates for distribution. So I would absolutely echo that. All right, the future, I'm gonna go quickly, I'm running out of time. AI was already brought, it's gonna play a role. I don't know exactly what that's gonna do, but we have various things that we're gonna be using AI to help make your lives easier. Um, the value proposition is gonna continue to blur. So the business essentials are not gonna change, but the expectations of customers are. They're gonna expect to use a credit card in your store. They're gonna expect that. Uh expectations are gonna rise. That means that they not only are they gonna expect to use a laundry that has accepts credit cards, they're gonna expect it to work. Quick story: one of our stores, our credit card system went offline because we lost our internet service and we couldn't take credit cards for a couple hours, and people were fuming over the fact that they couldn't use their credit card and how stressful of a situation that was. I had to take a second back after we got it all resolved to say, where else were they gonna do laundry? They were gonna do laundry, they only they were fuming because they only had a credit card. They didn't want to go get cash to do that. So the expectations are gonna rise. And I also love this industry for no uh from for a lot of reasons, but for this last piece, which is I really feel this is one of the few industries that a small, independent owner operator, maybe an entrepreneur like yourself, can compete with a store chain of 10 or 20 or 50. Because the gas, because our biggest expenses are gonna be the utilities, and you're gonna buy the utilities at the same cost they are. Maybe they can save a couple points on equipment because they're buying a little more equipment than you, but that's a one-time purchase, and it's all paid off in seven years anyway, seven to ten years. So you can compete strongly with a multi-chain. You don't have to worry so much about a you know, a franchise. I'm not saying franchises are bad, but you don't have to worry about a franchise in your area. Okay? So you can compete very strongly against competition. All right, quickly, questions. Anybody have questions? If you're interested in connecting with me, I've got some QR codes on there. I post a lot of stuff online too, some of this kind of common sense stuff, please reach out. Question.

SPEAKER_03 35:37

Thank you, Steve. This was really informative. Um I have two questions. The first one is what are the strategies to move a full coin store to that kind of slow motion just to straight uh card processing? Um and then the other question is do you think bill breakers are valuable right next to um I I don't know what you call it, uh the cash kiosk?

SPEAKER_00 36:03

Yeah, uh yeah, kiosk, yeah, payment kiosk. Uh all right, so you don't want to rip the band-aid off and go full card. So you can go hybrid. We call that hybrid where you're taking coin and card together. So the first thing that I would suggest is just eliminate the coin changers. If people want to pay with coin, make have them bring their coin in. So that makes it less convenient to use coin, but you're still offering coin. And I think what you'll find is that will that will migrate people to use the card. And then the other piece of it is start offering some kind of promo on the card. Don't just make it one for one. Say, hey, do it for a couple of months. Put $20 on your card, and I'll give you $2 extra. Get $22 for a 20. Who doesn't want to save 10% right now? The same people that argue the fact that my customers want to pay with coin, those same customers want to save anywhere they can. And I'm gonna tell you that you'll be able to offer them better value using some kind of promotion like that, and that will encourage them to get off the coin. And it and I'm gonna tell you nine times out of ten, it's more in your head about the coin than it is in the consumer's head. Now, this is not to say that someone's not gonna walk in your store one day and say, No quarters, I'm out of here. That's okay. We'll see you in two weeks because you'll be back. And it happens all the time. They're just frustrated. They were here to do their laundry, they don't want to be interrupted, and I get it. Like I said, let's not get in their way. And for a few weeks, we're gonna be getting in their way of doing laundry. But it's good for them, it's good for us, it's good for the business. Did I answer all the questions? Okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 37:40

Here you go, sir.

SPEAKER_00 37:41

Oh, what was that?

SPEAKER_03 37:43

Uh the the cash kiosk.

SPEAKER_00 37:45

Oh, the build-a-bill? Uh build-a bills are great. Uh, we have them in all of our stores, they're fantastic. So if you don't know what a build-a bill is, basically you could put in, let's say like a $20 bill instead of it giving you change, it breaks that 20 down into smaller bills. So it'll give you like two tens and two fives or you know, fives and ones, so that a customer doesn't have to put the full 20 onto their card. Maybe they just want to put 10. So it's a great way to eliminate the amount of cash that your staff might have to have to break change. Um there are a little bit of maintenance involved in them. There's nothing wrong with it. Everything in this business is gonna have some maintenance associated, but we have buildabills in all of our stores. It's a good investment.

SPEAKER_02 38:22

Uh I hear a lot about float. Can you explain that?

SPEAKER_00 38:26

Yeah, so float very simply is the amount of money that your customers have put onto their card but have not yet spent. So I'm gonna put $20 on my card today. I'm only gonna spend 15 of it. I'm gonna go home. I've got five dollars in float on that card. That five dollars multiplied by the number of cards you have in your system is essentially your float. In the very first store that my my family uh built, we we don't own it anymore, but just to give you an example, uh nice size store, about 3,000 square feet. Uh, after having it for four years, we ran a report on the our system. We tested our product on it. They said, how many cards have not been in the store for the last year? We kind of made that assumption, meaning they're not coming back. They've moved away, they've lost the card. For some reason, they're they're they've no longer doing business in this store. And I I'm not gonna remember exactly, but it was 27,000 cards had not been used in the store in the past year. Wow, that was shocking for one. The more shocking numbers, how much money is on all of those cards? $48,000. Has that money is income at that point? That's the power of float. I'm telling you, that card system did not cost forty eight thousand dollars four years.