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The Matt King Show
048: Ken Wimberly | The All-In Comeback: Trading $800K Loss for a Path to Purpose and Profit | The Matt King Show
00:53:15
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- [00:05]
Matt
You had comfort in your life, you had stability in your life, and you've kind of thrown that all by the wayside to say, fuck it, I'm going all in on Laundromats.
- [00:14]
Ken
Yeah.
- [00:14]
Matt
What made you do that?
- [00:18]
Ken
It was a series of events. Let's start back to 2018. Okay. So 2018, I was at a place where I was moving into two businesses. One was the laundromat business, and one was the mobile app business. I was going into both. I went all in on the mobile app business. What I really thought would happen, the laundromat was a side hustle for us, honestly. The Laundromat was a way to fill some real estate that we had bought, a shopping center, and we needed a vacancy filled. And so we tried to get a tenant in there. We couldn't find a tenant. We found a Laundromat guy who I thought was a Laundromat operator. Come to find out he was a manufacturer's rep. But he looked at the center, absolutely fell in love with it, said, this is an ideal center for a laundromat. He kind of educated us on why all the different reasons. And we said, this is great. Let's find an operator that can operate. But we're in Abilene, Texas, so we couldn't find an operator. We looked for about six months, couldn't find one. And so my partners and I said, yeah, let's study the industry. See, does it make sense for us to become. Not like we needed another business to run. We were all pretty busy anyway. But in studying the industry, it made a lot of sense. And so it was kind of a side hustle. Like one of us. I'm in Fort Worth, Skylar's in Austin. Jason, our third co founder, was in Colorado, and the property's in Abilene. So it's. It's two and a half hours away from Skyler and I and a day away from Jason. But we found someone to run it. Skyler's father was our first manager. We found him to run it. And so for the three of us, it was just a side thing. What I thought was going to happen, Matt, was I was going to go into Legacy of Love, which is my mobile app company. It was a app for parents to capture moments, memories, and lessons for their children and one day pass it on to them. And what I thought, because that idea was such a good idea, like 100 out of 100 people, I told we'll call it 99 out of 100 would say that's the best idea I've ever heard, like that is such a brilliant idea. And so I was certain that launching that would fuel so fast and so far that I would take the funds and profit that I would make from that and I would end up following the growth of our laundromats. So I figured I would be the benefactor funding the laundromats. That's not how it played out. Fast forward, that was 2018, we opened the first laundromat. So we made those decisions in 2018, we opened the laundromat in late 2019. We launched the first version of mobile app in 2019. I went all in on that business. Kind of walked away from the real estate business to go all in on that one. Three years later, in late 2021, I'd made the decision that we were going to have to shut it down. And so by January 2022, that business was officially shut down. And we, we migrated all of our customers from our platform to another platform. And yeah, so it's. So what made me kind of leap and go in, I leapt all in on the other business. It didn't work out. It was honestly one of the toughest decisions in my life to shut that down. It became my identity. It was everything I was, it was my baby, it was everything I wanted in this world. It was just such goodness into the world. And, and I lost $800,000, 300,000 of mine, half a million of my friends money. Had to call seven different investors. It was the hardest day of my life. Called seven different investors, telling each one of them, and I lost all your money.
- [03:47]
Matt
Yeah.
- [03:48]
Ken
Not a little, not like a real estate deal that kind of didn't hit your. Hit your numbers. I lost it all. And you know what's interesting to a t, Every single one of those people told me, they said, ken, we know what we're investing in. Right. This is a, this is a tech startup. We get what we're investing in. But we saw your vision, we saw the product. We loved the vision. We love what it was doing in the world. We get it. I wish it would have worked out, but it didn't. And yet we're there for you next time.
- [04:18]
Matt
Yeah. What's cool is people didn't really. They invested in the product, but they really invested in you. And that's like a heavy burden to carry is when people invest in you, give you their hard earned money, and now you're kind of stewarding their money. And what was interesting is it wasn't just an idea. This was something you had Done.
- [04:37]
Ken
Yeah.
- [04:38]
Matt
You had delivered this product, obviously, in a very different form because you didn't have this app yet, but you. You had created this for your daughter.
- [04:45]
Ken
I had been so at that time, yeah, I had been doing that for 10, no, 13 years. I'd been journaling to my daughter for 13 years at that time, and my son and. And that's why, heck, one of our friends, Daniel Ramsey, was a big impetus for why I launched that product. We were on the 2016 international trip in Vietnam, and I was sharing with Ramsey because I'm like, dude, you got young kids. You've got to do this. And he said, ken, you should really do something with that. He said, that's a really damn good idea. You should get that out so the rest of the world so more people can do it. And I just kept getting signals like that's what caused me to do it. Yes. It wasn't just a random idea. It was something that I was doing. And frankly, I'd shared it with hundreds of people over the years that had started doing it in some form or fashion, whether it was in a physical journal or some type of, you know, digital journal that they were using. But lots of people were doing it. Lots of people are still doing it today, and you'll never regret it.
- [05:43]
Matt
Did you do it in physical form for your daughter or digital?
- [05:47]
Ken
I've done physical a few times. More like if I'm traveling and I'm unplugged, then I'll use a physical journal to write my notes and things to give it. But I wanted the format that I gift to be digital just because I can put photos and videos and audio files and things that I can't do in. In physical.
- [06:04]
Matt
Right. So your daughter turns. I think it was 18 when you gave it to her, right?
- [06:07]
Ken
Yeah. She. When she graduated high school. Is. It was my gift to her.
- [06:11]
Matt
And she had no idea you had been doing it?
- [06:14]
Ken
No. So it was interesting. At the time, my older kids did not know. Now, of course, all my younger kid knows that I journal, he could care less. But they didn't know. And I, you know, we're still running the company. When I gave it to her and I had cameras set up. It's actually recording you on my YouTube and watch it. It's a beautiful thing. The day I gave it to her, it was special.
- [06:34]
Matt
Does she still talk about it?
- [06:35]
Ken
Yeah. Oh, yeah, well. Oh, my God. I love our relationship. She, you know, she was just sharing with me this weekend. She was home for the weekend, and we went to a concert Went to the rodeo. And she was like, dad, she goes, I so admire your development path that you've been on and how much you work on yourself, because I know how hard that is. And she's like, but seeing you do it makes me okay to do it on my own. And, you know, she goes to her own therapist and she goes, just. She's studying to be a child therapist, actually. And she's like, you know, just talking about this stuff is not easy. And I. Yeah, I get it. But I said yes. And she still reads her journal. The platform I switched to was one called Day One, which was amazing. It's owned by WordPress, so it's got lots of capital behind it, and I think it'll be around forever. And so with Day One, it was really cool. I can just literally share that journal with her. And so I still update for my older kids. Probably once a quarter, I'll write something and she's going family vacations or something. I'll write a recap or synopsis on that and put it in their journals. So, yeah, Grace still looks at it, and every once in a while, she'll snap a screenshot of one and send it to me that she's reading.
- [07:43]
Matt
That's so cool. How many entries do you think you gifted her?
- [07:46]
Ken
A little over 300.
- [07:47]
Matt
A little over 300. So it's not like a. Not like a daily practice. It's not this heavy thing that you have to do every day. It's kind of as the moments pop up and as the memories are made.
- [07:56]
Ken
Yeah, it was. The cadence I tried to hit was once a month, and I'm probably over once a month, but there would be months where life was just hard and I'd forget about it, or I'd just be too focused on life. And so I wouldn't write for two or three months, but on average. And then there'd be months where I wrote three or four times in a month. So, yeah, on average, I think it was right around 300 entries. Wow.
- [08:20]
Matt
And what I hear you saying is our kids learn more from our actions than they do from our words. Like, she's watched you work on yourself, lean into the personal development side, and she's witnessed that, which is al. Ultimately given her permission to do the same. So you're in this hardest day of your life where you're having to call all of your investors. How did you show up for your family and your kids in that moment to. To demonstrate to them how to handle hard times.
- [08:46]
Ken
Not great. If I can be Real. Let me be transparent about that and what I meant by not great. I went through a pretty dark period when that happened, even though every one of those people told me, ken, it's fine, we're okay, internally, I carried that weight on me. I felt like I let every one of my customers down that had believed in me. I let every one of my investors down. I let myself down, my wife, my family. And at the time, I had a lot of struggles going on with my son, who then was probably 17 years old. 16. 17 years old. And so from 14 to probably 17, we were going through a lot of just teenage struggles. And now looking back, you can say, oh, yeah, that was just a little struggle, period. But when you're in it, you don't know how it's going to turn out. Like, for me, it turned out great, it turned out fine. But it could have gone the other way. I could have lost my son to drugs. I could have lost him to a dwi. I could have lost him to, you know, a lot of things. And I was worried. And then shut down the business. And I went through, you know, six, ten months of real dark depression. You know, financial struggle, mental struggle, emotional struggle. I. I mean, I was mapping out my demise.
- [10:04]
Matt
How did you get out of it?
- [10:09]
Ken
I leaned on the people closest to me in my world. And this is really important. It was. I had deep conversations with people in the networks I'm a part of and go bundance and front row dads, and there's some people I trusted a lot. And I was really sharing the struggles I was having with my son. And one guy in particular, he was listening to what I was telling him. He asked me about my son. He said, look, does your son have adhd? I said, yeah, but that's not the point. What I'm telling you, he's drinking, he's using drugs, he's sleeping, he's not responding. And you're not listening to me. He said, no, I am listening to you. He said, what I'm telling you is I've struggled with ADHD my whole life. And untreated adhd, especially in teenagers, will show up as anxiety and depression. So a lot of times that will show up as anxiety and depression. And with anxiety and depression, oftentimes we'll go to alcohol to numb what's happening. And I was like, oh, this is an interesting perspective. So from there, we took Knox to a clinic to get assessed for adhd. This was happening right about the time he was graduating high school. So I'd been going through this for several years, and he's graduating high school. We get him during the summer of between high school and college, we give him the diagnosis, get him prescribed some medication. He ends up going through two or three different medications, trying to figure out what's right once he gets the right medication. Night and day, really night and day. And all of a sudden he's calling me, he's engaged, he's got just deep conversations. Hey, dad, did you know this? I'm like, where has this son been? I mean, it was the most beautiful thing. He graduates college in three years, cum laude, just does outstanding. And so to get back to me, how did that help me? So I saw that change in him and I thought, well, maybe I need something like that. Maybe I need ADHD meds. And so I actually went to the Amen clinics. They do brain scans. They've done hundreds of thousands of brain scans across the country. And I went and had my brain scanned. I was like, something's wrong. I was like, I'm. I've never been depressed in my life. I'm depressed, I'm anxious. I feel like life is not worth it. Something's wrong. And so I went and had these brain scans and thinking this would be my path to go get ADHD drugs. And the lady looks at my scan and said, you know, yes, I see signs of that in you, but I don't think you need ADHD meds, but you need some supplements. She goes, you're lacking, Gaba, you're lacking. She gave me four or five things that I was lacking that she could see from my brain scans and recommended some supplements to me that put me on like a year long journey of really dialing in my supplements. Everything was just better.
- [13:03]
Matt
It's almost like your body shut down. Like, it was like you were so beaten that your body just said, we're gonna stop making these things. And you just went into a dark place. Not intentionally, but like your body just said, we don't know how to cope with this stress or this anxiety or this, this feeling of sadness or emptiness. So we're just gonna shut down.
- [13:22]
Ken
I don't know exactly how it happened, but that's what it felt like. And it was. I had never had those feelings before. I've always been an optimist of man. Things are going to work. You know me, I'm super optimistic. And I was not at all optimistic at that time. But I can tell you, and it's not like you take something that's like you're going to go take Adderall, you can feel. Okay. I've got this feeling. I take probably 15 supplements a day now. Take some in the morning, some in the afternoon, some in the evening. And I can't feel anything. I just feel normal. And that's beautiful. I wake up, I feel refreshed. I'm normal. And so that's the biggest thing I can recommend to people. If you're feeling like that is number one, lean on your network. That was so important to have people that believed in me. I'd post messages to different threads and people would immediately reach out. DM me, hey, call me. Or they'd be calling me, just checking in on me, which is good because I had a plan, man. I had the plan and no one would have known.
- [14:20]
Matt
How did you not lose your wife in this whole process, man?
- [14:24]
Ken
She's a saint. She is absolutely a saint. And she was and is so good to me, so supportive of me. And yeah, I had a great relationship with her through this, but it was a dark period for me and which was scary for her. I mean, that's most thing it was. I was this rock in our marriage and the strength of our marriage. And here I am just with a dark cloud over me. Like, things are terrible and that's not who I am. So I'm just blessed that she was with me through the whole thing. So she went with me to Amen Clinic. She was there helping. Yeah. And listening. She's like, what supplements? And what's cool is that as she watches me go through my journey, you know, she is constantly on her. So now you look, she's got all these supplements she's taken, and she's working with a health advisor and doing all these things. And I love the influence that we have over those in our proximity that
- [15:25]
Matt
are watching what we're doing, but with our actions, not with our words, not yet.
- [15:29]
Ken
It's with our actions.
- [15:29]
Matt
Because if you would have told her, take these supplements, she'd been like, shut up.
- [15:32]
Ken
Go fly a guy.
- [15:33]
Matt
Shut up, dude.
- [15:34]
Ken
Don't tell me what to do.
- [15:34]
Matt
But when you show, don't tell. Just show people. Like, that's the true form of leadership, is just, I'm going to go down this path. You don't have to watch me. But you're not. You're going to be forced to watch me because I'm just going to do it every single day. And then as people see you transition and you evolve and you morph, they go, well, that would be pretty cool to feel or to see or to do. And what's also fascinating to me is most people would have quit after the failed app. They would have said, okay, I'm just going to go back to commercial real estate, go back to the transactional world. But you didn't quit. So how did you find the way to give yourself permission to then transition into the laundromat space, which is still working with other people's capital, working with your own capital and risking it all for something you truly believe in. But it's still a risk.
- [16:21]
Ken
So that's. Yeah, this is the long path to get here. So that business shuts down, we get health, right? And I'm at a crossroads. By this time, we've opened up two other laundromats. So 2019, we opened the first, 2022, we opened our second, early 2022, late 2222 we opened our third. And they're all starting to really do well. And, you know, for the last 25 years, I did commercial real estate. I was very good at commercial real estate. Didn't have a lot of passion in it as far as the brokerage side, which I made a bunch of money in. But I didn't want to get back into that business necessarily. But it was my quick path to cash. But the laundromat was really starting to go. But what the laundromat needed was someone to pour into it. It needed a full time person that. Skyler and I were both just half timing this deal, putting a little bit of time, and our third partner came to us, said, look, I'm not active in this business. I want you guys to, y' all just buy me out. And y' all are putting all the energy into it. And so Skyler and I sat down and said, look, what do we want to be when we grow up? We said we could continue opening up these things slowly and own four or five of these down the road, but we're making an impact. This is what was cool when we started the business. We wanted to do something different. I told you, we studied it for about six to 12 months. What we saw was a gap in the market. And that gap was in paying attention to families because oftentimes mothers would be in the laundromat with their children, and kids are just doing what kids do. They're running around, burning off energy, playing with stuff, pushing laundry carts, opening and closing doors, climbing in machines, and they're just bored. And we went to at least 25 laundromats during our study of looking at things. Never saw one place that really paid attention to kids, there'd be a couple of dingy little toys or something they could play with in a couple. There were little reading nooks, little bitty reading notes. But I said, man, we can do something different. I've got one of my mentors, owns 300 Sonics. He does things differently in the Sonics. He instead of the normal postage stamp lots you'll see with a super tight parking, kind of trying to get around your Sonic. Daryl buys one acre hard corner lots. He'll put a Sonic in that. Then he'll put a full on playground in his laundromats. He's even got sand volleyball courts at his Sonics. Wow, this guy does it right. And he's also some of the highest average unit volume in the entire system because he's paying attention to families. And so he was one of our inspirations. And I said, look, I want to kind of do what he does, really pay attention to families. So even in our very first one we opened up, we had a massive area in our laundromat that was dedicated to children. So a pony wall around the whole thing. So it's kind of protected. There's a TV playing children's programming on the tv. We've got books and bookshelves. We give away, we actually give away books to every child that comes in. And there's games for kids to play, there's places to sit, like just comfortable. It's a whole kid zone. And in our second and third, we did the same thing beyond that. We said, look, there's a need in these communities for us to give back. So we started doing things from backpack giveaway. So every back to school time August rolls around, every one of our stores buys as many backpacks as we can afford. And now we raise money from our vendors so we can make an even bigger impact. We'll buy hundreds of backpacks, we'll fill them with school supplies for kids going back to school and we give them away to the community. I don't care if you're a customer or not. We announce, hey, we're giving backpacks away. And it is such a beautiful thing to see the lines of people out the door. It just makes such a difference for the moms that are coming in and dads coming in with their kids getting backpacks. And we'll do that. We'll partner with health facilities to do health screenings, you know, mobile clinics, lots of these hospitals and clinics will be happy to do that. And so we've got the facility, we've got the customers, they'll bring an on site van or bus, if you will, and do health screenings, dental screenings, that kind of stuff. So there's always something we can do in the community. All that said, I started to notice we're making an impact. We got three stores. What if we had 100 stores? What if we had 200 stores? We could really make an impact. And so all that, Skyler and I talked, we said, one of us has to go full time. And I was at a transition point in my life. I said, I'll do it. I'll be the one going in. And so we went all in. I went full time. We were looking at a joint venture model. We really wanted to JV with people. And you. We go faster with other people's money. And we thought that was going to work. We were gung ho on that model. And then we started talking to our attorneys. Our attorney's like, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, and it's a duck and. Meaning they're like, you're talking about basically a franchise. And we, we were trying to avoid becoming a franchise, and there was really no way of avoiding it. And so we made the commitment to actually franchise our business, to go through everything that it took to be a franchise. And 2024, it was a long year in 2024 of legal restructuring, of recapitalizing the company, of just mapping out all of our. We're pretty entrepreneurial and we were good at what we did, but we had not written out every process and done that. So we spent all of 2024 just mapping out every process, started video recording how we do things, how we repair things, repairs. You can spend a lot of money on repair and maintenance or you can learn how to do it and save a lot of money. So we started documenting all those things and preparing our franchise, offering our FDD, our legal restriction, the company. So 2024 was a lot of that. And 2025, we were off to the races.
- [22:11]
Matt
What's interesting about it to me is most people say, follow your passion and you will find profit. And you followed your passion and you didn't find profit where you thought you would. But I can see that for you, what you're doing in the laundromat space, you're filled with passion for.
- [22:35]
Ken
Excuse me.
- [22:35]
Matt
No, you're good, man. Drink some water. We can edit that part, so don't worry about that. You're good.
- [22:47]
Ken
Yeah. The interesting thing here, this was not where I thought we'd find all the passion. You're Right. I was following it with doing something for my children, help people doing things for their children in journaling. But in this one, it's the same thing. We're helping people with their families, with their kids, with making an impact. And when I see the faces that light up when they walk into our laundromat, you see their face. They look up. We have high ceilings in all of our laundromats. It's really well lit. Someone's greeting them when they come through the door. Like, this is a laundromat. Yes, ma', am, it is. And they're so happy. And when I see the difference it makes for them to come to do a chore and how happy they are and their kids are playing and having fun and watching little kids movies and just being themselves and then taking a book home. Yeah, it's. It really lights up my heart. And here's what's cool. I'll tell you. We do something every month now in our stores. At first it was Skyler and I dictating, hey, we should do this, we should do that. And then it's our team members at our store saying, oh, I think there's a need for this thing or that thing. Now the community is coming to us saying, we need this, we need that. And we make a difference in every single store every single month. Sometimes, of course, you know, the floods that happened last summer, they were bad, really bad. And San Angelo got hit hard. And we have two stores in San. About to have three stores in San Angelo. We gave away hundreds of gift cards. I mean, Skyler and I had a big heart to heart, like, this is going to impact our stores. Your bottom line. I mean, we were giving away a lot of money in gift cards. Like, but this is the right thing to do, and we need to help us as fast, as heavy as we can. And so we gave away hundreds of gift cards. And the crazy thing is, is immediately, I mean, our bottom line ticked up, which you would think it's going to be the opposite because we're just giving away so much services. But everyone kept coming back to us and coming back to us. So every time we do good in the community, it comes back to us. Now that we sort of figure that out, like, my goodness, you'd have a. What a winning formula for business. Go do good, and good comes back to you. I know that's been in the Bible forever, and we inherently kind of think that. But, I mean, I can show you the numbers, and it's absolutely. The more good we do, the More good that is done by us.
- [25:20]
Matt
And what's really unique is you're kind of breaking the mold. Most people would say that little pony wall area for the kids, you're losing profitability there because you could probably put six washers, six dryers. You calculate how much runtime you'd get on each and you're like, oh, that's thousands of dollars a year that you're losing. But you guys have recognized that that's a different way to do business. And you're actually gaining revenue by creating a place where families want to come in. Generally speaking, like a negative thing in society. Like, when people talk about laundromats, they don't talk about like, oh, yeah, I went to the laundromat today. It was amazing. It's like kind of like this embarrassed sort of. I'm ashamed that I had to go, but you're kind of reshaping that whole mold.
- [25:57]
Ken
We want the opinion to be very different of laundromats. When they leave ours, it's go read our reviews that people have. And look, here's what I believe, Matt, if you take care of someone's family member, you take care of someone's child, you love on someone's child and smile at them, high five them, give them a book, give them a toy, you're going to build a trust and a love with someone they're going to look at using this person. I mean, every time I come, my kids like, ah, Matt's here. Yay. And that's special. But that's how it is with our team members. They get to know these folks, they get to know their families, their children. That's. That's how you really build trust with someone. And that's what we want to build. A long term relationship and trust with each person that comes in our store.
- [26:42]
Matt
So you fell into the laundromat space almost by accident and now are kind of stuck in the laundromat space again, almost by accident, because you thought the app was going to really take off. But what is it about the laundromat space that has you most excited?
- [26:57]
Ken
Like, there's so much opportunity to. I tell people, Tom, this is the Trojan horse for doing good. And I'm almost 55, so I'll be 55 in a few months. I'm in the second half of my life. This is the give back part of my life. This business allows me to give back in ways that I would have just never imagined. And so that's what gets me excited, what has me really excited. Now we're in the franchise model. We have so much inbound interest from the kind of people that are just outstanding, like we're putting out there to the world. We're a faith based business. We believe in doing good in the community. We believe in service first and that repels a lot of people and that's okay. And so we put that out there. So. But the people that are being attracted to us and I know the impact that we were going to be able to make or able to make with our own few stores, now that that's getting magnified and multiplied around the country, that's what has me most excited. It's just an impact business.
- [27:56]
Matt
Yeah. But you're, you're not losing sight of the profit through the impact. And I think that's what most people will miss when they hear this. Be like, oh, wow, it sounds like a nonprofit, a 501C3. Oh, it's all about give back. What you're saying is you have found that when you give, more is returned to you than you could have ever imagined.
- [28:11]
Ken
That's 100%. And I mean, look, this industry is, if you look at margins in this industry, you're looking at 20 to 35% plus margin in this industry. I'll tell you, the lower ends of that are honestly on the ones where you think, oh, I'm not running, I'm not staffing it, I'm not doing this, I'm going to shave all these expenses. Well, you're going to be on the lower side of that. When you're actually running a really strong business and you're paying attention to your numbers and you're dialing in the metrics and you're doing it right, you're going to hit the upper bounds and above on that kind of margin.
- [28:41]
Matt
And what I hear you saying is you're not really even in the laundromat business. You're in like the family entertainment business.
- [28:47]
Ken
We're in the service business. We're in the make. When the joy business bring people in, you take a chore and you turn it into a joy.
- [28:54]
Matt
Yeah. And did you make that mindset shift overnight? Was that like a spiritual experience? What allowed you to recognize that the more I give and the more free I am with my heart, my soul, my time and my money, the more that will come back to me.
- [29:12]
Ken
It continues to be an evolution right now. This was not an overnight thing. This was not the younger version of Ken the way I thought. But as I continue to grow and evolve and see things, it Helps me to get there. But one of them, to be quite honest, is like our first employee at Laundry Love was Skylar's father, Clay. And I mean, Clay is as close as you're gonna get to a walking saint on this earth. He really is. And Clay's example has been one of those things to just help me. You said, much like how we are with our children, it's our example and the thing that we show and do and how we show up. Well, Clay's that example for me. The way he has shown up and just treated people every day. And then I look at our numbers every day, I look at our profitability, I look at our revenue. There's a correlation on how we run our business and how we treat people and how it shows up to our bottom line. And so you kind of asked earlier about how you can kind of tie the two together. Well, I see once these two are tied together and we can run our business like that and bring happiness and joy and kindness into people's lives, and that translates to a really healthy bottom line. And I wish everyone could run a business like that well.
- [30:29]
Matt
I mean, and Chick fil a kind of exemplified that early. I mean, now they've gotten to a place where they're huge, and allegedly they changed the formula in the chicken, so it's not as good. I was never a Chick fil a guy, so I don't know that to be a truth. But I mean, they really showed that, right? They were closed on Sundays. They were all about the service. They were all about the family. They were all about the hospitality and the customer service. And look at what happened to them. And I think what you're really saying is you can not overlook profit. You cannot forget about profit. But if you focus on only profit, you will be really left with nothing. If you focus on service, you can trust, so long as you pay attention to the numbers, that the profit will take care of itself.
- [31:07]
Ken
Well, if you look at Chick fil a as an example, so we use Chick Fil a as an example. When we opened, we said, we want to be the Chick fil a of laundromats. That was our kind of mantra. We want to be the Chick fil a laundromats. What I meant by that was, number one, they are like the most profitable QSR that's out. And they're closed on Sundays. And they're closed on Sundays. They have a incredibly family friendly environment. They're a faith based company that's not ashamed to put out there. Hey, this is what we Believe. And when my kids drive by Chick fil a, they're like, hey, unfortunately, we still have Chick Fil a show up at my house so many times a week. So my wife is very weak when Kai wants something, so it shows up at her house all the time. We, we love or he loves Chick Fil a. They have a play area, they're super friendly. You go in, you're greeted properly like, yeah, it's my pleasure. Yeah. So we try to model ourselves against a business like that. I think another one that's a great example is BUC EE's in Texas. And they're all over now. Stopped at BUC EE's on the way down here today. And you walk through the door, welcome to Buc Ees. They greet you, they smile, they're friendly, they're well staffed, they're stocked, they're lit, they're everything you could want. They bathrooms are super clean. Yeah, we're trying to be the buckies of laundromats as well.
- [32:21]
Matt
Also, what I hear you saying is you do a lot of ripoff and duplicate. Like you're always researching, you're always learning, but then you're also applying, whether it's your mentor in the sonic space, whether it's Chick Fil, a, whether it's BUC EE's. You're a student of life.
- [32:36]
Ken
I've heard you use the term. I use it all the time, the R and D. I ask people. It's funny how many people don't know what R and D really means. And it's not research and research and development. It's rip off and duplicate. So I'm a big fan of R and D. When we see a great idea, we're going to borrow that idea and implement it in the business. Skyler and I are both voracious readers and we believe there are so many models. You can read a book and get 20 years of someone's life experience in a few hours of reading a book. And so we're all the time reading books, looking at models and figuring out what can we implement in our business to make it better, us better and us run more efficiently.
- [33:16]
Matt
A lot of people will criticize me for that statement. They'll say, oh, you just steal other people's ideas. You don't make them your own. And I was taught by my dad when I was growing up, copying is the greatest form of flattery.
- [33:27]
Ken
I'd agree 100%.
- [33:28]
Matt
Like there's. There's no greater compliment you can give to another human than the way you do that is incredible. I'm just going to do it the same way and that's how I've lived my whole life. Like I don't have to recreate the model, I don't have to recreate the idea. Yeah, I can make it my own. Just like you do with the Laundromats. We're going to focus on the kid area, we're going to focus on the service, we're going to focus on the community and the family. Families. But you don't have to recreate the models. And as we move into this sort of chat GPT type world where nobody has the ability to think for themselves anymore, which is my belief of where we're going to go if we're not careful, I think you're going to see R D happening more and more and more because the algorithm's only going to know a certain amount of things no matter what you ask it. It's going to spit out a certain set of, of answers or set of equations that you can go implement in your business or in your life. And I think reading is one of the things that can truly differentiate you from the competition because if you read book, take that knowledge and apply it to your life, you can truly transform to your point what somebody did over 20 years, in a year, in two weeks, in two months. So if you look at the books you've read in your life, I'm going to ask you a really uncomfortable question. What would you say the number one book to read that changed your life would be and you can't say the Bible.
- [34:40]
Ken
I'm reading the Bible for the first time right now.
- [34:42]
Matt
Oh really?
- [34:42]
Ken
To be quite honest, I've never read the whole Bible and Scholar now are in a one year Bible study. So I'm reading that for time. The first, first time I'll tell you the first one that kicked it off for me was think and grow Rich. When I read that there were so many aha. I would, I said out loud to my wife, oh my God, I can't believe I, I was reading that. And that was written what in the 40s I think and I didn't read it until 10 years ago. So that was the first one that kicked it off for me. But it's by means not the only. I, I read books right now on really this kind of service element of things and I could, you know, fans first. Yeah, absolutely incredible unreasonable hospitality. Absolutely phenomenal book on, on service scholars reading another customer service book right now. So it kind of going to depend on what the genre is of the book I just finished, Science of Scaling. We read that right before. Scott and I both read that right before our EOS annual. And that really helped me to shape our next 10 year vision for what things look like. So I get something out of almost every book I read. There's every once in a while I'll turn one off or just won't listen or won't read it. But man, there's so much to be gained from, from books I'm reading outlive right now. Peter Attia Just on longevity and ideas on how I can better take care of my body as I enter from my 50s, 60s, 70s.
- [36:05]
Matt
That guy's in some hot water.
- [36:07]
Ken
Well, I'll take it with a grain of salt.
- [36:10]
Matt
He showed up in the Epstein files. That's not a good thing to do. That's not a good thing to do. And the things he said were just not the right things to say. But you know, there's still a lot to be learned from every person you come in contact with and all the books you're reading. My question would be how do you actually make sure you apply it? Because we all are consuming information all the time, but if we apply it, that's what truly can change our life or change our business or our relationships. How do you take all these wisdoms, all these nuggets and say, okay, I'm going to apply this one thing or these three things. Do you have a rule? Do you have a process?
- [36:46]
Ken
The best thing for me is if I'm reading it with someone else. So Skyler and I, again, he's my partner, Laundry Love. We read a lot of the same book sometimes. So we'll share back and forth. Aha. And as a team, say we want to implement these few things. So I think that's probably the most helpful is to read a book as a leadership team and that would be the way to apply things. But the other way that I apply things to my life is I reread a lot of books because I used to just, you know, read 20, 30 books a year. But if I'm doing that, it's just, it's hard to actually apply a lot of that information. So what I'm doing these days is probably half of the things I read are rereads. Yeah, that helps me to go, there was that thing I forgot about and actually take action and apply some of those into my life.
- [37:33]
Matt
GoBundance is a community of over 800 high performers, entrepreneurs and investors with a combined net worth of over $5.7 billion. But look, it's not just about the money. We're about building lives of abundance. If you're ready for a tribe that challenges you to achieve a higher standard for yourself, visit gobundance.com tribe that's G O B u n D a n c e.com tribe to apply today. Reading as a leadership team is a game changer. We just started doing that in gobundance and I have this belief that a majority of the books you get the gold from the first three chapters. After that they kind of repeat the same thing over and over again. Maybe tell it with a little bit of a different flavor. But most of the self help books, you kind of get the meat and the potatoes in the first three chapters. And so I started a book club with our leadership team and we called it the first three. We're only gonna read the first three chapters and if people wanna read more, they're welcome to read more. But we're gonna take the first three chapters and we're gonna have a team meeting. And what I found was when I led the team meetings, it was a good conversation, but it was like a one way conversation. And so now what we do is every month somebody on the leadership team team chooses the book but then they're in charge of leading the mastermind on the backside of reading that first three chapters. So they have to come with the questions, they have to come with the AHA's, they have to dig into the details. And what I'm finding is, is our people inside of the organization are finding their voice, they're finding their little confidence to speak up, to share, to ask a question and to even challenge me, the so perceived leader of the organization, to say, well, what did you think about this? Are we really following that? We preach this, but this is what we're doing on day to day basis. And I think doing it as a leadership team or doing it with people in general is the incredible hack to really anything in life. When you, when you do it alone, you're in this echo chamber of your own bullshit where you can kind of lie and cheat and avoid and not really have to pay attention. But when you have that accountability. Did you read those chapters? What did you think about this? You can't bullshit your way out of that conversation. You have to have the conversation and have to talk about, I didn't read it or hey, I did read it and here was my AHA's.
- [39:42]
Ken
What's your cadence on that? With, with the monthly. Are you doing one book a month?
- [39:45]
Matt
With three chapters, One book a month. With three chapters.
- [39:48]
Ken
I like that idea.
- [39:49]
Matt
One book a month, three chapters. Because there's books that the team suggests that I don't want to read. There's books I suggest that the team doesn't want to read. I mean, the first time we did it, I said, all right, number one book changed my life as a man thinketh. And I'll never forget, Kelly Prosser has been with us for a very long time. Chief of staff. She's like, into the romance novel, you know, like the dragon and the room colors and all that things. And she's like, I have to read this book. She came back from reading the first three chapters of that book a changed human. She's like, I can totally see how my frame or my perspective on life is limiting my capabilities, because I'm going into things with preconceived notions, and those are ultimately dictating and determining the actions I take. And so she's like, she was totally bought in. Then we're like, okay, what's the problem in the business? What are we working on now? Whoever suggests the book, they're like, oh, let's go read this book. Let's go read this book. And it's just been really a fun way to create some camaraderie. But camaraderie that's purposeful, that actually has some intention behind it. Because we're taking a nugget and we're saying, what are we going to apply to the business today? How are we going to track that? How are we going to measure that? And then how are we going to make sure that everybody on the team understands this message, even if they didn't read the book?
- [41:03]
Ken
I love that. That's something my R and D, myself, with our team, That's. The first three chapters is a good one. Y' all can dig in individually deeper as you go on the books, but the first three as a team is awesome.
- [41:14]
Matt
Yeah. And a lot of people like Megan on our team, when I told her we were gonna do the first three because she's like, everything's gotta be done kind of a person, she was, like, mortified. Like, what do you mean we're not gonna finish the book? Where does it say in the book, you have to read the whole book? Like, let's just get a nugget and apply one nugget. If we apply 12 nuggets this year, we will be better humans. The business will be better. If we take 300 nuggets and only apply two, well, then we just left 10 on the table. So let's not try to do too much. Maybe next year we'll go to the first five. But like the first three is the perfect amount of time to have a one hour mastermind. People can read that first three chapters of the book relatively in less than an hour. They're not, you're not asking them to take hours and hours from their life. And you get in there and you have a meaningful conversation, impact the business, and then move on to the next, next book.
- [42:02]
Ken
Love the idea. I'm gonna steal it.
- [42:04]
Matt
It's easier. And the whole book, there's, there's some books I'm like you, I reread every single year as a man thinketh. Thinking Grow Rich are the two books I reread every year. And I was gifted as a man thinketh. Actually, when I started working for Pat Hyben, he gave me this little book, this limited edition collector's copy. And I, I wasn't really into the personal growth self help space. I was 23 years old. I didn't really know there was such a thing that existed. And he gave me the book, I still have it to this day. And he said, this book changed my life. I think you should read it. And I was like, what do you mean it changed your life? He's like, I had this book in the visor of my car and at stop signs, I would pull it out and I would read chapters, I would read pages of it and like, I just think through who we are today as humans. I mean, that was 12 years ago. Now people pull their phone out and they scroll social media or, you know, they're getting lost in somebody else's vision for their life. What Pat really showed me was if you get lost in the vision for your own life by yourself intentionally, you can create whatever you want to create. And so I read that book and I still have it today. Still read that same copy today. There's post it notes, there's pencils, there's highlighters, there's coffee spills. And every time I reread it, I find another nugget that either didn't Capture the first 10 times I read it, or that I've missed or that I've forgotten about. And I just find ways to reapply those concepts back into my life.
- [43:26]
Ken
What a gift from Pat to you.
- [43:27]
Matt
That's amazing, man. I still have the one where he wrote, he hand wrote a note in the front of it. And so that's something I've started to do is like Be more intentional with my gift giving. You know, we can give our time, we can give our talent, or we can give our treasures, but if we're actually intentional about what we're giving and just write a personal note, it's. It's far more valuable than any one thing he could have ever given me. And, I mean, the copy probably cost him like, 1999, but the note in there, I mean, that's something I'll hold near and dear to my heart forever.
- [43:55]
Ken
So in my office, I've got a drawer to my left hand side. In that drawer is every handwritten note I've ever received. And I can tell you what, Matt. It's not a very big drawer, but it's such a rare thing to receive. I make a point each week, send out two or three. Sent out one yesterday, handwritten notes to people, just thanking them and appreciating them for who they are or an encounter I had or something. I'll send them something. Sometimes I love sending books. I send challenge coins. I send different things out, but just the note itself is so impactful. And again, for me, everyone I've received, it's about a stack yay big. It's not that big, but that's how infrequent it is in this day and age.
- [44:44]
Matt
Yeah. And, I mean, Jesse Itzler talks about this all the time. I think he writes 50 a year, handwritten cards honoring people, seeing people, but forcing himself to take the time to be fully present with the message he wants to share with somebody else who had an impact on his life.
- [44:58]
Ken
John Israel wrote 300. You know what? Five a day for 365 days.
- [45:02]
Matt
Five a day.
- [45:02]
Ken
Talk about a commitment.
- [45:03]
Matt
Talk about a commitment. Yeah. I don't. I don't know that I could go that far. I wish I could, and I'm sure I could if I did it, but, you know, it's just. It's just trying not to go from couch to marathon. It's trying to go from couch to 5K. So if you haven't written a handwritten note, just write one this year, maybe write three this year. And like, you know, your. Your idea of just writing one or two a week, like, what a beautiful thing to just take time Saturday morning, Sunday morning before bed and just be like, man, that person impacted me. Let me jot down a quick note. And then the awkward part is like, how do you get their address? Do you ask them for their address? Do you look it up in white pages? You know, that's the fun part, too. Like, Hey, I gotta send you something. Can you give me your address? But it just means so much to people.
- [45:42]
Ken
I pay. I've never had someone say, I'm not going to give you it, give it to you. Because people are always curious, okay, what are they sending? And just getting a handwritten note. And again, you know, I said I had some custom challenge coins made. It's so impactful. Just something little like that that you can send to people. And it's. It's just the thought.
- [45:59]
Matt
So where do you see the laundromat world going five years from now?
- [46:08]
Ken
Consolidation is going to happen. So there's 30 to 30. It's a little opaque, but roughly 30, 35,000 laundromats across the United States. Of those, we'll call it 30,000, 99% of them are owned by single unit or one or two unit operators, mostly mom and pop. Old, the thing you typically think about in the laundromat. So the next five years, you're going to see a lot more consolidation, a lot of those things going away because of competition. Like us, like other competitors, we're by no means the only one in the space. There's other really great people doing good things in the industry, and I think that's. You see a lot more of that happening. I also think in the next five years, you know, Elon's going all in on Optimus. I think the. The robot revolution will be coming, and so there will be a lot more automation coming as well. So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out in the laundromat industry. But certainly I think you're gonna see a lot of these shabby, old dingy things are gonna start going away in favor of the newer, nicer things that you can be proud of to walk into.
- [47:21]
Matt
Yeah. And you think about the robots. Like, I mean, wash, fold, dry, wash, dry, fold. Like, you could literally drop a bag off and come back at the end of the day and a robot has washed your clothes, dried your clothes, folded your clothes, and now put them back in a bag and you can go home.
- [47:34]
Ken
That's it.
- [47:35]
Matt
I mean, it's all about efficiency. And so I think what I hear you saying is, is there's going to be consolidation, meaning the big guys are going to come in and buy up the small mom and pops so they can institutionalize the space, create more efficiencies. But more efficiencies in each individual store are going to drive benefits back to the consumers to have a better experience
- [47:53]
Ken
right back to the community. Yeah, it's going to be much better for everyone and just a much better experience.
- [47:58]
Matt
And as you see people, what I'm hearing is a lot of people are like, quit your W2, quit your W2, quit YOUR W2, go start a business. Go buy a business. Go start a, go buy a business. A lot of people, the path of least resistance for that is actually to keep their W2 and maybe buy a franchise where there's systems, models and processes that have been proven that they're buying alongside of it. What do you see right now in the franchise space and what are you feeling from people coming in as franchisees? Is there resistance? Is there excitement? Is there dumb money? Is there scared money? Like what are you feeling?
- [48:34]
Ken
Well, I think the dumb money is, are those that are chasing, you know what the Internet's screaming? Oh, it's the passive income. Free money jumping, no money down. Hop into this. That's an illusion.
- [48:45]
Matt
Yeah.
- [48:46]
Ken
In, in this business.
- [48:46]
Matt
Well, and I think it's really important to say that when anybody is preaching passive income, it's, it's delusional because there's no such thing as passive income. There's horizontal income, which is, hey, I'm making money while I stay in bed. But the second you go passive on your money is the second your money will be gone.
- [49:03]
Ken
Yeah. And I'll tell you, for the most part, laundromats are not horizontal income. This is an operating business. Even if you have a non staffed location, someone's got to collect the money, someone's got to maintain the machine. So there's a lot of work that has to be done in this kind of business. I say if you want real horizontal income, go invest in a third party deal that someone else is running. You're putting capital in and no responsibility into it. Now you, you, you're putting a lot of trust in someone else right there. But in this business, where I see is a lot of excitement from folks. We met with a guy on Monday, he's retiring as a, as a CFO of a health care company. And he's like, look, I've been working for corporate America for years and I want to build long term wealth right now. And he's so excited. He wants to open up five or six laundromats in a region and get going. He loves the idea of the franchise model. Right. It's the business in a box. You've got systems, playbooks, vendor relationships. You've got everything modeled out and ready to go from construction and architecture, design. You don't have to think all of all these things, we had to go through all this brain damage, think through it all up front. So what's great about the franchise model is a lot of the things are done for you. So you sign up and follow the playbook and you can really run a very successful business.
- [50:20]
Matt
So, yeah, whenever somebody complains to me about the franchise fees or why would I start a franchise, I could just do it by myself. One of the things I believe is actually franchising mitigates your downside. It doesn't totally eliminate it, but it definitely helps protect the downside because you're getting systems, processes and models from people who have already made all of those mistakes that you're not going to know you're going to make if you go do this by yourself. And so people will say, oh, the franchise fee, oh, that's just, you know, that's just capping my upside. That's just a limit. I'm like, no, that's actually fronting your idiot tax so you don't have to pay it later.
- [50:54]
Ken
Short circuiting. All these unforced errors that you are likely gonna make that you wouldn't have to make. I'll tell you this. With any business, like, if you're gonna get into a relationship with someone, and certainly a franchise relationship, that's a, you know, five or ten year relationship, it's important to underwrite who you're getting into business with. So that goes without saying. I know people that have gotten into franchises that have worked out really poorly. I know others, like my friend, you know, that owns 300 Sonics, he's very, very happy with that franchise relationship and
- [51:23]
Matt
they're probably very happy with him.
- [51:24]
Ken
100%.
- [51:25]
Matt
Yeah. So it's all about doing business with good people that you can know like and trust, build relationship and rapport with, where your visions align, your vision and their vision can coexist in the same environment. And so long as you have that, franchising is actually an incredible way to build wealth and to build income. Now it's also a way to have a miserable, terrible life if you get in business with the wrong franchisor or the wrong model. But if you vet the people right on the front side, it's. It's a really beautiful space to play in.
- [51:54]
Ken
Yeah, it can be a great thing. I know lots of folks that have franchise businesses and love them. I've known a few that have had some bad experiences. And it's our objective, getting biz with the right people, where we're the right fit. I know with the right people it's going to be a great relationship.
- [52:07]
Matt
So I want to wrap this up by asking you a personal question. You've you're a husband, you're a father, a faith based man. Let's Fast forward to 100 because you're going to live a long healthy life because you're cold plunging for 28 days straight. What is the one thing you want your kids to carry forward as they live their life of? How did Ken live his life? How did dad live his life?
- [52:32]
Ken
I want him to live with joy, with joy, happiness and just giving love into the world. And I am so blessed that all three of my children do that and I just my, my wish is that they continue to do that, that they pour that into their children. They just teach them live with joy each and every day.
- [52:54]
Matt
That's amazing, man. Thank you so much for your time.
- [52:56]
Ken
Thanks for having me.
- [52:57]
Matt
Appreciate it.
- [53:07]
Ken
Sam.