today I want to talk to you about five myths or misconceptions about wer mats if you don't know me my name is Mark sordos I own the washing well laundromat in Aberdine New Jersey I also go by the name the laundromat entrepreneur I do help people buy and learn about getting into the laundry mat industry so the first myth it is the biggest by far and its laundry mats are passive income and you might have seen other people on YouTube tell you buy a laundromat you don't have to do anything you're just going to collect quarters if you think that's the case then you're really in for a surprise now I said in other videos that one of the great things about owning a laundr m is that it's not all consuming you can have a full-time job and own a laundr m but if you think you're not going to have any involvement if you're just going to sit back collect quarters you're never going to talk to a customer you're never going to have to fix a machine never going to have to answer a complaint then you're fooling yourself you're a fool let's say you had employees and one of them calls out 15 minutes before their shift or what happens if that employee calls out at midnight says look I had some bad uh Thai food and I can't come in tomorrow morning and you open at 6 then it looks like you're going in and working that shift or the w m not opening I don't know it's up to you what you you're going to do but you can ask any successful laundromat owner and they will all tell you laundromats are not passive income when you see those offers oh buy my course and make $25,000 a month profit don't believe it it can be a good income don't get me wrong but it's not passive the second misconception or myth is that laundry mats have a 95% success rate the truth is that laundry MS are a very segmented industry it's mostly Mom and Pops so really nobody knows what the success rate is for laats I think somebody put 95% out there it sounds good it got repeated by others and so now it's kind of just taken as gospel that laundry mats pretty much always succeed and that's just not the case now I'm not trying to scare you off I'm not trying to tell you they're like as hard to run as restaurants cuz they're definitely definitely not they are a much easier business to run than a restaurant but it doesn't mean that they're automatically successful I tried to buy a laundry mat where the husband and wife just literally just walked away the landlord wound up taking over that location and now they own a laundromat that's an example of a unsuccessful one I pass a vacated laundromat every day on my way to my laundromat so they don't always work there is is some risk involved and again it's not like running apple or IBM don't think that it's a no-brainer business it does require effort and energy on your part and they can fail just like any other business number three laundromats are always profitable that's not true either you can sign a bad lease you could overbuilt your laundry mat if you started one from scratch you could have too much competition so wander mats are not always profitable a lot of the ones that I see that are for sale When You Dig Down Deeper into the numbers they're not even making a profit you know on paper they say oh you know you could make $30,000 a year as a owner operator which basically means that like if you want to come in here and work every day yourself you can make a salary of a whopping $30,000 what they don't tell you what you have to dig a little for is that they signed a bad lease I I was talking to another uh laundromat owner about this place because they had actually approached him to buy it the lease is just a bad lease it's it's like 45 to 50% of the sales every dollar that this laundry map brings in 45 cents of that dollar goes just to rent that doesn't include any other expenses okay you cannot be profitable if 45% of your money or revenue is going to just pay the rent number four not all laundry mats are the same they range in size from the smaller ones like 1,500 square ft to bigger ones that are being built today which are 11 12 13 15,000 squ F feet so just picture that a 15,000 sare footer versus A500 s footer well the one laundry man is 10 times larger than the smaller one so you can just imagine the amount of volume that they have to do to break even and be profitable also some laundry mats have dry cleaning they also might specialize in certain types of customers or maybe eco-friendly washing so not all laundry mats are the same and number five laundry mats are not Recession Proof now you might have heard me say another videos they are recession resistant but if there's a recession laundromats still get hurt they just don't get hurt in the way that some of the other businesses do perhaps the Auto industry the restaurant industry but if I have a large amount of pickup and delivery customers for most people pickup and delivery is a luxury now I do have some senior citizens who can't get out can't get to laundry facilities so it's a necessity for them but for most of my pickup and delivery customers they just simply don't want to do it they don't have the time they're not interested in it whatever reason so for them it's a luxury if somebody were to have to cut back in a household that could be one of the first things that gets cut back or if you're a drop off customer and we do Wash and Fold for you you might say well you know what it was nice having somebody else do it for me but I'm going to go use the self-served machines or you know what I honestly I've always had a machine at my house I'll just do it there I don't want you to think that if there is a recession that you know you won't see uh a hit to perhaps a revenue and profits now like I said it should be much less than other Industries cuz people always have to wash their clothes but they might not always need to do Wash and Fold they might not always need to do pickup and delivery so although it's largely recession resistant it's not completely Recession Proof I hope you liked this video I'm going to do many more I'm both entrepreneurship and laundry mats if you liked it please hit the like button hit subscribe that really helps and if you want me to cover any other topics please let me know in the comments thank you