Jackpot!

By Bob Nieman | May 13, 2009

Dan and Krista Mosher are like many residents of Las Vegas – in that they’re not originally from the City of Lights. In fact, Dan hails from Portland, Ore., and Krista spent her formative years down South, in Enterprise, Ala.

However, this entrepreneurial couple is unlike many of the city’s other self-service laundry owners – in that they went from just thinking about getting into the laundromat business to multi-store ownership in less than a year.

This time last year, Dan was working construction, which he has done for the past 22 years, and Krista was at home caring for the couple’s 5-year-old son, Drake. Today, they’re co-owners of The Laundry Factory and Sudz laundromats, both based in Las Vegas.

Of course, with Dan being a contractor, it’s not like running their own business was a foreign concept to them. In addition, the couple, who has lived in Las Vegas for 10 years, also ran their own home inspection business in the area for a while – before selling it a couple of years ago and looking for a new challenge.

“The coin laundry business is good everywhere, but Las Vegas seems to have an especially strong, captive market for this business,” Dan said. “We were looking for something that might be a little more recession-proof than other businesses. Actually, statistics show that when times get a little bit harder, coin laundry businesses pick up. We wanted something we could invest our money into that we knew was going to be a good stable investment.

“The return on investment was good,” he added. “Everything just fit into place. So we gave it a go, and now we have two of them. It’s been a wonderful experience for us. We absolutely love it.”

“For the past 10 years, Dan and I have worked together,” explained Krista, who has always handled the clerical and bookkeeping duties for the couple’s ventures. “This was a nice turn of careers to where we could continue to still work together and be our own boss and still be involved with our son’s schedule.”

The Moshers first got their feet wet with Sudz, a 2,200-square-foot store in a bustling strip mall that they had purchased last August from PWS. When the Moshers took ownership, the store already had been gutted and completely renovated with a new interior motif and upgraded equipment installed by the distributor. As a result, it was a rather turnkey operation for the couple – and a nice, simple initiation into the coin laundry industry.

However, Dan and Krista soon wanted more. And they got it.

Four months later, in December 2006, they acquired The Laundry Factory, a 6,000-square-foot store in another Vegas strip center just five miles away. However, this laundry required more than a little elbow grease.

“The store was in pretty bad disarray when we walked into it,” said Dan, who noted that they kept the store open throughout the renovation process. “We were the contractors on it. We’ve gone in and cleaned it up.”

“There was no music, no televisions, no vending,” Krista recalled. “Forty-five percent of the equipment wasn’t working.”

For four months, the Moshers gradually breathed life back into The Laundry Factory – building a children’s play area, fixing the broken vending machines, adding a drop-off drycleaning service with a storage carousel in the front window to help drive traffic through the store, installing display cases at the service counter to spotlight the store’s bulk sales of detergent and other ancillary products, and more.

“There was a 150-gallon fish tank in the store that was all green and just gross,” Krista related. “We’ve brought that back to life. Our customers haven’t minded the construction. We’re shocking them.”

One thing that is shocking to the Moshers is how much a part of the community their laundry businesses have become.

“We see the same customers over and over,” said a slightly astonished Dan, who added that more than 80 percent of their customers at both stores are Hispanic. “We know their children. We know their names.

“That was a pleasant surprise. But now they are expecting a certain kind of service from us.”

However, it’s probably no more than the Moshers expect out of themselves and their six employees (one manager and two attendants at each store).

“In our business plan, one of our main goals is to have the cleanest laundromat we can possibly have,” Dan said. “We understand that cleanliness is an expense.”

Apparently, it’s been worth the expense.

The Laundry Factory is situated in a densely populated section of Las Vegas, surrounded by fast food restaurants, supermarkets, video stores and, of course, other coin laundries.

In fact, among the four competitors located within just one mile of the store, two of those laundries are actually newer than the Moshers’ operation.

“But they have not done anything to hurt our sales numbers,” Dan said. “Actually, our numbers are going up. We’ve probably increased business by 32 percent since we bought it.”

And the news is even rosier at the smaller Sudz, where the Moshers claim to have quadrupled the store’s business since taking over.

In addition to a strong focus on cleanliness, customer service is the other key component that is attracting business to the stores and creating powerful word-of-mouth advertising, according to the couple.

“Our emphasis is on catering to the customers,” said Krista, who explained that their entire staff is bilingual. “I really believe that employees have a lot to do with it. They help the customers before they load our washers. My staff is wiping the machines off. They really treat the customers with a lot of respect.”

At The Laundry Factory, which is a card store, strong customer service has carried over into educating clients on how the system works.

“We actually rent cards to our customers who don’t want to purchase them” Dan said. “We either take a $5 deposit or they leave their ID – we mark it down and we give them the balance of the card back when they come back.”

But the Moshers’ emphasis on the customer extends even beyond that.

Being located in Las Vegas, the original Laundry Factory featured five slot machines when the couple purchased it.

“For us to keep the gaming, we would have had to go through all of the bells and whistles that the state wants you to go through to get a gaming license,” Dan explained.

However, before doing so, he and Krista took a poll of their current customers. Did they like the slot machines in the laundromat? Would they miss them if they were gone?

An overwhelming 90 percent of The Laundry Factory’s customers indicated that they would be glad to see the one-armed bandits disappear from the store.

And the Moshers were more than happy to accommodate their wishes.

“We’re really trying to listen to what our customers needs are,” Dan said. “Krista and I are both very customer service oriented. And we’ve noticed that customer service has gone away. The younger generation doesn’t even understand what customer service is. We really stress that when our clients come to our door.”

What’s next for Dan and Krista Mosher?

At Sudz, with its limited space, the couple plans to add a few arcade-type games and do some remodeling – perhaps even open up another area for more room. At The Laundry Factory, the addition of a café/snack bar is a strong possibility.

“We’ve actually been looking at opening a drycleaners/laundromat combination to service our current stores’ drycleaning accounts ourselves,” Dan said. “Plus, we know that there are a lot of other stores that do drop-off drycleaning as well, so we can target some of that business, too.”

Of course, a couple that has purchased two self-service laundries in less then 12 months is probably a safe bet to buy a few more. No?

“We’re constantly seeking the right purchase,” Dan verified. “We’ve already passed up two stores in the last month.”

“And, eventually, we’ll build our own building,” Krista added.

With two laundries and growing, do Dan and Krista have a lucky number of stores they’d like to acquire?

“Ten,” they both agreed.

It being Sin City, we guessed that number might have been seven… or 11… or 21...