Building a Winner

By Bob Nieman | Feb 08, 2010

When Bob Mangum was still working in the corporate world, his office was located in Mauldin, S.C. As a result, he would pass the Mauldin Coin Laundry two or three times a day.

Little did he know that years later he would own that very laundromat.

“I watched it go from an outstanding location with a parking lot full of people down to nothing over a period of years,” said Mangum, who was a broker in the wholesale grocery business. “However, I knew the potential of that store. I knew what it had been previously, and I felt very confident that I could turn it around.”

Mangum had good reason to be confident. After all, in addition to his “day job,” he has been a successful coin laundry operator for more than 30 years, first getting his feet wet in the business in 1979.

“I got started in this industry was when my first born arrived,” Mangum explained. “I knew I had to find a way to send that child to school. I had an excellent job with an excellent income, but I also knew what college was going to cost.”

To pad the college fund, Mangum invested in his first coin laundry – renting the building and eventually buying the store outright, then purchasing a second coin laundry.

“I never really considered myself to be a coin laundry owner,” he said. “I was in the real estate business. A coin laundry is the perfect way to build a little strip center, with the laundry sitting there to pay for it, and your rental income is free.”

As Mangum got deeper and deeper into the laundry business, it actually forced his retirement from the food industry.

“The last year I worked, I was in the hospital a couple of times from exhaustion,” Mangum explained. “The doctor told me something had to go. I was putting in 60 hours a week on my job and at least 40 hours a week on the coin laundry side of it.”

So, in 1987, Bob Mangum became a full-time laundry owner, with four stores to his name.

Today, he operates five laundries in towns and suburbs around Greenville, S.C. “I think five is enough for any one person,” he said. “I’m a one-horse show. I’ve had as many as eight, but I couldn’t pay attention to them the way I want to. So, I got rid of three of them and retired a lot of debt.”

Of course, one of the stores he hung onto was his most recently purchased store – the 2,200-square-foot Mauldin location, which he bought in 2005 and had seen go from riches to rags to bankruptcy over several years.

“As a matter of fact, my distributor bought this building from bankruptcy,” he noted. “I didn’t know it had gone up for auction. But I immediately called my distributor, and they re-sold it to me. It was a location I felt I could do something with.”

It took Mangum nine months before he could do anything with his new store because that’s how long the renovation took. Seeing as the laundry had been closed down for two years, a nine-month remodel was actually rather quick.

“The only things I could use in the building were the four walls and the floor, even the roof had to be replaced,” he said.

As for the old equipment, Mangum held an auction to get rid of it and make way for the new washers and dryers he would be installing.

There was only one problem – nobody showed up for the auction.

“I ended up giving all of the equipment away to some scrap metal people,” he laughed. “I just wanted the building empty.”

Unfortunately, the arrival of the new laundry equipment brought another issue for Mangum.

“I was probably 60 days away from opening the store,” he recalled. “My equipment was in place before I discovered that I had three-phase equipment in a single-phase building. I couldn’t plug it in. We had to rip out all of the electrical, which probably cost me an additional $15,000 to $20,000 that I was not planning on spending.

“I spent more than $300,000 on the building and $300,000 on the equipment,” he added. “In all, I ended up spending more than $700,000 on this location.”

However, he also ended up with a freestanding self-service laundry that he considers virtually “bulletproof.”

“I do things one time. I don’t patch anything,” he said. “For instance, with the roof, I could have installed a steel or asbestos roof, but I put on a rubber roof; it’s basically bulletproof. That roof will outlive me.”

Mangum also went to great lengths to secure his bill changer, actually building a steel cage around the unit.

“It might look like a jail, but we made it attractive by powder-coating it before installation,” he said. “We sunk it in concrete and filled the base up with concrete. You can’t even cut it down with a torch because when a torch cuts through the steel, the concrete will put the torch out.”

Using some of the steel fabricating skills he developed during years of racing cars as a hobby (“That’s a big problem a lot of us Southern boys have.”), Mangum constructed all of the bases in the store and incorporated chrome check plate.

“For the islands between the dryers and around the bottoms of the base plates, we added chrome check plate,” he said. “It looks industrial – shiny and pretty. About twice a year, we’ll put a little polish on them and shine it up. Everything in this store is stainless. I love stainless.”

The only thing Mangum regrets about his Mauldin store is not adding a couple of hundred feet to it.

“I didn’t make it big enough,” he said. “In fact, I have enough room on this property to go to the back of it and build a new building, and I still want to do it. The current laundry is up near the road. I can build a new building in back and move everything in there, plus add some equipment. I have plenty of parking. Then, I could lease the building that’s there now and service the community better.”

The community Mauldin Coin Laundry services is a working-class suburb of Greenville with a population of approximately 20,000.

“It’s not a large Hispanic community,” Mangum explained. “The average income is $25,000 and up. It’s middle class with working families, and it’s about 50/50 as far as homeowners versus apartment dwellers. Also, I probably wash more comforters in that store than any five stores put together.”

The Mauldin laundry is surrounded by a self-service car wash, a preschool, a real estate office, a strip center and a number of fast-food restaurants. However, there also are several apartment complexes nearby.

“There’s one other store in this town, and I knew it needed two stores,” Mangum said. “I don’t open stores on top of people – never have, never will. This one was far enough away to where it wouldn’t affect the other owner.”

Mauldin Coin Laundry distinguishes itself from the competition by being open around the clock. “All of my stores are open 24/7, and they’re unattended,” Mangum said. “They’re also lit so well that you’ll think it’s daylight around them at night. They all have good security systems. And that’s just the way I look at this business.”

Each of Mangum’s locations also has a soda vending machine. “I own them and I buy pop by the hundreds of cases,” he said. “We service the machines ourselves. It’s the only vending I have in my stores.”

And the veteran laundry owner has found that extra revenue to come in very handy come tax time.

“That’s the way I pay my property taxes,” he divulged. “I take the quarters, dimes and nickels out of all of my soda machines once a week. Then, once a year, I will roll it up, put it in bags and carry it to the bank – and that pays my property taxes. Just five pop machines for 12 months.”

Mangum is clearly not a fan of the trend toward mega-laundries.

“The largest store I have is 2,400,” he stated. “I’m not a big advocate of opening these 5,000- and 10,000-square-foot stores. There is just no way someone can take care of something like that without three or four full-time employees.”

Although Mangum’s stores are unattended, he has five cleaning people on the payroll who visit all five of his stores two or three times per day.

“My philosophy on that the stores have got to be spic and span before 8 a.m.,” he said. “I get compliments weekly on the cleanliness of our stores. That’s a real source of pride for me.”

For the last five years, Mangum also has employed a full-time maintenance man to keep his stores fully functional.

“That’s the best move I ever made,” he said. “Out of five stores, we may have two machines down at a time. And there are weeks when we go without any machines being down.

“We do a lot of preventive maintenance, such as taking off the front of the dryers and cleaning out the lint around the tub. That’s probably something not many owners have ever done.

“I drive a big circle around Greenville every morning, visiting all of the stores; it’s probably about 40 miles. I make the rounds every day. My cleaning people make the rounds every day. And my maintenance man makes it every day.”

In addition to cleanliness, Mangum is a stickler about his vend pricing.

“I’m the highest priced in town, especially in the Mauldin store,” he said. “If somebody comes in and says, ‘You’re the same price as another laundry.’ I’ll raise my price. I know I’ve got the best store with the best equipment, and it’s run the best. It’s like the difference between a Cadillac and a Chevrolet. I run the Cadillac of stores, and I’m going to get paid for it; if not, I’ll put the customer’s clothes in the car and help them find another location.

“Anybody who discounts their store just because of a competitor down the street is going about it the wrong way. And they won’t last.”

If anyone can speak to longevity in the coin laundry business, it’s Bob Mangum. And he’s not slowing down yet.

“When I opened my first store, I did it on a credit card, a second mortgage on my house and with couple of partners,” he explained. “If I open something now, it’s going to be pretty much paid for when I open it. I can’t see myself going $1 million in debt.

“I’ve got property to build five more locations right now,” he continued. “And I’m going to build a couple more before I’m done.”