Having a Laundry Service vs. DIY Laundry – DSP 69

Laundry is a fundamental necessity for float centers, the significance of which you can easily overlook. Some centers do laundry on-site, while others hire out a laundry service. On-site is almost definitely cheaper, but is it worth it? How much does it factor in to your bottom line to hire a laundry service, and what about the drawbacks of doing it on site? Not every float center can afford an industrial washer and dryer, can residential units handle a float center’s salt encrusted towels?

Graham and Ashkahn hit all these points and more while talking about their own personal experience doing both on-site laundry and hiring out a service and which one they definitively think is better and why/

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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Graham: Today’s question for you is “should I do laundry in house or should I outsource to a laundry service?”

Ashkahn: Oh. Boom. This is, you should do it in house.

Graham: If you can fit a washer and dryer into your space without disrupting-

Ashkahn: Which you can, no. You should just definitely do it in house. There’s so few spaces … our space is so tiny.

Graham: With double studded walls right next to the tanks.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: With vibration isolation pads put under everything.

Ashkahn: It’s very-

Graham: And you can still hear the washer and dryer in room six.

Ashkahn: Just barely. Only if it’s like something’s going wrong with it.

Graham: Sorry, this is one of those marital dispute episodes, where you just get to hear me and Ashkahn bicker about things.

Ashkahn: Here’s what I’m saying. Here’s what I’m saying. There’s very few scenarios where a laundry service is going to win, I think, in my opinion.

Graham: Uh-huh.

Ashkahn: Very few. We’re one of the worst case scenarios, we’re a worst case scenario and we still do laundry in house.

Graham: We’re not the worst case scenario.

Ashkahn: Here’s the problem. Here’s the problem with a laundry service. Let me tell you. I have years of anger about laundry services that I need to get out right now. There’s, first of all, they all suck.

Graham: Yeah, they definitely suck.

Ashkahn: Every laundry service is awful.

Graham: I’ll grant you that.

Ashkahn: Every time I’ve talked to anybody, I’ve never heard the phrase, “I love my laundry service.” No one has ever said those words to me.

Graham: Part of it is we’re in this weird in between zone where we have more laundry than is really easy to necessarily do completely in house for a lot of people, and we also have not enough laundry where any laundry service wants to pay attention to us.

Ashkahn: Right.

Graham: They’re used to doing hotels that just thousands of towels.

Ashkahn: Or a coffee shop where they just need to drop off a bag of rags and some doormats once a week or something.

Graham: Yup, and so we’re in this weird, uncomfortable middle ground where it’s very important that we always have towels for our customers, but the amount of towels we need total is not so small. So, it means small deviations in what they’re trying to do just really mess us up.

Ashkahn: So, when we first went to find a laundry service, we only found one company in Portland that was even willing to deliver to us three times a week, and we had to talk them into it. They normally only do two deliveries a week max, and we convinced them to do a third one for us because the amount of storage you’d need to have enough towels to have less frequent deliveries is huge. You’d just have to have so many towels on hand.

Graham: You actually need less towels on hand when you’re doing your own laundry.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: Than when you have a laundry service, which is kind of interesting.

Ashkahn: So, that’s, and then yeah. You’re cutting the numbers tight. It’s this weird balance where when they screw up, and they always screw up, all the time-

Graham: We had a spreadsheet that was just the laundry screw up tracker, basically-

Ashkahn: Yeah, we were just having to watch them. It was seriously like if they mess something up, we still had to do laundry. We still had to do, we had to take our laundry to a laundromat. We had to take their laundry, their towel service laundries, to a laundromat and wash them sometimes because they came up short and we weren’t gonna make it til Monday when they were coming with their next delivery.

Graham: Or they only gave us towels that were half the size of what normal towels should be. Tiny towel problem.

Ashkahn: So, I don’t know. It’s very frustrating, and the second part is that it’s super expensive.

Graham: Way more expensive than you might think-

Ashkahn: Way more.

Graham: Especially if you’re doing robes, as well.

Ashkahn: The robes are super expensive. Here’s what we calculated. We took the price we were paying our laundry service and we tried to figure out how much we’d save by bringing our laundry in house. I included in that price when we figured this out was not only the cost of buying towels and robes to replace them, because that’s something you gotta think about. Your towels rip and they get stained from people’s hair dye or whatever, and you just need to get rid of them, and so this includes the cost of replenishing towels, replenishing robes. It includes the cost of the extra water you’re gonna use and the extra electricity you’re gonna use to run a washer and dryer. With all of those things, everything we could try to consider, considered, we were still gonna save $14,400 a year by doing laundry in house. Which is crazy! That’s a significant amount of money. We could literally buy a washer and dryer and just throw it out at the end of the year and buy a new one, and we would still be saving money in that scenario.

Graham: Don’t get the full depreciation value at that point.

Ashkahn: That’s the, it’s really hard to argue against that. That and the fact that all the laundry services suck, means that you have to be in a pretty particular situation in my opinion to want to have a laundry service.

Graham: So, it’s over a dollar per customer is what you’re spending in laundry usage, so maybe around a dollar-

Ashkahn: On average.

Graham: On average. If you’re doing the outsourced service, so. In a month where you ran, let’s say, just make it a really easy number like 1,000 floats or something, that would then be $1200, $1300 you’re paying in laundry. Or what you’d expect to pay. And that’s about the rates we were getting towards the end of our service as well, so that goes down to maybe more in the 30 cents, 40 cents per person when you’re doing it in house, by our best calculations. That’s even including the replenishment and everything like that, so it actually works out that there is no better way to reduce your variable cost per float – the amount it actually costs you to run a float – than to switch over to doing your laundry in house.

Ashkahn: No salt. You just not put salt in the tanks, you know.

Graham: I think shut down, sure. You can, variable costs drops to zero.

Ashkahn: I don’t even think not putting salt in the tanks would save you as much money.

Graham: No.

Ashkahn: It wouldn’t. You could literally ditch salt and you wouldn’t’ save as much money as changing your laundry service.

Graham: So, the flip side is you need to make sure that you’re investing in a quiet washer dryer.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: You need to make sure that you’re getting a washer dryer than can actually hold up to your salty towels and that your staff is trained in treating the machines carefully. If towels are really salty, pre-rinsing them before you throw them in the washer so that it doesn’t get this huge salt cake dusted on them.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: There’s a lot more attention to this-

Ashkahn: That stuff’s no joke, too. It’s not even just the salt. It’s just literally washing that many towels and robes, and they’re heavy and they absorb a lot of water, and you’re doing as many loads of laundry in a day as you would do at home in a month or a few months or something.

Graham: Like a year, yeah. How often do you wash your clothes again? Once every couple months, or?

Ashkahn: We do, we do probably eight loads a day or something at our center.

Graham: Mm-hmm.

Ashkahn: Something like that. Maybe more. So, this is huge. You’re hitting these machines way harder than you would in a residential setting, and it seems hard for residential units to even quite keep up. I see them in a lot of float centers, and people seem to be okay with them, but we bought some pretty high end ones and they lasted maybe two years. Something like that?

Graham: Yup. So, at the rate of throwing out a washer dryer per year, that’s-

Ashkahn: Yeah, we’re doing great.

Graham: Twice as long.

Ashkahn: So, it’s, your within the range of maybe wanting to consider low end commercial units, but you do have to really try to find ones that are good with noise when you get into that. Or, you just need to have enough distance. If you have enough space to put your washer and dryer far enough away from the float rooms, the whole noise stuff becomes a lot easier to deal with.

Graham: Yeah, and that really is the ideal situation, is your washers and dryers are as far removed from your float tanks, like one quarter of the building, or one corner, and then your float rooms are in the other corner.

Ashkahn: Right.

Graham: And it doesn’t even matter. At that point, you can get noisier commercial machines that are gonna hold up better, and there’s a lot more options that you have at your disposal, and you don’t have to worry. Ours are literally two to three feet away from where someone’s head is in the float tank, for a washer dryer.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: We have some really intense soundproofing around those float tanks, which is kind of what I was saying earlier. But some kind of care needs to be taken there. Because you’re doing laundry during, you can’t do laundry not during people’s floats at that point. You need to be running-

Ashkahn: Oh yeah.

Graham: So, they’re running constantly throughout the day, so if the laundry machines are interfering with your floats, that’s a lot of not great floats and potentially returned revenue and just lack of reputation, so if you control for it – I think I’m on the same page as you now, Ashkahn – It is the single best money saver that you can do for your entire center. But you do have to take care setting it up.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: Anymore venting, or do you want to get anything else off your chest?

Ashkahn: I could, man. That laundry service, they’re really terrible.

Graham: Do you remember when they lost our robe tie? This is a funny … we were trying to get a robe tie back from the laundry service-

Ashkahn: Because they were our robes, I think.

Graham: Yeah, initially. Initially we were having them wash our robes, and they lost a robe tie, and we were complaining to them. They’re like, “Oh, yeah. We’ll look for it.” At some point we drove by their facility, and it’s just bags and bags of tens of thousands of towels-

Ashkahn: It’s huge.

Graham: And just 50 delivery trucks all sitting out front. We’re like, “oh, yeah. I bet they really looked for our robe tie.”

Yup. Okay. That’s all I got.

Ashkahn: All right. Good. Yeah. If you’re on a laundry service now, you quit. You fire them and you tell them I said so.

Graham: Tell them that I was a little more on the compromising side, but that I also agree.

Ashkahn: Okay. Well, that’s it. That’s it. You guys have other questions you want to ask us, you can go to floattanksolutions.com/podcast.

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