AI in Your Laundromat: Practical Applications Beyond the Hype

Alex (00:19): All right, well, thank you everybody for being here on the third full day of Clean. You've made it!

I think what we're excited about is using some of this content for people who aren't here and haven't been able to make it, or who left today, to talk about something we haven't really discussed at this trade show yet—at least that I haven't heard in any speaking session—which is specifically about AI and the utilization of AI within stores and how it can be leveraged in your business.

I'm really excited to be talking with Jordan Berry from Laundromat Resource, who by definition provides resources for laundromat owners in particular. And again, this session—as all of our sessions are—is not about Cents. You don't have to be a Cents customer. You don't have to use any of our products, because this is ideally about how you can leverage tools that are available, both made for laundromat owners as well as tools not specifically for laundromat owners but that can be really useful in your business.

Jordan, you've touched on this world of AI in some of the podcasts you've done with folks, and I know you yourself use it in your business. Before we dive more into the laundromat business, what's your perspective on how you, as a growing business owner and in the content work you're doing, are leveraging it today in your business?

Jordan (01:43): Yeah, I'll give you two sentences on that, but I bet you guys mostly care about how you can use it to make some money. My goal for this session is sharing some quick, easy wins so that you can make some money with AI—like today. That's my goal.

But the way I use it a lot in content—what it allows me to do is do more of what I already do, but faster. I'm not utilizing AI necessarily to replace an editor or a social media person or any of that stuff. I'm using AI so that we can do more of what we're already doing faster. That's mostly what I'm doing.

I know there's a lot of fear, and there are going to be a lot of people who are impacted by AI with their jobs and stuff. However, I think that AI—what it's going to do for us business owners—is allow us to do more of what we're already doing faster and better going forward from here.

Alex (02:43): I love it. I think to set some stage—we hear the term AI all the time with OpenAI and ChatGPT, and a lot of people think of AI as a little text box where you write a question and it just relays information to you a little bit better than Google. But AI is a much broader concept, and I think in the spirit of trying to get down to actually how this can make you money and how you can actually leave here by doing something, part of the problem is we don't really know what it is or at least how it can actually impact your business.

The way that we, at least at Cents, view building AI tools is both to help you visualize and understand what's going on. I'd say there are maybe three levels of it:

1. The visualization layer
2. The example that we launched with Cents Assist—which is to be able to help you do more and be less reliant on labor when it comes to actually picking up the phone, answering calls, things like that
3. Actually doing work for you—you may have heard of terms called "agentic AI." Think of an AI agent as just performing a task and filling out a form, if you will. They're doing something in a way in which you don't have to.

There is a notion that AI means there's no human or that a human doesn't need to do the work. In reality, it just makes you do more—it enables you to do more than you were doing before. It's an output multiplier. Every time there's been some sort of revolution when it comes to technology, there's always been concern: "Oh, the printing press! Oh, the industrial age! Oh, it's going to replace us! Our world is going to be different!" And while that's true, it's increased output and enabled people to do more and, in many cases, make more money.

Jordan, in your work and experience working with operators and talking to so many laundromat owners, what are ways that you think can generate more money—whether it's in the work with commercial customers, whether it's marketing copy for social ads, whatever it might be? What are things that you've started to see operators do that can actually contribute to the bottom line?

Jordan (04:54): Let me give you something very practical and tangible. If you've not done this—this is staying on that level one base level where it's not doing anything for you, but being a thought partner with you.

Something you can do right now today: Go to ChatGPT. If you've not done this before, say, "Here's what my business looks like. I have a laundromat. We are self-serve only, unattended, open these hours. Here's what machines I have. Here's the pricing." Tell ChatGPT all that stuff—whatever your business looks like. And say, "If I wanted to make $10,000 more a month, outline for me..."

I see someone laughing, but I'm dead serious. I did this with Laundromat Resource. Laundromat Resource is fine, but somebody challenged me to do a prompt and say, "See if there's a way that Laundromat Resource could do $100 million of revenue." For me, that sounds ridiculous. I did it. ChatGPT outlined a path to that that's actually very believable and reasonable. Now, will I do it? I don't know. But if you do this for your business, I guarantee you it's going to give you some strategies that you can utilize in your business right now today that will get you more money in your pocket.

That's base level, very basic: "Here's my business. If I wanted to make $10,000 more a month in my simple little laundromat or my portfolio..." You can fill in whatever number you want in that blank, but I would challenge you: Pick a number that seems ridiculous, that makes you chuckle. Pick a number that makes you think, "I don't know if that's possible," and see what ChatGPT comes with. That will put more money in your pocket now. That's very base level, but that's something you can do today.

Alex (06:45): With all the operators that you speak with and connect with, and AI is an example of this, but whether it's data or AI or just a lot of the new trends in general coming into the laundromat industry—what are the things that you recommend for people to actually start going? We're all talking about the baseline. Start with something—it's one prompt. Just type in chat.openai.com. But what's your advice to an operator who wants to start taking advantage of a tool? Maybe they have the technology, they've started engaging in technology, but they might leave the show saying, "I barely know how to work my iPhone. I don't really care." What is your advice to help somebody get going and start becoming more familiar with these tools?

Jordan (07:26): Yeah, the easiest way to get started with AI is to use one that's already created for you, specifically for our industry. Like Alex mentioned, Cents Assist. You don't really have to do a whole lot to utilize Cents Assist in your business. It's already set up. The hard work's already done. He didn't do any of it—some of these people did it. He doesn't really do anything, if I'm honest with you. But it's already set up for you, and you can go right over here, wherever, find one of the people in the blue shirts, and they'll tell you exactly how to utilize it. That's it.

That's the easiest way to start learning: Get something that's already built for your business and start utilizing it. And then obviously, there's YouTube University. There are lots of ways to learn, and it can feel super overwhelming, which is why it's kind of surprising nobody else I have seen, at least at the trade show, has been talking about AI, because it can revolutionize your business.

Alex (08:22): I'll say this—and maybe it's an unpopular opinion to share—but the reality of AI from a vendor perspective is it can be quite high margin to offer AI products, and there is a seemingly wide moat for an everyday person to build their own AI tool. It seems very, very complex. So an industry-based company can say, "Oh, we're AI for car washes" or "AI for laundromats" or "AI for this." They can charge a lot of money, and they can offer a product that seems so crazy and so unique that we've never seen before. But in reality, it's not very complex. It's actually quite easy to build, and the margins as a vendor on providing those solutions are actually quite high.

I always try to remind small business owners that the value of what they should be looking for in AI is: If you're going to go with somebody that's doing something industry-specific, have a reason beyond the fact that it's for your industry. Because I could almost guarantee that whether you use Cents Assist or you want to find an AI Google "AI call center" and train it yourself to answer the phone, you can probably save 70% compared to what you get from some industry vendor here.

The value of AI when it comes to being industry-based is: What does it know and integrate about your business, not about your industry? You should not buy Cents Assist if you're simply wanting AI to answer your phone. I will personally find you a cheaper product that will just help you do the baseline.

The value of a product like ours, and I think in general of how we think about the world of technologies, is it should be integrated together. It should have context. Contextualized AI is very, very valuable.

When somebody gets a loyalty card from the LaundroWorks product and they've used it on a machine, the AI would know—because it's integrated in the data—what is the last machine they used in case they left a pair of jeans in there. (We all know jeans left in a laundromat start as Gap and get lost as Versace—that's just generally how it goes.)

You want to know: Which machine were my clothes in? What is the balance on my laundry card? Where is a driver? I don't know how to place an online order. I barely know how to use my phone—can you walk me through it? I'd like to speak to [someone]. I'm speaking in a different language. The context of your business is where industry-specific AIs can be valuable.

It sounds negative when I say "snake oil salesmen," but there are a lot of folks who, when there's a technological revolution that the average person finds complicated or scary to try to understand themselves, people will say, "Oh, I've done this all for you. It's industry-specific. Pay me $200 a month." I will tell you, we'll never do something like that because we want you to be buying the products that are going to make sense for you and your business.

Alex (11:24): I would say if you're not a Cents customer or if you don't need the integrated system, get familiar with it by looking also at generic tools. Part of what I think—and I want to get Jordan's take on this—about the world of everything being so industry-based: I think part of the problem in the laundromat business is we think that the laundromat business is unlike any other business on the planet.

Your customers also frequent other retail businesses. They eat food, they sometimes drink coffee, they take their car for car washes, they get haircuts, and they do other things. Those businesses have a lot of similarities. We can learn from a lot of those businesses. When a laundromat AI—yeah, there are definitely some laundromat-oriented things that it's helpful for the AI to know—but if you typed in all the information to a prompt, congratulations, you just created a laundromat AI system. It's not a very complex thing to do, and it's only getting easier. A month from now, it's easier for you guys to build your own AI tools than it's ever been.

The data contextualization—that's where it becomes really interesting, and that's where you can actually save time and have things be done for you when it's integrated in your entire system.

Jordan, a question I have for you is just in the world of everything being industry-specific: From the resource perspective, there isn't enough resources about laundromat information and how to build, so Laundromat Resource plays such a crucial role. But as you come to a show like this and you see so much technology, how do you feel about the world of things that are...does everything have to be so unbelievably just made for laundromats? Outside of, of course, payment systems and all this stuff that we do here, but how do you think about that from a vendor perspective?

Jordan (13:13): Yeah, I mean, listen, we want to use the tools that are going to help us build the best businesses. There are obviously some tools that we need that are specialized for our industries. You mentioned a couple of them—payment systems. Obviously, our machines need to be for our industry. But there's a lot...

I love what you're saying. We've talked about this before on the podcast and stuff like that. We have a lot to learn as an industry. We're learning faster than I think we've ever learned as an industry from other industries. But in a sense, I might almost disagree with you a little bit in that our industry is a little bit different than a lot of industries, but only because we're so far behind a lot of industries in a lot of different areas.

Thanks to you guys, we're catching up and actually getting current, so I appreciate that. But I don't think you need industry-specific stuff for a lot of stuff. Like I said in that first ChatGPT prompt—"Tell me how you can grow my business right now"—you don't need an industry-specific tool to do something like that. There's a lot that you can utilize that's not industry-specific that we should be looking to other industries and saying, "Hey, what makes people keep coming back to Starbucks?"

It's not necessarily the best coffee. You're going to have to wait in line. It's expensive. (Well, maybe it is the best coffee—I don't know. I don't want to start a fight here, so you guys debate amongst yourselves.) But there are a lot of reasons not to go to Starbucks, so why do people go to Starbucks? There are a lot of reasons not to go to McDonald's, but why do people go to McDonald's? There's a lot we can learn from that that is not about our industry but that applies across many industries.

Alex (14:59): I mean, a laundromat insurance business, right? We have one here at Cents. Why is that valuable? Because we just try to educate insurance companies on how to know your customer for a laundromat because it's maybe not as high risk as they might think. But other than that, there is no such thing as a "laundromat insurance company." They're just trying to educate.

Lending is the same. Specialty lenders get more familiar with the business so they can underwrite and evaluate risk better. That's the unique thing. Otherwise, Eastern Funding is owned by a bank that isn't a laundromat bank. You probably use banks that have checking accounts that aren't laundromat checking accounts.

It might seem strange because you're currently sitting at an all-in-one laundry management system, and we pride ourselves on being a very vertically integrated system. It's why one of our customer success managers, Brian Hartstock, sat up here to say, "Here are all the ways that you can use Google"—a generic search optimization tool—"to grow your digital presence." A laundromat-oriented marketing agency can tell you that. Any marketing agency on the planet that has ever worked with a small business owner can tell you that.

I think it's important to see the forest through the trees a little bit. Our goal at Cents is to give the infrastructure of the things that need to be industry-specific. When I first got in the industry, I was wondering, "Why can't I put a Square reader on my laundry equipment?" Then you start to take apart a laundry machine and you realize why. You realize, "Well, why doesn't a restaurant POS just work for me?"

The relationship I have when I go to Starbucks or any other coffee shop and they pour a cup of coffee—the relationship with that order is 30 seconds. Versus wash and fold can go across multiple machines over 24 to 48 hours by different employees and have different preferences, and some are per pound and some are fixed price, and pickup and delivery is a pickup from a customer and return delivery—two-way logistics, pretty unique and rare in terms of retail.

There are a lot of industry-based tools, but I think that as new technology comes, particularly in digital tools like AI, it can feel very gatekeeping to say it has to be industry-specific. A similar analogy I'd make is, well, the laundry industry—everybody loves coins. We know we like cash, but everybody loves coins because that is something unique in a laundromat business. When they visit a laundromat, they bring in cash to then get coins from a bill changer, and then they leave and they save those coins for the next laundromat visit because they don't use them anywhere else.

There are, again, things that need to be laundromat-specific, but when it comes to AI, spend time to actually learn about the generic tools that you can implement today. You can go on ChatGPT and say, "How can I grow my business?"

Alex (17:42): Hopefully, ChatGPT is smart enough to say we should have Cents and have all those products. That's step one. But beyond that, there are things that you guys can do that are independent of any vendor here that are going to help grow your business.

I think that is such a core thing of new technology in general, and it is not just relating to a call center or a phone system or a marketing tool or anything in between.

Jordan (18:06): Yeah, well, one thing I like about this point that we're going through—here's something that I think is super valuable too.

I harp a lot about data. We need to be collecting better data and we need to be analyzing that data better to make better business decisions. And again, I think that's where AI can come into play and help us figure out what to do with that data, because it can be really difficult. Many of us don't have MBAs. We're not necessarily the savviest business people ever. But we can take that data and utilize AI to help us analyze that data and say, "Hey, what conclusions can we draw based on this pickup and delivery data that I have from Cents?" or whoever. Are you guys selling shoes, by the way?

We can utilize AI in those ways, but I'm curious for you. I know we have Cents Assist, which is customer service based—just in case anyone's living under a rock, it's customer service based phone answering, which is incredible. If you ever tried it out, make sure you try it out. So we have that. How else are you guys—do you have, or are you planning to have, AI integrated into your whole all-in-one business?

Alex (19:28): Well, when we launched Cents Assist, which is, as Jordan said, the call center contact center—we actually have a whole microphone and headphones and phones that you can test out fully integrated with everything—we actually, when we launched Cents Assist, were so worried that people were going to think that AI is coming for the laundromat space and we're not so familiar with it. So we actually also spun up a call center with human beings that's very similar to a Reception HQ product. So if you don't want the AI to answer, if you want the AI to then pass it to a call center, all of that is built in as part of that product.

But we felt like that's the healthiest starting point. As you know, we did our launch of "Into the Fold," which is an industry-based report, anonymized for customers of ours who have opted in to share their information. And "share their information" is on a state level, very macro. There's none of the tinfoil hat concerns about data.

But we started to kind of share, "Here are the trends that are happening in the industry." And a lot of what you'll start to see in the future when it comes to AI is benchmarking tools and AI kind of co-pilot, if you will, to help you understand how well you're doing in your area based on the performance of stores around you.

The funny thing is, people say, "Oh, well, how are you getting that data?" If you go on ChatGPT and say, "Here's my revenue, I'm based in this location, how well do you think I'm doing?" it can actually give you a lot of reasonable information. If you want to know what is the price per pound, you don't need to be an expert in data to type into ChatGPT to pull all the price per pound reviews from Yelp, from Google, from all that. And it can tell you what is the average price per pound in Orlando at laundromats. This is not terribly difficult information.

I had customers say, "I'm worried that you have your price on some of the receipts and the weight of the order on the receipts, because one of my competitors could walk into my laundromat, take a picture of the bags that are on my rack, and then back into what my price per pound is based on the sale price." I'm like, "Boy, hats off to that competitor. Anybody who wants to do that, they deserve to win, I guess, if that's the mentality."

So I think from an industry benchmarking side, that's where AI can be really powerful. But look, the real scary thing of AI, and I think also the exciting part, is this term of "agentic AI," as I mentioned earlier, where things are actually happening and being done for you as if it's an actual person.

Alex (22:18): So we've made huge investments in agentic AI—not there yet to be able to show it at the show—but I'll give you an example of one of the agents that you'll have through Cents. If you do commercial laundry, you may have a problem with accounts receivable. You've done the laundry, you've sent the bill, it's a net 30, and you haven't gotten paid. Unless you have an AR team or you are on top of it, that bill might not be sent to you, your commercial customer might have forgotten that they didn't send it, or anything like that.

An agent who has contextualized data based on what's happening in your store actually can become your AR specialist, where they can make phone calls, they can send text messages, they can have two-way conversations in email, SMS, and again, on the phone when somebody hasn't paid their bill. And that's kind of that idea where you didn't even have a person to do that to begin with. It's not taking anybody's job. It's doing something that you would have to do, but it's now doing it on your behalf.

Think of it as an attendant agent where somebody brings in a bag of laundry, they say it's just wash and fold, and an attendant discovers there's actually a comforter in there. What happens? An attendant would need to make the phone call or send a text message. They have to wait for the customer to respond to know if they should add it to the order or not, or if there's a stain or if they're saying, "Would you like us to treat it?" Those are the things that require human interaction to connect with another human to get an answer. An agentic AI can actually take care of that for you.

Is that replacing the attendant in your store? No, it's getting them to actually fold more pounds per hour and actually have less decision making and just follow process. Those are some of the examples of what agentic AI can start to do on your behalf. Again, that's something that's powerful to have in an industry-based solution. Why? Because it's contextualized into the data. It knows the price. It can actually build an order on the point of sale. It knows when a bill was sent out for a commercial order. It knows who the commercial customer is. It has the context of previous conversations. It starts to learn, "Hey, this customer actually has a history of not paying their bills on time, so actually, before the bill is due, they're going to send a message to them ahead of time to make sure that they've been notified."

These are the things that you actually shouldn't have to be good at. You should be spending time working on your business, not in your business, and that's when these tools can become pretty valuable.

Jordan (24:14): That's awesome. Let me just say, one of the things I'm most excited about about this show in particular is that we're seeing this move, this shift from very broad, general information, metrics, KPIs, all that stuff, and we're getting more specific about your business, your customers. And I think that's one thing that AI can really help us do is get more specific about what we're doing.

That KPI of turns per day—I harp on it all the time. It's been a fine KPI for us, something to keep track of. It's been great, but it's very crude, it's very broad. It doesn't really tell us all that much about the behavior of our customers, about the performance of our stores. So as we're getting more of this data and we're saying, "Hey, this commercial client has a history of not paying, or paying later, or whatever, let's make that call," or when we start to get that more specific information about our businesses, about the behaviors of our customers, now our businesses become so much more powerful because we can meet people's needs where they're at.

A lot of times, let's give them the benefit of the doubt—those other business owners, they're just busy. They've got a lot on their plate. They're not very administrative, and they just forget to pay. Well, guess what? That AI is not going to let them forget because it knows that customer now has been trained on that.

So I love that. And I think as you're browsing around here, be looking for that, because the people who are really trying to help you learn your store better and more personally—those are, going back to the industry-specific tools, the industry-specific things that we need. That's what we should be paying attention to. The rest of the stuff, like Alex was saying, we can use generalized tools because there's a ton of them out there right now for us to play around with.

Alex (25:59): And the reason I harp on the importance of being aware of the generic tools is those are the things that you should be holding as the benchmark. So if you don't use Cents, you don't use LaundroWorks, you don't use anything, go to whoever you work with, whoever your vendor is, and ask, "What are you doing to help me like this?" Challenge them to make them better.

We launch products like this. When we launch Cents Assist, guess what? There's going to be some "AI for laundry" company or somebody launching a phone call center or anything like that because the tools are available. And so we're happy to do the things that eventually somebody else is going to do and compete with us on because that's what is important. When you offer wash and fold, if you're the only store in town, guess what? Another store nearby might start offering wash and fold because you did something that's a good idea and they want to compete with you on it. And so it's up to the customers, it's up to you guys to actually push your vendors to be more aggressive in actually building some of these tools.

That's why we build customer success. It's why we have make huge investments at this show. It's not to just have a big booth, it's to be able to bring people in to actually have conversations, to help us learn about what are the challenges that you have. We only know to build a call center because we hear enough people that have frustrating conversations on phone calls, that can't pick up the phone for their customers, they can't provide the quality of support for their growing laundromat business at scale.

So we realize that's a pain point we can build for. So I think it's so important for operators to be pushing the manufacturers of equipment, their distributors, their software providers, their payment systems to continue to build. And you have all of the examples in generic tools and in other industries of what the gold standard should be. None of us here are geniuses—there are tons of examples of people doing similar...I mean maybe Jordan's a genius...but there are tons of examples of what we're doing here in other industries. We're learning in the same way. So I just think it's really important for you guys to continue to push the envelope and demand more out of your vendors.

And I say that at the risk of a number of people coming up to me this entire weekend demanding more out of us, which is what makes us better all the time. And hopefully you guys will continue to demand more content out of Jordan and to push these kinds of conversations to happen more, not just with Jordan, but with everybody in the industry, to share more information, to share the wealth of how we can make each other better. Because unless your store is right next to somebody else's, and even then, there's plenty of volume out there, there's plenty of business to win, there's plenty of ways to build something special. And we feel the same way where we invite all of our competition to look at our products.

Alex (28:32): We don't care because more competition means more optionality and more choices and hopefully we push everybody the right way.

Jordan (28:41): Yeah. Well, I'll just say one last thing, just in case you don't know, I don't work for Cents. I'm not affiliated with Cents. I don't even like Alex. And that is true.

But I do think one thing that he said is real and something that I like about what the team is doing here—that integration. This whole all-in-one platform, "business in a box" is how you set it, way back when you first came on the podcast. That concept is huge. It's massive. That's where the industry is going. That's where you guys are taking it honestly. And that's where it needed to go.

Having this stuff integrated, communicating with each other—that's why you guys bought LaundroWorks and are integrating it into your ecosystem here. Because when all that data, all that information, all the systems communicate with each other, it's all in one place. You have access to it. You can grab it for yourself. You can make decisions based off of it when it's all integrated together. And again, the AI is like one piece of it. When that is communicating with everything too, and you have a full understanding of your whole store, that is a powerful thing that we have not had in this industry until like the last year or maybe two.

So this is a very exciting time to be in this industry. I just want to say that—exciting time in general, there's a little bit of scariness happening too. But it's an exciting time, especially in our industry, because a lot of things are happening and changing and moving right now. And you guys are here and you have the benefit of seeing a lot of that stuff. There are folding robots over here that are pretty much awful and really slow at the moment, but they're not going to be for very long. We can just shoot straight, right? That's fine. But they're not going to be for very long. And are they going to end up in a laundromat? I don't know. But the fact that they're doing that is just pushing the boundaries of what's happening here.

Jordan (31:35): So don't be the laundromat owners who sit on your heels, sit on your laurels—I don't know, whatever the expression is. Don't get intimidated by the technology. Don't get intimidated by AI. Don't get intimidated by this stuff and not do anything, because the industry—we don't change. That's been our motto for like three decades, but that's not our motto anymore. Things are changing right now. Business models are changing. Technology is changing. We're changing and we need to be in on that. We need to be a part of that. Don't be afraid of it, or you can be afraid, but just do it anyway. Find some people who can help you. Find some people who are building it for you and use that to powerfully power your business.

It's going to let you serve your customers better. It's going to let your employees—I love the example of, "Oh, there's a comforter in here." The AI agentic agent is going to go out and call and just say, "Hey, you got a comforter. You want us to wash it? Here's what the price is going to be. Or do you want us to set it aside and we'll just give it back to you?" Or whatever the AI agent says.

Because that allows your employee, yes, to fold more pounds per day, but also to spend a little more time with the customers. Also to help somebody carry their laundry out. They're not making a phone call. They're carrying this stuff out. And guess what? That is the stuff—AI technology, all that stuff is great as tools—but the stuff that makes a difference is still the people. We're still a community business. We're still a people business. And what we should be utilizing all these tools for is to help us make those connections, serve our communities better, and to set those values and set that culture so our employees are doing that better as well.

Alex (32:27): As much as I like to piggyback off what Jordan says, I think that was said so remarkably well in every possible way. And I know we're at time now, but I want to, one, thank Jordan for his continuous commitment to independent operators and for always shooting straight, whether it's about manufacturers, software companies, or robotics businesses—of always being honest and direct.

And you should subscribe and do everything with the content that Jordan's doing. He does not have to do it. He lives a fun life in Hawaii, but does it because he cares so much about the industry and about operators. And again, he gives us as much shit as he gives us love because that's the fun part about our friendship and everything that you do for the industry as a whole. So thank you.

And for everybody here, if you want to experience what AI is like—I'm not saying to buy or anything like that—but just see where the state of things are. Check out Cents Assist, talk to the team, see what the experience is and what interconnectivity does. So you can go back to your vendors or just start to think about what's possible going forward. So thank you guys for being here on the third long day of Clean Show and continue to absorb so much information. And Jordan, thanks so much for spending the time with us.

Jordan (33:38): Thanks for having me, man. Appreciate it. Appreciate you, Kyle... sometimes.