Carmen Cardiel helps run 55+ laundromat locations across Arizona and Southern California. She joins Ian Gollahon to break down the systems that hold up at that scale, and the ones that quietly fall apart.

Carmen has been with Coinless Laundry for 12 years. She runs operations from the Arizona corporate office, which manages 33 stores, with a satellite office in Santa Ana covering Southern California. Fourteen stores offer wash and fold, three processing plants handle the commercial and bulk work, and almost 200 employees make it run.

Coinless documents every machine outage twice a day, on the AM and PM shifts, and keeps separate on-call rotations for maintenance and for systems. Carmen's own request for a plain "is this machine operational, yes or no" filter changed how Wash-Dry-Fold POS handles repair tickets, because sorting a squeaky washer from a dead one matters differently at 55 stores than at three.

Carmen also walks through running Cents and Wash-Dry-Fold POS side by side, and why Coinless consolidated onto one system. Her deciding factors were what her staff could learn and use at the counter, plus the long-term math on subscriptions and card processing across every location. Ian explains why processing terms barely register at low volume and turn into one of the largest line items as a chain grows.

Then there is the hardware. Coinless runs true Windows PCs at the counter, not Android tablets, because one commercial customer makes her staff log into an outside portal and upload photos into someone else's database. The POS is the brain of the laundromat, so it has to drive the weight scale and the label printer, and still open a browser.

Topics covered:

• Running 55+ locations across two states from two offices

• Windows POS hardware compared to Android tablet systems

• Why card processing scales into a major cost at multiple locations

• Running Cents and Wash-Dry-Fold POS side by side, and why they consolidated

• What a laundromat processing plant is, and why you cannot start with one

• Training almost 200 employees on the same procedures

• Why Arizona laundromats slow down in summer

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:42 Carmen's background and 55 stores across two states

02:31 Wash and fold locations and three processing plants

03:44 Training almost 200 employees

05:15 The two biggest challenges at any scale

06:01 Maintenance and twice-daily machine reporting

07:45 The repair ticket filter Carmen asked for

09:41 What a laundromat processing plant actually is

11:55 Why you cannot open a processing plant first

14:53 From paper tickets to a POS system

17:32 Running Cents and Wash-Dry-Fold POS side by side

19:38 Subscriptions and card processing at scale

21:03 Features compared to ease of use

26:05 Windows PCs compared to Android tablets

30:33 The craziest thing Carmen has seen, and the FBI

34:17 Closing

Ian Gollahon is co-owner of Liberty Laundry, three laundromats in the Tulsa, Oklahoma area, and co-founder of Wash-Dry-Fold POS, the original point of sale system for laundromats.

https://coinlesslaundry.com

https://www.washdryfoldpos.com

https://www.libertylaundryok.com

https://www.laundromat-ownership.com

Stephen Gramaglia spent 21 years at Eastern Funding watching laundromats succeed and fail before he ever owned one. Then he built CleanFresh Laundromat into four of the largest, cleanest, fully attended stores in the New York City area, and his busiest location now moves thousands of pounds of wash-dry-fold every week.

Stephen opened his first store in May 2020, in the middle of the COVID shutdown, and went against everything the industry was known for: small, dark, and unattended. He built big, spotless, "bougie" laundromats in densely populated Manhattan and Yonkers and ran them as a premium full-service experience. In this conversation he explains what 21 years of financing laundromats taught him about why owners fail, why undercapitalization is the number one killer, and how he runs high-volume wash-dry-fold across multiple locations without living at the store. He and Ian also get into commercial hardware, the dashboard numbers that drive staffing, tracking employee card usage to catch theft, and building a multi-generational family business.

What you'll learn:

• Building large, clean, fully attended laundromats against the industry grain

• 21 years inside Eastern Funding and what really makes laundromat loans go bad

• Why undercapitalization is the number one reason new owners fail

• Running high-volume wash-dry-fold across multiple locations

• Attendant ownership of every order, from sort to wash to dry to fold to bag

• Weighing orders in and out to catch missing items fast

• Why commercial POS hardware beats a cheap laptop at scale

• Employee theft and the machine start ratio that exposes it

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction

01:39 Four large NYC laundromats and the "bougie" positioning

04:27 21 years at Eastern Funding

08:33 Why laundromat loans go bad: undercapitalization

14:02 How much cash you really need to start

14:35 Revenue mix and high-volume wash-dry-fold

18:00 Operating at scale: systems and accountability

22:52 Weighing orders in and out to catch missing items

24:39 Why commercial POS hardware beats a cheap laptop

31:06 Building the dashboard operators actually need

34:06 Laundry cards, WashLynx, and tracking card usage

36:37 Employee theft and the machine start ratio

39:44 Building a multi-generational family business

46:15 The craziest things he's seen in his stores

Ian Gollahon is the co-owner of Liberty Laundry in Tulsa, Oklahoma — three stores, $2.5M in revenue in 2025 — and co-founder of Wash-Dry-Fold POS, the original point of sale system built specifically for laundromats.

washdryfoldpos.com

libertylaundryok.com

laundromat-ownership.com

cleanfreshlaundromat.com

easternfunding.com

Two numbers tell you almost everything about what a laundromat is worth: gross revenue and SDE. Ian Gollahon breaks down both — what they mean, how they connect, and exactly what belongs in seller discretionary earnings and what does not.

This is Part 2 of a 4-part series on laundromat valuation, running alongside Ian's ongoing feature in Full Cycle Magazine from the CLA. Part 1 covered the asset sale and the lease. This episode moves to the earnings side: gross revenue as your quick gut-check, and SDE as the number brokers, the SBA, and most buyers actually price a laundromat on.

You'll learn why laundromats typically sell for one to two times gross revenue, why Eastern Funding often lends on 50 to 70 weeks of revenue, and why you can never make an offer on gross revenue alone. Then Ian walks through SDE line by line — the owner's S-Corp salary add-back, and the difference between the costs you add back and the income you strip out.

What's covered:

• Gross revenue: why 1x to 2x is the typical range, and what it hides

• The Eastern Funding 50 to 70 week rule of thumb

• Why the SBA recommends SDE for businesses under $5 million in revenue

• The S-Corp owner salary add-back — the single biggest SDE adjustment

• What to ADD into SDE: owner salary, unnecessary personal vehicles, trade show and conference travel (Clean Show, Excellence in Laundry), redundant family payroll, lifestyle extras like magazine subscriptions

• What to LEAVE OUT of SDE: non-operating interest income from cash in an investment account, one-time equipment sales, and cash windfalls like COVID-era city or state grants

• Why roughly 3x SDE lands you right back at about 60 weeks of gross revenue

• How SDE differs from EBITDA, and when each one matters

Timestamped chapters (estimated — verify before uploading):

00:00 Introduction and Series Recap

01:30 Gross Revenue: The Big Number

03:15 The 50 to 70 Week Rule

05:00 What Gross Revenue Hides

06:15 SDE: Seller Discretionary Earnings

07:45 The S-Corp Salary Add-Back

09:15 What to Add Into SDE

11:30 What to Leave Out of SDE

13:15 3x SDE and How the Numbers Line Up

15:00 What's Coming on EBITDA

Ian Gollahon is co-owner of Liberty Laundry, a three-store laundromat chain in the Tulsa, Oklahoma area that did $2.5 million in top-line revenue in 2025. He's also co-founder of Wash-Dry-Fold POS, the original point-of-sale system for laundromats, and has spoken with more than 3,000 laundromat owners over the last decade.

washdryfoldpos.com

libertylaundryok.com

laundromat-ownership.com

laundryassociation.org/fullcycle/