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