Tyler Purcell - Laundromats and Finance

Business brain, episode 551 for Wednesday, May 22nd. Bitcoin Pizza Day 2024. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we take an idea or three, we crunch them, we analyze them, we use them to help each of us tune our business brains every single episode when we get together. Our sponsor for this episode is shopify.com businessbrain. That's where you can go to sign up for a $1 per month trial period. We'll talk more about that in a little bit. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton and out here in.

Northern California, I'm Shannon Jean. Is the pizza bitcoin thing like the guy that spent $10 million for pizza?

No, he spent 10,000 Bitcoin and bought two pizzas. Okay, so today, let me look. That's. That's $690,000. 690 million million worth of bitcoin. That's right.

Okay. Yes. Just want to be sure.

Doing the math.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Poor guy. If you're watching a stream this right now, you see we've got three people on the screen and we're joined by Tyler Purcell. Today we're going to talk about a bunch of interesting things. I met Tyler a few months ago, although I feel like I've known you fore met in a growth group on X and I've learned a lot about his business. He's a COO of. I like saying that. COO of Kiplinger Wealth Advisors. And he's also the co founder of the Laundry Spot, which is a chain of laundromats that I'm fascinated with. I don't want to own a laundromat, but every time Tyler posts something about it, I find myself wanting to own one. Tyler, thanks for being here today.

Yeah, thank you guys. Appreciate it. I'm excited to chat today.

Yeah, same. So we're Laundry Finance. Laundering. No, not laundering. That's the one thing not talking about, right?

Dave, don't get. Don't get the SEC on me, man.

Okay? If I mention bitcoin and laundry and finance, I don't know how I can avoid that, but we're going to try.

Those are bad keywords, man.

They're bad keywords all together. All right?

Like bitcoin. You got to be careful.

Yeah, yeah, that's true.

So.

So, okay, I. I have a bunch of questions, but I want to give you a couple minutes here. Give us some background how you got started, how you wound up in wealth management, and then how you added to your revenue stack by going out and co founding this chain of laundromats.

Yeah, so kind of all started with the finance thing. Studied finance in college. Was always kind of a numbers guy. Went the wealth management route. Thought about investment banking. But you know, I like, I like working with people, you know, and affecting their lives positively. So kind of veered off into that personal finance financial planning route. Started Merrill Lynch. Quickly found out that was not how I wanted to do things. So I moved on from there. Bounced around to a couple places and then ended up at an ria Kiplinger Wealth Advisors. Been here for eight years now. I'm the coo, but I'm also an advisor. So I have my own clients. But I kind of help run the place as well. Just absolutely love what I do. Super passionate about it. This will be, you know, the thing I focus on and keep the main thing for the rest of my life probably. So we're in Cincinnati, Ohio. We manage about $235 million. So a nice, you know, local family office type of business. And then flipping to the other side. Yes. I helped started four laundromats, the laundry spots also in Cincinnati, Ohio. That story is a little more interesting. Started dating my wife about 10 years ago. Knew her father, had a laundromat and never, never thought anything about it. You know, he was, he's a smart guy. You know, he's entrepreneur at heart. Was in a commercial real estate PNC insurance agency. So I'm like, yeah, it's got to be a decent business, right? You know, he's, he's smart, he knows what he's doing. So never really asked him about it or knew much about that, that business. Fast forward three, four years later, we get married and he approaches us as well as his son, my brother in law and says, hey, I think I got a good thing going. Do you guys want to team up and open up some more laundromats? We got together, created the Laundry Spot brand. He rebranded his first store Laundry Spot and then now we have a total of four stores and hopefully more here soon.

That's cool. How close?

I've always been fascinated by laundromats because they feel like something that approaches like that mailbox money, like you know, passive ish income. How passive is it really though? Or is this more of an active business?

Yeah, so I'm with you. Like not a big fan of the word passive. You know, people just think you sit back and kick your legs up and you're just making all this money.

Yeah. Never listen if Somebody's got that idea. Feedbackusbrain show. Like I could have. It turns out I could have like a hundred of those, so I'm totally fine with that.

Yeah, yeah. If they're passive, then you can have.

As many as truly passive.

Yeah.

So. Yeah, you know, at the beginning there was that, that learning curve. I knew nothing about laundry or the laundromat industry at all, so no super hands on at the beginning. Even had to go run some night shifts at the laundromat because we were figuring out the employee situation and manager situation, so just that, you know, trial by fire. But as we grew, we kind of built out, you know, somewhat of a corporate structure. So we have attendants at the base level, then we have managers at each store, then we have two assistant general managers, and then we have a general manager on top of the. Okay, so.

So you really built a hierarchy here, like, like a real business. I mean, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, that's the point that we wanted to get to because we all have full time jobs. So this really is a side business for us, albeit a great one. And we love it. But we all have, you know, limited capacity, so it was important for us to get to that point.

How many. Okay, so did. When did you bring on or did you do it from the beginning like that? General manager, Assistant general manager. Did it. Was it first store, second, third. How did that work?

It was the third store. Yeah, so we kind of hit that. Man, I don't know if we can grow anymore unless we figure something out here. So we're like, we, we gotta pony up and, and get this figured out if we want to keep opening stores.

Yeah, that makes sense. And, and I imagine, you know, did you see. I hear a lot of people talking about it, like, well, I don't know how to turn it over. You know, it's not going to be as good or productive. Did you see a dip in, you know, is there a learning curve then for this new person that you broug until they kind of picked everything up?

Yeah, yeah, like anything, there's a little bit of a learning curve. We got lucky though. Our GM is amazing. She does a wonderful job. She learned really quick. So if she's listening to this, hats off to, to her. We love her to death. So yeah, she is, she's killing it for us. We're basically running this thing. And yeah, it's great business at this point. Dave, to your point, it is, I think, as passive as it gets for at this point.

Yeah, that's cool. And So I want to talk about, we've done shows about working with family and everything. So your co founders, your brother in law.

Right.

And have you had to kind of set boundaries or design systems or. You know, I can't imagine you guys are getting together on the weekends and all the. Everybody's tired of talking about laundromats. How does that work? Tell me, tell me the trick.

Yeah, so we have weekly team meetings like online on laundromat, specific items and we have a slack channel. Obviously we're chatting, you know, about business in there. But yeah, on the weekends we try to keep it minimal business. You know, we're like, hey, let's, let's enjoy ourselves and not just talk about laundromats this whole time. So yeah, it's been a conscious effort to try to keep those, those things separate.

Yeah.

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Yeah, the laundromat specifically, right now, running those four stores, probably, I'd say about 10% of my time.

Okay.

Yeah, it's not bad.

All right, so it's a 10 business. That's pretty good.

Yeah, that is great.

Yeah. And so. Okay, so I have a question. I'm gonna. I have a couple of questions, but I think you may answer one when I ask this first one. So we met growing our accounts on X as part of this growth madness group. And tell me, and I think I know this now, but people listening, running their businesses. Businesses probably don't have a concept of, oh, I want to grow. I'm going to go out on Twitter and X and start posting about, you know, my business, my life, my family. Tell me what your, you know, motivation to get involved on social media to promote your. Your brand and yourself. How did that start and what is it more importantly? Because I know you've put a ton of time into it. What's it given back to you?

Yeah, so even before the growth madness thing, I kind of got involved in the small business Twitter X area. So I started following major accounts there, and I'm like, man, these guys are creating and growing businesses straight off this platform. I'm like, let me try my hand at this. So I started posting. I posted finance stuff at first, started posting a little bit of laundromat stuff, and people started kind of gravitating towards the laundromat stuff. And then I started looking like, you know, who are the laundromat extraordinaires on X? And I was like, there's a couple guys talking about it, but, like, there's not much. There's not much info on laundromats considering, you know, people love to talk about boring businesses. Cody Sanchez made it popular, you know, with her YouTube videos, but there really wasn't anybody talking a lot about their laundromat business. So I'm like, I'm gonna just jump into this head first. So that's why I started doing. Posting a lot of laundromat stuff and you know, have had a ton of people reach out, just, hey, I bought a laundromat. Hey, I'm looking to buy a Laundromat. You know, I'd love to get in the business. Can I. Can I pick your brain? And I love it. It's just like a hobby. I could talk about laundromats all day, but, yeah, I've talked to, man, over 100 people from DMs at this point, and just, just this year alone. So the connections are amazing. Obviously, Shannon, you know, meeting you has been great, and some of the other guys, but the connections you can make here just have blown my mind. So if you're out there and you're thinking about it, you know, dive in 100%. You can't be 50% in, 50% out. You got to go full bore to make this, you know, worthwhile.

All right, so I want to ask about this because we, especially with Shannon's recent sort of foray into X, How. How valuable can you put? I don't, I don't want to say, can you put a number on it? Can you assign a monetary value to the, the work that you've been doing on X? But can you look at your business and say, my business is better for me, having invested all this time growing my profile on X?

Yeah, like you said, I don't know if I could put a specific number, but I can say, probably five years from now, my business will be 10 times better and larger because of the work I'm doing here on X.

So that's a legitimate answer. Yeah, that's perfect. That's. Yeah. Wow. Why? Why?

Yeah, purely the connections, you know, the people. I'm meeting, the other laundromat owners and, you know, focusing on that, helping people possibly open laundromats in the future. You know, that is. That is all on the table.

That. Okay, that makes sense to me. I mean, I, you know, we talk a lot about going to trade shows on this show conferences that the social aspect of business for, you know, to put an umbrella term on it. And you're essentially saying the same thing here, that X is that sort of ongoing social platform that allows you to be more in touch with people either in the same business or that can help your business or that you can help, and that'll allow you to grow. Okay.

Right, right. Yeah. And there's a lot of things going on in the background I wish I could share today, but maybe we'll have to have another business brain podcast when we get to that point.

Well, but that in and of that comment in and of itself, and I know sounds sort of coy and all that stuff, but I mean, these things happen in business. There are, there are. I just had a conversation before we had the show that I would love to talk about on the show, but I can't yet. It's way too early. It's, it's how it works. We've all been there and we will all be there many, many times over. So the fact that you are having those conversations because of the time you invested meeting people on X, as opposed to that or not as opposed to. But you know, it related to the time that I might have spent meeting someone at a conference five years ago that I now just had a conversation with and might change the nature of one of my businesses over the next six to 12 months. It's the same thing. It literally the same thing. That's the interesting part.

Yeah, Yeah.

I compare it to like what you said, going and meeting at events or conferences. I'm talking with six to eight people weekly from DMs, from Twitter, from X. You know, so it's like, imagine all the time, effort and money you would have to spend to do that in person at that rate.

Exactly.

You just can't keep up. And that's why it's so valuable.

And it's a crazy filter because these are people that are, you know, in your niche already that are looking at your content and seeing that you have expertise and your credibility. You already have. It's like a soft credibility. Credibility. Right. Because you're not pitching them anything. It's just like, oh, this is who I am.

This is what I, it's like you're speaking at a conference right there. People come up to you after you speak and you don't have to tell anybody how great you are because the conference organizers already did that. Right. You know, I mean it like, that's the analogy here.

Yeah.

All right. You're selling me on spending more time on X, Shannon.

I'm telling you, it's, it's, I, I, I, I was on a podcast last week that's going to come out this week sometimes with, with Nick Tyler, you know. Yeah. And he asked me the similar kind of thing. And you know, how do you get involved in a business and what, how do you know it's working and what do you, what you measure? And he's a super analytical, crazy spreadsheet guy. And I'm not. I, I measure the energy. You know, in the beginning, you've got to give a Lot of energy to make it go. And you're going, okay, posting, doing all this kind of stuff for driving your new business, but at some point it reverses and it gives you energy back. And I think probably, you know, four or five months ago is when I started to feel the energy flowing back to me. The dopamine hits of the viral posts that we always joke about, but also that collaboration of people reaching out to me and in the DMs and phone calls, it's. It's amazing, man. Something going on there.

You're. I mean, because I think now, Shannon, you actually have more. More X followers than I do, I think. Yeah, no, I'm just shy of 7,000. I think you're just over 7,000.

Oh, yeah, 7,200.

But I never worked to build a following on X. Yeah, those people just kind of came because of speaking at conference, like all the other things that I've done. But I'm also a musician. And what you just said, Shannon, is what happens. Every single gig I play. The first few songs, we have to be the ones putting the energy out into the room.

Oh, yeah.

And then if you do it right, then the energy starts coming back from the crowd, and then it becomes this collaborative energy that hopefully lasts all night.

Yeah.

And now you're telling me I just.

Got to do it does. Yeah, you have to. This is pretty interesting. Yeah.

Dive in, Dave.

It's pretty wild.

I got to dive back in.

It's really what it is. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right, so what I. It's. It's great. I love the revenue stacking concept of, hey, I got my. Because I, I kind of did something similar. I built my first business, and then once I had that steady income, it allowed me the flexibility to go out and do something else. And you did the same thing with, you know, your. Your job, which I love the concept and, you know, I love the whole thing and expanding and I imagine, you know, someday we'll see laundry spots all over the country. It's going to be amazing. And it's all gonna, you know, it's terrific. But I have this question for you because you did this post one time that really blew my mind, and I want to dig in and ask you about it. And it's this 20 acre friends and family compound now. Yeah. For those of you that don't follow Tyler, whatever, there's a post, and I'll put it in the show notes where he talks about, he's got seven. He's got how many family? Eight lots. Four family. Four friends, 20 acres, creeks on each side. Got to go to a. Over a bridge, less than 10 minutes from the highway. Great school district. They bought this land. They're putting in utilities. And, you know, he's got some pictures in there. So tell. Tell me the impetus for this. He found it. Good. The impetus for this. And where you. Where are you going with this. This concept? Which sounds, like, just incredible to me.

Yeah. So I'm a big family guy. I grew up with four siblings. I got two kids currently. Me and all my siblings are super close. Same with my wife. She has one brother. We're super close with them as well. So we've always joked, like, man, I would love to live right across the street from you, you know, and just our kids can play out in the field or the creek and whatnot. And as we got older, I'm like, why can't we do this? Let's try to make this happen if possible. I've seen people do it, you know, over the years here and there. I've seen. Yeah, I live with my. My brother and his family, and so they started looking. I'm like, let me see if I can find places to make this happen. And quickly learned a lot about zoning. Just an absolute nightmare.

I can imagine.

I thought, you know, at first when I started looking, I'm like, oh, I can just, you know, get a piece of land, put one street in there, and we can have however many houses we want, you know, boom, easy. And then it's like, absolutely not.

Yeah.

So I went through a lot of different pieces of land, man. And meeting with zoning and doing a lot of work, and then them saying, nope, sorry, you can't do it. So it's been super frustrating. But, you know, I think the patience paid off. We found a great piece of land. We're all excited for it. So actually, the development should be done here in the next couple months, so be ready for the split. And nice. Get to building.

And you got utilities run in, and then you guys split them all up, and then is it you. You're. You're staying in the same general area where you're kind of at now and everything? Yeah, it's.

It's only about 15 minutes from where I live now, so super close.

You know, I don't. Much more difficult to do that in California, I hate to tell you.

You got to get the heck out of California, Shannon.

I told that all the time, Dave.

Yeah, I'm too stuff. I got my roots, man. It's. I got. That's a long Story. It's a whole nother show.

You know what I say to, to, to, well, anybody that, that'll listen to me is California is great, except it's full of Californians. Shannon accepted, mind you. Shannon and his family accepted.

Yeah.

But okay, so I'm, I'm curious about this. So in the, you found a bunch of land, you're going to divvy it up so that four people, four families can live there, right? Yeah. Okay. In the end, will each family own their own plot of land? And no. And, and you don't. I mean you might, you might choose to build like a homeowner's association amongst the four of you, which probably would be smart, but everybody owns their own land in the end, correct?

Yeah.

It's basically like we just created our own neighborhood.

Yeah, right, right.

It's, it's not compound how, how some people think about it, you know.

Right.

It's only, it's only 20 acres. It's basically a mini neighborhood.

Right.

And operates just like that. So yeah, we will have an HOA once everything is done and everybody will own their own plot.

So somebody one at 15 acres kind of thing is that the, it'll be.

Less, a little less than that with green space. But we have a lot of green space. So with the creeks and things, it's, it's a great.

So how does that work? Like who owns like you've got this 20 acre plot, there's going to be some green space that is, you know, the neighborhood land. Like who owns that the HOA will own.

You know, we'll pay to take care of it. A lot of it is woods. Yeah. So there's nothing really to take care of.

Yeah.

But we do have like a 3 acre open area that we, we kept open for like a field for, to do whatever in, you know, baseball. Baseball games. Yeah, exactly. Football games, whatever.

That's awesome, dude. I think that's great. And I, I love that, you know, that's your, the accumulation of all this hard work because I know how it goes. I mean, yeah, it's only 10 of your brain, but I, I would argue that, you know, you're up late at night, you're fix when the, the buck stops with you, when you have a problem or your co founder or whatever. And there's this stuff goes upstream and so I, I, I'm, I commend you for, you know, having the foresight to build something out like this to make your life better. Because that's what it's all about, man.

I'm not envious of many things. Not that I don't mean that I have everything already, but, like, the things that I want, I go and create. The scenarios in my life that I want, I go and create them. This is something I've wanted, but I never thought was possible. And you just made it happen, so that's cool. I like that.

Are we talking Laundromats or are we talking the compound?

No, no, the compound. I can create a business. It's fine. Like, whatever.

Problem.

Yeah, that's fine. Yeah, yeah. In fact, we often say here, and this is not meant to involve religion in the show by any stretch of the imagination, but the phrase, God grant us the serenity not to start another business, that is a thing. That's a mantra here.

I feel it. I feel it for sure.

Yeah. It's shiny object. Well, that's awesome. It's a great story. You're a great example of pushing yourself out of, you know, creating your own reality. I talk about it all the time and I think it's. It's terrific. I appreciate you coming on the show and sharing your story, man.

Yeah. Thank you guys for having me. It's been a blast.

Absolutely. Yeah. Creating. Creating your own reality. We talk about that a lot, but you've got it. You've done it in, like, from every angle. Tyler, that's. That's pretty cool, man.

Trying. Trying to.

As well you should. Why? Because it's. Because no one else is going to do it for you.

That's right.

Yep.

Very cool.

Thanks for hanging out with us, Tyler. Tyler, remind people where they can find you if they want to hunt you down.

Follow me on x ylerpercell24. There you go.

We will put that link in the show notes, folks. We'll also put links for Shannon and me in the show notes as well. Feedbackusinessbrain show is another way that you can find. Find us, but find us. Let us know what you're interested in. You might be somebody like Tyler that has a good story to tell and then we'll have you on the show and to tell it. But otherwise, keep living that charmed life and we'll see you on Friday.