From Teacher to CEO

Welcome to the Working Moms of San Antonio podcast. We're your host, Erika Radis and Marie Lifschultz, a realtor and lender here in San Antonio. But most importantly, we're working moms just like you. This podcast is all about creating a space where we can come together, share stories, and learn from each other. We love connecting with local moms in business hearing about their journeys and how they're balancing it all. Because let's be honest, it's not always easy, but it's so worth it. Before we dive in today's episode, we're excited to share some big news with you all. Our business community and coworking memberships are officially open. Whether you're looking for a supportive community of moms in business or need a beautiful space to work and grow, we've got just what you need here at Working Moms of San Antonio. You can visit the link in our show notes or workingmomsofsanantonio.com/membership for more info. Now onto today's episode. Grab a cup of coffee, settle in, and let's get started.

So hello everybody, I'm Candice. I am a wife, married to my high school sweetheart. I have two young girls, 4 years old and 18 months old. So I'm really in the thick of motherhood. I also run this pickup and delivery laundry service called Domingo Wash and Fold. And so what we really aim to do is to help families, but we all know that moms do the vast majority of the laundry. Right. I'm here to help moms just keep up with this ever-flowing river of laundry. So we pick up and deliver from your home. We return the clothes, fold it to perfection. Follow us on Instagram if you want to see how beautifully they're folded. And they are sorted by family member. When we pack them back in the bags, you get a cute, free tropical laundry bag, and they're returned the next day in most of the city. And so we really just allow you to confidently outsource laundry day. Know that we're going to do it at a really high level and it's just going to take you 20, 30 minutes in a week to do laundry. You just got to bag it up for us. And then because it's sorted, when it comes back to you, it just takes moments to put it back where it goes. So it'll like— Yeah, I really like to tell people that we like eliminate those clothes that are all around your house because like if you're not doing laundry all the way through, then there's inevitably clothes in this room, clothes in that room, piles of clothes, maybe folded clothes, maybe now it's dirty clothes mixed with clean clothes. Now you're washing everything again. We try to eliminate all of that. It's— so I taught high school for 9 years. I taught US history at the high school level, and when I had my first daughter, I just like immediately knew I can, I cannot do this 9-to-5 life, especially as a teacher. It's like super draining. As a teacher, if you're doing it well, which you should only be teaching if you're doing it well, it takes a lot out of you to do it. And so I would be pouring into these high school students all day long and then I'd have to come home and grade and plan and all this stuff. And then I've had this little baby. I said, no, this is just not what I want to do because as y'all know, as entrepreneurs, you are working all the time still. But at least you feel like you're building something for your future and for your kids' future. And, you know, whereas teaching high school just doesn't give you that vibe. I knew that I needed to do something else, so I, I started Flamingo as like my exit strategy from teaching. And it was kind of like, it wasn't like a linear move from teaching to Flamingo. I first realized that I just wanted to do something different, so I, I went into proofreading for a little bit and I, spent some money trying to figure out if that's what I wanted to do. And I had to get real with myself that I don't like to read enough to do it for a living. That's all. But I did come out of that knowing that I really like deadline-based work. Okay? So like, this needs to be done by Wednesday, right? Again, it's not set hours, but it's a deadline. So then I realized I didn't like to do that and I didn't like that I had to be like staring at a computer screen. So then I thought, as we were all sitting home during COVID and I thought, what else can I do? What can I do that keeps me out of the house that I can do while my kids are running around? And so I thought I'd like to do laundry, which is an uncommon thing I'm finding out. And so will people pay me to do this for them? And so I I actually looked at some other companies and they wouldn't hire me. So I was like, "Hmm, should I do it by myself or should I just give up this idea?" And I just decided to do it for myself. And so that was back in June of 2020, and I did it alongside my teaching job for a long time. And then I stopped teaching June. Somewhere in there, I got the idea that I want to travel full-time with my family. Now, that is a radical idea, I feel, but I really wanted to do it. So we purchased a bus. We own a 40-foot-long ex-military bus, flat-nose bus, and we've gutted it and we're turning it in slowly, slowly but surely. We're turning it into like a mobile luxury tiny home. Then my thought was, I can't do people's laundry and travel full-time. So that's when I started up with thinking, what else can I do that I can do remote from anywhere? And I got into bookkeeping and I took some courses and I now have a good set of bookkeeping clients. But as I'm doing their work, it just doesn't scratch that itch of like helping people. You know, as a teacher and as like a public servant for 9 years, I, I like to be of service to people and bookkeeping is just a lot of clicking of buttons and alone by myself. And so I do it, but I think of it now as like my day job and I'm putting all of my efforts into growing Flamingo because I do get that, that feeling that I'm helping families because, you know, laundry is a task that everybody needs to do and Why not outsource it to somebody who can do it at a high level and just take that, you know, task off your hands, off your mind too? COVID was actually really good for the pickup and delivery laundry industry. We saw like huge growth in the industry overall. I just started by creating a Facebook page for it. I eventually got a website. I got on Yelp, and I'm not very pro Yelp. In general, but it really helped me get my first really big client. So there were a lot of travel nurses in town when COVID hit, and these travel nurses were either working directly with COVID patients or they were just filling in for nurses who had moved to work with COVID patients. And there were a lot of them in town and they were staying in hotels and a lot of hotels didn't have capacity to do their laundry. A lot of times, you know, guests are just there for a couple days. They're just gonna take their dirty clothes with them, or maybe they're there for business trips and the hotel can do dry cleaning. They do that well, but they don't have the small washers to do 20 to 50 people, different people's laundry every night. So this random nurse found me on Yelp and I was just a little tiny baby company. I think I had had like 3 clients. Before she called me and she said, "Hey, can you come down to this hotel? Can you meet with the coordinator? Can you do the laundry for us?" And I said, "Yes." You know, I had no idea how I was going to do it. I didn't even have employees. I didn't have a team. I was just like, "Yes, I will be there." And so I went down there and it all worked out. My mom and my sister and a friend of mine, we just went and did massive amounts of laundry. Multiple nights a week for them while all of us still had like day jobs. So I would be like folding laundry till like 2 o'clock in the morning and then I'd have to go teach the next day. It was really crazy, but it gave me like a huge jumpstart in my business. It helped me figure stuff out super quick on how to like be organized, how not to mix up 50 different people's clothes all at once. It helped me pay off a bunch of credit card debt. It was great. And that gave me like the confidence to keep going even after COVID subsided a little bit and these travel nurses went home. I already knew that like the system that I needed to do a bunch of different people's clothes all at once in a short timeframe and to make it work for me. I've been connecting with a lot of other laundry service owners who are small like me and they do a lot of the laundry at their house. It's It's really common for even big companies to be contracting people to do laundry at their homes in their own machines, you know, at their house. Oh, wow. Super common. And so there are other laundry service owners who are spending sunup to sundown doing laundry, but I do not do that. So I do all of my work when my kids are asleep. So I do backend stuff when they're napping, and then I do— Yeah. Process the laundry after they go to sleep. And when I first started, and it was really just me, I used to pick up the clothes too after they went to sleep. I would just tell people, "Hey, put your clothes out at 8. I'll be by to pick them up." Wow. And people were really, you know, they worked with me on that. Yeah. It was really awesome. Because my kids hate the car. I don't know about y'all, but the first year and a half of both of their lives, hated the car. So I had to do car things after they went to sleep. But now they're both there. The best way of doing it is to hire Flamingo. But the second best way to make sure you actually do all of your laundry is to just go to the laundromat. And there are a lot of nice laundromats that are popping up around the city. My goal, my 5-year plan, is to open my own laundromat. So hopefully that will happen. Let's manifest it. I want to provide employment there are other moms of young children because I feel like it's just so hard to do both. Like people expect you to either be a good mom or be a good employee and it's really hard to do both of them at the same time. And not every mom is like entrepreneurial, you know, and can just think of these things and it's very hard to follow through and all this stuff it takes to be a good entrepreneur. But I want to be able to provide Like, I want to have folding team members and have like shifts where they can come and they work with school schedules. Or if your kid's really young, you can like bring them and there'll be like a separate area for the employees to just be back there folding clothes. I just want to have, I just really want to employ young moms and have, you know, options where they can, you know, kind of have their cake and eat it too.

Yeah.

Imposter syndrome is this idea where like, you're new at something and you're starting, you're trying, you're trying it out and you're getting yourself out there, but you're kind of too afraid to put yourself out there because you're like, oh, I'm not good enough. Ooh, I don't know if I should do this. Right. Am I just an imposter that doesn't know anything? You know? Yeah. For a lot of people it's like crippling and then they don't get their idea out there and get things going because they're just too stuck on thinking that they can't do it. Another thing that I kind of struggled with, which I don't know if this is a legitimate struggle, but I, like, am an educated individual, right? I went to the great University of Texas up in Austin. Yes, Hook 'em, Redskin. And for a while, it was a struggle for me to just be a launderer. Like, why did I go to school and do all of that? I'm just going to wash people's clothes now. For a while, it was like a legit struggle for me. These days, I feel like an extreme honor to wash fold other people's clothing just 'cause I know that it's doing them a great service and it's really helping them out in life. And so it brings me great joy. But at the beginning I was like, girl, what you doing? Why you wasting your education? I mean, I used my degree for a while. I mean, my degree was in history. I taught history, you know, but I just, yeah, I just couldn't, I don't know, maybe it's like a superficial thing that was going on in my head, but I, I couldn't get past that I was a clothes washer for a little bit, but I feel good about it now. So my favorite thing is being of service to the community. So I put in like my little social media posts that I'm often dancing when I drop off your clothes, so you check your little doorbell camera because you can often see me just like doing a little jig because I just, I really feel like I'm living my best life these days. I get to spend a lot of time with my children. And when they're asleep, I get to provide this income for them and help these other moms just live a slightly less chaotic life. And it really brings me joy.

Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the Working Moms of San Antonio podcast. We hope you loved today's chat and found a little inspiration to take with you into your week. If you have a podcast topic suggestion or a question you'd love for us to cover, definitely send us an email at hello@workingmomsofsanantonio.com. We'd love to hear from you. And until next time, see you in the community.