About a decade ago, Jordan Barry was at a crossroads in his career.

After working for 15 years as a youth pastor, he was looking for a low effort business

that would bring in money and free up time to spend with his two young kids.

I was trying to figure out what to do with my life. And my thought actually was to rent out our house

in Southern California and to buy a condo on the beach in Hawaii and, you know, sell seashells on the beach or

whatever. But a friend of the family ended up buying a laundromat and working five to ten hours a week.

So I thought, you know what? That sounds good. Let's shoot for that.

Barry knew nothing about laundromats.

But he contacted a broker and found one for sale outside of East Los Angeles.

It had 30 washers, 24 dryers, and a lot of issues.

It was very run down. Half the machines were out. The mismatch wood paneling all over the place,

dirty and dingy. It was what we call in the industry a zombie mat. It's functioning, but, you know, just

barely alive on its feet. I bought it all cash for about $70,000 and financed brand new equipment

and then remodeled the place. Since then, Barry has become something of an expert on laundromats.

He's owned and operated four of them and runs a company called Laundromat Resource.

It offers consulting services to hundreds of others in the industry.

And if there's one thing he's learned in the trade, it's that laundromats are no walk on the beach.

It's fun to see buckets full of quarters.

It's really fun to see huge stacks of cash.

But whenever you have people and you have machines,

you're going to have problems that you're going to have to deal with.

And laundromats have a lot of both.

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