MOST ASPIRING LAUNDROMAT OWNERS START WITH A BUILDING. TIM JOHNSON STARTED WITH A PLANE TICKET.
In August, the 46-year-old Air Force Academy graduate and former cybersecurity executive bought a one-way fare to The Clean Show. He didn’t know a single person in the laundry industry. He didn’t own a square foot of commercial real estate. He had, by his own account, no land, no equipment, no relationships and no money.
Months later, he is weeks away from opening Operation Laundry, a destination laundromat in Holland, Michigan, that he has financed largely with his retirement savings, built alongside a neighbor named Rob and willed into existence one decision at a time. What’s emerging is a candid, unvarnished look at what it actually takes to enter the industry today — the kind of story rarely told in highlight reels.
FROM THE AIR FORCE TO THE LAUNDROMAT FLOOR
Johnson’s path to Holland didn’t begin with a spreadsheet. It began with a question.
After a 20-year career in STEM, intelligence and cybersecurity — including selling his own company — he found himself working for corporate America and quietly unraveling. A divorce, a layoff and a stretch of professional uncertainty pushed him into territory most operators recognize: a recalibration of what success was supposed to feel like.
“What am I actually building? What’s tangible? What is the lasting of all this work I’ve done?” Johnson said.
He had given a great deal to his country. What had he given to his community?
That question stayed with him. When he heard about The Clean Show shortly afterward, he booked the trip on instinct.
“I didn’t know anyone there. I didn’t know anything about laundry. Knew, barely knew how to spell it,” Johnson said. “I just got on the plane and went down and started making a ton of friends and learned a ton about the industry.”
What he found was a culture unlike any he had worked in before. In defense and consulting, collaborators were often what he calls “frenemies” — partners on paper, competitors in practice. Laundry, he discovered, operated by a different code.
“The number one laundry person in Kansas City, Chicago, you know, Tampa, Florida, they could care less about Holland, Michigan,” Johnson said. “They’re not moving to Holland, Michigan. And they want to help. It’s a community that wants to help each other.”
His own market research suggested an opening. The laundromats in Holland looked, to his eye, like the laundromats of the past. Johnson saw room for something different. “No matter your economic background or situation, we all like good things. We all like nice things,” he said. “I felt like there was a desire and a need for a destination laundromat in Holland.”
A MILLION-DOLLAR BET, SITTING IN THE GARAGE
Conviction, on its own, doesn’t pour concrete. Johnson still had to solve for capital, equipment and a location — in roughly that order, and in roughly the wrong order, depending on how you look at it.
He researched a Rollover for Business Startups, or ROBS, structure that allowed him to deploy his 401(k) into the venture without an early-withdrawal penalty. Then he cashed in.
“I was unemployed, completely unemployed,” Johnson said. “No health insurance. Cashed it all in and went with that to start to get the funding.”
Then came the call that would define the next several months. A friend he had met at The Clean Show told him about a young franchise location going out of business near Detroit. The store was 18 months old, outfitted with brand-new Electrolux and Wascomat equipment and being parted out at a fraction of replacement value.
Johnson tracked down the owners, got them on the phone in the middle of their liquidation and negotiated a flat price for the entire store contents. They agreed.
“I bought pennies on the dollar, saved myself over a million dollars and bought 43 dryer pockets and 42 washers, 18 months old, which is basically brand new in the industry,” Johnson said.
He still didn’t have a building. So he turned to the closest resource available: his neighbor.
“I knocked on my neighbor’s door next door and I said, ‘Hey, are you busy?’” Johnson said. “He said, ‘No.’ ‘Would you get in a semi with me? We’re gonna rent like box trucks and drive over and move equipment.’ He said, ‘Let’s do it.’”
At 5 a.m. on a Monday, the two men began the three-hour drive to Detroit in separate box trucks. They loaded everything — washers, dryers, folding tables, vending machines, chairs, TVs, trash cans — and hauled it back to Holland.
The washers went into Johnson’s heated garage so the residual water in the lines wouldn’t freeze. The dryers went into a storage unit. His own car went out into the driveway as lake-effect snow began to fall.
“I bought it all with ROBS. No location,” Johnson said. “And it’s sitting in my garage. That’s where we were at at that moment.”
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