On a mild winter day in Arizona, 38-year-old Cami’s laundromat is crowded with customers loading clothes into washers and dryers and employees delivering laundry.
For Kami, running her only job, a business, is a welcome change of pace, she says. From October 2020 until April 2023, when she quit her job as a nurse, she ran a coin laundry while working almost full-time as a nurse at a hospital. (Cami requested to be identified only by her nickname due to safety concerns for her cash-intensive business. Her identity and business name are known to CNBC Make It.)
“Right now, I only work five or six hours a week (running a coin laundry),” Kami says. “But I’m also hesitant to tell people that, because five years ago, four or three years ago, that wasn’t the case. I was working more hours to grow this business.”
During that time, she hired employees. The laundromat employs six people, including one part-time worker. That way, she says, “you can focus more on growing your business instead of working in it.” Kami also said she spends about 10 hours a week creating videos about her business and management experience and posting them on social media.
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Cami’s laundromat brought in about $475,000 in revenue last year, plus nearly $30,000 in rent from the salon she operates next door, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. That included about $119,000 in profits, some of which went back into the business, of which $66,000 went to Cami’s salary.
She also earned about $22,000 in six months of social media posts in 2024, and is on track for a huge increase of “about $200,000” in 2025, she says. Although she misses the camaraderie at the hospital, she says she enjoys the work-life balance and freedom she experienced as a business owner.
“This is the first time I’ve been able to stay home for the entire holiday and have every weekend off,” Kami says. “I don’t have to go see my boss or manager and I can go on random trips, like going home. So my time freedom has completely changed.”
sell a house to buy a business
After working as a nurse for 13 years, primarily in bone marrow transplant units at large hospitals, Cami was ready for a career change, she says. She just didn’t want to re-enroll in school because of it. “Then I realized the only way I could get out of work was to own a business,” she says.
She considered several ventures, including renting a storage unit and purchasing a mobile home park. Then I found a listing for a laundromat on bizbuysell.com, a marketplace for buying and selling small businesses.
A friend introduced Kami to her uncle, who himself owned two laundromats, she said. “He looked at the numbers with me and said something I’ll never forget. He said, ‘If I could go back in time…I would never go to college. I would never get a master’s degree,'” Kami says. “He said, ‘Laundromats cost money, so just buy a laundromat.'”
Kami had been planning to buy the business for about a year before making the purchase, and part of that plan included selling his home to cover the costs. She sold her home for $310,000 in April 2020 and moved into a rental home.
Cami’s laundromat brought in about $475,000 in revenue in 2024, documents show.
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Since the mortgage was not paid off, she said she received about $150,000 in stock from the transaction and used it to fund a $300,000 laundromat. She said she took an additional $50,000 out of her savings in October 2020 to make a $200,000 down payment on the laundromat.
“We financed the remaining $100,000 from the seller at a 6% interest rate over the next two years,” Cami said, adding that she paid off the loan in about a year and a half. “I wasn’t really scared[of selling my home]. I was more excited about owning a business than owning a home.”
The laundromat has been in operation for more than 20 years and “the money was flowing,” Kami says. She spent $20,000 on renovations, including new lighting, flooring and new paint, to give it a more “homely” feel, she says. She is currently repaying two loans to purchase a washing machine and two loans for a vehicle for a laundromat pickup service, for a total of “about $4,900 a month,” she said.
As she ran a laundromat, she gradually reduced the amount of time she spent at the hospital each week. She said she bought a new house in April 2023.
How profitable laundry is
At Kami Laundromat, machines range in price from dryers that cost 25 cents per seven minutes to 80-pound washers that cost $12 per load. Laundry pickup and delivery fees also vary depending on the job.
Kami had no previous leadership or business owner experience, which she says was the “biggest learning curve.” She says she listens to business podcasts, reads books, and attends “at least one or two laundromat conferences a year” to stay up to date on industry trends, software, and technology.
One of the biggest lessons she learned, she says, is to make money and use it to pursue passions outside of work, rather than pursuing a career around your passion. In her case, her passion is managing time and schedules with loved ones, “[which]makes my days go a lot smoother,” she says.
Cami says she spends five to six hours a week working at the laundromat and about 10 hours a week writing social media posts about her experiences as a business owner.
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According to the Laundry Association, the average laundromat can generate cash flow of $15,000 to $300,000 annually, and its market value can range from $50,000 to more than $1 million. Kami estimates that within six or seven years he may retire or retain ownership and hire someone else to run the business.
You can also buy someone else’s laundromat or start from scratch, acquire a second store, grow it, and eventually sell it for a profit, she says.
“I think this is a fun game that I like to play,” Cami says. “I love the effort to learn more in order to scale and grow.”
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