Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/416f8b2c51dafc4d

a night in Nashville it was raining and I was walking to an event.
to sell dry cleaning.
And I remember realizing
I don't want to do this when I'm forty five years old.
We had been working for about
One thousand days in a row.
We were open twenty four seven.
And
There was just such a toll that had taken on us.
from bootstrapping this.
You were burned out.
Incredibly.
And
Guy, I made forty thousand dollars.
You know, I had friends in private equity who were at this point making partner and making, you know, a million dollars plus per year.
I'm at one point.
Calling my dad.
And saying hey dad.
When this doesn't work out.
If this doesn't work out.
Can I borrow some money so I can start again?
Like not a business, but to start life again.
Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements.
They built.
Guy Roz, and on the show today, how Vegan Battel spun dirty laundry into a
ID business with Pressbox.
a dry cleaner that grew to hundreds of locations.
Before selling to Proctor and Gamble.
You know how some prices kinda get burned into your brain?
Like a two dollar cup of coffee, or a ten dollar movie, or
If you grew up like me, a dollar ninety nine to get a dress shirt cleaned at the dry cleaner.
That number really stuck even when shirt actually cost$1.99 to clean for a long time.
And in a way, that number tells you almost everything you need to know about the dry cleaning business. Razor thin margins, mom and pop shops struggling to compete, and customers like me racing to drop their shirts off on a Saturday morning.
and scrambling midweek to pick them up before the place closes at six.
In twenty thirteen Vech and Battle looked at that dollar ninety nine shirt.
And saw an opportunity.
Not because he loved dry cleaning, but because he loved the numbers. Vijin actually trained as an actuary, then worked in consulting and private equity.
And when he set out to build his first company
He didn't chase a passion project or a dream.
He chased what he called the least worst idea.
That idea was laundry.
But instead of storefronts, Vegin and his co-founder Drew McKenna put lockers in apartment buildings in Chicago.
Places where young professionals could drop their clothes any time.
Day or night.
And then pick them up a few days later, cleaned and folded.
On paper, the margins suddenly looked a whole lot better without the cost of storefronts.
But in practice, the work was grueling.
Feegan and Drew spent years running pickup routes, pitching building managers, and hustling to win over skeptical investors.
But their company Pressbox
eventually expanded to other states.
And a few years later, it caught the attention of one of its biggest competitors.
Procter and Gamble.
The PG bot press box folded it into tide cleaners, and today it's in nearly 1200 locations nationwide.
Yeah.
Now, one of the main reasons this story caught our attention is that, like Spot Hero and Kinko's Copies, also brands we've featured on the show.
Press box is part of a so called boring industry.
It's not a new tech product or a flashy beverage brand.
It's dry cleaning and laundry.
And as you'll hear.
Fijian is such a champion of boring startups.
That he actually started his own VC fund in Chicago to support them.
Beach and Patel grew up in Chicago in the 1990s.
After he graduated from Notre Dame, he took a job as a consultant with McKinsey.
But the year was two thousand eight.
And the financial crisis changed.
Everything for Vegen's cohort.
New recruits.
And it was interesting because we were the two thousand eight class and
You know, everyone was said, Hey, you're gonna be able to do these case studies with the NBA or do all these you know amazing things, travel around the world and everyone got there.
And the economy had shifted.
And
Everyone was doing cost cutting in Iowa.
Or whatever it might be, and I you know.
being from the Midwest, I was just incredibly thankful to have a job.
But
I think even to this day our satisfaction level of like a cohort of business analysts was probably one of the lowest.
you ever had.
And so
We had you know, among us fifty five people, I think thirty of the fifty five became entrepreneurs. Well something around that that number.
But
I at the end of the day
the end of our work always culminated in a PowerPoint presentation.
And so it just felt like there was something left to be desired.
All right, so you you're there for like t three years, I think, almost three years, and then you moved to San Francisco to join a private equity firm. Tell me about
your one of your jobs as a I'm assuming you're an like an analyst there?
Correct, an associate.
to to vet potential
acquisitions right? You're just going through
uh looking at uh all these opportunities that they might be interested in acquiring.
That's correct, and I focus on consumer.
And
I'll never forget there were some of these brands like I don't know if you recall, like Brookside.
Uh Sahala Nuts.
And we have the opportunity to put investments in.
And ultimately we didn't get there.
Uh because it was so analytical.
about everything and the problem with consumer is that
There's a bit of a gut feel relative to other other areas that you can invest in. And so I end up over two years not being able to do any deals.
But I think sometimes about all those companies we could have backed in that basket.
It's probably north of worth more than five billion today.
Wow.
And I realized I mean I was mediocre at private equity at best.
Because
you know, a good private equity analyst is just needs to sit in front of a computer all day and just crank on models and decks and
And I was here and I needed to be with people and create change and change the world.
And that was the aha of like oh my.
I need to go put my money where my mouth is. Like I need to go
Be myself.
I mean, when you are in San Francisco, I mean this is like
you know, that that time, I mean it's like Uber is starting to make waves and obviously Airbnb is already
You know, really.
starting to have an impact and Slack is is coming out. And I mean there are all of these things
Were you following those trends? Were you cognizant of them or were you was that
sort of front and center in your mind?
You know, y I would think the answer is yes, but it wasn't.
And the reason why was like I was in this private equity bubble.
You know, all the private equity firms in San Francisco were in one building.
in one maritime plaza.
And then
I kind of looked at
starting a company as like a private equity guy.
And I was like, All right, let me think through what would be a good opportunity. And there was literally zero to no dream.
It was all right, I need to find a highly fragmented industry.
One that has low technology and no branding.
And so like
By the way, the irony is that if you pick those three things up
You actually should result in taxis.
Mm-hmm. But as you know, I ended up with dry cleaning. Right. And so
It was a different path altogether.
Well taxis were obviously there were there was some fierce competition, right, between Uber and Lyft at the time. But
You're I mean you were
Convinced by this point.
'Cause you're there from two thousand eleven, two thousand thirteen.
by the end of your time in San Francisco that you
wanted to start a business. I'm I'm trying I'm imagining that part of that was because you were vetting
So many businesses.
And you were listening to all kinds of pitches.
Already in your mind you're thinking
I'm gonna do this and I've gotta find something.
And
You had access to all kinds of tools, right, and analytics tools.
And so how did you start to
to search for what that could be.
I looked at what
I had a passion for moderately, right, which was consumer and retail, and I had some edge on that just because I had spent five years on it. And then it was like pick the least worst idea.
And I'm a ride at an idea of creating chai packets from India, and that probably would have been a better idea. Another one was dentures.
Um but at the end of the day there was something
about Dryplane that got us excited. Like I and actually to be clear, actually now that I I look back at it.
Our f private equity firm was business formal.
Mm-hmm. Like I still to this day have all these suits and ties and shirts. You had to dress dress formally. And I remember, you know, we worked long hours and
It was a pain point to go to the dry cleaner. Uh and again, think back to 2012, 11. So dry cleaner was often frequently visited. And I remember the only time I'd be able to drop it off would be a Saturday.
And that was like I don't want to go to the dry cleaner on Saturday, I wanna go see my friends.
And then combine that with like this analytical, finance, math background I have.
And
One of the best things you ever did is over those six months, over that six month process.
My eventual co founder would fly out to San Francisco.
And
Guy, we just I just made an investment deck on it. Like it wasn't even a startup deck. It was like, hey, how would I grade this startup?
And it was like a 12 page deck, but we put this idea in front of anyone we could talk to.
And you can imagine, you know, I think we talked to probably a hundred people over the course of the six months.
And ninety
Percent of them said this is an awful idea. Alright, let's break this down a little bit, because this is 2013. Yep. And you are you have this idea. Let's talk about the idea first.
For the most part
When you drop your clothes off at a dry cleaner
They do not do the laundering and the dry cleaning on site.
They're just a storefront, and there's usually central facilities that service all these dry cleaners. So when people say, Oh, my dry cleaner is the best.
It's actually not true necessarily because they're all getting it cleaned at the same central
What was the
Opportunity you saw.
to quote unquote disrupt.
That model.
From the consumer side, the biggest one was the twenty four seven access.
And could you create
something and actually there was like a a little company at the time called Landry Locker that like kind of tried this out a bit in San Francisco.
And the idea was to hey, you know
go here twenty four seven. I think you need like a you need like a fob.
to try to get into the building, but you could then access it twenty four seven.
But then as we dug in, we realized, oh my
Not just could we create something that's more convenient, but this would actually allow us to eliminate half the cost.
Because dry cleaners operate fifteen percent margin businesses.
And by the way, when you take out the salary of the owner operator, it's like zero percent.
And so, you know, everyone said, Hey, why are you doing this? This is a low margin industry.
But what we realize is that if we could get some twenty four seven access or depot
You can get rid of rent.
and labor on site.
And that all of a sudden allows you to operate at forty.
percent margins.
It wasn't that you were gonna be
any different from a traditional dry cleaner. It was just that
access to dropping your clothes off would be'cause b most dry cleaners would be closed after five or six PM on a weekday, right? And so the idea is you could go there two in the morning and drop your stuff off and
I guess pick it up.
From the locker.
That's correct. And we thought our ideal customers would be bankers and doctors and people just who had longer hours that couldn't meet the dry cleaner hours.
But this was going to be, I'm assuming, a tech enabled company, right? Was tech gonna be part of it?
It was, but it it was twenty percent.
And by tech guy we were referring to SMS.
I mean
It's funny, we one of the biggest pieces of feedback we would get is actually from people who say they love going to their dry cleaner.
And we asked why.
And the the simplest response would be like we like pointing out where stains are.
And any specific detail request.
And so our solution to that was actually not even tech.
It ultimately became tech.
But at the time it was actually put a pen and paper.
on the side of our locations and a sticker roll.
And so tech was actually not part of our, you know, DNA.
Alright, we're gonna get back to that because that comes later when you actually set up the lockers. But but before that, all right, you're in San Francisco and you're talking to people about this idea. You're just

And most people are telling you this is not a good business to pursue.
I would say overwhelmingly, you know, every nine out of ten people we'd say is a hey
Why are you doing this? And in fact it
I remember
Call them on.
and telling her I was gonna start this.
And she cried.
And she said
You're doing what?
Like you're leaving private equity to go start a dry cleaner.
And it's not something that like any, you know, traditional private equity firm would ever look at doing, or a venture capital firm. You know, they would have
looked at way sexier ideas.
But what was fun about that experience guy was that by being so vulnerable and telling everyone about it, and telling all the reasons we'd fail.
We actually sat on that feedback and then just started thinking proactively about how to mitigate those failures.
Okay, let's let's go back to San Francisco for a moment, because at this time, right, when you come up with this idea, as as is the case with so many different kinds of startups,
There were other
people working on similar ideas. There was a a brand called Washio. There was another c one called Rinse, which is still around.
Were you aware of those other companies, those other brands?
So funny enough, AJ, who is the CO of Rents is
We both approached and created dry clean businesses in the same month.
And had many common friends who said to each other to talk to each other.
And so we actually and he's still a friend.
We actually
Got coffee.
in two thousand thirteen to talk about it and it was great because we made a connection.
And we didn't talk again for three or four years, but he went down a different path, which is pick up and drop off, and I went down the the hardware path.
Yeah. But yeah, we did research and
To your point, Washio was the big one, but I didn't I we never made contact with him.
'Cause they were you didn't they didn't have a locker model. You would just put your clothes in a bag and they these drivers would drive uh to all these houses.
So it's not a great m I mean it's a less efficient model. Exactly. It's a less efficient model and
our solution was more convenient relative to them having to wait for a driver to come.
They could just go down.
Throw it into a locker.
Text us and go on with their day.
But tell me about
This
person that you started it with. Who his name's Drew, right? Correct. Drew McKenna. Tell me about Drew and who is he and why did you start it with him?
So Drew and I went to Notre Dame together.
And when I was going to start this
one of the biggest issues in this in in this
idea was just how hard it was gonna be.
Yes. It's a giant flaw and how is some private equity guy gonna all of a sudden

And so we knew that I needed a co founder.
Period.
And quickly with some conversations with friends, I realized Drew could be that person.
Uh literally we did an MBTI test early on and we were the exact opposites.
Which I loved.
Because we were different personalities.
But we had a common kind of
similar value system.
And then we dated, right? We dated, like we we were we were friends, but we weren't the closest of friends.
Yeah.
getting to know him over three or four months, I realized we would have different
Strength that could complement each other.
Okay. So you guys start working so he moves to Chicago to work on this with you.
So he was in Chicago.
Actually and this is this is hysterical, I'm probably the only founder ever who moved from San Francisco to Chicago.
Right.
We decided to start this in Chicago.
And why why in Chicago?
Ultimately we had advantages there.
Drew is from Chicago. I am as well.
Uh we had some relationships with real estate owners, uh Drew specifically did that would help us get some early wins.
But this was a hard business. And as we thought about who to hire
Who we could surround ourselves with.
We had a tribe.
We had a community in Chicago that we didn't have in San Francisco.
So all right, you moved to Chicago.
to really start to work on this. And
When you were telling people about it, w how are you describing this? Was it going to be a like Uber for for dry cleaning? Like what
How is it gonna work for a consumer?
So
At that time, the Uber for X movement was wild.
I there was Uber for everything. Right. And that was the washio pitch, that was the rinse pitch, and it was That's how they pitched V Cs. This is Uber for you know
Ice cream, whatever, you know, whatever it might be.
I think that was an actual startup. Flowers everything. I mean it w it was that.
And ours was as well.
Except the difference was that
We realis
Because we had our for profit, like we just were so focused on our private equity lens, like, hey, we need to make profit.
And so we were just dogmatic about what we eventually call the uni economics.
And
we put the bath on like a a rinse model or or some of these other models like Washio.
I'm like, how are they gonna make money?
And we did the math and the max transactions you could do with a pickup and drop off service, which have been the true Uber model.
Was
Four to six.
Transactions per hour.
And then we realized with our model we could do twenty six.
Oh
And so that was the real like unlock is we're you know pitching these investors like hey like this thing will make money.
So you you actually in Chicago started to pitch investors to raise money to do this, and tell me about that experience.
So moved back to Chicago 2013 and was so excited to be back home.
And I think at the time there were like five to seven VCs.
And we pitched them all.
And the general feedback was like, Hey, you're building a nice small business.
Like
Lifestyle business, I think was the right word, which like still hurts my soul when I hear that.
And so all of them passed.
All of them passed.
But
Ultimately guy
I was having so much fun.
It was the first time in my career where I was just having a blast.
And I think Drew and I confide in each other and said, Hey
there's something here and it was a lot of belief like this is worth it.
But it was incredibly discouraging. In fact, it got to the point where after we actually launched, an investor came back and said, we do want to invest with you.
But that point we were just so sick of, you know, hearing no we're like we're not gonna take on any investment.
All right.
one of the things that I'm I'm curious about is the is like
how you validated why this would work, right? Like what did
I mean you want to be an actuary, right? And so I guess you put on your actuary hat and
Started to crunch the numbers.
And discover that if you
If you've got a certain number of customers
you would be profitable.
quickly g explain how you how you sort of figure that out.
So to me
This is a math equation. You're exactly right.
We did research and we said, Hey, the average person spends about forty dollars per month.
So how many people do we need to get to use our service?
So that we can just make money.
And actually before that even guy, we set up a table on sidewalks.
And before we spent any dollars on actually any of the piece of equipment.
We would just survey people. Sidewalks where? In front of buildings?
In Chicago. No.
We did it at like main intersections and we said, Hey
If we were to put a location at your office, would you use it?
If we were to put one near home, would you use it?
And our initial hypothesis guy was that
Offices were actually the place to go.
And we we did the math that if we just get half a percent
of people to use our service.
we would have taken home two or three thousand dollars a month.
from each location.
So what were your I mean, so your upfront costs were going to be the lockers.
Right.
And let's let's kinda break this down.
First of all
you couldn't raise any money. So
How much money did you have to work with?
We put all of our life savings into it. I had about a hundred twenty thousand dollars say from McKinsey and private equity.
And
My co founder did as well, and we're fortunate we raised like a hundred thousand dollars of debt from our parents.
Okay.
So
The idea w would be there'd be lockers and
initially in office buildings. And let's talk about the locker first. Like I'm imagining an Amazon locker today that's
Digital and you know.
But this is two thousand thirteen.
So what what were those lockers going to be and how would people access them?
So you're exactly right. They were simple.
We actually call them dumb walkers.
But they were done by design because that brought costs low.
They had a DigiLock on them.
And you would just type a four digit code and you'd turn it.
And then the only other thing that would make it special was we put a number at the top.
So
Each person so say a a certain building would have eight lockers.
Yeah. Four on the top, four on the bottom.
Each of those would be numbered one through eight.
You'd go guy, drop off your your laundry in this, you know, hypothetically office building.
And you would just send us a text.
And it would just be this this one number.
And you would just say the number three.
And that would give us the signal to go pick it up.
And
We want to keep this as simple as possible.
Got it. Okay.
And an SMS message would go to your phone or to you or to Drew.
Correct. It would go to us and we use like a at the time it was called Twilio. Mm-hmm.
Yep, still around.
And that was it.
And what if all the lockers were locked? There was there was no availability?
That would be a giant issue.
And uh we would add lockers right away.
'Cause that would be the best issue we could have.
So when you would if if you were ready to drop your stuff off.
You first have to go to the website, set up an account.
Put your credit card details in.
And then you could leave your clothes in a locker and and send a text?
Correct.
It's funny because today, like, you look at a model like that and somebody would say, Oh, there's just so much friction.
But I guess
At that time in twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen, people were willing to do all those things.
Yeah, I think that at the end of the day
You know you say all that, and that does sound painful.
But it was still less painful than the alternative.
And
What about price? I mean, was price the thing that mattered or was it convenience that was more important?
It was convenience, but it was price on one item.
And
Ultimately I still think to this day, I don't know if people know how much they pay to dry clean a sweater.
But everyone knows how much it costs to dry clean a shirt.
Dollar ninety nine.
Exactly.
And that was the price we were incredibly focused on.
All of our marketing said one ninety nine a shirt.
Actually, I think we start at one seventy nine, guy.
'Cause we wanted to undercut to just get volume in.
And I believe we had five dollars for a dress.
And
That was the that was enough justification on the price.
for people to take a leap of faith.
So let's talk about getting there. So you had to buy lockers.
That's right. So
We had$340,000.
to our name in this company.
80% of a guy went to lockers.
And how did you get any building to agree to let you install lockers in the lobby?
This is where the edge in Chicago helped, but we
And actually
Before that we also started a storefront.
So we needed a a place to work.
and we put lockers in the front.
And we use the
Back two thirds is our office.
And so that was actually our first location.
And so it was in Lakeview Lincoln Park.
And then
We started talking to office buildings and gyms.
And we tried to get in as many office buildings as we could.
And
We completely failed.
Well we come back in just a moment.
Feach and Drew, figure out the locker situation, and learn the basic math of the laundry business, which includes a massive pay cut.
for themselves.
Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.
Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Roz. So it's 2013 and VGin has just joined his co-founder Drew in Chicago to launch their new laundry business, Pressbox.
They're gonna use lockers to pick up and drop off the clothes, and they wanna put those lockers
In office buildings.
To start, we like we would just call like, you know, family members and be like, Hey, do we know anyone who's in real estate and has an office building? And you know, we get
one meeting and they'd be like, all right.
This isn't gonna work, but you should meet my friend. And actually another another favor we asked was actually at Notre Dame.
But we actually asked at the time the head of the endowment to say, Hey, we're gonna go do this idea.
And he so kindly sent ten emails.
to owners and developers in Chicago.
Who were Notre Dame alums?
They were actually
The endowment had invested.
into their companies. Okay. Wow. And so again
It was like some of these favors were like, all right, we got ten leads from this engine, ten from our family.
Ten from like our friends.
Uh specifically guy, we we thought
Offices were like where we were gonna clean up.
And
We were completely wrong.
Why people were not
Like lawyers and finance people weren't leaving their stuff in lockers.
We quickly that no one wanted to bring their dry cleaning to work.
Right.
And that was when the light bulb.
Where we need to find the path of least resistance.
And
it ended up being we soon found out
proximity to someone's wardrobe.
In terms of not even not even in the buildings of apartment buildings, but also
in terms of where we go in the apartment building.
If we can be, you know, close to someone's wardrobe, we had a higher for them to become customers.
So you had to be in the buildings.
And in where they lived.
We had to be in the buildings and
Our big breakthrough movement.
Uh moment guy was
Around the month.
Eight mark.
And I'll never forget this building. It's called twelve twenty five Old Town.
And
At the time, this was the hottest property to be in.
It had the highest rent per square foot. It had a

you know, around the twenty to thirty five mark.
And
We knew if we could get them, we could get any
residential building in in Chicago.
And they said no.
For five months.
And
Ultimately.
We were lucky.
Uh, but we ended up having a lot of friends or friends of friends who lived in that building.
And we actually had them.
incessantly email the property manager.
And I think at the time of like the ninth email.
She's like, All right, I'll meet.
And
Guy, once you got twelve twenty five old town.
That's when the model started working.
How many lockers did you put in there?
Ten. So five on the top, five at the bottom.
And
Was there a big sign that said Get your dry cleaning done here?
Or I mean how d how did you catch people's attention?
We did a lot of gorilla marketing. So that same idea we had where we sat at a storefront and put a label uh a table down and talk to people.
We did the exact same thing in the lobbies.
Because what we realized in all the work we did up front is that
the reason why everyone wanted to drop off their clothes with a a known person
It's because they're
They're dropping off what they love to wear.
And that gives them confidence. And so ultimately when we
We realize the best tactic is
It's not the lockers, but it was actually us setting up tables in the lobbies of apartment buildings and
offices to say, Hey, we're a dry cleaner.
And this was really I mean, guy, I think over the course of our entire entrepreneurship, I think I might have hosted
A thousand events?

And that would be really where we'd convert.
Let's talk about the unit economics for a moment because you knew
That's the
Even with fifteen percent margins, well, you could increase those margins'cause you weren't paying rent for a storefront. And did you have to pay rent for the lockers to the buildings charge you?
No, this was the huge benefit, but we
We were called an amenity.
And so as a result
Our pitch to all these buildings was
you will now be able to charge higher in rent.
Or key people.
Right, longer in their buildings.
And that was enough for these owners to take a chance.
'Cause they could say on site dry cleaning.
Correct.
Okay, so
So basically you
Got into these buildings rent free.
Rent free.
To the unit economics, it costs us five thousand dollars to set up a location. That's it. And the cost was the locker.
And then the install.
And doing the math, if the average person spends forty dollars a month on dry cleaning.
And you get twenty five users.
That's it.
We realize you generate a thousand dollars of revenue.
You have the you to spend about half of it to actually get it cleaned. And most of your costs sort of pay for the dry cleaning.
Right.
That's right. Few percent of it.
And there's transport cost.
And then the other one was actually parking tickets.
We ended up on our PL.
Having wine item which was
Parking tickets.
You know, I've been to all of Chicago's tow yards.
Uh Drew has been to more of them.
But at the end of the day, our marketing was a flyer.
That's it.
And so we realize our breakeven mark was around that twenty six mark.
twenty six customers. And so if we can just get twenty six customers to use us. In one location. In one location.
will make money. And by the way,
That's every month. So over the course of a year we were gonna be cash flow positive.
Mm-hmm. And this is when it clicked. And this is when we really found what we'd call product market fit.
It was that 1225 all time moment where we broke even, guy.
In six weeks.
In six once you got that apartment building.
You broke even six weeks.
In six weeks. So you were profitable within the first year.
In the first year, I'll never forget when we hit the$80,000 mark.
Per month.
because 80 times 12 is roughly a million dollars.
And we got there at the round
Around like the fifteen month mark?
After starting.
And how did you identify how did you find a place that was willing to work with you to clean the stuff? Because I imagine
dry cleaners like taxis are you know, there there's probably some
they're represented by maybe some lobbying groups. I d I don't know. I don't know how it works. But
Was there any resistance from
the sort of the central dry cleaning
facility that was gonna clean the stuff. W was there any resistance to working with you guys?
So
In general with all these facilities.
they have a big fixed cost component, right, which is labor. People ironing, washing clothes all day.
And so they were open to working together with other dry cleaners to
Process more volume.
Right.
But
To your point.
Our work would always be secondary.
So they always want to take care of their own customers.
And then if they had capacity, they would then entertain our items.
And so to start off with, we actually use three or four different cleaners.
And
ultimately as we realize is like that was an operational headache.
And this is where again
maybe call it a break, but we realized there was a
A cleaner in the city.
that did a lot of hotels.
And they had capacity to take.
And so
around again the the one year mark, we started using this facility on Goose Island.
And they became our ultimate supplier.
For ultimately a lot of Chicago has rescaled.
So
In the first like
Twelve months let's say.
When you would get a text
Hey, I'm in locker one or whatever.
Who was picking up the stuff, who was driving the cars and dropping the clothes off of the dry cleaners and
And making sure that you didn't lose clothing and I mean who was doing all that stuff?
So
We it was Drew and I doing a lot of it, but we ended up hiring two people and and these were our third and fourth employees and David came on to work with Drew.
And Ariana helped me on the marketing and sales side.
Drew would be in charge of ops, I would be in charge of sales.
And so the team of the four of us did this work.
We operated seven days a week.
one of the worst decisions we ever made.
But we did it seven days a week.
And Drew and I would always do the routes on the weekends and David would do it on Saturday on on Monday through Friday.
All right, so you've got this um
And now I mean
As you begin to see more traction, did it become easier and easier to get into other buildings?
This is why twelve twenty five Old Town is so, you know, clear in my mind, is that we then could go to any building in Chicago.
And say
We work with 1225 Old Town.
And in real estate, it's so critical you are matching the amenities of the building across the street.
And once we were in 1225 Old Town.
the snowball started to form.
And we ended up adding eight new locations a month.
And then ultimately, guy, we grew to two hundred fifty locations in Chicago over the course of call it three years. And you know, you I go back to this idea of like fifteen percent gross margins, right, for a dry cleaner.
What kind of margins were you guys able to to hit? Twenty to
25% roughly was our IBD margin, if you want to call it that.
And how much money were you paying yourself?
Forty thousand dollars.
So you went from probably making over a hundred grand a year in San Francisco.
To forty grand.
Yeah, I I was making
Almost three hundred thousand dollars.
And I was what, twenty seven?
Wow.
And
Threw it all away to make forty thousand dollars for five years.
And Drew's the same.
So as it was growing and you start to get some significant numbers
You must have also been keeping an eye on competitors that were popping up in other cities, right?
Did that worry you or stress you out at at any point?
It did. And the big gorilla in the room was Washio.
Mm-hmm.
Washo had raised like
eighteen million dollars or something. Yeah, enormous amounts. They had Ashton Kutcher, like just it was the big he was an investor and it was the one that we were terrified of.
And
Again, I'll remember this moment. It was around the year two mark.
They decided to come to Chicago.
As their third market.
And guy, I don't think I slept that month.
And I'll never forget just the paranoia Drew and I had been like we don't have nearly as much money as them.
You know, how are we gonna compete with these guys?
And then I never will also forget feeling as good as I felt one month after they launched.
And we looked at our revenue.
and it had only gone down by two percent.
Mm.
And now is the moment where I was like, Oh my God, it actually does not matter how much money you've raised.
I mean it's it's wild because Wash U doesn't exist anymore.
I don't know the exact story, but it shut down.
in twenty sixteen and then its assets were purchased is what I've what I've seen. So
Clearly something must have happened. Maybe they expanded too quickly. Who knows?
But that was a real threat to your business. I mean that was a potential threat.
It was an incredible threat.
And by the way, you know, they had the funding to go down to a dollar per shirt.
And we didn't have that.
And
all of these customers, users, buildings.
They could have switched.
But they didn't.
They were happy with our service.
And they kept using us.
Yeah. Let's let me ask you about the expansion because um
You're doing well enough in Chicago, so you decide to go to Washington, D C next.
Correct.
And I'm assuming'cause D C is a dry cleaning heavy town.
Yes, and they also had a lot of new construction coming up.
But there are two pieces of data that uh we miss completely.
Yeah.
One is that no building in D C can be higher than the capital statue.
Yep.
And our entire model is built off of density.
And two is that we didn't realise how hard it would be to staff our facilities because you were competing versus versus the government.
for hourly labor.
Our cost for a driver.
was
Sixty percent higher than Chicago.
Wow.
And also
They wouldn't stick around.
we ended up churning through people in DC
Uh
two times the rate that we did Chicago.
So was the D C market profitable?
It was luckily we were incredibly frugal.
But
We never saw the lift off like we did in Chicago.
Alright, so back to back to Chicago. You've got your own
I mean
At a certain point, I think like two and a half
Almost three years in
You guys decide that you you don't outsource this anymore. You actually wanna you wanna control you wanna be vertically integrated. You wanna clean your own clothing with a plant that you own.
And you decide to
Explore this idea.
That's right.
So the big
trick we realize in our business model.
Was that take twelve twenty five all time?
There's two hundred twenty units.
If we lost a customer guy in that building,
Our serviceable addressable market now is 219 people.
And so it was so critical.
that we nailed quality.
Because we couldn't just replace someone.
Right, we kinda had a smaller audience.
And so for us, quality is what really kept me up at night.
And we ended up with our wholesaler and our our supplier.
We end up.
just building this friction where at times, you know, they might they might have a sh a staff shortage.
And so all of a sudden
you know, they're delayed in all of our cleaning by six hours.
Which then means lower quality cleaning.
Which means that we then take the hit on our user base.
And we did the math guide. We realized that
The difference between ninety eight percent retention and
And ninety six percent retention?
Even though it sounds small.
When you compound that every month
It's astronomical.
The difference I think is between having fifty five percent of your customers at the end of two years versus seventy eight.
Well
And so we realized that it was so critical for us to be at ninety-eight percent retention or higher.
Ninety eight percent
It had to be that high.
When we come back in just a moment.
Pressbox guards its customer base by building its own laundry facility.
And then winds up competing with one of the biggest companies in the world.
Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to how I built this.
Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2016, and Vegen and Drew are taking on a massive project.
building their own laundry facility just north of Chicago.
But to do it
They need cash.

So
At this point, we probably should have raised adventure funding. We should have raised something.
Guy our bank account.
I'd get a call every two weeks from our banker because our our bank account would go from positive three hundred thousand.
to negative four hundred thousand.
and the driver of it was payroll.
But I mean, how many employees did you have to pay?
So I think around this
Three year mark?
We were in DC.
And then also Nashville.
And so I wanna say at this point we probably had forty five to fifty employees.
And so we had a a huge transportation team, we had a team that would inventory all the items. At this point we had a marketing team that would set up these events.
We had a sales team.
And when we decided to to in source this
This is where the
The issue with the business model up front became our asset later on.
because this opened us up for debt financing.
And so we were able to buy all this equipment. We bought some of it used, some of it new, but we were able to finance about 80% of our plant using
debt and asset back lending.
And you just needed a warehouse that was relatively inexpensive.
Did you buy the warehouse or did you lease it?
We least it.
And
It was really hard to build this plant and you know
We had to get all these licenses and
Utilities figured out. Uh we even had to get an architect because we're the first dry cleaner that was in this facility.
But once we were up and running.
We ended up realizing that
we could all of a sudden get rid of this middle man.
And so instead of fifty percent of our costs all of a sudden going away.
All we had to do was pay for our own people and rent.
And so again.
you know, our margin where it's typically around
twenty five percent at the bottom line, fifty percent at the top at at the gross margin level.
Both of those went up by ten percentage points.
Even though now these are your employees.
Running the facility.
There are employees.
And this is probably, guy, though, the hardest part is that it's one thing to hire a driver or someone who's to, you know, can sit in front of a lobby at a table.
It's harder to staff a presser.
You know, I thought we would at the time Indeed was out, Craigslist, you know, we'd post these roles and we got no hits.
People literally.
pressing shirts and trousers like you couldn't find people to do to do those jobs. Where would I I didn't know where to go.
And you know, we asked our suppliers if if they would work for us and they would say no.
And then
We finally this light bulb went off.
That we were looking in the wrong place.
You know instead of looking at indeed.
we decided we need to start advertising in Spanish newspapers.
And so
There's a newspaper in Chicago called Oi.
And so all of a sudden
we posted these jobs of this new facility open up in Skoki.
And my phone.
Wouldn't stop rain.
Mm.
And we ended up staffing this entire plant.
in two or three months with
Incredible people.
All through the Spanish newspaper Oi.
Alright, so now you've got your own facility.
A bunch of new employees and
Tell me a little bit about how you were
I mean just growing. Was it organic or did you I mean, were you constantly'cause now you've got Washio and other potential competitors coming in.
I mean when you would go into a building, for example, in Chicago or even in Washington D C
Presumably.

You know, timing plays such a huge role in everything.
But one thing that we got right was that we were on the front end of not just the amenity war.
but also the new construction development in all these major cities.
But I think the year was 2016, and I believe there were 55 new buildings coming up in Chicago.
And guy, I think we were in 53 of the 55.
And it was because we just we just skipped the game overall. We didn't pitch any product manager, we didn't go to any of their customers, we talked to the owners.
And we said hey, we're in three of your buildings.
We notice you're building this other building.
Can we just go ahead and spec these lockers into your architectural drawings now?
And then the best part was
As we got into these new construction buildings in Chicago, DC, Nash was our third market.
Not just did we get these blockers in a great location
Where they'd be highly visible.
We ended up be able to
to create behavior instead of change behavior. So someone would move into their building.
And as they walk into their apartment, we'd have a gift box.
Uh this cost us like seven dollars.
But it'll be a bag.
A water bottle.
a handwritten note and a flyer with our pricing.
Those four things.
And we would drop off two hundred of these at every one of our new buildings.
And we slowly realized that we would track this KPI called revenue per unit.
and revenue per unit was twice as high at a new construction building.
versus an existing building.
Because people move in and it's part of the welcome package and they're like, Great, let me set this up while I'm setting up my phone or my internet, or Exactly, and we realize that.
People are just really reluctant to change behavior.
So if you can find them during these moments of change.
Then you get them they're set in their ways. Yeah. And then Washo can come to them, enemies become like, No, I'm good. I'm kind of into my habit. I'm gonna use press box.
All right.
Twenty I think around twenty sixteen.
You've got another
fire to put out or maybe fi or fire to battle, which is um Procter Gamble.
Right, one of the biggest multinationals in the world.
They launched their own version of this, a competitor.
Called Tide Spin.
And I guess and they launched in Chicago.
And so tell me about
You how you reacted, uh at least in your mind when you first heard about
Protra and gamble coming into the space.
So luckily we were used to competition. And as tides been started to get going, we kind of
We saw them coming, but it wasn't like we had a different level of fear.
It was like all right, same old, same old. Tide's been follow the wash in model, they start with pickup and drop off.
And around the year mark, I think for them, they realized that they were not going to make money off of this.
Because again, the uneconomics just don't work.
Where if you're just doing four transactions per hour for a driver
And you then take up into account this fifty percent gross margin guy, you're taking home like five dollars.
And funny enough, their order sizes were bigger. I think for that model
generally have like eighty dollars per order instead of like forty dollars for us.
But still it was really hard to make money.
And
The good part guy at this point for our journey.
was we had two hundred fifty buildings in Chicago.
And so we'd go to one building.
We'd pick up four orders.
Drop off six.
Then we drive.
Half a block down the road.
and pick up three orders and drop off five.
Then we take a left turn, do that all over again.
We could do twenty six transactions per hour.
where all of our competitors are doing four.
And so it's the same cost where everyone has to send a driver on the road.
And by the way, because it's twenty four seven.
We got our drivers on the road at like five AM.
And they were done with their routes.
at nine a.m.
And what was the average cost per order?
So the average cost per order for us was around twenty six dollars.
What I'm curious about was
You would think that Tide
the you know, the P and G with their tide branding would just switch to your model, would just say, All right, this doesn't work
We need lockers like Pressbox has.
And that's exactly what they did.
And so they ended up realizing that pickup and drop off was not the path and then they went down the locker path.
And
For about three to six months, they competed with us head to head.
They would what would they do? They would go and try to get into the same buildings you were in?
they get into the same buildings, they would try to pitch the new construction.
And
every time we would win because
We would have this track record.
We've also oftentimes work with these developers and owners.
And
If it was an existing building, it's like why would I take out these lockers and put your lockers in? Like
That's the same thing and
Again, Pressbox has done a great job.
So
I'm not hearing complaints of why would I create my own headache?
So I'm wondering now, I mean, by the way, you have you've got you've expanded to Nashville, your D C Nashville, Chicago, anywhere else yet?
Yeah, so two thousand sixteen we were in Philly
And I believe we were just getting going on Dallas.
And what was exciting is around that two thousand sixteen mark.

Partly why we went to DC is that four of our developers in Chicago said, Hey, we're gonna go build in DC, do you wanna come with us?
And then those same developers did that in Denver.
And this became our expansion plan is that we kind of just followed our customers. And then that would always lower
how much we need to get in revenue for us to break even because we would have a head start versus any competition. And this is still
Without any
outside capital, right? You're doing this all with through cash flow. So you must have been thinking this is gonna be a national brand. We're gonna expand this all over the country. That's our goal.
No, even back then, we were just focused on execution. I mean we
We had enough confidence that DC was going well.
But still it was like death by a thousand cuts. Like
It was just barely starting to stay afloat.
And so we just had this tension throughout our company's history of like grow.
but also be paranoid about quality.
And so yeah, there are probably some inklings of like, you know, we could be a national company.
But it didn't feel like it.
And did it feel like there was gonna be one winner? Like w there was the Uber Lift wars, right, going on at that time.
Did you feel like one of these companies is gonna is ultimately gonna win, or were you not even focused on that because you didn't see yourself competing with those other competitors?
Our view.
Was that if we just capture three percent market share.
We're gonna be millionaires.
And so we didn't view this as a winner take all market, because again,
We could only sell into high rises.
And so if you're in some small building in, you know, Marina and S F or
Bucktown in Chicago or you know.
Brooklyn and New York, we can't serve you.
And so our view is that we knew exactly who our product was for, which was these 25 to 45 year olds and high rises.
And if we could just capture that across the country, that would be our model.
And you only needed what percentage of those residents to use your service?
Ten percent.
To break even.
Well.
So the the numbers were on your side.
The numbers were on our side, and it was because
We were so frugal. We we we didn't have any money to spend to make
any of the upfront costs like
We would have loved to have invested more upfront.
to make the lockers and get QR codes and
to do all this signage, but we didn't have the money.
Did you hire a PR firm?
Never.
Never.
So all of the I mean'cause there there were
Every time you'd go to a new city there were articles right written about and and so all this was just
Uh media.
Or immediate.
All right, so it's twenty seventeen and Procter Gamble is really going head to head.
trying to get into the same buildings you guys are in, at least in Chicago.
And I'm wondering, and as you're sort of expanding, you're gonna move into Philadelphia and you know, you're in D C and Nashville
I'm wondering why you didn't
The two of you, you and Drew didn't at that point say, All right, we have got to do a
We've got to go out and raise money'cause now
You're profitable.
Right? You've got a nice business going. You've got I mean, you you could really raise money on pretty good terms at that point.
So why didn't you
Or did you?
Start to explore this.
So I think
Two things. One, I think we were still, you know, of a view of like
These guys were never
They were never there for us. You had a chip on your shoulder. We had a huge chip on our shoulder. You know, we we tried to be vulnerable and expose ourselves and let people invest and
They all said no. And so we had a huge tip on our shoulder.
And probably too much of a chip on our shoulder because at that point
Yeah, well
We we talked about we have a few regrets, but one of them is that we should have raised.
Because at that point
Like my homepage for our computer was my bank account.
And
I only now realize how unhealthy that was.
Because we were so focused.
in our business that we never actually got time to spot.
On our business.
And so this was a this was a huge issue and it was a it was an issue that we never fixed, but
It was around that two thousand seventeen mark where we started to realize also like
Who what are we gonna do with this thing?
Right, because as you know, we were not looking at this as like we were passionate about dry cleaning.
You know, one of the first things we did, guy, in that twelve page deck early on, that investment deck.
One of the biggest issues was
Who are you gonna sell this to?
And we knew you could never IPO it.
you would not really be able to sell the private equity,'cause we had come from that world.
And so it was always quite logical that we would
want to get a strategic buyer.
And we actually viewed it as a really good sign.
that PG was doing work here.
And so we were always just actually vi
Proactive.
about I always kept our competitors close.
And it was, you know, we'd always be guards up, not tell them everything, but we would always have a relationship.
And so around 2017, Mark, we actually got to know the Tide Spin team.
And we just said hey, what are you guys doing here?
Like I remember they actually wanted to come to our plant and Drew said, Yeah, come and I was like, absolutely no way you're coming in.
Uh
But we were we wanted to make sure we knew all of our competitors because either we were gonna buy them or they would buy us.
Yeah.
And so because we were just up front about that.
Whenever there was a p conversation, we would be there.
And we'd say, Yeah, we'll make the time for this, let's make it happen.
Because
From their end, guy, they were they were thinking through, all right.
They're at 52% market share of tide.
And they can't push that much further.
And so they've always organically had this journey where if they can't provide the goods for laundry, can they just do your laundry?
And so they were more curious to meet with us because of how we built Pressbox.
And then guy we ultimately around 2017
Realize like hey
We will have no negotiating power with with PG.
If we don't have anything else on the table.
And so this is when we did then start having some conversations for additional funding.
So you started to go around and now you've got some private equity firms who are interested in raising.
you guys were trying to raise about, I think five million dollars.
That's correct.
And this is where multiple things happen at the same time, but we then ultimately got some some term sheets.
And for PG, they started offering capital.
Two owners.
to switch from press box to tide spin.
Mm.
And how much were they offering?
You know, we don't even know the ultimate numbers, but I think it was anywhere between 10 to$25,000.
They were gonna pay these buildings ten grand to
Bring on the tide blockers.
Yep, and switch from us.
Yeah. And it makes a ton of sense because from them, their math they're doing is again builder by. Do we should we just give Tide Spin more money?
Or should we buy is there's something special here?
And ultimately
All of our partners except for one.
Said no thanks.
Okay.
And that meant
an incredible amount to us and still I get emotional thinking about it because
Because we had this trust.
that was embedded with all these partners that had been compounding over five or six years.
So
while you're doing that you get a
From what I've read, you get an offer from P and G.
They basically say all right.
We want to acquire you, but I think their initial offer was like a lowball offer.
Yeah, we
We ended up with a couple term sheets for funding.
And P and G had expressed interest.
And they lowballed us.
I think a couple of times and
I remember the third time Drew
was a little bit fired up and upset.
And I think within twenty minutes of the response
had redacted a term sheet.
and uh sent it back to them and said, We're gonna go ahead and sign this term sheet.
We look forward to competing head to head.
And I'll never forget.
That was next to my wife.
And she's like
Don't you just want to talk about this maybe for a second?
Yeah.
And she was right,'cause it was life it would have been life changing money.
But what I value so much about Drew is how principled he was, about how how we had built something of value.
And
Yeah, maybe we should have taken longer than twenty minutes to respond to it, but we
We didn't.
And
I think a few hours later.
P and G
They said, Give us twenty four hours and and we'll come back with something.
And
And we ultimately decided to sell.
And you and Drew would go work for
for P and G.
We'd go work for P and G
And they would rebrand press boxetide cleaners.
Uh
It was a short debate about seven minutes of which brand name was taught was stronger. But
Tide one.
And
the tide spin team would work for us and we would end up running
the urban division of tide cleaners.
in which they wanted our model to go national.
Well.
From every and I mean it sounds like
from virtually any perspective it made sense because
They were aggressive and they had certainly had the money.
to pour into this if they really wanted to go after this business.
Um
You saw that there were opportunities, but there were also
Potential pitfalls.
And so
Partnering with
The big one of the biggest.
multinationals in the world.
Uh would
Enable you guys to really super scale this business too.
A hundred percent. And we know we wanted a home.
Right. I think what kept us up at night, guy, was
It was a night in Nashville, it was raining, and I was walking to an event.
to sell dry cleaning. And I remember realizing
I don't want to do this when I'm forty five years old.
Like, we need to find a home for this, and it doesn't have to be now, but there has to be some longer vision here. Why did you say that to yourself? What was it about?
What were you feeling that gave you that
that impetus to say I don't want to be doing this at forty five.
You at this point
We had been working for about
One thousand days in a row.
And I'm not joking, like we
We worked seven days a week.
We were open twenty four seven.
I had missed friends' weddings. I stopped getting invited to friends' birthday parties because that would just be no show.
Mm.
And this path of us building just took a huge toll on our life.
You know, every night my wife would come home and on the weekends and she was a resident in med school and and you had no kids yet, right? No kids, no kids, and she'd say, Hey let's go out on Saturday night.
And like I wanna see my friends and I'd be like I
I am so exhausted.
But I
Can't do that.
And there was just such a toll that had taken on us from bootstrapping this.
that we just wanted to make sure that this wasn't our permanent state.
You were burned out.
Incredibly.
Yeah.
I made forty thousand dollars.
You know, I had friends in private equity who were at this point making partner.
and making you know a million dollars plus per year.
Uh I remember one point calling my dad and saying, Hey Dad, when this doesn't work out
If this doesn't work out.
Can I borrow some money so I can start again?
Like not a business, but to start life again.
Uh
My wife and on our first trip.
We
We were she was a resident, I was this dry cleaner.
We wanted to a trip and so we went to Kansas City.
Because it was where we could find spirit airlines flights.
And we found a hotel on like
some website and like the all together the trip cost us five hundred dollars.
That was our life.
And
I just didn't know what the end state would be and we were incredibly burned out.
So the deal with Tide was wasn't just obviously wouldn't just change your life.
financially, but it was a real it was a lifeline.
Yeah, like I think we would have we would have probably, you know, found another purchaser, another dry cleaner to sell to.
But
They never would have matched the terms or the capital available.
And it was an incredible
alignment that led us to that opportunity.
How long because it you were required in July of twenty eighteen. So when you
Now
transition to becoming a PG and play. How long did you stay?
With the company.
We stayed for two years and in fact they wanted me to stay longer and guy I had a great experience.
Like I we not just did we have capital.
But Drew and I could shine.
you know, I could finally for the first time I made a PowerPoint slide again.
And
You know, all of our employees who were making
fifteen, twenty, twenty five dollars an hour because we didn't have more capital.
All of a sudden they gotta pay raise.
Uh
We
made some like actual salary. We didn't make a lot, but we had like a real salary where like I could, you know, pay rent not from savings. Yeah.
Yeah, so we had this this two year experience at our P and G it was great.
And finally, like our earnout had ended.
And
Around then.
There was also this thing called Covid.
And
We got guy our last earnout check.
March of twenty twenty.
And so the world was falling apart.
Our business.
Right, you could think about dry cut volumes, our business had had hit a wall and was starting to see some real hit in terms of what people were wearing.
And I was somehow in this sanctuary in Chicago.
with capital and with free time.
And it was a wild world to be in.
Yeah.
But I mean uh I guess after
uh this time or fr around this time, you you took some time off, like quite a few months off
just to take a break from from all that. Um
And then you eventually kinda jumped back into things. Um, you founded a a venture firm.
called the 81 Collection. And I guess you're focusing on something pretty specific, which is investing in companies like Pressbox. Basically
like boring industries, right? Companies that typically don't get a lot of attention from VCs, right?
Yep.
We did some math on this recently, guy, and
There's about three thousand four hundred early stage or early investing firms. Mm-hmm.
and about 90% focus on software.
Yeah.
leaving only 10 to 20% to fund things that are quite critical to our society.
And even in that group, half are not even active anymore.
Mm-hmm.
And I noticed that
Everyone in this technology world was continuing to look for the same thing.
They were all looking for the next asset light, employee like cloud based unicorn.
And then I look back at my own experience guy and I'm like, wait.
We built the opposite.
You know, we built this plant up in Skokie.
We ended up having these assets all across the walls of America bolted into the walls of all these buildings.
And we also built a good company, but in a completely different way.
You know, a lot of our employees who originally started making fifteen, twenty
Dollars an hour.
As the business grew.
They started making fifty K a year, seventy five K a year.
and having gone to their weddings and seeing them buy homes and in many cases even start their own businesses.
We move people from lower class into middle class.
Yeah.
And I realized
This is a giant hole in our economy.
You know, we're in the greatest economic period in global history.
But the profits are going to ten thousand people?
And so that was the inception of the 81 collection.
Yeah, I mean, when I think of like boring businesses or businesses that are unsexy, like I think about in in high school there was a
Uh there's a brother and sister in their family owned a mortuary.
And they were like the richest kids in town.
It's a mortuary, but it's a I think funeral homes are profitable businesses. Mortuaries are profitable. Like right? Am I am I right about that?
We just recently did an investment in pet cremation.
And we were blown away.
eighty percent EBITDA margins. Wow. And I have to imagine there's a similar profile with the end of life space.
Yeah.
So now you're looking at these s sort sort of quote unquote boring businesses, right? Like
What are some other I mean, I think of like car washes or laundromats or like
Are you are you looking at industries, you're looking at specific businesses? Like how do you evaluate
Where you want to deploy your capital.
You know, we've realized
These opportunities are everywhere.
You know, from dentistry.
You know, we looked at re something recently in property tax appeals.
We've looked at pediatric services. Like if there's all of these
industries that are
Frankly, they're oversubscribed from private equity and buyouts, but they're completely under subscribed from technology and innovation and
When was the last time you went to a doctor's office and it was newer? Or you know, a mortician and it was newer.
They're integral.
But they're forty years behind best practices.
And so if we think about some of the stuff that's going on right now
It's important that we lift
These industries which then will lift these economies.
Yeah.
Um, Vijan, when you think about the the journey you took in and the outcome
How much of of of it do you attribute to the work you put on the grind and how much do you think had to do with luck and timing?
I think luck plays a huge role in our life and
Time and luck played a huge influence.
And not just the exit timing, but
the multi-family wave, the new construction wave.
And so I think there were a lot of forces that we benefited from.
I used to think eighty percent of it was hard work, smarts.
Great.
I now think eighty percent of it was luck.
That's Vijin Patel, co-founder of Pressbox, now known as Tide Cleaners.
Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And also, if you're interested in insights, ideas, and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, please sign up for my newsletter at guyroz.com or on Substack.
This episode was produced by Alex Chung with music composed by Ramtin Arabli.
It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Olivia Rockman.
Our engineers were Patrick Murray and Maggie Luthard.
Our production staff also includes Casey Herman, Chris Massini, Sam Paulson, Carrie Thompson, Catherine Seifer, Nor Gill, Ramel Wood, Andrea Bruce, and Elaine Coates.
I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to how I built this.