Brainstorm: Building a coin-op laundry route empire

[squiffy]

One very interesting possibility may be that you have found a sweetspot. It's possible this is a great profit opportunity for you, but that it's small potatoes for CoinMach so that they don't provide good service.

In other words, they may be paying some employee to manage a huge number of routes. And he may be rationally focusing 95% of his effort on large contracts, where most of his profit comes in.

And if a large apt. owner demanded new machines, coin mach might provide new machines rather than lose the contract.

Here, they may believe that it's not worth it to buy new machines since it will cut into their profits.

But be careful. You may be wrong about many of your numbers. Theory and reality are two different things.

It's also possible that you will be in the red for a very long time due to high purchase costs and repair costs for the machines.

It may be that your breakeven time is 3 years before you even start to see any real profit. And it may be that the machines start to break down a lot from misuse.

In which case, you will be in the same position as CoinMach, you have to hold onto the old crappy machines for a long time to make a profit.

But anyway. Keep us posted on your progress.

It could be that this is a situation analogous to high priced stocks and low priced stocks. Sometimes large fund managers with Billions to invest cannot take advantage of a stock with low trading volume and a low price, because their purchases would drive up the price very high and they really couldn't invest enough to make it worth their while.

So if this 12 machine operation is profitable for you, but not for CoinMach, then you may have found a nice niche and might be able to poach other small operations from CoinMach by providing new machines and better service.

But beware. There may be some hidden problems you didn't anticipate. And your numbers may be very very unrealisitic.

I still think you are way underestimating your costs and way overestimating your profits.

If it's profitable for you to install new machines, why wouldn't it be profitable for CoinMach?