Originally posted – Dec 18, 2012
Scott Moses had a leg up on his competition long before he entered the coin laundry business almost three years ago.
As an economics major at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania, Moses landed a position in the banking industry after school and quickly became a branch manager.
“One big advantage the banking business gave me was a real sense of business,” Moses explained. “I learned a lot from pouring over other people’s financial statements and cash flow reports. It was very helpful. After three years, I could tell if a certain business was a little heavy in a particular area or perhaps a little light in another area.”
After three years, he was also starting to burn out on the banking business and looking for a change of scenery. So, 16 years ago at the age of 24, Moses bought a furniture store in Port Allegany, Pa.
“The women who owned it before me was a customer of mine,” he noted. “She said she had lived inside that store for 40 years of her life and was ready to get out of the business. I had all of her financial statements, so I said, ‘Why don’t you hire me to come down there and run that place, and you can retire to your condo on the North Carolina coast.’ Then, she replied, ‘I’ll do you one better – I’ll sell you the joint.'”
About a month later, Moses quit his bank job and was the proud new owner of a 14,000-square-foot furniture store.
“It’s been tough the last five years, but it’s provided my family and me a lifestyle we would never have lived had I remained working in the banking business,” he said.
In 2010, now with several years of business ownership on top of his previous banking experience, Moses was looking to branch out and diversify – and a self-service laundry seemed like the ideal investment to compliment his furniture store.
“We already owned the furniture store, which is a horrendous amount of work,” he said. “We were looking for something that would create fewer headaches – something that didn’t require assembling furniture or have a great deal of staff turnover like we have with your delivery people.”
The second deciding factor was that, at the time, there were no other laundromats in Port Allegany.
And the icing on the cake was the fact that Scott and his wife, Karen, had purchased a vacant, 6,500-square-foot commercial building in the city’s downtown area that they felt was perfect for a coin laundry.
“If you drive through small towns, you’ll see a lot of vacant buildings,” Moses said. “This building fit our price range and was in the best repair of any building available. Plus, it’s all ground floor, with great access.”
The building had been the headquarters for an oil and gas company. As a result, it featured a lot of open warehouse space and several loading docks along the side of the structure, which is where Moses conveniently located his new laundry’s entranceway.
In addition, Moses pointed out that the building in located on perhaps the most traveled and visible corner through the community, thanks in part to a bustling Sheetz convenience store just across the street.
Enlisting the help of a contractor he had used for years on other construction and renovation projects, Moses recalled that the retrofit process went very smoothly.
“I have a saying I use at the furniture store all the time: presentation is nine-tenths of the sale,” he said. “So, I was very picky, but the contractors made it very easy, and the community was very supportive.”
In March of 2010 – about 90 days and $90,000 later – Moses opened the new Sud City Depot. The laundry takes up approximately 1,100 square feet of the total building, with a 24-hour fitness center renting a portion of the remaining space.
The laundry was designed with a café-style concept in mind, featuring a modern, comfortable look and feel. The store boasts stylish apple wood flooring, leather furniture, a coffee counter, internet access, a flat-screen television, a beverage cooler, air conditioning and even a candy counter.
Even at only 1,100 square feet, Sud City Depot may initially seem a little light on laundry equipment – with six toploaders, two 40-pound frontloaders and eight dryer pockets.
“They tried to sell me more equipment,” Moses laughed. “And I definitely have the space for more equipment. But I’m a strange person in that I don’t borrow money. If I don’t have the money, I don’t buy it. So, I knew my limit, and I wasn’t going to spend any more than that. Of course, I suppose I could add more machines at some point, if the need arose.”
Over the last few years, two other laundromats have opened up in the small town of about 2,200 people. However, Moses continues to set his business apart and spread the word to his community.
“We have professionally designed signage,” he explained. “And we have a very visible corner, so if you look right and left when you’re coming out of the convenience store parking lot, you have to see our sign.
“We also sponsor a lot of local charities and area events. Plus, we run regular ads in the local newspaper.”
Moses said that Sud City Depot – which is open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily – caters strongly to dual-income families that are looking to save time on their laundry chores, maybe even more so than money.
“We really try to make it a little nicer, a little fancier,” said Moses, whose store is fully attended, with one full-time attendant and a part-time employee on staff. “We get a lot of professional people in here. For example, I was here when one of the teachers in our school district came in and did literally 12 loads of laundry because she had been coaching for the last three or four months and got behind. She could have done it all at home, but she didn’t have the time.
“Our place is immaculately clean. It doesn’t carry the stigma that some laundromats may.”
Although the furniture store still provides Moses with his primary income, he also supplements his self-service laundry revenue with a growing wash-dry-fold business, a drop-off drycleaning service and even a few commercial accounts, including the county jail.
The continued and growing success of Sud City Depot is certainly a testament to the old adage that big things can come in small packages.
“It’s very nice inside here,” Moses said. “It’s not very big, but it’s trendy looking. The concept is that doing laundry at a laundromat doesn’t have to be miserable. We wanted to make it comfortable and make it somewhere customers would want to go – and eliminate the ‘laundromat’ stereotype.”
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