By Sara Belcher

Cami, who goes by @laundromatgirl on TikTok, left nursing after 10 years to run a laundromat

She's found that she makes three times as much as she did when she was a nurse and has been sharing how financially lucrative it's been for her on TikTok

With more than 400,000 followers on TikTok alone, she's also making significant money from her social media and from selling courses

One woman found trading in her scrubs for dryer sheets to be much more financially lucrative.

Cami, who runs the TikTok account @laundromatgirl, left her career as a nurse to run a laundromat — and as a result, she’s making three times more money a year.

“It's not that I hate nursing or anything like that. I think I was just ready for a new track, like that was it. I just was looking for something different that I could do,” Cami, 37, explains. Before purchasing the laundromat she runs, she was an RN in the oncology wing of her hospital, working specifically on bone marrow transplants.

“I had this really good friend and she was going into nursing, and so I thought, okay, I'll do it with you — like, there was no passion behind it,” Cami admits, noting she started completing her nursing pre-requisites in high school. “There was no dream story. It was just like, ‘Oh, a nursing job is a good job for a girl.’"

While working as a nurse, Cami says she was making $41.50 an hour, typically keeping a schedule where she only worked three days a week. Though the money was good and she found the work fulfilling, she notes that it was the COVID-19 pandemic in particular that wore on her and sent her looking for a change of pace.

“I think I just got burnt out. 2020 was hard on nurses,” she says.

Feeling “bugged by healthcare,” she began looking for something new. Cami says she was determined not to go back to school and says she knew the “only route out of healthcare was to own my own business.” But instead of building one from the ground up — a route she knew would come with a plethora of risks — she opted to purchase one that was already established.

“I just wanted a very simple business that I felt like I could run,” she says, admitting she’d never owned a business before but was researching the best options for her skill set. “Originally I was looking at mobile home parks a lot... I was even under escrow at one point for a mobile home park. Luckily it didn't work out.”

Cami also considered storage units as a possible option, but when she noticed a laundromat for sale, she decided to tour it.

“I had never even walked into a laundromat at that point,” she admits. “I just went and looked at it that night, and I just remember walking into the laundromat that first time and just going, ‘I can do this.’ It just felt good to me walking in. Probably within two days after that, I put in an offer.”

30 days later the laundromat was hers. The business cost $300,000, she says, and she was able to pay two-thirds of that upfront by selling her house. Through seller financing, the final $100,000 was a loan from the original owner, which Cami paid off over the course of two years. Though few experts would recommend selling your home to purchase a business, it’s more than paid off for Cami, who notes that with her current income, she was able to upgrade to a more spacious home after renting for a couple of years while she built her business.

“When I first bought it, I was just like a deer in headlights. I had no experience,” Cami admits. “I also didn't know anyone personally that owned a laundromat. So I was by myself the entire time, just really kind of winging it — and I definitely made some mistakes in the beginning.”

About six months into her venture as a laundromat owner, Cami began offering a wash-and-dry pickup and delivery service, which she says required hours of work to establish. As she fell into the groove at the laundromat, she also maintained her nursing job, not quite ready to put all her eggs in this new basket.

“I would say probably one full year after starting my pickup and delivery, I was at the laundromat probably four to five times a week,” Cami explains. “I would come in after working a shift at the hospital to help fold laundry to process orders.”

Now, though, she says she only spends between 10 and 15 hours a week working at her laundromat. She has anywhere from three to seven employees putting in full-time hours at the business, depending on the seasonal demands, which makes running it that much smoother.

It’s not just the laundromat that has netted Cami the extra cash — her social media following plays an important role. She notes that it’s important to her she doesn’t include the name or even the state her laundromat is located in for privacy reasons. While most business owners see social media as a way to promote their specific business, Cami uses it as a way to promote her journey, inspired by another laundromat owner who shared his lucrative social media earnings with her at a conference.

“He said that he was making more money from his social media page than he was from his laundromat,” she shares. “But I'm like, okay, if I'm gonna do this, I don't want weirdos coming into my laundromat and robbing us. Like, I also have a team of women too that I have to protect. I don't want to put them in danger.”

Even with the anonymity of her page, going online only by the name “the laundromat girl,” Cami says that she brings in anywhere from $3,000 to $4,000 a month in income from her views — and then she also gets the occasional brand deal on top of that.

“My biggest reason for doing it was just to get paid by TikTok,” she admits while noting that her specific niche (laundromat owners) is one that doesn’t have a lot of competition online.

“I saw my TikTok videos as a journal of my business, and I kind of liked that idea that I could look back on these videos and see how I progress as a business owner,” she says.

Cami now maintains more than 400,000 followers on her TikTok page alone — and her transparency as to her journey to earn the money she flashes in her videos has inspired a lot of feedback from her followers, many asking how they can also get started.

This, Cami says, was just another business opportunity for her to pursue. She now has links on her page to courses detailing how to own and run a laundromat, with a second tailored to a wash-and-dry pickup service. In February alone, she says these courses alone brought in $26,000.

“I think my followers just see me as like, oh, [if] she can do it. I can do it. Which is great — that's what I want people to feel is that trust [in] me,” Cami says. “I'm no one special. The only difference between me and them is that I did it.”

This laundry empire she’s built was done entirely on her own; Cami is currently single — she doesn’t have a partner carrying the load with her, and she also notes that she does not have any children to take care of either. The journey to get to where she is has been a long one, and she says that while purchasing the laundromat was ultimately meant as her way to leave nursing behind, it wasn’t a career move she made lightly.

“I had so many great experiences as a nurse, especially being in oncology. A little oncology unit is such a special place in the hospital that I never took for granted,” she says. “I feel like I learned so many life lessons being there, and I'm so grateful for the time that I was a nurse.”

The change also didn’t happen overnight. Cami took three years to fully transition into a full-time laundromat owner, “titrating” her shifts down to part-time, then once every other week. She didn’t say goodbye to her job as a nurse until 2023.

“I really eased into the idea because ... when I quit, it was really scary. I cried on my drive home from the hospital. It was so sad,” Cami says, tearing up as she recounts this. “I didn't take quitting my job as a nurse lightly. It was a very big deal for me.”

Though the transition was tough emotionally, taking the leap opened so many doors for Cami — and she can reflect on it all by looking through her TikTok posts.

“I feel like my journey, [as] cheesy as that sounds… I started with one idea and it's completely evolved to something different.”