By Ashton Jackson & Valentina Duarte

On a mild winter day in Arizona, 38-year-old Cami’s laundromat can teem with customers loading their clothes into washers and dryers, and employees working on laundry deliveries.

For Cami, running the business as her only job is a welcome change of pace, she says. She worked almost full-time as a nurse at a hospital while simultaneously running the laundromat from October 2020 to April 2023, when she quit nursing. (Cami requested to be identified by her nickname only, due to security concerns over her cash-heavy business.)

“Now, I’m only working maybe five or six hours a week [running the laundromat],” says Cami. “But I also am hesitant in telling people that, because that’s not how it was five years ago, four or three years ago. I was working a lot more hours trying to grow this business.”

In that time, she hired employees — the laundromat employs six people, including one part-time worker — so she can “focus more on growing the business and not working in the business,” she says. Cami also spends about 10 hours per week creating and posting videos on social media about her business and the experience of running it, she notes.

Cami’s laundromat brought in roughly $475,000 in revenue last year, plus nearly $30,000 in rent from a salon that operates next door, according to documents reviewed. That included about $119,000 in profits — some of which went back into the business, and $66,000 of which became Cami’s salary, she says.

She also made about $22,000 from six months of social media posting in 2024, and is on track for a significant bump — “around $200,000” — in 2025, she says. And though she misses the camaraderie of the hospital, she enjoys the work-life balance and freedom she’s experienced with business ownership, she says.

“This is my first time where I’m able to be home for all the holidays, have every weekend off,” says Cami. “I never have to go to a boss or a manager to be able to take off on a random trip home or anything like that. So my freedom of time has been completely changed.”

Selling her home to buy her business

After 13 years of working as a nurse, primarily in the bone marrow transplant unit of a large hospital, Cami was ready for a change, she says. She just didn’t want to re-enroll in school to do so. “And so I knew, really my only way out of working would be to own a business,” she says.

She looked into a couple ventures, including renting out storage units and buying a mobile home park. Then she saw a listing for the laundromat on bizbuysell.com, a marketplace for buying and selling small business.

A friend referred Cami to his uncle, who owned two laundromat locations himself, she says. “He looked at the numbers with me, and he said something that I will never forget. He said, ‘You know, if I could go back in time ... I would never go to college. I would never get my master’s degree,’” says Cami. “He’s like, ‘All I would do is buy laundromats, because laundromats scream money.’”

Cami planned to buy a business for about a year before actually making a purchase, she says, and selling her house to help fund the expense was part of that plan. She sold her house for $310,000 in April 2020 and moved into a rental home, she says.

Because her mortgage wasn’t fully paid off, she received about $150,000 in equity from the transaction to put toward the $300,000 laundromat, she says. She took another $50,000 from her savings to make a $200,000 down payment on the laundromat in October 2020, she says.

“We seller-financed the remaining $100,000 with a 6% interest rate over the next two years,” says Cami, adding that she paid the loan off in about a year and a half. ”[Selling my house] wasn’t very scary. I was more excited about owning a business rather than owning a home.”

The laundromat had already been functioning for over 20 years and was “cash flowing,” says Cami. She put $20,000 toward renovations like new lighting, flooring and fresh paint to make it feel more “homey,” she says. She’s currently paying off two loans for washing machine purchases and two loans for vehicles for her laundromat’s pickup and delivery services, totaling “about $4,900 a month” in payments, she says.

As she ran the laundromat, she gradually decreased her hours per week at the hospital. She bought a new house in April 2023, she says.

The lucrativeness of laundry

At Cami’s laundromat, machine prices range from dryers that cost 25 cents per seven minutes to 80-pound washers that cost $12 per load. Laundry pickup and delivery prices vary depending on the job, too.

Cami didn’t have any prior leadership or business ownership experience, which was “the biggest learning curve,” she says. She says she listens to business podcasts, reads books and tries to attend “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’s learned, she says: Make money and use it to follow your passions outside your job, rather than pursuing a career around your passions. In her case, her passions are time with her loved ones and control over her schedule, she says: “My days are a lot smoother [that way].”

The average laundromat can generate cash flow between $15,000 and $300,000 per year, and can range in market value from $50,000 to more than $1 million, according to The Laundry Association. Cami estimates that she could potentially retire in about six or seven years, or maintain ownership and hire someone else to run the business.

She could also acquire a second location — buying someone else’s laundromat or starting from scratch — grow it and eventually sell it for a profit, she says.

“I see it as this fun game that I like playing,” says Cami. “I love the hustle of trying to learn more so I can scale it bigger and make it grow.”