Notifications

We have grown to, as of this date, have 1,350 customers, a 4% monthly growth rate, and recognition as the primary, recognized and trusted pickup and delivery laundry service in the North Bay. We have achieved this in only slightly over four years.

Far more importantly, during this time we have had a chance to get to know many, if not most, of our customers personally. Our drivers have met, our founders have spoken with, and our senior production team has come to know and care for the personal priorities, as well as the laundry preferences, of most of our customers. In short, we have come to care about each of you.

For large commercial customers, everything will remain the same, as we have a separate, special team for you. The following applies only to our residential customers.

Our expectation and objective was to continue to grow much more beyond this level.

Unfortunately, we have had one major challenge. We have not been able to successfully expand our production team to reliably meet our commitment to you of near perfect attention to detail with near perfect consistency.

Moreover, we have also not been able to expand our production team with team members that can provide reliable attention to detail at an industry standard rate of speed.

With an industry appropriate production speed, we would be a profitable business with industry appropriate net margins and appropriate profit.

But, because of the slow speed of most of our production team, we have remained a business that loses money. We have achieved a gross annual revenue that would be the envy of most pick up and delivery laundry services after only four years in operation. Yet, we have been losing a very significant amount of money, requiring ongoing investment from our founders to keep the business alive.

Perhaps this fatal flaw and enormous problem with our production team’s rate of speed has been caused by our founders’ picking two different operations managers over four years and delegating the hiring of our production team to them. Given that our founders’ carefully screened and hand selected our driving team, not doing the same with our production team was clearly a mistake. And, it is a difficult to recover from mistake.

Very, very, importantly, we should emphasize that the core small production team with which we started can complete laundry at a faster than industry standard rate, with great attention to detail, never making any mistake since we launched, and probably in the decade during which they were doing drop off laundry service before they joined us to launch this business.

You might be able to imagine that none of this has been helpful to minimizing stress and maximizing the health and well-being of our founders, our General Manager (who is one of the just mentioned senior production team members), and our senior driving team members.

This has led to a hard to imagine decision, especially since business psychology tends to involve the objective of growth. Perhaps we should have made this decision a year ago. But, one of our two founders (namely, the husband who has had a tendency to barrel through things without pulling back from his objectives to get perspective) could not imagine solving for this problem in the way we are about to explain.

We must – for now – find a way to actually scale back and reduce our customer base to a level that can be managed by a smaller number of our most high-quality production team members and our most senior and trusted drivers.

It is better to be around for the long-term as a profitable, small business serving a smaller number of customers than alternative solutions. We believe the common expression applies here. Sometimes, one needs to fall back, regroup, and live to fight another day. Only, in this case, we are talking about the ability to move forward serving customers.

In the future, this might change and we might resume our focus on growth again. If and when we do, we will be able to let you know through our messaging system and perhaps hope that those we have lost in this process might return.

For now, we must figure out how to reduce our customer base, and at the same time continue to attract enough new customers to maintain a specific level of customers (if we inadvertently lose too many customers).

This will obviously be an imperfect formula, that we must achieve by trial and error.

And, we hope that with the understanding of the situation we have just explained, our customer base will refrain from negative reviews that might hurt our attempts to successfully maintain the business’s survival during this unsettling transition.

In most business turnarounds, the objective is to figure out how to reduce debt and grow to achieve revenue. In our case, the objective is to shrink to a sustainable level without losing more customers then we need to stop serving.

Here are the parts of our plan to find this balance.

1. Please monitor the pricing page of our website for ongoing updates about pricing and minimum prices. These will go up to temporarily reduce customers, and then may come down again periodically.
2. We may also use a waitlist system. However, our software does not provide for this feature. So, presumably, new customers who sign up should expect to have their initial pick up date adjusted, as they are put on a waiting list. We will attempt to figure out how to communicate this to our new customers. And, we expect to continue to need an ongoing inflow of customers to offset the normal loss of some irregular customers.
3. Existing customers should please communicate through our customer service team when you absolutely have to have your laundry returned on time. We will prioritize you. For others, there is a possibility that we may have some delays of returns while working out the balance of inflow and outflow.
4. Our small business and commercial customers will always be prioritized, and always have their items returned according to our current schedule, or our specially arranged schedules. We understand that you need your laundry back quickly to serve your own customers.
5. Though we anticipate that everything will remain the same in Marin, it is remotely possible that we may temporarily adjust our route days in Marin.  In the unlikely event that this occurs, we will send another message.
6. We will continue our Tuesday and Thursday pickups and returns in Sonoma County, with return on the next of those two days.  We will only discontinue our Saturday Sonoma County route. Unfortunately, we will no longer serve the Town of Sonoma.  (While we have been very popular in towns running along 101, we have only had a limited number of customers in the Town of Sonoma.)

Importantly, we will continue to seek and serve larger commercial customers. This is because the production time and pick up amounts support sustained profitability.

This is also because this is the best path to covering the costs mentioned above of the previously shut down laundromat taken over by our service during the pandemic phases of Covid.

Secondarily, we believe that this may look like a smaller, higher price, concierge type of laundry service. This is not because we favor higher income customers, who can pay a higher price for the time saving value of our service. Rather, this is simply because the volume for pick ups at a lower price designed to maximize growth to a broader customer base is not sustainable as a smaller business. One might imagine the financial metrics behind why we lose money as a full scale pick up and delivery laundry service on the customers who only send us enough laundry to meet our current minimum service charge.

Third, we can suggest an alternative option for our many Tiburon customers. Some people may be aware that when the pandemic began, in addition to our primary facility, we took over the Tiburon laundromat. This large floor space laundromat with big opening windows was an ideal location for keeping our production team members distant from each other and protected from Covid.

This was an easy decision, because the founders of Marin Wash and Fold happened to also own that store. It was necessary from the Covid perspective, but financially unwise from a business perspective. This is because self-service Laundry has exponentially higher margins than a full scale pick up in delivery service. Suddenly, we were attempting to maintain roughly $7000 per month of fixed costs for rent and machinery finance payments for all of the machines purchased in 2018, but attempting to do this under the much lower margins of a pick up and delivery service.

The Tiburon laundromat used to have an independently owned wash and fold sublessee. Technically, she was not a sublessee, because she did not pay us any money to offset the increasingly expensive rent in that location. Rather, she used some of The laundromat’s floor space and provided a drop off wash and fold laundry service. Practically, she was our largest customer, using our machines and paying their vend prices.

We are hopeful that one of the many production team members who will be losing their jobs as a result of our downsizing might choose to do something similar to what this person had been doing for the prior roughly 25 or 30 years. If nobody from our team chooses to take this option, then somebody else in Marin County may choose to do so.

The net take away from this section of this overview is that Tiburon residents may eventually once again have a drop off option. If so, the location is at 1690 Tiburon Blvd., which is roughly across from the fire station about a block and a half from Main Street and the bay.

We thank you for your trust in us over the years. We hope to be around for many years to continue serving a smaller customer base. And, while we don’t know what the future holds, we do believe it is possible for us to regroup and eventually serve a much larger customer base again in the future.

Very sincerely yours,

The Marin Wash and Fold Laundry Services Team

We are very aware of the costs of living in The North Bay,  Believe me, since ours founders are a family with three young kids, we are led by people who are very aware of this.  We appreciate your choice in choosing convenience and more quality free time as a value over the cost in time and quality of life of doing one’s own laundry.

Still, we will be raising our minimum price from $35 in most areas to $50 in all areas. The $4 fuel and inflation surcharge we added in 2022 as a result of a substantial increase in all of our costs will be in addition to this.

We do, In fact, lose money every time we provide service at the old minimum.

We will also be raising our prices slightly, by five cents from $2.19 to $2.24 for weekly customers and by four cents from $2.45 to $2.49 for by request customers.  This also will help us keep up with increasing costs and inflation affecting all the costs we incur in serving you.

Since customers using home washers are incurring increases in their bills for water and gas or electric bills and condo and apartment dwellers will ultimately be incurring higher vend prices in laundry rooms (if they have not already), this increase is consistent with the cost of other options that do not offer the convenience we provide.

Please remember that we have a biweekly option at the weekly rate for regularly scheduled customers (who have sufficient clothing to last).

So long as your profile is set to allow text or email messages, you should receive a reminder the night before your pickup day.  To make this change from weekly to biweekly, please call or have a website chat with our customer satisfaction team.  Just tell them the first week you want to skip, and our software will schedule your pickup for the next week, and begin biweekly thereafter.

With appreciation for the loyalty of our long time customers and customer  base which recently passed 1,300, we are,

Very sincerely yours,

The MWF Laundry Services Team

My wife and I have a special, personal request for our customers.  

You may have read why we chose to create and bring this service to our community just over four years ago, including seeing the mission statement, newspaper article, and This is SF TV interview on the website.  Seeing our three vans on the road and knowing what it took for all businesses to safely navigate Covid and post Covid economic challenges, you can conclude correctly that we have taken a personal and financial risk to bring this time saving convenience to our community (and do so in a scalable way that allows us to serve many customers).

My wife and I would like to ask you to think about which business owners and managers you know and refer us to them.  To sustain properly our operational capacity, we are overdue to increase our base of business customers, especially larger ones.

You may be aware that we place a $20 referral fee credit on the account of customers who refer new, recurring customers.  This credit for free service will be larger for referrals to business customers, depending on their volume.

As reflected in the material at the link below for your referrals, we promise that they will receive better, more personalized service from us than from the giant laundry services that focus their attention on the largest of businesses.  To them, your referral is a number.  To us, they are a person focused on serving their own customers.

You can also see video testimonials from some of our existing business customers there.  At the time of this writing, four more have been offered and are being scheduled for recording and posting.

You can refer businesses in three ways.  
(1). Email the recommendation and name of the person you know there to us at contact@marinwashandfold.com, and we will call them.  
(2). Reach out to them and suggest that they look at the business customer page at marinwashandfold.com, mentioning that you are a customer of ours.  
(3). Cut and paste the text and links below and email it to them (or simply forward this email or email this page to them with a short note).

Thank you.
Very sincerely yours,
Michael Gralnick
Co-Founder
Marin Wash and Fold Laundry Service

Sample Text To Cut and Paste
Subject:  
I recommend a laundry service I use that I feel can serve your business better

Email or SMS text content:
I am a customer of a personal laundry service that also serves business customers of all sizes.  My experience with them tells me they are likely to provide you with better service and more care than the big companies do.  You can learn more about their business service and watch a short message from their founder and video testimonials from some of their other business customers at these links.

While very high volume business customers including B&Bs and other examples sited on our business customer page may discuss customized rates with us, we will unfortunately be increasing our price per pound rate for all other customers effective beginning with pickups on July 20, 2022.  The per pound rate will be increased from $1.99 to $2.19 for weekly or regularly scheduled every other week customers and from $2.34 to $2.49 for by request customers.

We aspire to be here to help people trade some amount of money for the benefits of more quality free time to invest in any of family time, recreation, or whatever higher level financial return can come from time put to something other than the chore of doing laundry.  And, we are committed to fulfilling on the mission statement at the bottom of the home page of our website. 

To do both of those in a time of significantly higher costs across the board in what was already a relatively low operating margin business, we do need to pass on these increased costs. 

Importantly, one of the many increased costs we are facing is drought and climate change related water cost increases, which people who do their laundry at home and pay their own water bill will be facing directly, even if they choose to do their own laundry.

Even after this increase, our pricing is still on par with the cost of taking your time to drop laundry off without the inclusion of pickup and delivery. 

So, we hope that our present and future customers will both join in continuing to appreciate the time saving benefits of the service we provide.

We thank you for your understanding and look forward to continuing to serve you in the future.

Sincerely,
The Marin Wash and Fold Team

We are again pre-announcing our plan for the entire holiday season this year to provide a consolidated announcement.  We will also resend a reminder just before Thanksgiving.  As always, we will work closely with and prioritize our business customers, who we know need their returns to serve their own customers.

As always, we ask that regularly scheduled customers traveling for the holidays remember to place their account on vacation hold to avoid the monetary and environmental cost of sending our team to your location, and the resulting $17 no laundry left for pickup charge if we do go out to your location.

Also, please remember that the email and text notification component of our software is determined by days of the week, and not dates on a calendar.  Unfortunately, we are not able on these small handful of adjusted holiday dates each year to adjust the notifications.  Please disregard the night before notifications if they differ from what follows (and please bear in mind that night before notifications may not be sent on the adjusted days).  

However, the same day notifications and reminders will occur on the date of your holiday adjusted scheduled pickup or return.

Looking way ahead, the Christmas and New Years holidays in 2022 both fall on Saturdays into Sundays.  Therefore, there will be no changes for these holiday weekends this year.

July 4th falls on a Monday in 2022.  Friday July 1st pickups will be returned on Tuesday July 5th.  Saturday July 2nd pickups will be returned Wednesday July 6th.  And, pickups scheduled for Monday July 4th should be placed out and will be picked up on Tuesday July 5th, with our business customers being returned on schedule Wednesday July 6th, and our residential customers either being returned on schedule on Wednesday July 6th, or being returned on Thursday July 7th (depending on our volume and staffing on Tuesday July 5th).

Our Thanksgiving day (Thursday) pickups and returns will be moved to the day after Thanksgiving. If you have a pickup the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, please anticipate a Friday return date.  Our Wednesday pickups should not be effected by thanksgiving, though return times on Friday may be later than normal in the day because of the consolidation.

As noted above, we will work to focus on prioritizing our business customers and getting them prioritized returns, on days that are earlier than the adjusted return dates above.

We know each year that this does create some added complexity.   Nonetheless, we believe that enabling the people who handle your laundry to take time off of work on the some specific holidays ultimately leads to serving you better through the year as a whole.

We wish you all the best on July 4th, on Thanksgiving weekend, and during the holiday season and in the new year.

Sincerely,

The Marin Wash and Fold Team

We recently on May 6th shared a message about having hired a far more experienced Operations Manager.  Please review that, if you have not yet done so.  We are pleased to share here our plan to begin using The Predictive Index (PI) as part of our process for hiring our Laundry Service Professionals.  You can learn more about the PI at https://www.predictiveindex.com.  It has been in use for over 65 years.  It is designed to improve hiring practices by assessing the key behavioral and cognitive drivers that determine what people are good at and what drives relationship dynamics in the workplace. 

Unlike resumes that primarily address a person’s past, the PI is forward looking.  It will enable us to create a personality profile for the Laundry Services Professional role (analogous to a job description, but focused on required personality traits) that summarizes the key traits we believe are essential in the best people for this role.  Candidates will take the five minute online survey that will inform us of whether they appear to be a good fit for the role even before we move to a formal discussion and interview. 

Of course, this is not fool proof, as people will know the job for which they are applying before taking the survey, and can attempt to answer according to what they think we want to hear.  But, PI has a 65 year track record of success in this field for a reason.  

Please allow us to close this communication by explaining why we are making a substantial, annual, recurring, capital investment in licensing a tool traditionally used by much larger companies.  We went to great lengths when we launched in 2018 to have and create the best people, best software package for tracking customer preferences, and most thorough and detailed operational processes, all put in place to help assure that we could scale and maintain attention to detail as we grew.  Hiring to meet demand and training new people at a healthy physical distance in the Covid era gave us a crash course in realizing that some personality types are resistant to adhering to the detailed procedures, processes, checklists, redundancies, and communications methodologies we had put in place.  These only matter if we hire people who follow, adhere to, and use them.  Hence, we are attempting to close a gap that has existed in our organization by  matching the people with the role.

Like most businesses, we are not perfect.  We can only strive to continually learn faster and improve our performance.  We hope both our current and future customers, and our residential and business customers alike, will recognize and appreciate that this is another example of how we strive to provide the best service possible.  We are essentially hiring on behalf of the customers we serve.  Our investment in the PI will help us further improve our performance.

Very sincerely yours,

Michael Gralnick
Co-Owner
Marin Wash and Fold

We are pleased to share how we will be able to serve our customers even better as a result of a recent change in our Management Team. 

Our General Manager, who had over a decade of laundry service experience when we launched in 2018, has been with us from the start and remains our General Manager.  However, we have replaced our Operations Manager.

We operate with a General Manager responsible for overall quality and an Operations Manager responsible for training, developing, and overseeing our growing production team of Laundry Service Professionals, so a larger number of people can deliver the same quality as our most experienced team members.  Our new Operations Manager has exponentially more management, hiring, and leadership experience than our prior, original Operarions Manager.  He is therefore much better equipped to translate all our detailed and thorough processes and procedures into consistent implementation by a larger team of people, thereby enabling us to better maintain and improve our attention to detail as we grow.

This change actually took place over three months ago.  However, we wanted to wait until some time passed and all of the Laundry Services Professionals on our team adapted to the change to make this formal announcement.  All of our six driving team members who I have personally and carefully selected who have been with us for years are still with us, and we also have a new addition starting this week. 

Yet, as I anticipated might happen, the past few months has resulted in some departures and even more new members joining our team of Laundry Services Professionals.  The new additions are coming in under the collective expectations being set by myself and my wife as co-founders, our General Manager, and our new, far more experienced, Operations Manager.  I am optimistic that the culture shift we have created recently has resulted in the removal (either deliberately by us or organically) of the former members of our team whose selection and hiring may have been either rushed (due to the rapid increase in demand for our service, while we were also navigating Covid) or made in error due to the relative management inexperience of our former Operations Manager.

Unfortunately, our prior Operations Manager lacked the management experience to be able to maintain what our new Operations Manager can maintain and achieve.  As startup businesses grow, they often transition from the people they are able to attract early on as managers to having the ability to attract and pay more experienced managers.  (In our case, we were able to start with a small team of people who even then had over a decade of experience with Wash and Fold laundry service.  However, this is different from management expertise.)

When it became clear to me last December, 2021, that this change was both necessary and in the best interest of our customers, I began preparing and interviewing multiple potential candidates.  We feel very confident that our new Operations Manager who joined us in January was an excellent choice for the long term.  We are confident that his management style will lead to even greater quality, and improved service to our customers. 

I have learned in life that my decision-making, while guided by experience and wisdom, is not fool proof.  Inherent in life is the inescapable fact that wisdom is acquired over time.  Just as I am wiser now than I was a few years ago, a few years from now I will have new hindsight on the decisions I have made recently.

So, I will close by sharing the feedback of another key member of our team on the result of our selection process.  One of our long term driving team members decided in January, 2022, just as the above referenced transition was happening, to train and become a shift leader within our production team of Laundry Services Preofessoinals.  She knows our philosophy and vision for the business.  After spending extensive time with our new Operarions Manager, she recently said to me “I don’t know how you could have found anyone better.”

We have tried to use these notifications and messages as a source of both logistical updates and full transparency on how we operate, and how we evolve and improve over time.  We apologize to those who feel we provide too much detail and transparency.  We appreciate the trust you have placed in our ability to evolve and improve, to serve you better.  And, we also appreciate your referrals.

Very sincerely yours,
Michael Gralnick
Co-Owner
Marin Wash and Fold

This message serves to explain how our credit card preauthorizations work, alert existing customers to a slight change in that process, and explain the reasons for that change.

Going forward, you may notice that our preauthorizations may start to be slightly more than your ultimate invoice.  Our software is being reset to preauthorize an additional $10 automatically, and we may ultimately adjust this to an additional $20.  Here is why.

We initially chose to not add an additional preauthorization amount.  We wanted to minimize placing a hold on cards for any more than necessary, to support our more cost sensitive customers.  Unfortunately, some customers have expressed frustration recently due to the impact of how the banking system handles credit card preauthorizations.  And, we have realized that others have been effected (albeit without being bothered).  When the credit card preauthorization is even slightly less than the final invoice, some banks automatically separate the final transaction from the preauthorization.  Instead of the preauthorization automatically being replaced by the final invoice, a duplicate charge may remain until it automatically disappears after several business days. 

Unlike a gas station that preauthorizes for the maximum potential charge and stops the transaction at that amount or a hotel that places a hold for potential incidental charges beyond the room rate and tax, we had previously leaned toward a lower preauthorization amount.  We did this knowing that there may be some additional charges for per item pricing.  We will now be seeking to strike a better balance among the needs of our different customers in this regard.

The credit card preauthorization balance is not an exact science because of what we just described above about how the banks process estimated preauthorizations. Our new approach is intended to strike the best balance possible among the slightly different needs and priorities of our different customers. 

Our service enables people to exchange a cost in the value of time put into doing chores (ar time and cost spent driving to a drop off laundry service) for a dollar cost for a service that saves time and allows people to re-invest their time in things that provide either a non-monetary return or a greater financial return from how our customers use their newfound free time. 

On aggregate, if you are in the group that prefers the old approach to the new approach, we trust that the aggregate value of time saved will still exceed any inconvenience from our attempt to strike this balance among our customers.

Sincerely,
The Marin Wash and Fold Team

Our priority as we have grown has remained identifying and training more team members to meet the attention to detail embodied by our most experienced team members.  And, we still also do commit to a second day (third if overlapping with a Sunday) return, or faster if special arrangements have been made in advance.

Over the next few weeks, there may be some returns that exceed our normal second day return time.

Business customers will be returned on time.  And, if you have a special need or priority to assure that your clothes are returned on the second day, please communicate with us via phone or email (at the number and email on the bottom of our website’s home page) or chat on our website when available.  

If you let us know, we will make a note in your profile for our team and assure that you are prioritized over customers who have more flexibility.

This will be temporary.  It is in part the effect of choosing to prioritize quality by removing some people from our team that we felt might not reliably live up to our standards.  We have also been seeking new people to meet increased demand for our service.  But, we have been attempting to be selective in who we allow to join our team.  

Thank you for your patience with us now.  It will allow us to better serve you over time in the long run.

Sincerely,

The Marin Wash and Fold Team