The second door: what changed when owners opened another location

A single store, wash or route can be run by the person who started it. The second one cannot, at least not the same way, and the owners in this database who opened another door describe that as the point where the business changed shape. Several have done it, two more say they are about to, and their entries show three different ways of going about it.

Buy the next one, cheaply

Dave and Carla Menz never built a laundromat from scratch. The first was an $85,000 money-loser bought off Craigslist in 2010. With the first two stores producing about $7,000 a month in combined profit, they paid $75,000 for a third store and $170,000 for its building, and after renovation it added $3,000 to $4,000 a month. A fourth cost about $35,000. Dave kept his phone company job until the third store, which says something about how much one or two laundromats actually pay an owner.

Two choices made the chain work. Menz buys the real estate where he can and holds it in a separate company that rents to his own stores. And every store is attended, which he credits with cutting incidents and insurance headaches to nearly zero. Queen City Laundry now reports over $2 million a year with a team of around 40 across four locations. Attended stores mean payroll at every door, and the laundromat category page shows how that sits against unattended models.

Copy the playbook into a new market

Mike Andes had a second Augusta Lawn Care location near Bellingham by 2017, with a staff of fifteen. That location was the rehearsal. When Augusta began franchising in November 2019 it opened 16 locations in the first year and 87 within two and a half years, and it now counts more than 200. The pay-for-performance system his crews use is what made the copies possible: it travels without him.

Cristobal Mondragon took Bumble Bee from the Seattle area to a second market in Atlanta. His own warning about growth applies here. He puts early-stage margins in cleaning at 40 to 50 percent and says they compress as staff and management layers arrive. A second city is a management layer by definition. The margin cliff piece works through what that does to the owner's income.

When the site is the expensive part

The D'Eri family put roughly $3 million into one failing car wash in Parkland in 2013. Volume went from about 35,000 cars a year to past 100,000 in the first full year under the new model. Rising Tide now runs three Florida locations, Parkland, Margate and Coral Springs, washes close to half a million cars a year, and reports nearly $6 million at margins above 20 percent, with a fourth location planned. The startup cost ladder puts an express wash at $1.5 million to $4 million, which is why each new site is a decision measured in years. The training systems built for the first wash, color-coded steps and QR codes linking to instruction videos at each station, are what let the next ones open with the same workforce.

When the location costs nothing

For route businesses, a new location is a placement or a territory rather than a lease. Adam Hill runs more than 100 vending machines across more than 40 locations in Florida, out of one box truck and about 1,600 square feet of warehouse at roughly $1,600 a month. Each new location is a free machine for the host and one more stop for the truck.

Ryan McCoy went from one Scoop Soldiers territory, where he passed 1,100 clients and $900,000 within a year, to a merger with another owner and roughly 30 trucks across three major markets by 2026. Nick Huber and Dan Hagberg went furthest from the attended model: 68 Bolt Storage facilities in 11 states, bought largely from retiring owners and run with no on-site managers at all. Gate codes, cameras and a central call team do the job a resident manager used to.

The ones about to try

Christian Sanya's 40-machine store in Lanham brings in about $24,000 a month with four employees, and she still fulfills roughly twelve hours of laundry requests a day. Her entry says a second location is already in progress. Anna-Marie Ortiz, who reported $10,000 a month in October 2024, lists expansion beyond Portland in her stated roadmap. Neither has published results from a second site yet, and we will add them when they do.

What the entries suggest

The owners split on one question: who stands in the second location. Menz staffs every store. Huber staffs none and runs everything centrally. Andes and the D'Eris built systems first and then let other people run copies of them. Nobody in the database ran two sites on personal effort alone for long.

The cost of a new door also decides the pace. Hill and McCoy could add locations quickly because a placement or a territory costs little next to a car wash. The revenue per location ranking published alongside this piece puts numbers on each model, and the database has every entry with sources. This site is one of SideRoad's weekly builds.

Common questions

Keep reading

• Revenue per location, ranked
• Owners who bought instead of building
• Revenue per employee, ranked