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“And so they ended up realizing that pick up and drop off was not the path. And then they went down the locker path. And for about three to six months, they competed with us head to head.”

“But what we realized is that if we could get some 24 seven access or depot, you can get rid of rent and labor on site. And that all of a sudden allows you to operate at 40% margins.”

“Once we were in 12, 25 Old Town, the snowball started to form, and we ended up adding eight new locations a month. And then ultimately, Guy, we grew to 250 locations in Chicago over the course of, call it, three years.”

“I think we talked to probably a hundred people over the course of the six months, and 90% of them said this is an awful idea.”

“Ultimately we had advantages there. Drew is from Chicago, I am as well. We had some relationships with real estate owners Drew specifically did that would help us get some early wins, but this was a hard business. And as we thought about who to hire, who we co…”

“Guy, our bank account, I'd get a call every two weeks from our banker, because our bank account would go from positive 300,000 to -400,000, and the driver of it was payroll.”

“And so all of a sudden we posted these jobs of this new facility open up in Skokie and my phone was Wouldn't stop rain. And we ended up staffing this entire plant in two or three months with incredible people all through the Spanish newspaper.”

“And I remember the third time, Drew was a little bit fired up and upset. And I think within 20 minutes of the response, had redacted a term sheet, and sent it back to them and said, we're gonna go ahead and sign this term sheet. We look forward to competing he…”

“And ultimately, all of our partners except for one said no thanks.”

“Our cost for a driver was 60% higher than Chicago.”

“I was making almost 300,000 dollars, and I was, what, 27? And threw it all away to make 40,000 dollars for five years, and Drew's the same.”

“Moved back to Chicago, 2013, and was so excited to be back home, and I think at the time there were like five to seven VCs, and we pitched them all. And the general feedback was like, hey, you're building a nice small business, like, Lifestyle business, I thin…”

“And we slowly realized that we would track this KPI called revenue per unit, and revenue per unit was twice as high at a new construction building versus an existing building.”

“And so again, you know, our margin was typically around 25% of the bottom line, 50% at the top, at the gross margin level. Both of those went up by 10 percentage points.”

“I'll never forget when we hit the 80,000 dollar mark per month, because 80 times 12 is roughly a million dollars, and we got there at around, around like the 15 month mark after starting.”

“And we looked at our revenue and it had only gone down by two percent.”

“And we did the math, and the max transactions you could do with a pickup and drop-off service, which had been the true Uber model, was four to six transactions per hour, and then we realized with our model, we could do 26.”

“But I think the year was 2016, and I believe there were 55 new buildings coming up in Chicago. And guy, I think we were in 53 of the 55.”

“I don't know if people know how much they pay to dry clean a sweater, but everyone knows how much it costs to dry clean a shirt.”

“Proximity to someone's wardrobe. In terms of not even in the buildings of apartment buildings, but also in terms of where we'd go in the apartment building. If we can be, you know, close to someone's wardrobe, we had a higher ability for them to become custome…”

“We talked about we have a few regrets, but one of them is that we should have raised, because at that point, like, my homepage for our computer was my bank account, and I only now realize how unhealthy that was, because we were so focused in our business that …”

“Because dry cleaners operate at 15% margin businesses. And by the way, when you take out the salary of the owner operator, it's like zero percent.”

“We bought some of it used, some of it new, but we were able to finance about 80% of our plant using debt and asset-back lending.”

“To the unit economics, it cost us 5000 dollars to set up a location.”

“We realized that the difference between 98% retention and 96% retention, even though it sounds small, when you compound that every month, it's astronomical. The difference, I think, is between having 55% of your customers at the end of two years versus 78.”

“20 to 25%, roughly, was our EBITDA margin, if you want to call it that.”

“Our view was that if we just capture three percent market share, we're gonna be millionaires. And so we didn't view this as a winner-take-all market.”

“We put all of our life savings into it. I had about a 120,000 dollars saved from McKinsey and private equity, and my co-founder did as well, and we're fortunate we raised like a 100,000 dollars of debt from our parents.”

“10% to break even.”

“It was that 12, 25 all-time moment where we broke even guy. In six weeks.”