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. Her identity and the name of her business are known to CNBC Make It.)
“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 by CNBC Make It. 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.