Ken Wimberly: Laundry Luv and Accountable Entrepreneurship, Real Finds Podcast #7 Transcript
Gordon Lamphere: Hi, I’m Gordon Lamphere, and welcome to the Real Finds Podcast, the podcast where we interview key entrepreneurs, scientists, and activists who are shaping the real estate industry and, as a result, our world. In today’s podcast, we’ll be speaking with Ken Wimberly, co-founder and Chief Visionary Officer of Wimberly Group Real Estate Advisors and founding member of Laundry Luv, a chain of laundromats with a mission to educate, equip, and inspire the communities they serve. On the podcast, we discuss the keys to building a strong real estate practice, the ins and outs of successfully running a laundromat, and accountability as a bedrock for success. Hey Ken, thanks for hopping on the podcast today.
Ken Wimberly: Gordon, thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here.
Gordon Lamphere: Could you give a brief background for folks who don’t know you?
Ken Wimberly: I live and work in Fort Worth, Texas, and I’ve been in commercial real estate since 2002, so 20 years now. Prior to that, I was in the Navy, then in financial services doing insurance and investments, and then I launched my entrepreneurial career with a pizza restaurant that later failed. That brought me to the real estate business. I specialized early in land brokerage, working with a handful of residential developers. We’d amass land parcels for them, and they’d zone, plat, subdivide, and sell them to home builders. I did that for years, which led me into land investment in the mid-2000s. Then the 2008 and 2009 crash came, and I transitioned into a lot of bank REO work for a couple of years. That eventually led to my introduction to the Keller Williams and KW Commercial world. I built a large brokerage practice within KW, then became a KW franchise owner, and around 2018 and 2019 I started two more businesses. One was a tech company, a journaling app for parents to write to their children, which unfortunately we decided last year to shut down. We’re in the final month of that now. The other was the laundromat business, and now we have three successful laundromats open and we’re looking to acquire ten more this year. That’s the short version.
From the Navy to Real Estate
Gordon Lamphere: You’re a jack of many trades with diverse cash flows. First, thank you for your service. Over the years we’ve made a conscious effort to hire veterans, and it’s not pure altruism. Veterans typically have great soft skills, leadership ability, teamwork, and work ethic. How was your transition out of the Navy into the private sector, and do you use those skills today?
Ken Wimberly: I joined the Navy during college, with a year left, when America went to war with Iraq in 1991. I enlisted the day after the bombs flew and did a tour. The Navy was great, and I loved my time there. I’d been watching all these Navy SEAL movies and really wanted to become a SEAL. I passed the physical, no problem, but I’ve always had mediocre vision, and at the time you needed 20/20 to go into special forces, which makes a lot of sense. You don’t want someone looking for their contact lens. I had no idea that was part of the process when I went through recruiting. Getting out of the Navy and back into college was a smooth transition. Frankly, the Navy helped me focus a great deal. I went from being a B and C student before the Navy to a straight-A student when I came out. I was really focused on what I wanted to accomplish.
Gordon Lamphere: Let’s focus on one of the key things you’ve done very successfully: real estate. Why real estate? You could have done so many things when you got out of the Navy.
Ken Wimberly: I got my degree in finance with a real estate concentration, so I had interest in it when I got out of college in 1996. I applied to a number of commercial real estate firms and never got picked up, which led me to stick with the financial services field where I’d been interning. But it always interested me. My family was in the development business, developing residential lots at the time, and that part of the family is in multifamily development now. When the opportunity arose after shutting down the pizza restaurant and working in the restaurant business for another year, I said, I’ve got to do something else. I looked into real estate as a career, interviewed with people, and studied both residential and commercial brokerage. Commercial seemed much more in line with my personality. I’m a finance guy. I like numbers and deal structure. So commercial real estate was the path.
Building a Real Estate Practice
Gordon Lamphere: You built a practice at Keller Williams that was the number one commercial practice for the KW brand around 2014 or 2015. How does one build a successful real estate practice?
Ken Wimberly: It starts with yourself: learning who you are and learning the business. I spent my first year working probably 15 hours a day making zero dollars. If you’re getting into commercial real estate brokerage, anticipate making very little your first year or so. I was making nothing, but working 15 hours a day learning the business, studying, learning about landowners, learning how to have conversations. It’s really important early in your career, and frankly throughout it, to have good mentors and advisors. I had a great mentor when I got in. I went to work for a small partnership and would sit for hours across this guy’s desk listening to his conversations and asking, what did that mean? What does that acronym mean? He slowly taught me the business. So focus early on learning your skill set and the business.
Then, as you get clients, figure out how to add value to every single person. What I didn’t learn for another 10 years is that I can bring a lot of value to people who may be super successful in real estate, in other aspects of their lives, whether accountability, health and wellness, or parenting, things I’ve developed skills in. That bonds the relationship, and then I can help them even more in real estate. Finding ways to add value to every person and every transaction is the most important thing we can do.
From a blocking-and-tackling standpoint, focus on having a database in your business. Whatever niche you’re in, it’s really important, and Excel is not a database. Outlook is not a database. Your iPhone is not a database. Have a true real estate database, a CRM, and feed it every day. I had a call with a guy a minute ago, and I have notes I’ll add into my database after this, because a week from now, and certainly six months from now, I won’t remember that conversation. Feed it with transaction details, but more importantly with details on your interactions with the person, their family, what they like to do, what they’re passionate about, their dreams. That really helps build a relationship.
Gordon Lamphere: When I took over a lot of our sales and leasing practice about five years ago, we had a very analog database. It was thorough, but hard to research. We moved to a Salesforce-based database and it’s been a game changer. Someone calls in, maybe you’ve heard the voice before, you look them up, and you’re done. To everyone listening, if you’re not using a database, it doesn’t have to be Salesforce, but you need an efficient system you go through daily, or you’re leaving money on the table.
Ken Wimberly: And with databases now, my wife has a successful residential practice and uses a great one, and you can create workflows within your database. Salesforce allows it. You can have follow-up workflows that are 99% automated so you stay in touch with people you might otherwise lose contact with. It’s super important.
Hiring for Integrity and Grit
Gordon Lamphere: I’m not a lazy person, but comparing my efficiency before and after setting up workflows, it’s a game changer. One of the most under-discussed systems in our industry is hiring. You have diverse cash flows, so you have to delegate. What do you look for in a team member? You’ve had a diverse set of staff from the restaurant business.
Ken Wimberly: And now we run laundromats, which is another very diverse set of staff. Thinking in terms of real estate and professional services, we’re looking for core intelligence. But integrity is a massive one. You can be the smartest person ever, but with low integrity, you have no place here. And then a whole lot of grit and drive, that internal passion to do good things and big things. You can’t teach grit and drive. And if someone isn’t living in integrity, you can be a great example, but it’s hard. Those are things you have to pull out in the interview process and in vetting through references, and not just one level deep. Go two or three levels deep. When anyone interviews with us, they sign a form allowing us to ask anyone they give us for additional references, so we can keep going down the path. I’ve had people say in an interview, can I be honest with you? Talk about a red flag. But if you ask the questions and listen, you learn a lot through that process.
Why Laundromats
Gordon Lamphere: Soft skills and core values drive a great team, and we follow very similar practices. One of the most interesting things about you is your dive into laundromats. I was blown away when I started researching you. It’s not a business people think of as core to how our society runs. How did you get into laundromats, and why?
Ken Wimberly: Interestingly, it was not a business we were looking to get into. The last thing I wanted was another business. I was already stretched too thin. Now I’ve narrowed my focus. I still do a little brokerage, but most of my business is laundromats today. It started as the solution to a real estate problem. My partner and I were buying a 50,000-square-foot retail center in Abilene, Texas. We were under contract, 30,000 feet leased and 20,000 vacant, but still cash flowing, buying at about an eight cap on actuals, a solid deal with upside. We were looking for tenants to fill the vacancy. I was at a real estate conference pitching the asset to different tenants and pitched it to a laundromat guy with a table there. He came back a couple of weeks later and said, Ken, I ran the numbers and demographics, and this is actually an ideal location for a laundromat. I assumed he was an operator, so I asked what he needed in a lease. He said a 10-year lease, and that they pay $15 a square foot in rent. We were charging $4, so I thought this was a home run.
Through the process, I realized he wasn’t an operator. He was a manufacturer’s rep for laundromat equipment. But he introduced us to the local distributor, and through the distributor we tried to find an operator. There was nobody teed up in that market, and we kept toying with the idea: what if we became the operator? My partner and I said yes, we’d be interested, but no, we would not be good operators, because we know ourselves. We’re great visionaries, fundraisers, and starters, not great stick-with-it operators. However, there was a gentleman I’d gotten to know well through KW. He’d been running all the commercial and luxury operations at KW, and I’d tried to recruit him to our real estate team years earlier, but that was pre-COVID when you needed someone on site, and he didn’t want to relocate. We stayed in contact, and I respected him a lot. He’s a West Point grad, multiple tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, a former professional baseball player, a leader of leaders. So we went to Skylar and asked if he’d explore this industry with us, and he said yes.
The three of us took a full year learning the industry before we opened a store. We went to industry conferences, read trade magazines, talked to other operators, went to meetups from the equipment manufacturers’ reps, and really studied the business. We said, if we’re going to do this, we don’t want to just fill a space. Let’s create a business around it. So we created our own brand, Laundry Luv, L-U-V. We have a children’s play area and a children’s literacy area. Our stores so far are six to seven thousand square feet, spacious, well-lit, staffed locations with friendly attendants, lots of machines, and TVs on the wall. My big rule is that our TVs only play positive programming. No news, no daytime TV, no junk. I want programming people can get something good out of. We opened our first one in late 2019, just in time for COVID. You limp through COVID, and now that store is really thriving. We opened two more this year. Next year we’ll open at least one or two more ground-up, and then purchase six to ten. We’re really starting to scale.
The beauty of our laundromat business is that we’re real estate guys. When we look at purchasing laundromats, we only buy if we can also acquire the real estate. That can be a single-tenant building with just a laundromat, or a 100,000-square-foot shopping center where we also buy the laundromat operation. It’s a dual play, the operations and the real estate, and we’re hopefully creating a very large real estate portfolio through the process.
Gordon Lamphere: For someone not familiar with the laundromat business, what makes it unique compared to other service businesses?
Ken Wimberly: It’s a service we all need every week. Many of us have a washer and dryer at home, and if you’re in a new apartment complex, you have laundry in your unit or on site. But in many places throughout the US, there are people who don’t own washers and dryers, or who live in older B or C class apartments that either don’t have hookups or have a dilapidated laundry room you’d be embarrassed to use, where you’re lucky if your clothes get clean. There’s demand for this service. Here’s an interesting stat: 89% of laundromat customers come from within a one-mile radius. So we look for locations that, within that one-mile radius, have certain demographics, income profiles, and numbers of rental units. For us, it’s about finding great real estate locations to operate laundromats.
Gordon Lamphere: One voice a lot of folks follow on real estate Twitter, Strip Mall Guy, harps on the environmental challenges of dry cleaners. Is there a significant difference between the equipment in a typical laundromat and a dry cleaning operation?
Ken Wimberly: Really different in terms of chemicals. We don’t use any hazardous chemicals in our facilities, so it’s a non-issue for us environmentally. We do need upsized utilities, water, electric, and gas, but as far as environmental or hazardous chemicals, we don’t allow them and don’t use them.
Gordon Lamphere: You mentioned factors that drive site selection. I’m guessing income and population. Can you elaborate?
Ken Wimberly: There’s a combination of good real estate factors and laundromat factors that go alongside them. Real estate factors: traffic counts, hard corner intersections, significant visibility. A hard corner is ideal, not necessary. Visibility from the street is really important for a laundromat, because often a shopping center is offset from the street and hard to see. Laundromat factors: income and population. In a super wealthy area, you probably won’t get a ton of laundromat business, because everyone has a washer and dryer at home. In a lower-income area, say $30,000 to $40,000 average household income, you have a lot of potential customers who may not have a washer and dryer in their home or apartment. Then we do a competition analysis, because you can be in the best location possible, but if there’s a great competitor half a mile down the road, good luck stealing that business. You’ll just split the pie, and it might not make sense.
Gordon Lamphere: My only exposure to laundromats growing up, beyond commercial real estate, was a man in my grandmother’s building, one of the wealthiest men there, who ran many laundromats. He always talked about how cash-heavy the business is. Has the model changed with card access, or is it still cash heavy?
Ken Wimberly: In our business in particular, we have three partners, one in Colorado, one in Austin, and me in Fort Worth, and our operations are two to three hours west of me. So we need it to not be coin based. A lot of the old laundromats are coin based. We’re an all-card system, and many new laundromats are moving primarily to card. You can put cash into a machine and it spits out a card, or you can use a debit or credit card. While there’s still a significant amount of cash going onto cards, it’s not coins. The dollars are in one location in a safe room, which mitigates some of the security risk and, frankly, the logistics of collecting those funds.
A Thousand Days of Working Out
Gordon Lamphere: I can only imagine bringing a Brinks truck up and hauling thousands of quarters out. Now, you’ve done a thousand-plus days in a row of working out. Laundromats were interesting, and your real estate success is unique, but the thing that absolutely blew me away was how someone works out a thousand days in a row. Back in law school I read David Goggins’s Can’t Hurt Me, and it inspired me to be a stronger, better-adjusted person. I work out three or four days a week, not every day. How do you start working out every day, and how do you not stop?
Ken Wimberly: I started a health and fitness journey in 2012, learning about food and nutrition and committing to working out. I’d gone through Shaun T’s Beachbody workouts. As I studied more, I came across a Nike video on YouTube with Kevin Hart and his training partner, Ron “Boss” Everline. It was inspiring, him cranking it with a voice overlay, and one thing he said was, 365 days, no days off. I thought, whoa. I used to teach classes and would sometimes show that video, but I’d never done 365 days with no days off myself. On a great week, I worked out four or five days. So in late 2018 I decided to do it in 2019.
Here’s what I know: if you have a detailed plan, it’s a heck of a lot easier to follow and execute than a hope. I wanted to be fully committed, so I mapped out a very simple plan. I also wanted to do it so we could have a conversation like this today, and I wanted it to require no gym and no money, something you could do at home with a mat and a pair of tennis shoes. The plan was rep based. In January, 400 reps a day of push-ups, sit-ups, squats, lunges, pull-ups, all body-weight exercises, mapped on a spreadsheet and tracked daily. I started in late 2018 with 300 reps a day, went to 400 in January, 500 in February, 600 in March, and by December I was doing eleven or twelve hundred reps a day. January was hard. Four hundred reps a day was a beating. But February was easy, because I had 30 days of repetition behind me. Each month I layered on a hundred more. When you get to a thousand, eleven hundred, twelve hundred, it just takes time, an hour to an hour and twenty minutes. But I was super fit and looking great.
I got to the end of that year and thought, there’s no way I’m stopping. This feels amazing. What I learned about myself is that it’s so much easier to go every day than five days a week. If you take one or two days off, it can easily bleed into three or four. So I kept going. In 2020 I modified it, because with so many reps I wasn’t running at all, and I enjoy running and cardio, so I layered cardio in. Same thing: mapped out a plan and followed it. That was especially beneficial through COVID and the weirdness of that year. Consistent exercise was really important to getting through it. I continued through 2021 and into 2022, so over three years, more than a thousand days in a row.
Then in 2022, I had some things going on with one of my kids, and I was shutting down the tech business, which had become my baby. I went through a mild depression in 2022 and fell off the wagon. I probably averaged three to four days a week.
Gordon Lamphere: Most folks would take that. Nobody’s hating.
Ken Wimberly: But for me, daily working out had become so much of who I was, and I felt so good about it. So I’m back on this year, every day, no days missed, with my plan mapped out. Someone reached out to me wanting fitness accountability this year, and I told him, in my opinion, it’s easier to do something every day, even if that something is walking two miles with your dog, than to say you’re going to work out four or five days a week. If I were your coach, that wouldn’t work. You’ve got to have a defined plan and commit to it. And here’s the cool thing. A guy in one of my accountability groups asked me six months into my journey what I was doing. I told him, and he said, man, I’m stubborn, I could do that. He’s now well over a thousand days himself. It’s awesome to see the ripple effect one person can have.
Accountability and Handling Failure
Gordon Lamphere: Accountability is one of the leading ways we achieve our goals. Before the Final Four, you’ve been very accountable to yourself and everyone you coach. What makes business people successful is accountability for past successes and failures. The most successful entrepreneurs I meet are always humble, and you’re no different. You’ve been open about ventures that didn’t succeed. How do you handle setbacks?
Ken Wimberly: There’s certainly an inner drive, and I’ve learned through osmosis from others that failure is part of moving forward. I didn’t grow up knowing that. I’m a little envious of people whose parents taught them that failing is part of it: go forward, fail, get up, do it again, it’s a learning process, an iteration. I teach my children that very much now. All that said, Gordon, it’s still hard. I told you I went through depression last year shutting down this business. I felt like I let down my investors. I lost a lot of my own money. I felt like I let down customers who believed in me. People would tell me I didn’t let anyone down, but I felt like I did. Failure is difficult. Yet as long as we learn and apply the lessons, it’s worthwhile. I got an MBA in the tech business through that process, and we’ll figure out how to apply it going forward. I learned so much, and I met great people. One of the coaches I had in that business, we now coach each other. He was coaching me then, and now I’m coaching him in some of his business and life. We don’t charge each other. We meet an hour a week and mastermind each other through things. As long as you learn through it, it’s a good thing.
Gordon Lamphere: You’re not the first successful person I’ve met with an accountability buddy. People in a lot of industries pick someone in a similar area, maybe the same industry in a different part of the country. For anybody who wants to talk about that, you’re a great person to reach out to, because having that accountability method is key to success.
Ken Wimberly: I’ll give you an example. I’m kicked off again on the 365 program, but in November I was feeling fat, lazy, and out of shape. With a group I meet with monthly through GoBundance, several of us said we wanted to kick it off, so we created an accountability group for people who wanted to work out every day for 30 days, December 1st through 30th. About a dozen of us committed, and we put up $200 a day for anyone who missed. We created a Telegram thread and all reported our results every day. It was so cool to see the results, because I would not have worked out every day in December without the accountability, and many others said the same. I got COVID over Christmas and was working out even through that, which frankly I think is a good thing. A handful of people missed a couple of days, but worked out every other day. You can’t say enough about the need for and the benefits of accountability.
Gordon Lamphere: The world would be a better place if folks were more accountable. Briefly, before the Final Four: you’re a coach. Is there benefit in coaching beyond helping others? What drives you to coach?
Ken Wimberly: There’s a lot of benefit in helping others. I worked as a formal coach for a number of years, though I’m not doing much formal coaching these days. I love looking at prior students and the success they’ve had. My students are absolute ballers in this business now. I’m not taking credit for that, but it’s sure cool to be affiliated with them. I still have coaches in my life, and I’d consider hiring a laundromat coach as we scale that business. I really enjoy helping people, so mentoring and coaching, even unpaid, is important. I have a mentor right now I’ve had two phone calls with this week. He owns about 280 Sonics, and he’s making time for me. He picks up every time I call, and often he calls me. He’s a great example of the importance of offering your value to others, and I try to emulate that whenever I can.
Gordon Lamphere: That’s what life is about, adding value.
Ken Wimberly: That’s probably the most important thing you said. Adding value to people. It’s huge.
The Final Four
Gordon Lamphere: On that note, our Final Four questions add value in understanding both the industry and the person we’re talking to. First: what do you think will change most about the commercial real estate industry over the next ten years?
Ken Wimberly: Technology is going to continue to play a larger role in commercial real estate, and you’re seeing it in some buildings now. I think blockchain will find a role, certainly in title. I don’t pretend to be an expert, but from what I’ve read and listened to, that’s going to play a big role. And for people in brokerage, specialization and niching down will get more and more important.
Gordon Lamphere: The world is flat, so it’s hard to be a generalist. Going back to the start of your career, what would you tell a young Ken? Your one-minute spiel if you had a time machine.
Ken Wimberly: I’d tell myself, I’ve looked at all the real estate you’ve owned and sold over the years, and it’s so much more valuable today than when you sold it. So think about hanging on to everything. Keep investing, whether single family or shopping centers, whatever you can buy, and continue to own it.
Gordon Lamphere: That may not be the first time we’ve heard that. Though the funny thing is, the buy-and-hold folks we talk to see the grass greener on the other side and say, I really should have sold that office property in 2006. The grass is always greener. Next: I’m a big reader, a nerd. Is there a book on business or real estate that really influenced your career?
Ken Wimberly: Twenty-plus books a year for me. Here’s a book on mindset I didn’t read until I was forty, eleven years ago, and I was absolutely floored: Think and Grow Rich. In business, The E-Myth Revisited, a great book about growing a business and becoming a business owner instead of an operator. And Cashflow Quadrant by Kiyosaki, which I read early on, even before I got into real estate, along with Think and Grow Rich, and thought, whoa, this makes a ton of sense. Those are a handful that have been really influential.
Gordon Lamphere: A lot of brokers follow the podcast, and I’d say this definitively: if you work in the service industry, find some avenue of long-term cash flow, because you don’t know how powerful equity is until you have it. I’m in the service industry, but I certainly don’t get all my cash flow from the labor of my hands. Great books. Last question, and the most important: is there a person who’s influenced you in the world of real estate that we should reach out to? You’ve coached and helped a lot of successful people.
Ken Wimberly: I’ll give you four. One is a former coaching client who’s now probably the most successful manufactured housing broker in the country, Buddy Martin. He’s amazing. Another is the guy I mentioned who’s also worked out more than a thousand days, Jay Carris, a significant real estate developer building a massive thousand-unit complex in San Antonio that’s going to be a magical property. And then my two laundromat partners. Skylar, the operator I told you about, the former Special Forces guy, who runs a residential real estate practice and is building our laundromat empire. And my other partner, Jason, who’s been a real estate redeveloper for 20 years, a shopping center rehabber and a phenomenal guy. I’m happy to get you contact info for all four.
Gordon Lamphere: I’d love it. They sound like phenomenal folks to bring on. Ken, thank you so much for hopping on the podcast today.
Ken Wimberly: Gordon, it’s been a blast. Thank you for having me, and keep doing the great work you’re doing.
Gordon Lamphere: If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a like, a five-star rating, or a review. Your comments, interactions, and subscriptions matter for the podcast algorithm and help us continue to get the guests our viewers want to listen to and learn from. You can follow us on YouTube, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Gordon Lamphere with the Real Finds Podcast. Thank you for listening.
Van Vlissingen and Co. has been the Midwest’s oldest commercial real estate brokerage, development, and management firm since 1879, and today is independently ranked the #1 commercial real estate agency in Chicagoland, home to the #1 independently ranked agent, Gordon Lamphere, and the region’s #1 ranked commercial property management team. If you own, manage, or invest in energy-adjacent, mixed-use, or transit-oriented property across Lake County, the North Shore, the Northwest and O’Hare corridors, DuPage and the I-88 corridor, Will County, or southern Wisconsin’s Pleasant Prairie, Kenosha, and Racine markets, contact Van Vlissingen and Co. at 📞 847-634-2300 or 🌐 vvco.com. For a market-wide view of where these dynamics sit today, see our State of the Chicagoland Commercial Real Estate Market for Q3 2026.