By Timothy Oommen, Owner — Laundini Laundromat | laundinilaundromat.com
I’m going to tell you something that most business owners won’t.
Not because they’re dishonest. Because it’s hard to say out loud. Because admitting it fully means sitting with the memory of it, and the memory is not comfortable.
But I started this blog to be real with you. So here it is.
The Year I Tried to Do Everything
At one point in the not-so-distant past, I was simultaneously:
Running a food delivery company. Co-owning and operating a restaurant. Building out a laundromat from a bare unit — running utility lines, sourcing machines, managing contractors. Taking on occasional construction jobs on the side as a general contractor just to generate cash flow.
All at the same time. Every single day.
I want you to understand what that actually means in practice. It doesn’t mean you’re busy. Busy is fine. Busy is just a full calendar. What I’m describing is something different — it’s the point where the human brain, which has a real and finite capacity to hold things, track things, communicate things, and make good decisions about things, starts to fail under the weight of too many open loops.
You start forgetting things. Not small things — important things. A conversation you needed to have with a contractor. A detail in a lease you should have read more carefully. A machine spec that mattered. A supplier you needed to follow up with. An employee who needed a clear answer and instead got silence because you were already mentally somewhere else entirely.
And when you forget things, people notice. And some of them assume the worst. Contractors accused me of being deliberately evasive. Vendors thought I was dishonest. People who deserved clear communication from me got confusion instead — not because I was trying to deceive anyone, but because I had genuinely run out of bandwidth to be the person every situation needed me to be simultaneously.
That is what taking on too much looks like from the inside. It doesn’t feel like ambition. It feels like drowning slowly while trying to convince everyone around you that you’re fine.
What It Actually Cost
I’m not going to give you a single dollar figure because the cost wasn’t only financial. It was everything at once.
There were months I couldn’t make rent on the business. Then there were months I was late on rent for my own apartment. I was taking outside work — construction jobs, anything — just to cover the gap between what was coming in and what needed to go out. There were days I had just enough money for gas. Days where the math of the day was that specific and that tight.
Mentally, I was drained in a way I hadn’t experienced before. Each day had a ceiling: go home, eat, sleep, start again. That was it. There was nothing left for anything else.
Friendships got strained. Relationships I’d built over years started fraying because I didn’t have the energy or the presence to maintain them. The people in my life who mattered were getting whatever was left of me after the business took everything else — which some days was almost nothing.
I want to be careful about how I say this next part. I’m not telling you this for sympathy. I’m telling you because I think there is a version of this story that gets told in business media where the hard part is always framed as the exciting part — the gritty montage before the success, the obstacle that makes the eventual win more cinematic.
It didn’t feel like that when I was in it. It felt like genuine uncertainty about whether this was going to work. About whether I had made a series of decisions that were going to cost me more than I could afford to lose.
What I Learned — The Hard Version
The lesson sounds simple when you say it out loud. It is not simple when you are learning it.
People have a finite amount of bandwidth. This is not a motivational talking point. It is a biological fact with real business consequences. You can only track so many things, communicate clearly about so many things, make good decisions about so many things, before the quality of all of it starts to degrade. The answer is not to work harder. The answer is to do fewer things, done properly.
I should have picked one thing. Finished it. Made sure it worked. Then moved to the next.
Instead I picked everything simultaneously and gave each thing a fraction of what it needed. The restaurant needed all of me. The laundromat buildout needed all of me. The delivery business needed all of me. None of them got all of me. They all got a tired, overextended version of me who was making decisions on insufficient sleep, insufficient information, and insufficient time to think anything through properly.
Test everything before you commit. Before you sign a lease, understand the numbers deeply enough to know what the business needs to generate to make that lease survivable. Before you buy equipment, understand the installation requirements, the maintenance costs, the downtime implications if it fails. Before you take on a partner, understand what that partnership actually obligates you to. Before you say yes to anything — a deal, a purchase, a contract — ask yourself: do I understand what could go wrong here?
I did not always ask that question. I paid for it.
Contractors are not your friends. I say this not with bitterness but with clarity. In my experience, contractors will tell you what you want to hear to get the job, underprice to win the bid, and then find reasons why it costs more and takes longer. Not all of them. But enough of them that you should verify everything, put everything in writing, and never assume that a verbal commitment means the same thing to both people in the conversation.
Test the work before you pay for it. All of it.
The numbers are not optional. The intricate details of a business — the actual margins, the actual costs, the actual break-even point, the actual cash flow timeline — are not something you can approximate and fill in later. They are the foundation. Without them you are making every subsequent decision on guesswork, and guesswork compounds. One wrong assumption leads to another, and another, until you are standing in a situation that feels sudden but was actually the slow accumulation of decisions made without enough information.
The Turning Point
There wasn’t a single dramatic moment. There rarely is.
It was more of a slow understanding that settled in over time. As easy as it is to build something up, to feel momentum, to feel like things are working — it is equally easy for all of it to be taken away. Quickly. Without much warning.
I had felt momentum with BiteBring. I had felt it with the restaurant. I had felt it in the early weeks of the laundromat buildout when things were moving and the vision felt close.
And I had watched momentum disappear. From the restaurant, from my bank account, from my relationships, from my health.
What that taught me — really taught me, in the way that only losing something can — is that sustainability matters more than speed. That doing one thing right is worth more than doing five things at once. That the people who depend on you, whether they’re customers or employees or friends, deserve a version of you that is actually present enough to show up properly.
I stopped taking on new things. I sold the restaurant. I focused.
And then I built the pickup and delivery system, because it was the thing I knew how to do and the thing the business actually needed. Not because I had boundless energy. Because I had finally learned to direct the energy I had.
Why I’m Telling You This
Because I think the honest version of this story is more useful than the polished one.
If you’re building something right now — a business, a side project, anything — and you’re feeling the specific exhaustion of too many open loops, I want you to know that the instinct to add more, to do more, to take on the next thing before the current thing is stable, is one of the most expensive instincts in entrepreneurship.
Close the loop in front of you first.
And if you ever want to talk about it — I’m at info@laundinilaundromat.com. I’m not a coach or a consultant. I’m just someone who went through it and came out the other side with a laundry business I’m genuinely proud of and a very clear understanding of what I would do differently.
The business is better for what it cost. I just wish it had cost a little less.
Laundini Laundromat serves all of Cook County — pickup and delivery, 24-hour turnaround, residential and commercial. Book at laundinilaundromat.com.
Timothy Oommen is the founder and owner of Laundini Laundromat, with locations in Evanston, Bucktown, Skokie, and Wheeling, IL.