By Timothy Oommen, Owner — Laundini Laundromat | laundinilaundromat.com
I’m 27 years old. I own four laundromats across Cook County, a delivery truck, and a business I built from nothing. I’ve also sold a restaurant at a loss, nearly run out of money more times than I’d like to admit, and spent more than a few nights wondering if I’d made a series of irreversible mistakes.
I’m not writing this from the other side of success. I’m writing it from the middle of it — still building, still solving problems, still figuring things out in real time.
These are the five things I believe most deeply about building something. They’re not borrowed wisdom. They’re what I’ve learned from actually doing it.
1. Fight. Fight. Fight. No Matter What.
You’re already in it. The lease is signed. The machines are in. The money is spent. The only direction that makes sense is forward.
This sounds obvious until you’re in a month where the revenue doesn’t cover the bills, the contractor just told you the work needs to be redone, and you haven’t had a full night’s sleep in three weeks. In those moments the easiest thing in the world is to rationalize a graceful exit. To tell yourself you tried, it didn’t work, and at least you learned something.
Don’t.
The businesses that survive are not the ones where nothing went wrong. They’re the ones where the founder refused to stop when things went wrong. Persistence is not glamorous. It doesn’t make for a good origin story in the moment. But it’s the single variable most within your control and the one that matters most.
We are in this. We might as well make something of ourselves.
2. Sales Fixes Everything
Cash flow problems. Team morale. Operational chaos. Debt. The creeping anxiety that comes from watching your bank balance move in the wrong direction.
Sales fixes all of it.
Not perfectly. Not instantly. But more reliably than any other single variable in a business. When revenue is coming in — when the phone is ringing and the orders are booking and the accounts are growing — everything else becomes more manageable. Problems that felt existential at $0 feel solvable at $10,000 a month.
The instinct when things are hard is to cut costs, optimize operations, restructure. Those things matter. But the most powerful lever is almost always on the revenue side. More customers. More commercial accounts. More recurring orders.
When in doubt: sell something.
3. There Are Opportunities Everywhere — Don’t Get Over Yourself
The biggest trap in entrepreneurship is ego. The belief that the next opportunity has to be bigger, flashier, more impressive than the last one. That is how people miss the best opportunities available to them.
My rule: the first goal is self-preservation. Before ambition, before growth, before vision — survive. And the opportunity worth taking meets three criteria:
It can generate an outsized return. It sits within your circle of competency — you understand it, you can execute it, you’re not learning the fundamentals while your money is on the line. And you’ve diagnosed the specific problem in that business and you’re uniquely positioned to fix it.
I bought laundromats because I understood delivery, marketing, and digital infrastructure. The laundromat industry had none of those things done well. That was the gap. That was the opportunity. It wasn’t sexy. It was correct.
Don’t wait for the opportunity that impresses people. Find the one that fits.
4. Consistency Beats Timing. Always.
Everyone wants the outsized win. The investment that triples. The business that goes from zero to a million in eighteen months. The market timing that makes you look like a genius.
Here’s what actually works: showing up consistently over a long period of time.
Warren Buffett averaged 22% annual returns over 50 years. The market averages around 12% over ten years. A newer investor — talented, first year — fell to 18%. All of that outperforms the person who tried to time the market, got out at the wrong moment, and missed the recovery.
100% to 200% returns are possible at small numbers in short periods. But the people who build lasting wealth do it through consistency. Same standards every order. Same process every day. Same commitment to showing up when it would be easier not to.
Time in the market beats timing the market. Build the habit. Trust the process. Stay in it long enough for it to work.
5. Don’t Over-Leverage. But Know That the Line Is Hard to See.
Leverage is seductive. Borrowed money lets you move faster, buy more, scale sooner. And the stories you hear are almost always about the people for whom it worked. You don’t hear as much about the ones who didn’t.
The data is sobering. Approximately 20% of new businesses fail within their first year. By year five, roughly 50% have closed. By year ten, about 65%. The primary causes: cash flow problems, lack of market demand, and poor management. Leverage amplifies all three.
I know this from experience. There were periods building Laundini where the liabilities felt like they were running the business rather than the other way around. Those periods are survivable. They’re also avoidable with more discipline up front.
The honest advice: leverage yourself enough to move, not so much that one bad quarter ends the game. The line between those two things looks clearer in theory than it does in practice. It feels like ambition when you’re taking on the debt and feels like a mistake when the revenue doesn’t arrive on schedule.
Borrow to build something real. Not to feel like you’re building something big.
The Honest Summary
Fight no matter what. Sell relentlessly. Take the right opportunity, not the impressive one. Show up consistently for longer than feels necessary. And be careful with leverage — it’s a tool, not a strategy.
None of this is new. All of it is harder than it sounds. Most of it I’ve had to learn by getting it wrong first.
We’re still here. Still building. Still figuring it out.
That’s the whole point.
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Timothy Oommen is the founder and owner of Laundini Laundromat, with locations in Evanston, Bucktown, Skokie, Wheeling, and South Shore, Chicago.