Experience in Dry Cleaning?

August 11, 2025

by a searcher from Brigham Young University - Marriott School of Management in Lehi, UT, USA

Currently looking at dry cleaning businesses to buy and I was wondering if anyone has any experience in the space and would be willing to connect. What are things to look out for when purchasing a dry cleaners? How difficult is it to find good employees? Manager? Should I consider purchasing a drop store first and then look at purchasing a plant? A lot of these businesses are cash heavy, do you consider under the table cash transactions at all when looking at SDE and SDE multiples? Is it difficult to service the equipment or find a local mechanic? Thank you in advance!

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Reply by a lender
from Eastern Illinois University in 900 E Diehl Rd, Naperville, IL 60563, USA

Speaking from a lender perspective, the issues we see come up are as follows: 1) How much of the business is walk in versus commercial accounts. The more commercial accounts you have the more consistent the business can be, but it also can pose a customer concentration risk. 2) What have the revenues trends been? Dry cleaning took a bit hit with the pandemic and has not fully recovered. 3) How much competition exists in the market you are looking at? 4) Do they provide a pickup and drop off service for customers, or is that something you can expand into? That appears to be used a lot now for convenience for customers and to grow. 5) What does the employee retention look like? 6) As Sean said above, if an older location and you are buying the property, you definitely want to find out how long they have been operating and if they did cleaning on site. Most of the original dry cleaning chemicals were toxic and most sites that used the original chemicals are environmentally contaminated. It does not mean you still can buy the site, but there might be some additional cost to doing so. We often find the owners can be pretty involved if they only have one or two locations. Once you get larger, you can move into more of a management role. But finding good people is always a challenge. Happy to discuss further at any time at redacted

Reply by a lender
from University of Missouri in Denver, CO, USA

Thanks for the tag, Luke. I don't have a ton of experience here. If you're purchasing real estate it can be a headache for the environmental testing. Also, it's very difficult to count cash transactions if you are using SBA.

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