I founded our Evergreen® laundromat business, SuperSuds, in 1996. Having come from a career on Wall Street, I launched the company as a numbers guy. I saw opportunity in a $6 billion fragmented industry, consisting mostly of mom-and-pop stores, to grow a regional business through paced acquisitions over time. The metrics were all promising for developing professionally run stores, and I jumped in.

I quickly realized what I had known theoretically in my finance career—there’s a big difference between being an investor and being an operator. I had never managed people, and I was learning as I went.