I was reading through some of the online forums last week. These spaces are to get information and viewpoints on our industry. Owner/operators and others exchanging ideas, asking questions, sharing what's working and what isn't. It's where a lot of real conversation happens.
One post caught my eye. An owner/operator wanted to know if others offered and thoughts on a service where the attendant moves a client's clothes from the washer to the dryer. Over 25+ comments followed. Some charge for the service. Some do it at no cost to keep machines turning for the next client. Some see it as part of the services they offer. Others raised concerns about liability and the potential to undercut their WDF business.
What got me thinking was the piece that's hardest to capture in a comment thread, the process. Over 25+ perspectives, and almost all of them shared where the person landed on the topic. I began to think about how this thread could be even more valuable to a reader. I landed on, something that rarely makes it to the comments, what did you try, for how long, and what happened? Not because perspectives aren't valid. They are. But the difference between "we don't do that" and "we tried it for three months and here's what we found" is the difference between a perspective and a data point.
When the middle step disappears
There's a pattern in how business decisions get made in our industry that I've been turning over for years. It tends to move in one step. Someone hears about a service, a pricing approach, a layout change, or an operational practice. They form a position. That position becomes permanent. Yes or no. Do it or don't. Policy.
The step that's missing is the one that sits between hearing about something and committing to it. The small scale test. The limited run. The "let me try this with a handful of clients for a few weeks and see what actually happens" step.
Most of us have been exposed to testing in some form, whether through a previous career, a company we worked at/with, or just the products and services we interact with every day. The concept isn't foreign. But somewhere in the transition from working inside an organization to running your own business, the practice tends to fade away. The infrastructure that made testing feel natural, the teams, the budgets, the processes, the expectation, disappears. And without that structure, testing just stops happening. That's probably not unique to laundry. It may be something that happens across small business more broadly when you move from being part of a system to building one yourself.
The math your brain does before you do any math
Behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky spent decades studying how people evaluate risk. Their research, which earned Kahneman the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, identified a pattern they called loss aversion. People feel the pain of a loss roughly twice as intensely as the pleasure of an equivalent gain.¹
That ratio matters here. When an owner/operator hears "someone will claim their $500 designer shirt went missing," the potential loss registers at roughly double the emotional weight of the potential revenue the service could generate. That calculation happens before any spreadsheet gets opened. Before any test gets thought of. The brain has already voted, and it voted no.
Layer in a second force. Researchers William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser identified what they called status quo bias in 1988. People disproportionately prefer choices that maintain current circumstances.² Kahneman and Tversky found a related pattern. People feel greater regret for bad outcomes that result from new actions than for bad outcomes that result from doing nothing. If you try a new service and it creates a problem, that feels worse than if you never tried it and missed the revenue. Even if the revenue would have far outweighed the problem.
These two forces work together. Loss aversion makes the downside of trying something feel twice as heavy as the upside. Status quo bias makes inaction feel safer than action, even when inaction has its own cost. Together, they create a default, permanent decisions made without testing. The "no" feels responsible. The missed opportunity stays invisible.
The industries that made testing non-negotiable
McDonald's doesn't add a drink to its national menu because someone at headquarters thought it sounded good. When the company decided to expand its McCafé beverage lineup, the process took years. They built an entire spinoff concept called