Alex Winch Interview 2026-06-10 @ Oro

First Cleaned-up Draft

A: Well, I said to you to use generally a recording device. I suggest this, I think there’s all kinds of apps, I’m sure, that will make this happen. We’re recording now.

M: The 1st one, now that you’ve got it, I put the questions sorted by how you would introduce yourself at certain places. So this would be, if you were at a dinner party, for example, and somebody goes, Oh, where are you from? That’s the kind of thing that people think of here.

A: Born in Edmonton, Alberta, raised in Burlington, Ontario. I’ve been in Toronto since 1985 when I graduated from Queens. I was at Queens in Kingston from 1981 to 1985. So where am I from? I’m from Canada.

M: Perfect. Perfect answer. You did it. I was looking for that answer. Hmm. Okay. Then this introduction would be if you were at a council meeting, at The Beach, and they’re saying to you, okay, what brought you to The Beach Village? So that’s the kind of people that you that you’re talking to.

A: Right. So I have been in the neighbourhood since 1994. I bought my house, signed the papers in December of 93. I moved in in March of ’94. I’ve been in the same house ever since. I came to the neighbourhood because, looking at various different neighbourhoods in Toronto, walking along Queen Street, the shopkeepers were just overwhelmingly friendly and legitimate. And that’s what, for me, weighed the balance between various neighbourhoods that my then girlfriend, who became my wife, who became my ex, and I were looking at it. So, it’s the friendliness of the neighbourhood, the shopkeepers, that specifically selected this neighbourhood over others that we were looking at.

M: As you know, I will be editing this and you’ll be approving it, so this is just… getting it on the tape, whatever you want to get on there. All right, so then the next question is, you’re explaining to a new person who’s just moved or thinking about moving a business into the cleaning area. Okay, so, what in your previous life helps you to take over a laundromat and then start Monk’s later on?

A: There’s a long story prior to buying the Beach Solar Laundromat building at 2240 Queen East, which I bought in 2002. Immediately prior to that, well, let’s do the lead up.

I did a degree in engineering physics at Queens University, graduating 1985, went to work in the stock market as a technology analyst on Bay Street. I worked for three different firms, ending as VP of research at Sprott Securities. He and I had a disagreement over valuations on publicly traded companies, and in 1989 he invited me to leave the company. I was pissed off at Eric, who, in this instance, was wrong. He’s done very well for himself. He can’t complain. He’s unlikely to, he’s probably gonna laugh if he ever hears this. But I was pissed off at him.

So I set out to set up a research house that would sell research on Canadian companies. The principal focus of the work I had been doing at Sprott was research from a bearish perspective, specifically serving American short seller clients. And so when I set up my own shop, I wanted to establish my own reputation independent of any influences that I might have had at Sprott Securities. So if you’re going to establish your own reputation, you have to be standing alone, as opposed to being part of a team, because the team might have influenced your good or your bad decisions. Right? So I set up a research shop specifically to establish my own independent research, my own independent name. That was October of 1989. I sold research for a year. I billed it on a blank invoice basis, so once a quarter, I would send my clients a piece of paper that had the word “Invoice” at the top of it, and at the bottom was “Amount Owing”. They would decide how much the work was worth, and that, in turn, forced them to think about the contribution that my research had made to their organization. What had they traded based on my research? What had they made, profit wise? A small hedge fund, managing $10 million, might have had $100,000 of exposure to my ideas, and they might have made a few thousand dollars, and paying me a few hundred dollars would have been a right, an appropriate amount. A larger hedge fund might have taken larger positions on my ideas and my research, and might have made more money, and so paying a larger dollar amount, but a similar percentage of their earnings, would have been an appropriate amount. So I let them decide how much to pay me, as opposed to me.

M: And was this your own idea?

A: Yes. So, when I left Sprott Securities, a couple of houses tried to convince me to join as a research analyst. A Bay Street brokerage firm called First Marathon, run by a man named Lawrence Bloomberg, was very successful. Lawrence asked me into his office, and jumped up and down, literally not just figuratively, telling me nobody, nobody does that, nobody survives selling independent research, I absolutely have to come and work at First Marathon.

M: He was a salesman.

A: I said Lawrence, I’m not going to, but if the research is that good that you want to hire me, do you want to become a client? He said, Sure. So First Marathon became a client; how they traded their own portfolio, or challenged their own analysts, with a contrary view that they might have heard from this crazy guy Winch ~ what they did with the research was up to them. But after a year, my clients had paid me well into six figures on this voluntary invoice basis, and I realized that my clients, primarily American short selling hedge funds, were serving American clients with American ideas on American stocks. I had a unique proposition as a Canadian, selling ideas on Canadian stocks. Those same American ultimate clients would benefit by the diversification. I wouldn’t be competing with the American hedge fund clients that I had been serving, because I was focussed on the Canadian sandbox, and they were all focussed on the American sandbox.

M: And this is still 1990-1.

A: Yes. My American hedge fund clients were generous enough to introduce me to their ultimate clients when I told them that I would be stopping the research service. So that’s how I got started managing other people’s money. I set up a hedge fund in Canada. and then took on some accounts south of the border for side-by-side management. Then a year or two later, exactly when I don’t remember, I set up an office in New York City, and ran an American hedge fund, qualifying under American Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) Blue Sky Regulations. I became a Regulation W (Federal Reserve transaction limit) investment advisor.

M: Is this getting tested to get certified? They would test you, or they would check your work, or how would you get this? Do you get certified by filing with the SEC?

A: I was already recognized as a Chartered Financial Analyst. I got my CFA designation in 1989. There really is no certification, or there wasn’t then, to be a money manager. If the clients trust you with a million dollars, that’s credibility enough, right? And it’s ultimately their money, and these hedge funds have high minimum investments. The whole intent of the SEC and the OSE (Ontario Securities Commission) at the time was that by having a high minimum investment, you wouldn’t be taking from widows and orphans the last $10 that they might have. If you’re accepting a quarter of a million dollar contribution from somebody who’s worth $100 million, it’s not going to make or break them if you take high risks with the investments. So, I set up a Canadian hedge fund, and I set up American side-by-side accounts. A year or two later, in 1993, I set up an office in New York City. and ran a US hedge fund from there, as well as continuing the Canadian hedge fund from Canada. And then in 1995, I retired on performance fees.

At that time, my wife and I were expecting our first child, who was born in June 1996. The timing’s important here. Nine months prior, in September/October of 1995, Mr. Garth Drabinsky chose to sue me for $10 million for writing a letter to the editor of Forbes magazine, in which I called his accounting aggressive. As a financial analyst, I was fully qualified to opine that his accounting was aggressive, as I had done a lot of research on him and his company, Livent.

M: What attracted you to this issue?

A: When I joined Sprott Securities, they had a salesman, Lawrence Graham, who was convinced that Drabinsky was cooking the books. But he didn’t have the time to pour through the financial statements. So, as an analyst at Sprott Securities, he, with Eric’s blessing, said to me, “Go take a look at Livent.” So I spent some time on the books. I wrote a 100-page report on exactly how he was cooking the books. I had him dead to rights. I knew the books were cooked. Then I wrote a ‘letter to the editor’ after Forbes published an article in which Drabinsky was quoted as pounding the table saying “There’s not an ounce of flamboyance in these financial statements.” My letter to the editor said, “The accounting’s aggressive.”

M: How could you get access to their books?

A: Oh, every publicly traded company has to file quarterly financial statements. So, as an outsider, (and remember in all of this, I’m an outsider, and that’s an important point to make. I’m an outsider, not an insider. I’m not the auditor.) But as an outsider, I was able to see the financial statements he was filing were internally inconsistent. What he told the SEC materially disagreed with what he told the Ontario Securities Commission. The two sides cannot [both] be true. So I had him dead to rights. And he chose to sue me for $10 million dollars for libel. Drabinsky, Gottlieb, Livent, and I went back and forth in pretrial motions for a year. I wanted to get him into deposition, and he wanted to get me into deposition, in Canada. And my lawyers argued that because he was suing me, he had to get deposed first. I don’t know whether it was Ontario law or just the position lawyers took. But they wouldn’t make me available for deposition until he was deposed first. He was an Ontario lawyer. but that was irrelevant to the fact that he was committing securities fraud based in Ontario. So, he used shareholders’ money to hire a big, fancy Bay Street law firm. to try to get me off his back, right? Or at least quiet. And I am sitting on my own little nest egg of money made from performance fees. And I’m fighting my own case, having hired a big Bay Street law firm, shooting that on my behalf. We went back and forth with pretrial motions for a year. He absolutely refused to be deposed. My lawyers refused to make me available for a deposition. So he moved that because I was not a chartered accountant, I couldn’t possibly understand their financial statements. Move to summary judgement.

M: May I make a point here? My father was a CA.

A: Okay, there you go.

M: This is what I was waiting for. Thank you. Keep going.

A: He asked his lawyers to move for summary judgement. I asked my lawyers what that meant and what my chances were. And they said, Well, we’ve reviewed all the paperwork. We think we’ve got a 70 or 80% chance of winning against a summary judgement. I said, Okay, so what does winning look like in this case? Well, he goes away, but he could appeal. I said, Okay, what does losing look like? Well, he’ll ask for damages: the amount by which the market capitalization of the company has decreased since the letter to the editor was published. And now we’re talking tens of millions. So I just said, Okay, what’s the third choice? What’s the third choice to settle this thing? They said, Well, let’s go and talk to their lawyers and figure out what he wants to settle it. And what he wanted to settle it was: I publish a grovelling apology that they wrote, published in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes Magazine. I can’t remember if The New York Times was in there as well.

M: Yes. Yes.

A; They were? Okay. And I had to cover any short positions, and I had to agree to silence. So I was short stock. Short means you sell something you don’t own in anticipation that you’ll buy it back later at a lower price, and you’ve sold high and bought low, and the chronology is just reversed from a normal investor, who wants to buy low and then sell high. So, grovelling apologies, cover any short position, and agree to a three-year cone of silence, that I may not speak about Drabinsky, Gottlieb, any of his directors, or any of his businesses, Livent, Cineplex Odeon, for a period of three years.

M: How did you feel about that?

A: Unjust. But a way out, an escape hatch, because it let me sail off into the sunset with a nest egg.

M: But wasn’t he under suspicion still?

A: My letter had been published, but it didn’t cause a permanent ruffle. And we’ll get to what I’m talking about there in just a moment. So, I agreed to publish the grovelling apologies, cover the short position, and go totally silent. A couple of years later, and this is still before the proverbial hit the fan, Michael Ovitz’s Los Angeles Talent Agency invested, personally, $20 million into Livent. So my letter to the Forbes editor didn’t cause suspicion. The police weren’t knocking at his door. The securities commission thought everything was fine even though I had him dead to rights based on what was in the published financial statements. For a period of years, I was ahead of the curve. Michael Ovitz invests $20 million into Livent.. Six weeks later, the accounting people at Livent go to Michael Ovitz and say, “You ought to know the whole thing’s a sham.” Words to that effect.

M: But the money was already there.

A: Michael Ovitz’s $20 million had already been put into Livent. But the corporate books are all a sham. So Ovitz, to his credit, did the right thing and called a board meeting. They terminated Drabinsky and Gottlieb, sealed the offices, and began the forensic audit of what’s going on. 1995? Uh, no, that was… a couple of years after that, ’95 was the letter to the editor. There’s a 98 and a 99. Right, I think ’98 was when the Michael Ovitz, so ’95 was the letter to the editor, October 10th of ’95 was the notice of suit, I fought him for a year, pre-trail promotions we’re now late ’96. Two years after that, 98, was when Obitz put the money in. I’m still under the cone of silence. Right. So I’m living in Toronto. At that time, my phone number was unlisted. because I didn’t want scrap calls. And I got a call from my father one Saturday morning. And he said, I’ve had a call this morning from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, asking if I’m related to you. Is there anything I should know? I said, no, Dad. Some other people have some problems, but not me. So anyway, the period of a three-year cone of silence expires, and by that time his empire had already collapsed. When Ovitz called in Drabinsky and Gottlieb to the board meeting, the board room, whatever, and fired them, the stock was halted by the Securities Commission at $11.50 a share, and it never reopened. So all shareholders at that moment lost everything.

So the whole thing collapses, and I am now retired. I have closed down my hedge funds. That was happening simultaneously. End of ’95. So, I completed the audit of the money that I was managing at the end of ’95, that was done, the audits were complete February of ’96. And I’m now just an individual, managing my own money, and keeping my mouth shut. So managing my own money, I began investing as anybody could or would, with a little bit of insight in how stock markets work. Started buying shares of a company that ran casinos on Indian lands in California. Indians, were they saying Indian at that point? At the time, it was called the Indian Gaming Act. So the Indian Gaming Act permitted indigenous people to operate casinos and to hire consultants to manage those casinos. There was a publicly traded company in California that ran the casinos for several indigenous groups. And I began investing in that company and bought a meaningful enough piece that, when I called them up and said, I’m not happy with the way you’re doing investor relations, and communicating what you’re doing to the investing public, I can do better. Let me do that as a volunteer. So I became a volunteer Investor Relations person for Thunderbird Gaming, as it was called.

M: Did you still have your American accreditation at that point?

Yes, CFA, no Regulation W, so I’m no longer registered [in America] to manage other people’s money. But to this day, I still carry my CFA designation. If I wanted to get back in the investment industry, it’s like a calling card. With that in good standing, I can work anywhere in the world. and make a very healthy income, if I wanted to.

So, as Investor Relations (IR), I was able to make some recommendations on governance. They invited me to join the board. In 2002 I became chairman of the board, and ~

M: All of a sudden, you were chair?

A: All of a sudden, well, in a couple years. Still pressing on matters of governance, somewhat consistently, as the chairman of the board, and the management didn’t like how insistent I was. They were lawyers, and when I pressed hard, they were unhappy and asked me to resign as chairman of the board. Which I did. And then I travelled on my own nickel to meet the shareholders.

M: This is still 2002? Real quick!

A: Yeah still 2002. When I get people pissed off, I get them very pissed off. I started travelling to meet the shareholders in Vancouver, in Montreal, and in Zurich. And my proposition was, as a director, as a chairman of the board, I had the authority to influence governance, but I have now been asked to resign. I don’t have the authority to run the company, unless we have a hostile proxy fight and you as shareholders give me that authority.

M: Please define hostile and then proxy.

A: So hostile means that I am acting against the wishes of the management team. It doesn’t mean that I’m hostile to the shareholders or to the corporation. Proxy: every shareholder gets a chance to vote at an annual meeting, to elect directors, to appoint auditors, and any other business that legitimately comes before the meeting that has been properly called and convened. Usually, the management team will propose a slate of directors, and the shareholders rubber stamp that, they agree to whoever the management recommend should be the directors. That’s what normally happens.

M: In other words, they trust the managers.

A: Right. In a hostile proxy fight, you are acting against the preferences of the management team, to solicit the proxies to elect a different board of directors. And so my proposition to the shareholders as I travelled was, I don’t have right now the authority to upend this corporation, but please give it to me. And in private meetings, in Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, and Zurich, I was very clearly in the commanding position. So I went back to management and said, “Here’s what’s going to happen. We’re going to have an annual meeting, and I have in my hand, or figuratively, I hold the cards. Yes. to replace management. Let’s do this in an orderly manner. At the annual meeting, one existing director will resign, and one nominee for me will join the board. The next director will resign, the next nominee will join. And for every second of that meeting, we’ll have a properly constituted board of directors, right? Sequential resignation, sequential appointment, by the end of the meeting, you’ve got a properly constituted board of directors, and you sail on.” Instead, they chose to have a hissy fit. And their hissy fit consisted of all management resigning simultaneously, issuing a press release that I am now in charge of the company.

So I called up my lawyer and said, “Okay, so what do we do now?” He said, “Well, you don’t do anything. Because you don’t have the authority to write a check on behalf of the company. You can’t sign a contract, you can’t hire or fire. You can’t do anything on behalf of the corporation.” The management team cannot just point at Joe Smith and say, “You’re running the company now” out of the blue. You have to have the shareholders approve a process.

M: And management knew that as they were all lawyers.

A: That is right. They absolutely knew what they were doing, that they were sabotaging the corporation, and trying to stick the blame on me. So my lawyer said, “Don’t do anything. Just absolutely nothing. Don’t issue a press release in response to their allegation that you’re now running the company. Don’t do a thing.” So, a couple of days go by, and the former (because they’ve all resigned) the former chief legal officer, and former chief financial officer, get on a conference call and called me up, and say, “We don’t see your proxy papers being filed with the Securities Commission. What’s the wait? What’s the holdup?” I said, “Dave, Albert, I am not filing. I’m not filing a proxy fight. You’ve maliciously caused material damage to this publicly traded company. And if you don’t go back in there and fix it, I’m going to sue your ass off.” A couple of conference calls with senior shareholders in Zurich and Vancouver, who agreed to have mediate, ensue, and agreement was reached where we would munificently replace the board of directors with some people who were aligned with my perspective, and management would govern the corporation in accordance with the wishes of the shareholders. I would step completely aside. So I go back under my little cone of silence. I didn’t have any involvement from that day forward in the casino company. My friends in Zurich and Vancouver became the four directors, and lo and behold, the company reported a profit in the very next quarter.

In September of 2002, I bought a piece of bricks and mortar because I want to get my arms around my investment, not be subject to the whims of lawyers in California. It had a laundromat and a vacant store, and there was a tenant in the apartment upstairs. That’s how I came to have the Beach Solar Laundromat. How’s that for making a short story long? But for me,what that building represented was 100% control of the asset. I paid cash for the building, so there’s no mortgage, there’s no bank to convince.

I had already done a solar thermal shower at my in-law’s cottage. So let’s jump into the physics. It was the thermosiphon. At the cottage, the solar panel that I made from roofing metal and copper piping is what warmed up the water. The water circulated to a storage tank that was physically higher than the panel. In the day the hot water rises, the cold water at the bottom of the tank piped down to the bottom of the panel. During the day, while the sun is shining, the hot water circulates and accumulates in a hot water tank. At night, the sun goes down, the panel cools down, at the bottom of the system. The hot water automatically stays in the hot water tank. The next morning you want to shower, a bypass valve takes water from that circulation loop into the shower, and a cistern, held up at roof level of the cottage above where the shower is, now by gravity feeds new water into a loop. So ~ no electrical motors at all. [drawing]

M&A mix: You have the drawing of the solar thermal? Yu did it on that table. Oh, there you go. Okay, yes, there you go. I don’t think Beach Metro News is going to be interested in all of this detail. But when you write the biography, okay. The whole thing is, I am. Okay, there you go. And when I send this to you, I’m going to take a picture of that drawing and send it to you.

So back to the story. September of 2002, I become the owner of this building. It was an estate sale. The two brothers who had operated the laundromat since it had started in 1964, had experienced declining health. One had passed away. You know, that’s somewhat irreversible. And the other one was incapacitated. I don’t know all of the details. The man who was operating it day to day, a man by the name of Jimmy, with a long, white flowing beard, did the best he could with no budget for parts or professional repair service. So the place was held together with chewing gum and duct tape. It was the perfect kind of project for me to step into.

[Plug for Baar?)

So I now own a rundown laundromat and a vacant retail store. Mira’s consignment store had been in that retail space, but she had moved next door to the Fox building when the building went up for sale, because the certainty of her tenancy was up in the air. So it’s a vacant retail store and a really run down laundromat. It was gross inside. And I own the building.

Based on what I learned putting in a solar shower at the in-laws’ cottage, I commissioned a company out of London, Ontario, to put a professional installation up on the laundromat roof. I didn’t make this one: when you’re playing with eight panels, each of which is 4×8’, each of which weighs a couple hundred pounds, they’ve got to be secured to the roof. If a windstorm blows it loose and it lands in the middle of Queen Street, hits somebody and hurts somebody, that’s a serious liability. So this setup was designed and installed by professional engineers qualified to do it. Bob Swartman, a professor at University of Western Ontario, ran this company on the side with his son Peter, a firefighter. These two, designed and effected the installation on the roof. Once in place, I rebranded the laundromat from Beach Laundromat to Beach Solar Laundromat. So I’ve now got a vacant storefront and the laundromat and the apartment upstairs.

The tenant upstairs, Ann Casserly, had been there for 27 years, and the brothers had generously never raised the rent. She was sitting up there in a two-bedroom, beautiful apartment with a private 500-foot deck, paying $400 a month. So I went to Anne and said, Let’s have a conversation. I would like to raise the rent to market rents, and that’s significantly more than you’re paying right now. Is there a price that would encourage you to move? And so she and her son went away and did some numbers, and crunched some ideas, and called another meeting, and sat down in the dining room upstairs in the apartment, and the two of them were sitting there, somewhat nervous, and she wrote a number on a piece of paper, and pushed it across the table. I wrote the check right away. I remained friends with her daughter, who is in California. She’s married, and I don’t think she has kids. Ann’s son has passed away, but before he passed, he told me that the family and friends were delighted that she moved. Ann, bless her soul, was significantly overweight, and the family was concerned that if ever there was a health emergency, the firefighters and the ambulance simply couldn’t get her down the stairs in time.

M: Can I say something here?

A: Yeah, yeah.

M: This is the second time, in the story here, that you’ve let other people set a price for you. Can I ask what’s behind that?

A: If somebody sets the price and I choose it, it’s like a shotgun clause. That’s when two partners have built a business, but eventually they have a misunderstanding, a disagreement that is irreconcilable. A shotgun clause works where one partner names the price, and the other partner decides if, at that price, they are a buyer or a seller of the 50% they own. If you and I are business partners, and we disagree, and we pull the shotgun clause for the business, whatever it is, you set the price as $10 for your 50% interest. I decide whether at $10, I want to buy your 50%, because I think your price is too low, or I sell you my 50% because I think your price is too high. But you’ve already declared that $10 is a fair price. That’s how a shotgun works. So when I’m dealing with a counterparty, if I have the means, I much prefer that kind of shotgun pricing, because then the other party should walk away with a smile. Annie moved to a ground floor apartment in the neighbourhood and lived out the rest of her days in peaceful happiness. She was a retired school teacher. As I said, the daughter and I still remain in touch; she shared photographs of Christmas parties up in that apartment with me. All kind of fun stuff.

So the laundromat has now been running under my management, my ownership, since 2002, coming up on a quarter century. And in that time, it’s been everything from a little hobby business while I continued to invest in different things privately, to now it’s my main gig.

M: Okay. That’s the end of the first question.

A: Oh, wow, we got through one. I’ll take a second bite.

M: Please do. Your second cake, let’s keep this clear. I’m not starving you. No, it’s just that got recorded. And later we’re picking through the recording.

A: For the record, I did offer her if she wanted to eat anything.

M: And for the record, she already ate. The next page says, and you just read these questions before, so you need to just reminding you. How has this business enlarged your view of how you want to live your life, and affect others? And here is where we’re heading into the Master Class.

A: In teaching people how to run a business?

M: No, it’s more teaching people how to be more human in business.

A: Okay. The laundromat has evolved since I bought it. When I bought it, it was just a community utility.

M: Like the other ones.

A: That’s right.

M: So I checked them out.

A: There you go.

M: Which is why you’re the one that’s getting interviewed.

A: Okay, thank you. As a community utility, the proprietor may or may not keep it clean. The machines may or may not work. The hours may or may not be convenient. From those perspectives, it’s an extraordinarily simple business to run. You have no inventory of raw goods. Your electricity, your water, your natural gas, arrive in pipelines, and you pay for them in arrears. You’re not buying an inventory of fresh fruit, where you pay for it before you take delivery of the fruit, and then you’ve got the risk of whether you can move that fruit before it goes bad. So, as a business, it’s relatively simple to run, and from that perspective, it attracts people who want a perceived secure income. However. Pull the focus back a little. The laundromat is a community utility, but it’s also a community service, where people who don’t have laundry facilities in their own home, can come to use a communally shared machine.

M: Yes, utility is more government, services more human.

A: You’re thinking of utility from the economics perspective?

M: Yes, as in utilitarian.

A: Right. So, what began as a simple community utility evolved as I realized, as a business person, there was opportunity to do a better job. The first breakthrough was realizing that my machines were being heavily used in the evenings and weekends, and not much during the day. And if I started a wash and fold service, I could have my machines busy during the day, as well as have somebody there to answer questions about how to use the machines.

M: In the comments on your website, there were two or three criticisms that somebody came in during the day, and weren’t able to use machines because they were all full. And unfortunately, they decided to complain about it.

A: Right.

M: Your response was not too sympathetic.

A: I would draw the analogy. If you go to a restaurant and every table is busy, would you complain that it’s a terrible restaurant? Or would you be there next Saturday lining up?

M: Yes. I mean, your response was perfect, not to the person that wrote the complaint, but to anybody coming and reading, they would know, “This is a smart guy.”

A: Well, I’m sorry if I’m smart. I’ll try and dumb it down. No, I have to. I try to run a good business so that the machines are busy. My hours, both when it’s available for self serve, and when the shop is staffed, are well publicized. If you want machines that aren’t being used, come when the staff isn’t there. Exactly the same machines. My staff leave at 6 o’clock Monday to Friday. They leave at 4 on Saturday, they leave at 3 on Sunday. The shop is staffed 64 hours a week. There’s 168 hours in a week, and the shop is open from 5:30 in the morning till 10:30 at night, so it’s open 17 hours a day, seven days a week, 119 hours, and it’s staffed 64. So literally half of the hours are staffed, half the hours are unstaffed.

M: Is that, you said, that’s publicized? On your website?

A: And the hours are in the window. I am of the opinion that businesses that need to put signs everywhere have missed a point, right? I consciously run with a minimal amount of signage, so the signs that are there might actually get read.

M: Now, this may be my eyes.

A: Okay.

M: But when I looked at your window, it looked like it was saying it opens at 5:00am. And when I looked at your website, it says, 5:30am.

A: The man who did the signs retired, and I can’t get the signage to put 5:30 in place of 5:00. So you are absolutely right.

M: Suggestion. Get a razor blade.

A: Well, if I got a razor blade, I can cut off the zero.

M: You could remove half the zero. I’m an artist. This is what I do. And then you put a little indent halfway down for the middle of the 3.

A: Of all the complaints I’ve had, that is not one of them. I’ve never had people complaining: “But your sign says 5 o’clock, and your door doesn’t unlock until 5:30!” But thank you for bringing it up. One of the first things I did with that shop was to put in an electronic door lock, so the door unlocks automatically at a preset time.

M: I know that. Well, what if I arrive at 5:00 and I’m waiting at the door?

A: Well, you would be regretting that The Remarkable Bean doesn’t open for a full hour after that.

M: You also say that it’s open at Christmas.

A: I used to close on Christmas Day.

M: But it’s still on your website, in one place.

A: Oh, okay. The website has a lot of information, and I’ll go and hunt it. Thank you. I used to close on Christmas Day as the only day of the year that I closed the laundromat, and then I realized, legitimately, there are people who don’t recognize Christmas. And for them, some movie theatres, and restaurants do regular business on Christmas Day.

M: When did this happen?

A: Just a couple of years ago.

M: How long?

A: Yeah, it was just a couple of years ago that I started opening Christmas Day. You laugh. You know, I haven’t I haven’t, uh, squeezed this lemon?

M: This is fun. I’m having so much fun!

A: Oh, good for you. Me, too.

M: Yes well, it’s my turn to mercilessly tease you.

A: That’s fine.

M: I will take a photo snap for you and send it to you to show where the discrepancy is, because as an editor, I noticed it right away. It’s been driving me nuts ever since. But do you have a webmaster who takes care of your website? Okay, so they’ll be able to do it in two seconds. Are they on a retainer?

A: No, they bill me by the hour.

M: They’ll take two minutes.

A: From Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia.

M: It’ll take five minutes, because they’re relaxing. Do you want me to put that in, though, only two years ago? You realized that there were more than WASPs? No, I don’t think I could do it.

A: I don’t think it’s about realizing that there are more than WASPs, as opposed to realizing that, as a business, it was more prudent to be available than to recognize a holiday. It’s a weighing of values, right? Okay, so that’s in there, so… It’s a weighing of values.

M: To me, that’s core with you. But at least you’re saying it. In your words, not mine. Okay, so this is your best surprise. Anything else you want to say about living your life? Because that’s basically what you did. You open it up to the whole community.

A: Well, yeah, I mean, once you operate a business that is a service-oriented utility within the neighbourhood, then you have to become aware of the needs of the neighbourhood, that some people are going to come and linger over their laundry, and some people are going to be methodical and effective, moving through as quickly as possible. Everybody wants a clean machine, a clean floor, a well-lit space. The colour of the lights was very important. So if you notice, the lights in the laundromat are a bright white, graded in degrees Kelvin, which is a measure of the temperature of any substance. They emit light, reflective of the temperature, not the material. So when you’re making glass, for example, the glass maker will study the colour of the glass to know what the temperature of the molten glass is. Similarly, the colour of the lights is very high. I think it’s 6,000 Kelvin. It’s a bright white. I chose that colour for the laundromat because I want the whites to look white. I want the colours to pop, and if somebody has a stain, I want them to see the stain, right? So, in the laundromat, bright white. In the Monk’s side, it’s a softer yellow, they call it soft white. And the intent there is, that’s a service. It’s an upscale service place.

M: You’re dealing with the humans, but not really the clothing.

A: That right. So it’s a very conscious choice, the colouring of lights.

M: I will wear my sunglasses going into your laundromat.

A: I don’t think they’re quite that bright. Do you wear sunglasses inside?

A: I wear sunglasses even in the middle of snow in winter.

M: Okay, great. Well, I’m glad that you have found a way to be comfortable. That’s what’s most important.

A: So, in the course of a quarter century, I’ve seen characters in our neighbourhood. I’ve seen characters in our neighbourhood who have frequented my laundromat, and it’s a colourful cast of characters. I mean, you could write a whole book on the people who frequent the laundromat. And that would be a whole different story.

M: That’s the sequel, right?

A: As a neighbourhood, the people who come and go are a cross section of everybody. Even people with large homes, their machines break down once in a while, and they come to the laundromat, and they similarly expect the machines to work and the floor to be clean, and the lights to be bright. Everybody’s got the same expectation of a laundromat.

M: Then you meet their expectations.

A: I do my best. So these are mechanical machines. They will occasionally break down. And when they do, I feel it incumbent on me to, first thing, to talk to the customer. What were the symptoms? Here’s your money back, slap an “Out of Order sign” on it. But the symptoms are really important, because I want to know what went wrong. Because that’s the first step in fixing it. So now the customer feels that they’ve been heard, and I really, truly, it’s not just lip service. I want to know what went wrong, what were the symptoms, what stage of the cycle did it crash out? Because this is going to really help me in diagnosing it and getting it fixed as quick as possible.

I keep an inventory of parts. I don’t have every part on hand. But I keep an inventory of parts. So the common things that can crash out, I can fix that night. I do my repairs at night, so the laundromat closes at 1030, and the front door locks, and that’s when I will pull out the tools and spread tools across the floor and go at it. And I do that so that when I’m moving the machine out in the middle of the floor, I’m not conflicting with other people who are trying to get their laundry done. So things that are relatively straightforward, I’ll do right away. Some jobs like the bearings on a front load washing machine, it’s a two-night job. Some jobs are, I cannot physically buy the parts for love or money. I have two washing machines right now that are graveyard. I cannot get parts for them. I am on the trail of two more washing machines to come into the shop. At number 14 and number three.

M: So you never got your ball bearings.

A: Number three, the issues, there are multiple issues. It’s an electric motor that the motor controller isn’t performing properly, and I cannot physically find one. I have subsequently cannibalized that machine for the computer board, the change acceptor. I kept other machines running, with parts from that one. Machine 14 is the main bearings on the drum. But that particular Maytag, the bearings and the drum are only sold as one entire unit. It’s a $1,400 part, and I can buy a used machine for less than $1,400. So it’s graveyard bound, and to the extent that I can cannibalize parts from it. I have been and will continue to do.

Right. So back to that thread. In 2004, realizing that the machines were idle in the day, busy in the evenings and weekends, I went to Neighbourhood Link Senior Link, now called the Neighbourhood Group, I think. (end first recording)

I went to Senior Neighbourhood Link and said, “Here’s my situation. I’ve got a laundromat that’s busy in the evenings and weekends, and it’s idle during the day. You’ve got a clientele who are experienced in life, including laundry, and are idle during the day, and are resting in the evenings and weekends. Wouldn’t it be great if your seniors could be enabled to come and work in the laundromat? They would get light exercise, social interaction, community involvement, meaningful task, earning some money, wouldn’t it be great if your seniors could come and work in the laundromat?”

M: How did you come up with this idea?

A: You’re just sitting there, sitting there looking at it, mutely. And going, seniors know how to do laundry, because they’ve been around for five or six or seven decades, and somehow their laundry has been done. And not many 70 year- olds are taking their laundry to their mother. So, I went to them, and that was my pitch.

They said, “Great idea, but the bathroom is down a steep set of stairs with not much overhead. We are concerned that our seniors would not be able to make it down those back stairs. But we also serve many different demographics within the community. We serve recent immigrants who are looking to get established in Canada. Would you consider the same parameters, but with recent immigrants?” So I said, “Absolutely!”

The agreement I struck with them was, I would backstop the wages, that is, commit that they would make a day’s pay, regardless of how much laundry was to be done. And Senior Link Neighbourhood Link would choose the people who would work there and manage them in terms of: “You must be here at 8 o’clock in the morning, you must do the laundry this way,” setting the parameters. A woman by the name of Gerrie Burnett became the manager of the Human Resources aspect of it. Gerrie and I get in the managing staff game, and she selects people to work there. We had people who were recent immigrants to Canada, who had significant difficulty with language. Most were Chinese. Language was a challenge. Within China they had already been extraordinarily well educated, many master’s degrees, but were unable to get a first job here because they didn’t have a reference. Not many Canadian employers are willing to speak Chinese, call China, and get a reference. By working in the laundromat, they were able to prove their reliability and consistency so that Neighbourhood Link could write them a Canadian letter of reference to get a job in their chosen field, while practicing their English day to day. So it worked out well from those perspectives.

So that’s September 2004, and the Wash & Fold is now operational. Available for people coming in. And the staff helping them. So, two streams. Some come in for self serve. Some asking for help on coming in. The Wash & Fold service was run out of the tiny little back office at the back of the laundromat. The staff operated out of a tin box, where the money went in from the customers. At the end of the week, they divvied it up and I backstopped it.

In September 2004, my Beach Solar Laundromat won the Bremen Prize in Germany because it was considered the best in the world. The awardwas under the auspices of the United Nations’ Environment Program (UNEP). The Bremen Prize recognizes sustainable environmental initiatives in conjunction with social community partnership. I heard about the award and wrote the application. It was kind of cool because there were several hundred applicants, and the seven finalists were invited to go to Germany for interviews. I diligently asked, “Okay, so what’s the travel budget? I would like to spend a couple of days. I’ve never been to Northern Germany, and I recognize that that would be on my own expense. But what am I looking at in terms of booking a hotel, booking travel on the ground and so on?” They were very circumspect about how this was all going to work. Fortunately, I had the means to travel, and my attendance wasn’t dependent on their travel budget. When we seven finalists arrived, we met in a hotel lobby with the award administrators, and the question of expenses didn’t even come up. They just handed me an envelope with 1,500 euros in cash, no receipts, no questions asked. Extraordinarily generous, and more than covered the expenses of travel. So anyway, during the course of the interviews, the judges were pleased because I was able to share not just the mechanical details of what I’d done, but also the social impact of these recent immigrants to Canada getting not just a job, but a job that led to a reference with an organization that could introduce them to places where they could get employment in their chosen field. And become productive Canadian citizens. And it was in Toronto, where most immigrants enter.

I guess the icing on the cake was the true story that I had an indigenous man who did his laundry in the laundromat; he was keen to learn Chinese, and my staff were keen to learn something about the aboriginal languages of Canada, so they would have language lessons. He went on to become a professor at UofT in Indigenous studies. Very, very smart man: Cat.

After a couple of years of running the Wash & Fold, Senior Link Neighbourhood Link came to me and said, “Great impact for the people that were helping. But it’s taking a significant amount of time of our manager Gerrie, to help six people. We’ve got more than 1,800 people that we serve in the community, and the time-to-benefit ratio is just too high in the laundromat. We have to withdraw.” I totally understood that.

M: You probably saw that coming.

A: Well, it was a predictable outcome. Clearly, Senior Link Neighbourhood Link wasn’t making money, and they didn’t have a donation or grant to sustain the project though they enabled it to start. So a local woman, Janice Wheeler, stepped forward on the suggestion of Mira, who runs the neighbouring consignment store. Janice didn’t have any connections to the recent immigrant community, but did have connections to the local people who might need a job doing laundry. The cadre of staff evolved from that point. Atiqa still works for me. She was at Senior Link, and now is at Woodgreen Community Services. To call Atiqa my human relations manager, resources manager would be terribly grand, but she has the calm when I can be abrupt. She has the gift of being able to listen to a problem and take the time to answer it where I, as an engineer, can sometimes be too gruff and abrupt and sometimes rude.

M: I call it snarky. You’re a problem solver.

A: Atiqa now manages the human relations side of it, and it has worked out very well for the last couple of decades. We’ve now got three generations of one family working there, and I learned this morning that, subject to Atika’s approval within that same family, we might be adding a fourth generation. God help me if they ever form a union. So, it’s kind of cool. The great grandmother has taught us all how to fold a fitted sheet. So that’s the laundromat.

M: I’m going to get a glass of water. Do you want anything? Is there a pause button?

(end second recording)

A: Atiqa is by training a physician, but she is herself an immigrant to Canada and her qualifications are not recognized here. Her day job is working for Woodgreen Community Services where she has 300 personal support workers who report to her. So that’s her day job. And on the side, she manages the henhouse at my shop.

M: [spurting laughing hands over mouth] You did that on purpose!

A: I waited until your mouth was full of water. Thank you for not spraying it all over me.

M: I wouldn’t be so rude.

A: So, it works out well because Atika is also current on things like statutory holidays. What’s the obligation of an employer? All that kind of stuff. So… There you go. Are there any more, are we at a blank page? Have we completed all the questions?

M: No, you haven’t finished your story.

A: Right, but where do we start? What do we do next?

M: You were at Wash & Fold, and that’s 2004. We haven’t gotten to Monk’s yet.

A: Okay, so 2004, Wash & Fold going. This is interesting. There are a series of tenants in the retail space that is now Monk’s. There was a…

M: You mean they kept turning over?

A: Yes, there was a jewellery store, and the proprietor retired to Salt Spring Island. There was a doggie daycare place, but she let a little dog out into the back. There’s a small patch of land back there. Little doggie out into the back to go pee, but little doggie decides to run around the side of the building; it got through the gate, ran out into Queen Street, and that was the end of the business. Oh, and the dog.

M: I got that.

A: Most recently, there was a business called Luberon, selling imported goods from France, Luberon being a reputed area in France, en Provence. Soaps and oils and fabrics and whatever. And in 2018, Susan, the proprietor of that store, announced that she and her husband were going to retire, and so I would get the keys back. Which is great. Totally understandable. People do that. And I had lots of notice, so I, at that point, decided to start assembling in my dining room at home: the shelving units, the tables, all the bits and pieces for a drycleaning business.

M: You had this idea in the back of your head for a while.

A: Well, yeah, because dry cleaning is a natural companion to a wash and fold service, but I had no space in the little back office. It was already to the point where customers bringing in laundry in the morning, it had to be stacked at the back of the laundromat, because we had no place to put it. The ladies would do the laundry during the day, and then stack the finished goods back into that tiny little office at night. It was literally shoulder deep in laundry at night. It was crazy.

M: Do you have a sense from your history, from the things that’ve happened to you ~ I’ve got the words right here. In me. You have a sense of time in you.

A: Yeah, when the timing is right.

M: But you don’t push for it.

A: No. So the wash and fold business had to develop its own momentum, its own clientele, its own reputation with clients, for trustworthiness, for reliability, for timeliness, for value, before I could contemplate getting into dry cleaning, which is absolutely an elevated service, an elevated level of trust. If you trust your jeans with us, you may consider trusting us with your blouse.

M: Fur?

A: We don’t do furs.

M: So I can’t bring my polar bear pelt.

A: No, you can’t bring your polar bear fur. Don’t bring your polar bear, either. So, in 2018, I’ve got all of this hardware: shelving units, rolling hampers, cash registers, the whole 9 yards. Got the keys back and opened Monks 36 hours later.

M: Are you ready?

A: Oh, totally ready. Totally ready to pull the plug.

M: How do you do that?

A: Oh, how do you plan over the course of 16 years? Can you put a plan together? I’m sorry if I’m giggling.

M: No, this is important, because this is how a successful business person moves on. It’s not that you never have failures. It’s that there’s something there that comes out, and that’s all ready, it’s like when one tree falls, another three more trees are already growing underneath.

A: So the choice was, do I want to have another tenant in there?

M: Yes!

A: OR, do I want to extend the service offering of what’s become a successful business in the laundromat and the wash & fold service? Further, I physically needed more space for the wash and fold. My staff needed tables to fold on, and space to store their completed work overnight. But with that base, with a staff that were already occupied, economically occupied, and not just twiddling their thumbs happily. They were busy. Productively busy. That’s the word I’m looking for! To launch the dry cleaning required relatively little investment because I’ve already got the staff. To accept a men’s shirt that needs to be laundered and pressed, which we then send out, takes very little time with my staff. If that staff person is already productively employed doing wash & fold, then the dry cleaning is absolutely icing on the cake. Right?

And about my risk to get into dry cleaning: we don’t do the cleaning on premises, we send it out to a factory that has massive scale, processing a couple of thousand items a day while we process about 300 items a week. At that scale, they can afford to have the latest and greatest machines, the highest and best technicians, to know the current fabrics, and know the current techniques for removing stains ~ in a way that if I was to start from scratch and try to build all that machinery and expertise, the trial and error. Well, the economic proposition is much worse. Right now, I make a few pennies on every blouse I send out. If I owned the entire shop I would have to cover my fixed capital costs before I would begin to make a variable profit. Right? Here, I’ve got relatively no risk. And I like the no-risk proposition, where somebody else takes the capital risk. They serve more than 90 different depots. Is the style of the jargon? You’re a depot. I’m a depot. I don’t have the drycleaning equipment on hand. Right. I send out the dry cleaning to get it expertly cleaned.

M: Is it a contract, or does it just you just get billed?

A: I show up, I show up every day, six days a week, at the factory.

M: And they bill you based on that.

A: And they bill me once a week. Yeah. Okay. They eat what I kill.

M: I just saw a whole bunch of dead customers outside your door.

A: So, they’re very happy with the relationship, because with their other depots, the principal of the business doesn’t show up on their premises every day. I know them by face, and probably half of their staff by name, we’re friendly, we have a cordial relationship. You just heard me call the factory. I’ve got a pair of pants that should have been back this morning and said congenially, “Call me if they’re not going to be ready at 4 o’clock.”

2018, I’m into the drycleaning business at no big capital cost. I mean, the shelves in there are IKEA shelves. The tables, I built the framework underneath, from oak, from Home Depot, with a tabletop. They’re solid. You can stand on those. And you may have noticed that they are at two different heights. Some of my staff are taller than others, and it’s easier to stand to the table that’s at the height that works for you. I don’t have every height available, but I do have six inches difference between those two tabletops. And that matters if you’re going to be standing folding laundry all day. So, all that’s now underway. The solar thermal panels, from 2002, continue to operate, and now I’m having some fun with innovation on top of all of that.

So, 2025, Mr. Trump comes into the White House and announces all kinds of tariffs and trade disruptions, and I had no way to know what the impact would be on the Proctor and Gamble soaps that I was using. Would Tide raise their price? Would there be an interruption in availability? Would there be fuel surcharges to get it delivered? What would be the impact on my business? And that’s a relatively minor problem compared to an auto manufacturer who’s shipping parts back and forth across the border. For them, a nightmare. For me, it’s kind of like a first world problem, but it’s still a potential problem.

So at that point, I developed my own soap. We produced Monk’s Magic, for lack of a better label. It doesn’t really help my communication with staff to say, “Are we running low on our mixture of A, B, C, and D, those four powder chemicals that go into it?” It’s much easier to have a name for it. I do the mixing, and we have a big ice cream tub where we store the mix, because it’s hydrophilic, and there’s no anti-clumping agent in it. By the time I’ve gotten through a five-litre tub, it’s only starting to clump. But with my hand, I can break it up, back into the powder. Borax is mined in two places in the world, California and Turkey, and my stuff actually comes from a Canadian supplier buying it from California. I have not been able to buy anything less than a railroad tank car of Turkish borax, yet. I’m still working on that one.

M: Are we going to tell people that Monk was your grandmother’s name?

A: Can do. Monk was my father’s mother’s name. So my grandmother was a monk. Well, I thought that was better to say than actually using the tagline that did cross my mind, which is, “Monk’s fine fabric care: get into the habit.”

M: That would have been perfect!

A: A little too risqué. A little too risqué.

M: It’s so you!

A: Oh, my God. Okay, so that’s our own soap.

The latest innovation was last summer. A woman who was not yet a customer called me up and said, “Can you clean hockey equipment?” And I said, “Well, I don’t know anything about cleaning hockey equipment, but let me do some research.” And what I learned is that there are really two ways to do it. One, you can launder the big shoulder pads and chest protectors and shin guards, and so on, in a big machine as they are rugged enough to withstand tumbling in a washing machine, and then you hang them to dry for a couple of days. Okay. So that’s sort of, like, the basic level. But in laundering, the best you can hope for is to dilute the microorganisms that contribute to the smells, and wash most of them away. If you leave some behind, they are bacteria. They will start to grow again with the next application of sweat and being stuffed in a hockey bag for weeks. And you’ll smell again. So laundering will work for a little while.

The better solution is to saturate with ozone. Ozone is just three atoms of oxygen linked together in a metastable molecule. Metastable means it reverts naturally within 30 minutes to O2, and a free radical oxygen atom. The free radical oxygen atom goes hunting for something that it can attach to, and it likes carbon. If it finds carbon, it will take two oxygens onto one carbon and make CO2. And the amount of CO2 we’re producing is minuscule in the global environment when a car is spewing out CO2 all day long. It’s not like I’m a major polluter with CO2. But the carbon that I’m pulling from is a building block carbon in microorganism single cell bacteria: mould, mildew. Cigarette smoke is largely uncombusted carbon. The free radical oxygen atoms are also attracted to sulphur. Sulphur is the smelly thing in sweat and body odour. So, sulphur plus oxygen, you produce SO2: Sulphur dioxide. Again, it’s a gas. Again, it’s not nice. But it’s very minor in the context of the quantities that we’re producing. And the final thing that oxygen likes to find is nitrogen. So nitrous oxide is a gas. You find nitrogen in animal pee. When the cat pees on your duvet, how are you going to get rid of the smell? Well, for us, we can launder with vinegar. That usually will do it. But if we’ve got a bad situation, I can saturate with ozone overnight.

So, objectively, back to the story, to serve the hockey mom, I explained: “I can do the laundering for you. I don’t have an ozone cabinet in my shop. Would you like me to do the laundering?” Yes, happy. And then I went away and did some research. There’s a company in Montreal that will sell you a cabinet for ozone saturation of sports equipment.

M: Owned by the Habs?

A: No, it’s an independent company. Anyway, it’s nice-looking stainless-steel cabinet. $21,000. I ran the numbers on what I could charge for hockey gear and how many kits I could do in a week or a month. The numbers just about work if I built a biggish, from my perspective, business in hockey equipment, but then I would have lots of stinky hockey equipment waiting to be processed in my shop, which wouldn’t go well with my regular customers. Lukewarm on this proposition. But I called up the company and said, “Okay, I’m really interested in this equipment. Help me understand. Your literature says the treatment takes 12 minutes. At the end of a treatment, how do you remove or neutralize the oxygen? How do you accelerate that reversion from a metastable molecule into normal oxygen?” And the answer from the technical salesman was, “I don’t know.” I said, “Do you put a tray of activated carbon in there and increase your carbon exposure so you can create more CO2 and neutralize your metastable molecule that way?” “No, we don’t do that.” “Do you exhaust it? “No, there’s no exhaust.”

So I went looking for answers. and found that I can buy an ozone generator. Now I need a cabinet. I found a company in Brampton called Ancaster Food Equipment. Why Ancaster Food Equipment is in Brampton, I don’t really know, but they sold me a used grocery store refrigerator. I said, “Please, take out all the refrigeration equipment. don’t need that.” “Okay, I’ll reduce the price.” “Great.” Had them deliver it to me. So I’ve got a cabinet that’s about seven feet tall, about three or four feet wide, and maybe two or three feet deep. It’s airtight, as a grocery store cabinet should be. You don’t want your milk to be getting warm by air coming and going. And the thing is wired for 120 volts, and there’s a louvre cover at the bottom. I use a multimeter and check, and I’ve got a 120-volt bus down there with a bunch of spade connecters. So rewire that, put in a power bar, cut off the plug from the power bar, and rewire that into the spade connecters of the 120-volt bus in the basement of this refrigeration equipment, drill a hole in through the cabinet, caulk it so you’ve still got airtight. Now you’ve got power to a 120-volt power supply, and there you’ve got the lights of the equipment. You’ve got circulating fans overhead in a grocery store refrigerator equipment there are fans to circulate the cool air around. And now plug in your ozone generator, put a couple of metres in there to measure humidity, temperature, and parts-per-million concentration. And do your research.

What does it take to kill listeria, to pick the bacteria out of the air? Well, bacteria, you can have a 99% kill rate at 300 part-per-million minutes. A part-per-million minute is one part-per-million for one minute. One part-per-million for 30 minutes is 30 part-per-million minutes. 30 part-per-million for one minute is 30 parts. You got the idea.

If you need 300 million, 300 part-per-million minutes, then you can do 30 parts-per-million for 10 minutes does the trick. Well, their service does 12 minutes. Okay, I’m in the right ballpark. Now I need a metre that’ll take me up to 30 parts-per-million, but the only metres I can find are safety oriented, as soon as you get to 5 parts-per-million, it’s considered toxic. So I’ve got a little metre that, at 5 parts-per-million, it starts to beep, and the digits go red, and then you can see it go up to 9.9 parts-per-million, and then it just locks at 9.9. But throw it into the mathematical algorithm of an engineering physicist, and if you got a chart, you can chart the ascent of concentration, you got a consistent source of generation in a finite space. The concentration is going to go up linearly. And if you can track it linearly going up to 9.9, you can project what the peak is going to be. And once you stop the source of generation, you can then wait until it goes back through 9.9 again, and then you can watch the tail back to zero. Right? But with those data points, you can estimate what the peak is, and what the total area underneath (the chart line) is, and the area is your part-per-million minute concentration. And so you can solve for it, and you can saturate to a degree that will kill 99.9% of the listeria, or any other bacteria that come along. I did some research on some common odour causing bacteria. And they’re all around 300 part-per-million minutes. So, I can saturate blankets, boots, leather jackets, handbags. I’ve done cat pee in a handbag, beautiful job.

Musty smell on a leather jacket ordered off of eBay. Gorgeous vintage leather jacket, man delighted, 20 bucks. Arrives, reeks of must. “What do I do? Can’t send it back. Can you guys do anything to clean it up?” “Let me try.” Into the cabinet, next morning, smells like buttery leather. Job done.

M: What do you charge for that service?

A: Pick a number. 15 bucks, typically. I’m not walking up and down Queen Street with a banner.

M: But it’s like things keep moving forward for you.

A: I am not just having fun.

M: I know, I was just wanted to say that.

A: The economics are silly. So it’s not a $20,000 cabinet. My all-in is about 1,000 bucks. So I could go into the business of making cabinets and sell them to dry cleaning shops around, but why would I? I could go into the business of hockey equipment and get all the little peewee teams and all their stinky hockey gear all over my shop. But why would I?

M: Do what your buddy did. Write the book.

A: I could do that, too. Or I could just have some fun.

M: Or I could record it, and I could do it.

A: When I do a leather jacket, when I do a pair of boots. If I charge 15 bucks for a pair of boots. Right? 15 bucks divided my capital cost, which is not $20,000? No. It’s $1,000. So $15 divided by $1,000 is a 1.5% rate of return on my investment. How many 1.5’s do I need to make me smile? Not many. Well, do six pair of boots a year? And I’ve got a 10% ROI.

M: And that really makes you smile.

A: Well, that makes me smile, right?

M: I’m going to go into another segue here.

A: Okay.

M: Are you finished with this part?

A: Yup

M: Okay, let’s make sure it’s still on, and what your time is, okay, we have…

A: I’m out of here by 3:15.

M: We have half an hour. approximately. Let’s segue from this into when you first got interested in ecology, doing your bit to not wreck the planet. Is this something from when you were younger? Was it sort of a growing awareness? And you can finish your bite first before you try to answer.

A: It’s really… A combination of things. It is living consciously aware, of your footprint as an ethos, as opposed to just a learned behaviour. It’s being aware of your impact, not just on your environment, but also on other people. Right? When anybody has gifts, whether it’s an athlete or a brain surgeon or an accountant, they should be conscious of their impact on people around them, who look to them as a role model. And if you are blessed with attributes in science, and business, you have an obligation to conduct yourself morally.

M: How long has this been fomenting inside of you, or did it just come with growing up?

A: High school was when the concept, the seed was really planted along with the French concept of noblesse oblige. But even to say that in a modern context…

M: It sounds elitist.

A: Exactly. But if you have that concept, then you have the obligation to give.

M: Exactly.

A: And broken down to that level, then nobility really doesn’t require landed status or anything like that. It is really just recognition that you have some talents, and you can make a difference, even if only just by your own conduct, let alone by encouraging others. So, it’s a light footprint approach that I have found to be very comfortable. When I did the laundromat, it would be grandiose to say revolutionary, but there was no green in marketing shtick in 2002. It was being whispered. But nobody had applied sustainable energy practises to a commodity service like a laundromat. Nobody to my knowledge yet, has done a green ketchup. Arguably, you could make ketchup with sustainable solar thermal energy. We have seen a whole bunch of green washing, where people will claim that their product is eco-sensitive but really, when you dig underneath, and you find out what they actually do, they’re not quite or not really. And is that unethical? Yeah, it is. If you’ve led somebody to believe that a product has an attribute that it really doesn’t, then that’s unethical.

M: That’s been going on about 15 years now.

A: Right. So in my little shop, I’ve really tried to be clear what I am doing and what I’m not doing.

M: What your limits are?

A: Right. So the solar panel is on the roof. I’m very clear with everybody. They’re not solar electric panels. I’m not lighting the light bulbs with those electric panels. They’re solar thermal. They’re heating the water. The hot water is used to heat the building, and for water out of the taps and into the washing machines. And on a cloudy day, I am still using a gas boiler. My laundromat is open every day of the year, even if it’s cloudy, even if it’s February.

M: Question.

A: Yeah.

M: So solar panels, I was looking at Marilyn’s this morning. Solar panels, if it’s cloudy, the sun is not strong enough to actually activate it. It’s not storing energy.

A: So, solar electric, solar thermal? Solar electric, the photons are coming in in the light. And they are knocking electrons loose in a semiconductor junction. For me, I’m heating water, so I’m looking at the infrared portion of the spectrum, and it’s heating up a piece of metal. If you hold a piece of black metal in front of the sunlight, it will get warm. If you encase that piece of black metal in glass, the black metal will get quite warm. If you use special glass that is transmissive, as opposed to normal window glass, these are low iron glass and highly transmissive. Then you can actually capture about 70% of the sun’s energy. I will still warm water on a cloudy day, but not heat it. So it’s much more intense on a sunny day. Are we through all the questions? Have you run out of questions?

M: Oh no, I always have a million for you.

A: But we will run out of time, we have about thirty minutes.

M: Do you have a favourite story I can share?

A: My favourite stories are really about the people. About the employees that I’ve helped, that I’ve made a difference to. But those are all personal stories. I don’t want to dive into, but suffice to say it’s given me great satisfaction that I’ve made a difference in some employees’ life. Water is hungry. Equally, I know I’ve made a difference in the lives of some homeless people, who know me by name, and I know them by name. I can think of one man, I won’t use his name, although I know it. who has psychosis. And when he first came to the laundromat, he was perhaps off his medications, and he was loud and assertive and threatening. With time and respect, he understood that he would be respected in my shop, but it was not acceptable for him to threaten my staff. That’s a red line. And so he would come, and we would help him with the laundry. We have a program that does that, i.e. when, during the staff hours, we have little brass tokens that have accumulated in my machines from a neighbouring laundromat that salts their change machine. These brass tokens start to show up in my machines. We set them aside in a mason jar, so that we can start my machines with brass tokens. They aren’t part of my revenue stream. I’ve checked with Revenue Canada. I don’t owe any tax on the non revenue I’ve received, but important to ask. Who knows what Rev Can’s got an idea of? And I don’t have to try and track the amount of water that went through and was charitable or whatever. So we can start the machines for free for people who are in need. And this client developed the comfort that he would be respected in our place of work. Some of his behaviour remains unacceptable, not from a psychosis threatening perspective. But just from the context of what is acceptable behaviour in a public space. He has arrived with the notion that because he is there to do laundry, it should be totally acceptable for him to do all of his laundry, and to take off everything he is wearing. and to parade around the shop without anything on, and do his laundry. I don’t know that he knew that that was unacceptable behaviour. We did explain to him that that was unacceptable behaviour. And he still comes and no longer does all of his laundry. A year or two ago, at night, just before closing, a woman came in with just a shawl, would be the right word, wrapped around her middle, nothing on her top. And sat on one of the tables for customers to fold laundry in the middle of the laundromat. While she was up there, she began to complain that she had been hit by a taxicab on Queen Street and broke her leg. So I called 911. They sent police first and then a paramedic. And the police were as gentle as gentle could be. Totally understanding that this was a mental health situation. And they treated her with the dignity of taking her concerns seriously and following up with a paramedic, who interviewed her seriously, and finally, they called a paramedic supervisor who recognized her and said, “Okay, we all know your leg is not hurt. Can you please step down off the table?” And they helped her to get into on her own volition. She was not pushed or coerced. They helped her to get into an ambulance to go to a hospital for a proper health checkup. And so occasionally, I do have concerning people come to the laundromat, as I think any laundromat in the city would, almost every business. If the client in question is threatening, I will call the police, and the police’s first question is, “Is this a mental health call?” And my answer is always, “I don’t know. I don’t know if somebody has taken something they shouldn’t have taken, or not taken something they should have taken. All I can share with you is the behaviour I’m seeing that is a threatening, aggressive behaviour, and I need help to deal with this.”

M: And they do have more qualified people to do that.

A: Absolutely. And they can call on the resources of an ambulance to help them to deal with it.

There’s a lady, I don’t know her name, who is very fond of pigeons. She will often arrive at the laundromat late in the evening with a pigeon in the folds of her clothing. She’s a regular. I see her about once a month or two. And in her frame of reference, it’s totally acceptable for the pigeon to be free to wander around the laundromat. And I have, on occasion, explained to her that when the pigeon goes poop in the laundromat, somebody has to clean up the pigeon poop in the laundromat. And I had success in sharing that perspective but it wasn’t received. The behaviour continued. Until I finally had to point out that at the back of the laundromat, there is an exhaust fan that’s activated by a thermal switch. It can come on and turn off by itself. And if the pigeon meets the fan, it will not be a good outcome. And she was able to internalize the risk to the pigeon at that point and restrained the pigeon.

But it’s always a delicate balance, because I want the customers’ safety. I want people to come and go with clean clothes. And the program that we have where we will start up the machines for free for someone in need has helped a lot of people. I keep track of the tokens that show up in the little coin boxes, so that I’ve got some idea if this is manageable. It’s running about 1 and 1/2% of revenues. So it’s a manageable, charitable thing in my neighbourhood. About a year ago, it ran out of control. Suddenly, it was 4 or 5% of revenues. And I asked my staff, “Well, what’s changed?” And they said, “Some of the social housing organizations in the neighbourhood, city run, are sending their clients here to do their laundry.” And I had to get onto our city councillor, and the counsellor for the site where I was told these people are coming from, and explained that this is a little charitable thing that we do in our little tiny neighbourhood. I can’t possibly afford to do the laundry for the City of Toronto, for free. Take down, please, your notice that apparently appeared on your peg boards in your social housing. Somebody had the charitable idea that this would be a nice outing. And they had the power to commandeer a TTC vehicle to send people to the laundromat to do their laundry for a day, and it won’t cost anybody in social housing anything. Great idea but it costs somebody. Somebody’s paying for the machine maintenance and amortization, somebody’s paying for the water and the gas and so on. And the electricity that machine used. At the end of the day, I only have so many machines available. Come full circle back to one of the questions you asked right away at the start, which was, “What happens when your laundromat gets too busy?” It’s a paradox of success, that you can serve some of the people some of the time, but if you try to serve all the people all the time, you’ll get everybody unhappy. It ends up being conflictual rather than successful.

I think you may have enough for two paragraphs in the Beach Metro News. I guess this is a good note to end our discussion for now, on, and that’s, as a business person, I have walked the halls and corridors of Bay Street. I have served as chairman of the board of a publicly traded company. I’ve served as chair of the audit company of a marijuana company in Portland, Oregon. I have seen that side of big business, and I now run a small business, where I have 100% control. And 100% control may be the phrase that a megalomaniac searches, but for me, it’s about time frames. I’ve got the time frame to experiment with a new soap, or with an ozone treatment process. I can play with my own capital with solar panels on the roof, and if it meets expectations of energy, natural gas displaced, to give me an adequate return on investments, then I can smile that I’ve made a good investment, quite apart from the unique selling proposition, of having a solar green laundromat.

And what will that do to customer business? At the time, 2002, there was no precedent of a solar powered laundromat to know what the impact would be. Would customers preferentially come to a green laundromat?

M: But you weren’t, I don’t think, doing it just to be the first. You would do it, because you could see…

A: I could see that it could be done. When you can see that something can be done. Yes, then. And there’s no good reason not to do it. If you have control, you can go and do it. If you have to convince a committee, then you may or may not be successful doing. And there’s always compromises built in. That’s exactly the reason. I have to worry that my employees get paid. So when COVID hit, and Doug Ford announced that businesses had to close down. And businesses had to close down, except dry cleaning shops could stay open. Doug Ford’s suits could still be pressed. So dry cleaning shops could stay open, but laundry services and laundromats had to close.

M: Because that was people congregating.

A: Right. Laundromats were then announced to be open. That happened fairly quickly. was very quick. When I researched and found it in San Francisco, they had permitted laundromats to stay open. But all kinds of requirements on six feet of separation. So I had duct tape on the grids of the tile floor, squares like a checkerboard. I had to explain that one person per square on the checkerboard. Please. And laundry service was still suspended. And so I went to my local MPP. She was NDP so she had no authority in government. I explained that we’re three weeks into this closure of the laundry service. I’ve got seniors, as clients, and for them, the laundry is piling up, and it’s a health hazard. What do we do? Because they can’t physically make it to the laundromat. They can’t do their own. They depend on a laundry service, and yet it’s illegal to run a laundry service right now. She said, “I’ve got no authority to tell you this, but just go ahead and do it. Go ahead and serve the seniors that you need to serve.” So we reopened. But for three weeks there, all of my employees had to stay home, and they stayed home on full pay. Which, for a small business, is not easy. I was easily $10,000 in the hole very quickly. And fortunately, we came through that, and I can tell you today that I’ve never missed a payroll. And sometimes it’s been a little hairy.

M: So you don’t mind? See, some people don’t want that same responsibility. You don’t seem to mind it because you can see the way through it. Is that how it works?

A: Partly, partly, it’s also… How to phrase it? Contextually, I can see what’s important to do for the long term. And I have the luxury, um, a loaded word, but I’ll use it, the luxury of being able to ride out small bumps and understand that the longer-term vision, that I choose to pursue, is worth enduring the short-term bump. If I had to report to a committee, the committee would have said, “You’ve got no choice. Lay everybody off, stop the pay.” Maybe, but yeah. They may have demanded that, and I may have been able to rehire them, and I may not. That’s just it. It’s amazing. Yeah. And if you’re reporting to a committee, the committee may take a short-term view, and I know because I sat on audit committees. I know how they make decisions. I’ve seen, at the corporate board level, the accountability to shareholders can make some really stupid decisions, because it’s not always looking in the long-term best interests of the business. It’s more frequent, looking at the short term, to cover their asses. And that doesn’t always make good decisions.

M: I would say maybe 10%.

A: Who knows?

M: Well, I’m talking from my own experience.

A: From my own experience, now the only ass I have to worry about is my own.

M: But you do care about the people that work for you.

A: I don’t care for their asses. I care for the people.

M: Did you finish your cake?

A: I’ll take it with me.

M: Okay.

A: Which means I can’t have my cake and take it with me.

M: I have always had a lot of questions for you. Millions and millions of questions that just sort of pop up all over the place, and I try to channel them. It’s just that the way you think is so amazing and wonderful.

A: Well, it’s a clarity of thought that comes partly from the engineering background.

M: Yes, but you went into engineering with it.

A: Yeah, and it’s problem solving. Most people would say it’s irrelevant now, but in high school, I did fairly well in science fairs. Have I ever told you about high school science fairs?

M: Yes. You won one.

A: Yes. Some international science fair in Milwaukee, first Canadian to take the top prize. That’s kind of cool.

M: Yes, it is.

A: And it’s kind of cool, because I remember the work in my basement at home.

M: See, you started where I’m arriving now.

A: Oh, there you go. So, as a student, a high school student of physics, to be able to predict an effect, a physics effect that hadn’t been taught in classroom, and be able to show your physics teacher, that effect is actually happening.

M: You must have felt fantastic.

A: He felt fantastic, too. It was cool. It was cool. It was one of those cool moments of innovation that now I get to play with Ozone cabinets. It’s the same child.

M: You’re still a kid.

A: I’m still a kid at heart. I can hand that [phone] back to you. I’m going to go and take care of a pair of pants.

M: You’re with Marion, you’re early.

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