didn’t want my father’s name to be tarnished,” says Yaakoub Hijazi, president of Paterson, New Jersey–basedWhen his father, Youssef, died in 2011, four months after being diagnosed with lung cancer, Hijazi was a 19-year-old student at Montclair State University. He soon learned that his dad’s $4 million commercial laundry and dry-cleaning business was on the brink of collapse. “When you go bankrupt, your name is destroyed,” he says.
Laundry is a cutthroat business, priced at 30 cents to 45 cents per pound in New York. Price cutting to gain market share is rampant. Stumbles abound. Prestige Industries, once Hijazi’s biggest competitor, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2017, and its assets were subsequently bought by a private-equity firm that owns laundry firm PureTex Solutions. “The entire market is fighting over the same 200 hotels,” says Sang Cho, CEO of Prestige until 2012, who founded Cooperative Laundry in 2018.
On a November visit to the Paterson headquarters, Hijazi showed off one of his four giant tunnel washers. The dirty linens arrive in 800-pound bins labeled “Star Laundry Baba Joe 1948–2011” for his dad. Next, 135-pound loads pass through modules that scour dirt with 180-degree water and brighten colors with hydrogen peroxide and six to 11 other chemicals. Separate compartments in the tunnel and computer coding allow multiple hotels’ linens to be washed at the same time.
When Hijazi took over, he got hit with a lot. “And when you’re 19 years old, people are not going to listen to what you say,” he recalls. The company faced a cash crunch, sewer liens, tax liens and fines from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Hijazi borrowed $300,000 to pay off everything, ditched the middling dry-cleaning business and hired an OSHA consultant to address the safety issues.
Have you gotten a Sculpturette TM yet?
Let me guess . . . it was already worth $200 million
ForbesUnder30 honoree Yaakoub Hijazi dropped out of college at age 19 to save his late dad's faltering business. Now 27, he's built it into New York City's premier hotel laundry service called Star Laundry
Do they call that money laundering!!
Resilience.
Step 1: inherit business
I tap into this