Tim Harty, The Business Times

Sometimes, all you have to do is ask. As in: Do you want to sell your dry cleaning/laundry business to us?

When Eric and Robbie Boucher posed the question to Holiday Cleaners’ owners Mike and Janine Sitz, the answer was yes, and a couple weeks later the Bouchers were the new owners.

They tweaked the trade name, and now Holiday Cleaners and Laundromat resides at 1251 N. Third St. in Grand Junction.

The Bouchers’ approach was what their business coach advised them to do when they decided they wanted to leave California and live in western Colorado. Part of the reasoning for the Colorado relocation was to be closer to their son, who is a student at Fort Lewis College in Durango.

“Three years ago we came up with the Exit California plan,” Robbie Bourcher said, “and that plan included us renovating our house, putting it on the market and putting the equity into an LLC to buy a business.

“Originally we planned to buy self-storage facilities, but that market is saturated. The interest rates aren’t great. And the market for that just wasn’t what we were looking for, so we kind of looked at some other opportunities. We looked at Airbnbs, but kind of the same thing: oversaturated, interest rates.”

Robbie said their business coach suggested businesses that are recession-proof, “so we started looking at laundromats and walking into businesses and ask if they’d like to sell.”

Robbie estimated she and Eric approached 35 to 40 businesses, knocking on doors in most cases and using Facebook Marketplace for some others. When they approached the Sitzes about Holiday Cleaners, Eric said the interest was immediate.

“They’d been trying to sell it, but it wasn’t really advertised,” he said.

Robbie said the sale transpired much quicker than they anticipated, wrapping up in about two weeks. She said they finalized the terms, went back to California to pack up their house and moved to Grand Junction two weeks after that.

“It was quite a whirlwind,” Robbie said. “We landed (in Grand Junction) on June 28 and unpacked the house, started working the business, just learning the business here July 1, and then took over August 1.”

The Bouchers’ prior business experience – Eric as a water-distribution operator, Robbie in storage management and real estate – didn’t prepare them for running a dry cleaning business and laundromat, so they’ve relied on the veteran employees at Holiday Cleaners to get them up to speed.

“The crew is outstanding,” Eric said. “Without them, we wouldn’t be able to do this.”

Robbie added, “Holiday Cleaners is unique in that it’s a laundromat and dry cleaning, and then we also have delivery service. … So, just learning all those processes and how things are handled was quite a learning curve.

“And then the biggest surprise, I think, is just the pace of business, the pace of the work here. And then the most pleasant surprise, I think, is that the employees here that have decided to stay on with us are amazing. We hit the jackpot with the employees that we have. They’re just awesome.”