Like many young entrepreneurs, Julia and Keith Pooler started out with a simple idea: they wanted to work for themselves. Both had backgrounds in retail management, where they’d worked plenty hard for other people. In the late 1990s, the couple’s landlord suggested that coin-op laundries could offer opportunities for people like the Poolers. Julia and Keith liked the idea. In October 1999, they tapped savings to gain a toehold in the laundromat business in Sacramento, CA. From there, the Poolers embarked on a decade-long trek that would feature a recession-led shift to alternative markets for textile processing. The latter move ...