Enterprise Builder · Bali, Indonesia
Denpasar
Tedi Widnyana, 101 Laundry
From the ground up: a driver’s journey from COVID to owning three outlets in three years.
Founded
2023
Stage
Early Stage, Expanding
Type
Service, Retail
Businesses
Laundry (two locations), Warung (small kiosk)
By The Number
33
Years old
Started his first business in 2023 after years as a tour guide and ojek online driver.
3
Businesses running
One warung and two laundry locations, all in Denpasar.
10
Female employees
Across all three businesses, from all around Indonesia.
3x
Revenue growth, first laundry
From below IDR 10 million to IDR 25 million per month in three months.
10
Laundry locations by 2035
Tedy's stated target. Two are running.
Zero
Businesses before 2023
Everything was built after COVID, from a standing start.
The Journey
COVID took the car. The road gave him something else.
Tedy was a tour guide in Bali. In late 2019, with steady income and a plan, he bought a car on credit. Three months into the loan, COVID hit. Tourism stopped. The income stopped. He surrendered the car to the lender voluntarily in May 2020.
For income, he worked as a motorbike ride-share driver. From 2020 through 2022, that was the work. The earnings were modest. But riding through Denpasar every day turned out to be an education. He started noticing people in small rented rooms running food businesses from their doorways, selling snacks and juice, using tiny spaces and minimal capital to keep something going. It stayed with him.
A relative had opened a small grocery stall in a narrow residential alley. Quiet street, low foot traffic. Tedy didn’t believe it could work. The business was pulling IDR 400,000 to 500,000 a day. When he asked how, his relative said: people will come to a good shop. It doesn’t matter if it’s a small alley.
Around the same time, a guest he had guided on tour became a friend and introduced him to a circle of business people. The contrast with his existing social circle was sharp. Old friends focused on what couldn’t be done. This new circle looked for what was possible and backed the people around them who were trying to build something. He started saving. He read.
By the time tourism recovered in 2022, his wife had been working through her pregnancy at a bakery. Still on the floor eight months in, resting only two weeks before the birth. When their child came, the question became concrete: keep working for someone else, send the child to live with grandparents in the village, or build something of their own. His wife had spent years at the bakery learning production and running the customer counter. Tedy saw in her exactly the skills a business needed. Someone who could run the floor, handle customers, and manage the day to day. He started researching where to open.
The Business
He opened the warung. Then the laundry found him.
In January 2023, Tedy began researching the area around Jalan Sekar Tunjung in Denpasar. He visited competing grocery stalls as a customer, noted their prices, calculated margins. He opened the small grocery stall in June 2023. His wife runs it day to day, handling customers, managing stock, running the floor. Within weeks, people were finding the business through Google Maps and calling to ask for deliveries.
The laundry was always part of the thinking. When Tedy had first seen a vacant kiosk nearby, he suggested to his older brother that he open a laundry there. His brother wasn’t interested. Someone else took the kiosk and did exactly that. Five months after the grocery stall opened, Tedy heard through word of mouth that the laundry’s owner had listed it for sale online without telling him. The owner ran several businesses and couldn’t manage this one from a distance. Tedy called, confirmed no one had committed, and said he would take it.
He had no laundry experience. He negotiated two days of training from the previous owner. He tracked down the former employee, who had moved to a villa laundry across town, and offered her a higher monthly wage to return. He took the keys on the 25th of the month, renovated the layout in four days, and reopened on the 1st. He designed, printed, and installed the promotional banners himself through the surrounding alleys and buildings nearby.
All ten of his employees are women, from Java, Sumatra, NTT, and elsewhere across Indonesia. It started from a practical decision: he needed someone who could iron. Everything else he could teach. The people who applied were women. That is how it stayed. Tedy works the floor alongside his team when orders pile up. He redesigned the laundry layout to make the work systematic and easier to move through, not just for efficiency but for the people doing it every day. He and his wife stock dry ingredients and keep a cooking stove available so employees can prepare their own meals at work.
Revenue went from below IDR 10 million per month to IDR 15 million in month one, IDR 20 million in month two, IDR 25 million in month three. A second laundry opened in 2025. Tedy now runs three businesses with ten employees. His stated target is ten laundry locations by 2035.
Key Problem
Growth planning and targets
With ten employees across three locations, roles and responsibilities still sit largely with Tedy. Stronger operating systems would allow the business to grow beyond his direct oversight.
Credit access
A disputed COVID-era loan record continues to block access to formal financing. Resolving it would reopen pathways currently closed.
Staff and management structure
Growth is happening without a clear financial roadmap. Turning ambition into a plan would make the next stage easier to build toward.
Stories & Principles
Through his tour guiding work, Tedy built a friendship with a guest from Surabaya who introduced him to a circle of business people. What he took from the relationship was not instructions. It was a way of thinking.
The circle looked for what was possible, not what was broken. They gave Tedy books on investing and personal finance. They shared Instagram accounts, videos, and links to follow and learn from. They told him when they thought he was about to make a mistake. They never said “you should do this.” Tedy described the principle himself: “They gave me the fishing rod. Not the fish.” It is a cliche, but it is also exactly what happened.
When the circle formed a WhatsApp group, Tedy’s older brother was included. The conversations covered investment, geopolitics, and business opportunities. His brother found it overwhelming and left. Tedy read every message.
The principle changed how Tedy helps people. When he thinks about what someone in his family needs, the question is no longer what can I give. It is what can I build for them that keeps giving. His father needed income between ceremonies. Tedy bought him a pig-roasting spit and a grinding machine that families in the village rent when they host events. Not cash. Not a transfer. A small business that runs on its own.
When Tedy was setting up shelving before the warung opened, his aunt came by. The street was quiet. Bali was still thinning out after COVID. “Who’s going to shop here? The street is empty,” she said.
The motivator friend circle had a different response. He had told them about the plan before he told most people. They backed it — and gave him specific things to try: set up a Google Maps pin, ask people to leave reviews, build visibility in local search.
Tedy did all of it. Not every suggestion lands. One did: a customer found the warung through Google Maps and started placing regular bulk orders — large quantities of drinks, delivered to their villa.
Tedy is looking for a Support Partner ready to walk alongside him.
