What do you think Mendez should do? Invest in new technology or maintain status quo?

By the end of 2004 Chris Mendez was tempted to give up. The owner of a chain of dry cleaning stores in central Florida, Mendez had grown up in the industry, learning his chops at his father’s business in Apopka before striking out on his own in 1995. In just eight months he broke even; by the end of 2003, he had six storefronts and his own 1,400-square-foot dry cleaning plant. But in his eighth year, Mendez’s business, Clothes Dr., was spinning out of control:
He was losing $130,000 a year on revenue of $1.2 million; he had completely leveraged his house; and he was physically and emotionally exhausted. “I couldn’t sleep at night,” he says. “How many more things could go wrong? How many more people could quit? When would the boiler explode again?”
Did the dry cleaning business really have to be so difficult? Mendez wondered.
Such thoughts couldn’t have been farther from his mind when Mendez, at the age of 25, first set up shop in a newly developed area of Apopka, outside Orlando, just far enough from his father’s store to avoid direct competition. He opened a second store in a nearby shopping center in 2001 and a third shortly thereafter. “I had a good credit history, so I was getting credit cards in the mail with zero-percent interest,” Mendez recalls. “So over three years, I floated $100,000 to expand, and I paid it back as we grew.”