Turning a positive into a negative
have a busy professional life. That must
be obvious outwardly because I am very often asked, “When
do you find time to write your columns?”
I usually have three or four columns in
the works at the same time and, on occasion, an idea for a
column comes to me and I defer the completion of the articles
in progress and favor my latest brainstorm. The works in
progress are often general shirt-related subjects like
“how to press a better shirt” or “why
aren’t my shirts getting clean?”
The brainstorms usually come from a
particular incident that has recently
occurred at someone’s drycleaning plant.
 | ||
There is a third type and those tend to be
more philosophical. They tend to be ideological webs that are
far easier for me to think than to type. There have been two on
my computer for well over a year. I am committed to completing
them because I think that they are important.
This month and next month, I’ll
carry on more about these philosophies that are more on the
general side rather than specific to shirt laundering. Still,
they have value in your shirt department as well as your
general day-to day-duties of running a drycleaning business.
A great deal of our day-to-day business
lives has to do with customer retention. Sure, we want to get
new business and we may often say to ourselves that we do a
“good job” so that this level of quality breeds new
customers via the word-of-mouth advertising medium.
As true as that surely is, in fact the
only reason to do a good job is so that our particular level of
profitability continues into perpetuity. Otherwise, business
life would be more like “take the money and
run.”
So we work at doing a good job and adopt
procedures and policies that are a means toward that end.
The list of these things is endless. They
range in scope from something as cosmetic as remodeling a
storefront and buying new counters to buying a videotape that
will help your pressers do a better job of pressing shirts or
pants or any other garment. But there is a something that we
often neglect.
We will spend thousands of dollars to
visit the Clean Show — a very worthwhile investment
— so that we can see the latest and the greatest that
this industry has to offer. Maybe the secret to our success is
that one piece of equipment that we have long managed to get by
without. With that, we may hypothesize, we will finally be able
to cut out overtime, trim back on the payroll and get out a bit
earlier on Fridays.
What I think is missing doesn’t cost
a red cent. It is truly free.
We adopt company policies that
theoretically enrich the bottom line. You know the type: greet
all customers by name to make them feel remembered, needed and
important, for example.
We actually do lots of things like that to
enhance our image. You might have a policy that requires
someone that answers the phone to say “Good Morning!
Thank you for calling Don’s Fine Cleaners. How may I help
you today?”
Hmm. Before customers get a word in
edgewise, you have greeted them (perhaps no one else has
today), thanked them for their patronage and/or for recognizing
you as the person to call, thrown in an adjective that
describes Don’s Cleaners as a cut above and then you
remove all doubt that you “can” help them by saying
(in effect) “Of course I ‘can’ help you, duh,
but in all of the ways that I ‘can,’ which of those
ways works for you at this moment?”
You probably already do something like
that now. No, that isn’t what I think many managers
forget about or fail to do altogether
Sure, this isn’t going to cost
you a penny either.
Professionalism is key, to be sure.
Anything that you can do to enhance the way that the public
perceives you is important. It is cosmic and intangible and
maybe even too snooty for you, but the less you look like
Don’s Cleaners and Live Bait and more towards Don’s
Professional Dry Cleaners the better your public image will be.
Don’t you agree?
So you decree that all of your managers
will wear business clothes and your customer service reps will
wear clean crisp uniforms with a name tag and a
“I’m thrilled to be here” smile.
You probably do something like that now,
but it’s important to be reminded why.
And we do things to keep employees in
line. We have to have rules so that the inmates don’t run
the asylum. Be on time. Respect each other. Maintain production
standards.
Ah! There’s a good one. Maintain
production standards. Hey, that’s pretty important. Push
the work out, but not to the “bang and hang” level.
So, as a means towards that end, we have a
couple of other rules. No radios or CD players. Or maybe we
want them to have personal entertainment, but you must have
headphones so that the hip-hop fan doesn’t drown out the
soft rock fan.
These kinds of rules exist so that workers
work. That’s not so cosmic an idea. In fact, we may
prohibit cell phones in the plant. That makes sense to me.
It’s important to have all of these
rules. Rules are what we adopt to live in a civilized society.
Otherwise, chaos would prevail.
With those thoughts in mind, how about
prohibiting (here’s it comes…) something that so
many of us do and I believe is not only counter-productive, but
a waste of time, energy and sound waves.
Why don’t we prohibit (ready?)
sarcasm. The use of sarcasm has no place in business.
I hope that as you read this you feel that
this doesn’t apply to you. The more I write for this
publication, the more plants that I visit, the more drycleaning
and laundry employees I meet, the more I marvel at the power of
words.
When I approach a shirt presser and say,
“Hey, Betty, great job on this shirt,” how often do
you think that I get a quizzical look? How often do you think
that I get a “What’s wrong with it?” as a
response.
I don’t understand this. How do you
pay a compliment? How do you really say, “Hey, Betty,
great job on this shirt”? How do you encourage employees
to continue to do a good job when your very words make them
wonder if they’re doing a good one or a bad one?
I understand that sarcasm can be a form of
humor, but my statement stands: It has no place in business.
The answer to my rhetoric is simple: How do you say,
“Hey, Betty, great job on this shirt?”
Try English. It works. You will learn to
marvel at the power of words. You will learn, once you break
the cyclical hell that is a “yes” when you mean
“no” and “good” when you mean
“bad,” that employees thrive on encouragement and
support.
You will get startling results. You
probably don’t think that your employees would respond
like they will because they have never understood your words
before. Well, actually, maybe they have. But I’m not
convinced that you used the right ones.
“If you do what you’ve always
done, you’ll get what you always got.”
Donald Desrosiers has been in the
shirt laundering business since 1978 and is a work-flow systems
engineer who provides services to shirt launderers through
Tailwind Shirt Systems, 867 Spencer St., Fall River, MA. He can
be reached by phone at (508) 965-3163 or by e-mail at tailwind1@comcast.net and he has web sites located at: www.tailwindshirts.com and www.donsway.com
 |
