or over 70 years, the Butler family has
cleaned garments in Ohio, dating back to the early 1930s when Bernard
Butler realized he needed to supplement his income as a barber.
Initially, he accepted clothes at a counter in his
barbershop in downtown Columbus and sent them in to another cleaner for
service. However, as the amount of “side work” continued to
increase, Bernard opted to trade in his scissors and razors for a
couple of presses and a drycleaning machine and call his plant Hudson
Cleaners.
Bernard’s son, Greg, chalks his
father’s early success up to a couple of different factors.
“It was probably mostly location and the
fact that he had a pretty good attention to detail as far as getting
things done
the way people wanted them done,” he
explained.
Bernard’s tireless work ethic kept him very
busy throughout most of his life. According to his grandson, Brian, who
is now a vice president with the family business, the elder
Butler’s personal and professional lives overlapped, which is
fortuitous since otherwise there may never have been another generation
to continue the tradition.
“My grandmother met my grandfather because
her friend at the office said the drycleaning guy was cute, so she
called up to get him to come deliver her cleaning. She kept calling
until he asked her out,” Brian said.
Eventually, she worked at the company, too. Martha
Butler, now 88, still comes in three days a week to do financial work.
She’s played a role in the business for over 60 years. In fact,
after her husband died in the late 1970s, she was a major financier
when Greg moved the company from downtown Columbus to Dublin and
renamed it Dublin Cleaners.
Long before that time, Greg grew up around Hudson
Cleaners doing a little bit of everything. After studying business in
college, he spent a couple of years in the Navy sailing through waters
that reached Northern Europe and Alaska.
In 1970, he began working alongside his father at
Hudson, bringing with him a few ideas of his own.
“My father let me do a lot of things I
wanted to do,” Greg recalled. “We got into the uniform
rental business to supplement the amount of business we were doing and
to give me an income.”
At the time, the company had eight employees and
offered delivery service that ran for about half a day, twice a week.
Over time, however, the business expanded, as did the family.
In 1972, Greg married Martha, who has performed
bookkeeping and marketing duties for the business over the years. The
couple have three sons: Michael, 24, now in culinary school; Kyle, 21,
who studies video production and film at Ohio University; and Brian,
27, who works with his father at the plant.
In the latter half of the seventies, Greg kept the
company afloat while his father battled cancer. It was a difficult time
in his life, watching his father struggle, but Greg endured by putting
everything he had into his work.
“It was a little hectic for a while,”
he admitted. “I worked about 70 hours per week, but we had three
children along the way, so I must not have been working that
hard.”
Even at the time, Greg was able to joke about the
long days. In fact, he had an unusual request for Margaret pertaining
to Brian’s birth. “I told her, ‘You’re going to
have to have this baby on Sunday because that’s the only day I
get off’,” he laughed.
Oddly enough, Brian was indeed born on a Sunday:
Mother’s Day, May 8, in 1977.
Hudson Cleaners has remained a fixture in downtown
Columbus for almost 50 years, but the location that had been such
a blessing in the beginning grew to be more of a curse.
“The neighborhood had made an unfavorable
transition over the years way down in the city, which is the nicest way
we can put it,” Greg said. “In 1982, we had a robbery down
at Hudson Cleaners. A guy came in with a gun, so at that point I was
ready to start looking for another place to relocate.”
That same year, the family business changed names
and locations to Dublin. It was a risky move at the time since the
small town had only about 3,500 residents.
“If you asked a lot of people that year,
they would have told you he was crazy,” Brian said. “It was
nothing but farm fields up there.”
Greg, however, knew better. “I talked to
some real estate people who showed me what development was coming, so
an early in was a good idea,” he said. “The business took
off quickly. We were actually profitable in the first month.”
Dublin is home to over 35,000 residents nowadays.
The growth of the town was ignited in large part because PGA golfer
Jack Nicklaus opened Muir Field Village in the area, an upscale
community that turned out to need a lot of drycleaning.
Today, Dublin Cleaners has about 75 employees. In
addition to its 12,000 sq. ft. main plant, the business has four
satellite locations. The delivery service has grown, as well. These
days, it requires three trucks for its daily routes that service close
to 2,000 customers altogether.
The community has certainly been kind to Dublin
Cleaners, so Greg has returned the favor. In addition to cleaning coats
for the Salvation Army, he has spent five years on the town’s
Chamber of Commerce, including two years as treasurer. He had been
involved with the Dublin Rotary Club for a decade, but stepped down as
his wife joined in his stead. The couple were both named
“Business People of the Year” in Dublin in 1989.
While the days of cutting hair for the family are
long past, they are now much more interested in cutting edge
technology. Brian joined the company full time a couple years ago,
bringing with him the computer skills he acquired at Ohio University.
Brian, a mischievous boy, was no stranger to the
plant. He was kept occupied there a lot by his father while he grew up.
“He had me working at the counter so young
the customers were a little startled when they came in,” Brian
recalled. “They’d just see a head over the top of the
counter.”
When it was time for college, Greg has some advice
for his son. “I remember saying to him: ‘Be sure you study
a lot about computers because that seems to be the
future’,” he said. “Brian’s comment back to me
was, ‘I’ll do like you. I’ll hire somebody to run the
computer for me’.”
Brian was no fan of computers. In fact, he had to
ask for help on how to turn one on during his first computer class.
However, he soon learned he had a real aptitude for them. In 2000, he
graduated with a degree in Management Information Systems.
After selling educational software for a
family-owned company for a few years, Brian decided he would rather be
a part of his own family’s business.
He began at Dublin Cleaners in late 2002, working
a few 70-hour weeks of his own. Many late nights were spent designing
the company web site (located at www.dublincleaners.com).
“Our customers love it,” he said.
“It’s an amazing communication tool because people can sign
up for our delivery service online. It can e-mail them a credit
application that gives us all of their information right away. If the
weather is bad and we have to change our delivery schedules or
there’s an upcoming holiday in the week, all that is posted
there. It really helps us to not spend a lot of time sharing the same
information over and over again.”
Though he hasn’t been full time with Dublin
for long, Brian has still made a big impact. At his urging, the company
upgraded its technology, making it one of the most advanced plants
across the country.
“Now we have an intelligent conveyor that
reads bar codes that are permanently adhered to garments so we
don’t have to put new tags in every time,” he said.
Brian explained the process further. “These
bar codes maintain individual garment preferences. People used to tell
us, ‘Starch the men’s shirts with heavy and the
ladies’ shirts light, but if the men’s shirt is dark,
don’t put any starch in it.’ They want all of this stuff
and we’re a shop doing between 18,000 and 20,000 pieces a week.
It’s pretty hard to individualize like that, but now you just
shoot the bar code and it reminds you each time it returns.”
The information on the bar codes also
includes the date when the garment was first cleaned, the amount of
times it has been serviced, and how much revenue it has brought in. The
conveyor — built by Metalprogetti — automatically assembles
finished orders when they are done, saving even more time.
To help eliminate unnecessary errors, LCD flat
screens are placed throughout the plant at critical junctures of the
cleaning process. Brian estimates that as many as 14 different people
can handle one garment, so, if a mistake is made, it can easily be
caught and corrected along the way.
The Butlers began the project almost a year ago
and have worked out most of the kinks. Still, the technology
isn’t for everyone.
“We spent my salary on the system,”
Brian laughed. “We see it paying off already. We’re at the
point now where we’re having fun. I think what’s fun about
my dad and I doing this together is that we didn’t have to have
anybody come in and tell us how. His 30 years of drycleaning expertise
and my current knowledge of what a computer can do put together has
worked out really well.”
