Approximately a week prior to this
profile interview, Drycleaning By Dorothy owner Bob Devaney had installed a $17,000
security system at his three cleaning stores in Hingham, MA.
Since he and his father purchased the
plant in 1976, nobody had attempted to rob one of the stores
while armed with a weapon, although there had been late night
break-in attempts.
Ironically, three days after installing
the system, a man with a knife came into the store and
subsequently ripped out the cash register drawer and fled.
The front counter clerk — a high
school girl — ran out the door after the man and
wrote down his license plate number before coming back inside
and calling the police, who soon apprehended the suspect.
Bob’s security system provided them with additional
evidence for the arrest.
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While the system provides Bob with some
peace of mind for obvious reasons, it also allows him to keep a
close eye on the company he has worked so hard to build up.
“The system is unbelievable,”
he continued. “It’s already helped me in several
ways in just watching customer service and how my deliveries
are made. It’s incredible. I can sit at home actually,
and, with my laptop, dial right in and watch my stores
live.”
When Bob looks in on his employees,
it’s simply because he cares a lot about everything that
goes on inside his plant.
Clearly, the sentiment is reciprocated.
After all, most employees usually don’t chase after
knife-wielding criminals in order to get a license plate number
unless they truly appreciate their job and their boss.
Unfortunately, the front counter clerk
did have to quit soon after the robbery since her father deemed
the job too unsafe, but her display of loyalty is a great
example of how Bob’s successful efforts to make everybody
who steps foot in his plant (except for armed criminals, of
course) feel like part of the family.
When a young lady named Dorothy tapped
her ruby red slippers together and said: “There’s
no place like home,” she was referring to Kansas, not
Massachusetts. However, it’s quite appropriate that
Bob’s New England-based business shares her name since
his main goal is to make sure there is no other fabric care
place like Drycleaning By Dorothy.
The business has been in operation for
over 50 years. It was started by Frank (as in L. Frank Baum)
and Dorothy Ward in 1953. Bob, along with his father, purchased
the business 23 years later. At the time, the elder Devaney had
been retired and young Bob had already sworn to never pursue a
drycleaning career.
While growing up in Weymouth, Bob watched
his father manage a large chain called Shea Drycleaners during
his formative years. Naturally, Bob wanted nothing to do with
any of it.
Instead, he attended Northeastern
University to become a speech therapist after graduation.
“While I was in high school, I
worked with mentally handicapped children and I really liked
it,” he recalled. “The teacher thought I had a
natural ability to work with these kids and mentioned to me
this opportunity of continuing to work with them.”
All of Bob’s plans changed,
however, when his father called and told him he wanted to get
back into drycleaning and he wanted his son by his side.
If timing is everything, then the
Devaneys had little hope when they bought Drycleaning By
Dorothy. At that time, the entire industry was mired in a
significant slump.
“There were a lot of leisure suits
then,” Bob noted. “Wash-n-wear shirts had come onto
the market... and polyester. Drycleaners were in a lot of
trouble at that time.”
For the next couple of years, the two men
struggled just to keep their company open. By 1980, Bob began
to wonder what else he was going to do with the rest of his
life. Then, things got even worse.
“My father died in 1980,” he
recalled. “So, now my mother looks at me and says,
‘Please don’t leave. You can do it.’ It was
one of those situations where I had nothing to lose. What else
was I going to do? We decided to go forward.”
Rather than drop out of the drycleaning
business, Bob expanded his drycleaning business with drop
stores. That turned things around as business started to boom,
so much that he would sell a few drop stores for a big profit
and then open additional ones. In 1985, he took the concept
further.
“I had this idea that if I could
open up drop stores for other people and do their work, then it
would be a business that people with no drycleaning experience
could open up. It was simply waiting on customers. If I did the
drycleaning for them, they were going to have good work and be
able to make a nice living.”
The idea may have worked a little too
well.
“I was selling them back then for
$40,000 — a complete turnkey business, and people were
buying them for graduation gifts for their kids!” Bob
said. “I sold like 13 or 15 stores. It completely
overwhelmed me. I was running around like a maniac with all of
these people calling me.”
Soon after, Bob and his franchisees
parted company under good terms. As he returned to the helm of
Drycleaning By Dorothy, however, he kept thinking about what he
could have done differently. The wheels turned in his head for
several years before he was ready to give franchising another
try in the late 1990s. He joined with John Dallas, owner of
FabriCare House in Hingham, and Larry Friedman, also a former
cleaning plant owner, to form Lapels in 1999.
They used one of Bob’s prize drop
stores as a model and the idea skyrocketed. They sold 25
franchises in the next five years, with locations throughout
New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey and
Texas.
“We made the Franchise 500,”
Bob recalled. “We had zero failures, which is
unbelievable for any franchise business.“
By late 2004, Lapels had dropped down to
only two partners: Bob and Larry Friedman. The duo began to
have disagreements on which direction to take the business, so
Bob bowed out and returned his attention once again to
Drycleaning By Dorothy.
“I came back to Dorothy’s and
I had free reign,” he recalled. “Now I could
concentrate on the things that I loved and all of the things
that I’ve learned over the years. Now, it’s really
starting to pay off. My business is up when everybody is
complaining about business being down.”
One reason that Drycleaning By Dorothy is
more successful than ever is because Bob utilizes a lot of
customer retention marketing. He offers a reward program and he
participates in Upromise. He also likes to keep in close
contact with customers through e-mail.
“I think it’s great for an
ongoing relationship,” he noted. “Every two weeks,
my customers get an e-mail right in their home. I speak
directly to them and they respond.”
In four years, Bob’s list has grown
to include over 3,000 names, with dozens signing up monthly to
receive discounts and fabricare tips.
“One of the e-mails I sent out was
titled ‘All in the Family’,” Bob noted.
“I told them I think of all of them as part of my family,
and I want them to think of me as family, too. At the end of
it, I wrote: ‘If you have a problem or question or
anything, call me directly. Here is my cell phone number.
Please do not give this number to anybody else. It’s only
for family.’”
The customer response was overwhelmingly
positive.
“You wouldn’t believe how
many comments I got from customers over that,” he said.
“I didn’t get any cell phone calls, but now they
know how to contact me. They know I’m being open and
honest. That’s a very basic thing in business, but it
escapes some people because they get so involved in how much
profit they’re going to make.”
Of course, Bob doesn’t mind making
a profit himself. Nowadays, he’s already churning out a
new franchise idea the he hopes to start in the near future.
Such a project will take time, but that doesn’t really
bother him.
“They way I look at it is, success
is like a staircase and every customer is a stair, one at a
time,” Bob said. “Every time I make a customer
happy, it makes my day because I know I have just gone up
another stair. I’m going up instead of down, so I know
that I’m going in the right direction.”
Bob hopes to continue to steer
Drycleaning By Dorothy in the right direction, no matter how
difficult things may become.
“My vision of the future of
drycleaning is not cleaners doing $10,000 or $20,000 a
week,” he said. “Those are the old days. The new
drycleaner is going to do $3,000 or $5,000 a week. So, if you
can find a way to make a profit within that range, then you are
going to be successful.”
Bob isn’t worried about the future,
though. A long time ago, he made a promise to someone special
and he intends to always be true to his word.
“It was my father who got me
started in this business,” he recalled. “The last
thing he said to me before he died was: ‘I want you to
promise me that you’ll always take care of your mother
and never sell the business. Though it will probably never make
you a millionaire, it will always provide you with a good
living.’”
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