National
Clothesline
It was the Muppet Show’s Kermit the
Frog who sang “It Isn’t Easy Being Green,”
but drycleaner Kermit Engh probably disagrees with that notion.
As owner of Fashion Cleaners in Omaha,
Nebraska, he cares a lot about keeping a clean environment. In
fact, he was literally one of the first cleaners to achieve the
Certified Environmental Drycleaner designation from IFI back in
1994. He drove all the way to Minneapolis just to take the
test.
“We have always been concerned with
the environment and have always maintained our records and
manifests and have been careful with the way we handle
products,” he explained. “It’s not that I am
concerned that perc is cancerous — I don’t believe
that for a minute. I’ve met too many very old
drycleaners. But, at the same time, it’s no different
than gasoline or anything else like that. I don’t want my
kids growing up with contaminated dirt of any kind.”
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Certainly, that might explain why Kermit
now owns a 37-acre farm, half of which is devoted to growing
Christmas trees, a secondary business venture that has proven
to be rewarding.
“We currently have about 13,000
trees in the ground,” he noted. “We’ll be
planting 600 more trees this coming week and we’ve got
2,500 coming in two weeks for this year’s planting. I
only wish that my grandfather was still alive today to see what
we have done because he’d be in absolute heaven out here
in these fields.”
The tree business’s roots can be
traced back to 1994 when Kermit bought the farmland and started
planting from scratch. It takes a typical Christmas tree
anywhere between five to nine years to grow so Kermit has only
been selling them during the busy holiday season for the past
six years. This year, he anticipates selling 1,000 altogether
— all of which will be cut down and carted away by
customers.
“In three weeks, we’re all
done for the year,” he said. “But I just love it. I
love working with dirt. It’s so different from corporate
life or drycleaner life. It is truly an escape. When I am out
working in the fields, I don’t dream about anything else.
It’s hard, physical, dirty work, but when you get done
after a day, you are mentally refreshed.”
When he originally bought Fashion
Cleaners in 1992, Kermit certainly felt refreshed at the
prospect of trying to expand the small business, which, at the
time, had only one location and about nine employees.
“I jumped in and really had no clue
of what I was doing,” he laughed. “But the fun
thing was since I didn’t grow up in the business, I
didn’t know what wouldn’t work. So, if I saw
something that I thought we could change or make better,
that’s what I would do, not knowing if it would work or
if somebody had tried it before.”
For a handful of years, Kermit learned
from trial and error. He bought a new computer system and
updated equipment and played around with marketing and
management strategies. His ideas worked and the company grew
— at least until Kermit started running out of ideas.
“Probably in 1997, 1998, I kind of
hit a wall,” he recalled. “I was just going through
the motions each day. It all became a fuzzy blur.”
Kermit still believes today that his
drycleaning days would have been numbered if not for an ad he
saw by Deborah Rechnitz. She was trying to start up a midwest
Methods-For-Management group and was enlisting cleaners.
“That kind of relit the pilot
light,” he said. “I started traveling to other
people’s plants and getting ideas. I had somebody else
holding me accountable for my financials.”
The success gained from joining that
first management group prompted Kermit to continue networking
with cleaners and experts from all over the country. Nowadays,
it’s hard to find an organization with which he
isn’t affiliated.
He has taken up the presidential gavel
for the Iowa-Nebraska Drycleaners & Laundry Association and
has been invited to be on the boards of the Alliance of
Professional Restoration Drycleaners and the Association of
Wedding Gown Specialists.
Kermit is also proud that he participated
at the final Varsity International Conference in 2003 and, more
recently, was invited to join America’s Best Cleaners, a
distinguished group with a stringent set of criteria.
“We are now having our solvents
checked once a month by sending test swatches to
Germany,” he noted. “It is not a group where you
just send your money in and you’re a member.”
So far, all of the networking has paid
off considerably. Fashion Cleaners has increased its scope by a
large margin. Now, it has nine locations, 80 employees and six
delivery vehicles on the road at any given time.
Recently, the company upgraded even more,
installing a plantwide distribution system for garments,
including a MetalProgetti assembly conveyor and a Sankosha
autobagger.
“I think we’ve got a pretty
good place to work,” Kermit said. “We try to stay
on the leading edge, not the bleeding edge of
things.”
Before Kermit had even graduated from
high school, he already held jobs as a tomato picker, a
janitor, a photography developer, a bicycle repairmen and a
stocker/cashier at a grocery store.
In college, he was employed by the
intermural and recreation department at the University of
Nebraska for four years while he earned a bachelor’s
degree in Business Administration.
Not one to ever slow down, Kermit next
worked as a pharmaceutical representative for Hoechst-Roussel
peddling powerful antibiotics and blood clot dissolvers to
physicians, pharmacies and hospitals. He enjoyed his job very
much and stayed with them for four-and-a-half years. He might
have remained with them longer, but he couldn’t pass up
an “opportunity of a lifetime.”
“It was a start-up restaurant
concept here in Omaha called Romeo’s,” he
explained. “We were going to be the next
Godfather’s pizza chain, so I left my comfortable job
with the pharmaceutical company and got involved in restaurant
management/development.”
For the next 30 months, the chain grew
steadily to six locations, but then it hit a wall. The
potential was still there, but the owner was content to stop
expanding. Eventually, Kermit became a “corporate
refugee” and was laid off from his job. As a matter of
fact, that was the first of three times he found himself in
such a predicament.
Later on, after he earned an M.B.A. from
Creighton, Kermit was laid off from his job as a market
research/manager for Applied Communications, Inc., the
world’s leading provider of banking software for ATMs and
TOS networks. A few years after that, he was laid off yet
again, this time from his position as director of marketing
services for Clarkson Hospital.
After being laid off on three separate
occasions, Kermit could easily have given up.
“The first time is a huge, huge
slap to your ego,” he said. “It is demoralizing. It
is depressing. The second time, if you go through the emotional
level that I did, it just makes you kind of angry. I was just
mad. The third time, it was like, ‘Oh, who cares?’
It was not a big deal. I’ve been fortunate in that each
time that it happened, I didn’t have to take any massive
steps backward. I was able to find, in essence, an
advancement.”
After being downsized for a third time,
the next “advancement” he discovered was Fashion
Cleaners. He didn’t know much about drycleaning, but at
least he wouldn’t have a boss that could lay him off.
“The only person who can lay me off
now is my banker,” he joked. “As long as he is not
standing at the door in the morning asking for the keys, I
figure we can work another day.”
Prior to becoming a drycleaner, Kermit
quite literally logged in hundreds of thousands of miles in the
air. His various jobs over the years often required him to
travel all over the country and beyond on a variety of
commercial airlines.
During all of those flights, he was often
intrigued by flying, a feeling he initially felt when he was a
boy. The underlying irony here is that Kermit is very afraid of
heights.
“I hate shaky ladders,” he
said. “I will not stand on roofs. I have no desire to
feel unsupported in the air.”
With that in mind, it is probably odd
that his wife, Caroline, gave him a certificate for a discovery
flight on their 20th wedding anniversary. The experience
convinced him to take flying lessons a little over four years
ago, and, in May of 2002, he bought his own Cessna 182 Turbo.
To overcome his fear of heights, he tries
to be a “smart pilot” and only fly in weather
conditions that he knows he is capable of handling.
“I get up anywhere from once to
three times a week. I now fly to all of the meetings I go
to,” he said. “I can go to the meetings and get
home faster than the other guys who do it commercially because
I don’t have any layovers or have to go through security
screens or wait for baggage claim.”
Of course, it’s also one more way
for him to escape and enjoy the great outdoors a little more.
“I’m comfortable in my
airplane,” he added. “To me, it’s very
liberating. It’s the ultimate freedom.”
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