National Clothesline

The Golomb Group’s “Ultimate Route Conference” brought 120 leading drycleaners to Chicago from all parts of the U.S. and Canada to hear eight speakers with opinions and ideas about building routes and improving customer service.

A Friday night cocktail party and a Saturday night cocktail party followed by dinner at the famous Maggiano’s Italian restaurant provided the atmosphere for networking and exchanging ideas between attendees and speakers. While sharing new concepts and good cheer, there was an opportunity to mingle with some of the most knowledgeable in the industry and meet old friends and make new ones while learning about new trends in the industry.

Presentations started off Saturday morning, Aug, 19, with Ron Strauss of the American Marketing Association. He spoke about the need to set yourself apart from other cleaners. The first step is to mystery-shop your competition to see what they are doing. Are they sewing missing buttons? Are they reaching out to new customers with mailings? Are they wearing uniforms with logos? How is their call office ambiance? Are the CSRs getting people to say, “ I’m going to ‘Sudsies,’instead of “I’m going to the cleaners?”

The next speaker was Harvey Gershenson, who runs the successful Sterling Cleaners operation in Los Angeles.

He spoke about the great opportunities in running multiple routes. There are many advantages to route customers that distinguish them from over-the-counter customers, Gerhsenson explained. He also reminded everyone that starting a route business was essentially like starting a whole new business. While many think of a route as just a simple extension of the regular business, Gershenson explained the many differences and how you can use those differences to your advantage.

Trudy Adams of Cleaner’s Supply spoke about focusing on employees to get the most from them and, at the same time, creating a more pleasant working environment. When she became director of customer service and sales at Cleaners’ Supply, there were six CSRs taking orders. Now she is in charge of a group of 32 CSRs and the number keeps growing.

Adams is a fountain of information when it comes to dealing with employees and their myriad of problems. “Employees will give 110 percent if they know exactly what you expect of them,” was one of her insights. Write out job descriptions, review them, renew them, and retrain for them, she advised. Details cannot be reinforced enough, she said, adding “It may not be your fault, but it’s your problem. Take care of it.”

Adams asked the group, “Who is the most important person in the store?”

The group anticipated that the correct answer would be the customer, but she said it is the employee because without employee satisfaction there can be no customer satisfaction.

Treat your employees as you would treat your best customer, she said. She provided many tips to inspire employees to create a great team, which will create a great business atmosphere, and a great business.

Next was Darrell New, vice president of operations for 1-800-DryClean, a franchise that helps people from outside of the industry become independent route owners who contract with established drycleaners to do production work. Currently, more than 100 routes are being operated under the 1-800-DryClean banner.

Thomas Cornelius and Derek Colantonio of Happy Valet presented a concept in route franchising. Their organization comes to a cleaner’s area with a team of energetic salespeople and builds a route. The cleaner pays for each customer that they find. The cleaner can pick an area or zip code and they do the demographics to make sure it is conducive to route service. If it passes the household gross income test, they knock on doors and find the route customers. While the route service must be branded as Happy Valet, they allow the cleaner’s storefronts to continue under the current brand.

Richard Ehrenreich spoke about the pitfalls of selling a business and the strategies needed to avoid those pitfalls. After spending a lifetime building a business, it makes no sense to be penny wise and pound foolish and fall into the traps that abound in the sale of your lifelong project.

Jason Loeb gave an inspiring presentation about how he built Sudsies.com in southern Florida into a profitable business. Initially beginning as a laundromat, Sudsies now operates 13 routes in three counties. Loeb uses his wit and wisdom to capture customers and also uses e-mails to contact his customers. Sometimes he will keep e-mailing them until he gets a response because he feels any response is better than none. His enthusiasm and dedication was infectious and demonstrated how extra energy can vitalize a business.

James Peuster gave a seminar on his techniques of building routes by going door to door. He worked with Alan Robson to co-produce the successful Biz-Builder route seminars. He helps cleaners learn these techniques and trains employees to use them to build routes.

After a short interlude of a “Jeopardy” type game show, hosted by Ed Roth, the seminar concluded with a round-table discussion with all presenters taking questions.