An umbrella for a rainy day
The economic climate for your business can change every bit as fast as the
weather. It may be sunny today, but dark, cloudy skies may be edging up on
tomorrow
’s horizon. Things can literally change in the blink of an eye. For a good
example of this, check out the story about the cleaning plant that went up for
auction on eBay recently (see front page).
Last year, $1.75 Cleaners in Mayfield, OH, grossed over $400,000 and was poised
to make the jump to another level. This year, volume for the company dropped by
40 percent while the stress level of ownership shot right through the roof. The
only thing that changed was a $17.4 million road widening project that took
place right in front of the store. It made no difference that $1.75 Cleaners
continued to offer the same service and quality. What mattered was customers
could no longer get to the plant in a convenient and timely fashion.
There was nothing really that the plant’s owners could do to avoid their fate, but it is a good reminder that cleaners
should never be content to let business come to them. Drycleaning volume runs
hot and cold, like the weather, but unlike meteorologists, drycleaners have two
major tools available to help control the temperature.
The first one is marketing. Some cleaners prefer to engage in a huge marketing
blitz once a year to pump up business. That helps heat things up for a little
while, but it does not have a long-term effect. For that, cleaners must keep
the fires going by marketing in small increments year-round, or, as columnist
Bill Bishop calls it,
“drip marketing” (see page 8).
The other invaluable tool is diversification, a risk-reduction strategy that
involves adding more products and services to your plant
’s repertoire. If volume drops in one area of your company, there are other areas
that can make up for it. Perhaps the most successful diversification tactic in
the industry is the pickup and delivery route, which literally involves going
door-to-door for garments. This month, James Peuster
’s column (see page 10) can help you decide if your computer software is capable
of producing a route manifest which you can use for operations, marketing,
maintenance and management.
Of course, not all production volume problems can be solved by adding services
or simply increasing your marketing, but such actions can function as umbrellas
to help keep you from getting soaked when the thunderstorms inevitably hit.
The customer is king… er, defendant
Everybody has a “favorite” customer. We’re not talking about the Big Tuna who you go out of your way to please. We’re talking about a favorite at the other end of the spectrum. You know, the
customer who whines and wheedles, demands and complains, expects everything for
next to nothing. This could be the kind of customer who might sue you for
millions of dollars for losing a single pair of pants. Yes, the customer may be
king, but any study of the history of royalty shows that sometimes the king is
just nuts.
Generally, you try to deal as best you can with this customer, often applying
that advanced degree in psychology that you received from the School of Hard
Knocks. Sometimes enough is enough and you kindly invite that customer to take
his business to a competitor. Any vocal criticism of the customer is usually
reserved for private
— among colleagues, family and friends. But a New York drycleaner decided to take
his beef public by filing a $300,000 defamation lawsuit against a customer who
posted fliers in the area around the store and started a web site to tell the
world just how little he thought of the cleaner. In the customer
’s opinion, as expressed on the fliers, “Todd Layne Cleaners sucks and is overpriced.” Todd Ofsink, owner of said cleaners, decided to put a stop to it by taking the
customer, Evan Maloney, to court. A judge has barred Maloney from entering the
store; whether he has to take down his web site and fliers remains to be
determined by the court.
Customers filing million-dollar lawsuits for lost pants… cleaners suing customers for six figures for broadcasting a negative opinion… this makes good work for the lawyers and gives the newspapers something to
write about. But both customer and cleaner would come out ahead by resolving
disputes the old-fashioned way: let the customer find another cleaner; let the
cleaner invite the problematic customer to do so.
