When Rick Kasperbauer headed off to college, he didn’t know what he wanted to do in the long run.
He did have short-term goals. He simply wanted to study business and marketing
and avoid treading down any path that lead to drycleaning.
His father had owned a plant and coin laundry in his hometown of Carroll, Iowa,
which, naturally, Rick wanted no part of.
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“It’s really funny,” Rick recalled. “My father bought a house and it was actually a big lot near downtown. In the
backyard, he built a cleaners, so we lived, literally, three feet from the
cleaners. That’s how I grew up.”
Jack Kasperbauer got into the cleaning business in the 1950s and ran it mostly
as a one-man operation. He managed to make a living despite the fact that
Carroll had a population of only about 10,000 people and was nestled in the
heart of rural country.
At the time, small town life was not as appealing to Rick as it was to his
father.
“I always said — and I was very serious — I’d never go back to Carroll and I will never be a drycleaner like my dad was,” he laughed. “But, things happen and your life changes.”
At the age of 20, Rick married his high school sweetheart, Laurie. He had
graduated from Des Moines Area Community College and was ready to transfer to a
four-year program; however, an irresistible opportunity cropped up.
His oldest brother, Dennis, owned the family business at the time, but he had a
business opportunity of his own to pursue and wanted to sell.
“I had a conversation with my brother,” Rick noted. “He was making pretty good money. Back then, I wasn’t making anything anyway so any money seemed like a lot.”
After avoiding the cleaners for many years, Rick still had a lot to learn about
drycleaning, but he didn’t have the luxury of time. Instead, he had to settle for a crash course.
“It’s funny,” Rick recalled. “When my brother sold it to me, he spent like three hours with me — you know: ‘This is how you do this and that. Good luck.’ That’s literally how it went. We were at the press and I asked him what the pedal
down there was for and he said, ‘It’s a vacuum. Don’t worry about it, you won’t need it.’ I figured out what the vacuum pedal was for. Thank God it was a very small shop
that didn’t do much volume.”
During his first year as owner of Kasperbauer Cleaners Rick sold off the coin
laundry aspect of the business and began to look for other ways to get his
profits up. Adding several commercial accounts worked well, as did joining the
Golomb Group.
“I’m still a member,” he said. “That played a major role in growth and learning. I went to a lot of Golomb Group
meetings and seminars and followed their marketing strategies.”
According to Rick, marketing has become especially essential for his business
because he cannot simply rely on population growth to keep his production
numbers up.
“I’m in a rural area,” he noted. “I don’t think the census population has really changed in 50 to 60 years. Our
population has remained very close to the same. The town we’re in is considered a big city. We have a shopping mall, a Wal-Mart. We’re kind of a retail center. There are a lot of towns of maybe 1,000 to 3,000
people, in that range. It’s tough.”
Just because the local population is not growing, however, does not mean
Kasperbauer Cleaners has remained a one-man operation.
Since he took over in 1980, the business has expanded to include 27 employees,
too many to fit in the backyard building by his childhood home.
“We have about a 6,400 sq. ft. building now,” Rick said. “I moved only three blocks away. I bought an empty lot on the same street in 1990
and built the facility.”
“The old cleaners still stands,” he added. “It’s a beauty shop now. The house I grew up in still exists, but they moved it
about five blocks away.”
Rick strongly believes Carroll is an ideal small town to raise a family in — he and Laurie have raised four children who are all currently in college — but it is not the easiest place for a cleaner to proper.
Currently, he has no competition because every other plant in the area has
closed down.
“If it wasn’t for diversification, I probably wouldn’t be around,” he admitted.
As a former president of INDLA, and the serving Director for DLI’s District 5, Rick talks to a lot of cleaners. Right now, many are telling him
they are struggling to stay open.
“In general, drycleaning volume is just dropping,” he said. “In the state of Iowa, the numbers are probably a third of what they were 15
years ago. The smaller plants aren’t surviving.”
Rick’s own plant might have closed down long ago if not for the fact that he fostered
a strong desire to grow the company.
“I always dreamed of becoming a big plant,” he explained. “It was kind of my dream to become a big drycleaner in a small town. I feel like
I’ve accomplished that. We have three route drivers and cover almost all of
western Iowa. We probably have 30 drop stores — agencies is what I call them — in little towns. Iowa is full of little towns.”
In all, Kasperbauer Cleaners reaches out and taps into business from a 70-mile
radius surrounding Carroll.
“The agencies might be a grocery store or a hardware store, an appliance store, a
women’s dress shop — we just give them a percentage. There’s not much overhead for me except getting there and back. Plus, they like it. It
creates traffic in their store.”
Not too long ago, Rick and his son-in-law, Tyler Anderson, became business
partners and opened a GreenEarth plant named Blue Sky Cleaners in Kansas City.
The new venture has been a welcome challenge, especially since it is an entirely
different market for Rick.
“We built the plant in a younger, more progressive, higher income area,” he said. “We wanted an alternative solvent that we could say is more environmentally
friendly and use that as a selling point. That’s what we’re doing and it is working out well.”
Even after launching a more modern cleaning plant, Rick can’t shake off his rural roots.
“I know drycleaners from all over,” he said. “They call Iowa a flyover state. It doesn’t even exist in their minds. I tell them I get frustrated when I have to wait
for a red light or a train when I come home from work while they sit in traffic
on the freeway for hours. I live two miles from my plant. I go home to eat
lunch every day.”
Not only has Rick learned to embrace his small town roots, he now considers
himself DLI’s voice for rural cleaners in the midwest.
“You talk to people on the board of directors for DLI, most of the time they are
from big cities and they’re from big plants,” he noted. “I’m kind of an idealist that way, where I want us rural people to be heard a
little bit. Iowa does exist and we pay dues just like you guys. That has always
been the way I felt.”
Rick also believes that even small cleaners have to produce big quality.
“In a small town, you can’t get away with bad quality because everybody talks,” he said. “I grew up in this town. My customers know me. One of my biggest incentives for
trying to give good quality is so they don’t come in and chew my butt.”
The next time that happens, though, Rick may want to just point to the wall that
now holds the plant’s DLI Award of Excellence certificate.
“I got it in the mail a couple of weeks ago,” he said. “It’s really a neat thing. I’m sure there are a lot of naysayers out there who think all you do is pay them
money and you get it, but it’s legitimate. It’s earned.”
After a hard day’s work, Rick finds few things more relaxing than a long run.
“I’m a Type A personality,” he said. “It means I work 12 hours a day, go home and put my running clothes on and run
five miles almost every day.”
Occasionally, he competes in 13-mile half marathons; however, that is not the
reason he does it.
“I like the physical benefits,” he explained. “I’m 48 now and I feel like I’m in good shape, so I like that, but the number one benefit is stress relief. It
just makes you feel good. My average run takes 40 to 45 minutes, depending on
where I run.”
No matter where he goes, he always finds his way back home.
“Family is just really the big thing with me,” he said. “This industry has been really good to me. I was able to let my wife raise kids
and not work outside the house. She still does some of the bookwork and the
payroll, but it’s not a full-time thing. She does it in our home office. But she was able to
stay at home and raise the kids. We ate dinner together every night. A lot of
that
doesn’t happen anymore these days. We’re kind of traditional in that way.”
The Kasperbauer family will soon continue another tradition. One of Rick’s sons will graduate in May with a business degree. He plans to come to work at
the plant. Rick hopes the industry will provide another long run of prosperity
for the next generation.
“When you sit and think about it, the drycleaning business has really provided me
with a good living,” he said. “It’s been a good industry. Not too many people can say they’ve raised four kids and put them through college and all that and still
survived.”
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