When you aim to be the best, there is a lot of target practice involved. For
Farshad Sayan, owner of three fledgling Clevergreen Cleaners plants in Boston and Medford, MA, that means working hard on a daily basis.
“Sometimes, it just takes about everything I’ve got,” he admitted. “I’ve been in the drycleaning business for 28 years. I’ve done it all different kinds of ways, but this company is my baby. It’s about two years old. I want to set the culture with my employees and my
customers that we are different. It’s been challenging.”
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“He was really amazing,” Farshad said. “I am in awe of what he did and how he did it. He used to import goods from all
over the world. He used to pre-sell what he would import. He never carried
anything. Anything he imported was already sold and paid for. He was just so
phenomenal.”
Because of his astute business acumen, Enayat was able to afford to send his
children to the US for college.
“With Iranian money, he put me and my older brother and two sisters through
universities here,” he recalled. “You can imagine what the cost was of boarding and school and everything. He did
that. We never had to get a student loan. We never had to worry about pocket
money or a weekly allowance.”
Despite it all, Farshad felt a need to earn some of his own money while he
studied chemistry at Tuft’s University in Massachusetts. He didn’t have a work permit, so he could only take part in jobs on campus, starting
with a dishwashing position in the cafeteria.
“I found out that the pot washers used to get 25 cents more an hour, so I
actually said, ‘I’m going to do the pot washing’,” Farshad said. “I still recall how corrosive and strong those detergents were that they were
using because some of it would get into the gloves — no matter how high they were — and boy, would I get blisters.”
Farshad soon traded the gloves in for keys to the campus mail truck. He and his
brother also worked at the campus Buildings and Grounds Department moving
furniture, painting and performing other similar duties. He always worked at
full speed.
He also hit the books hard enough to fulfill all of his chemistry major
requirements by the end of his sophomore year. So, he opted to become a double
major and earn a chemical engineering degree, as well.
With that kind of educational firepower, Farshad was well-groomed to apply to
Dupont, Dow or another leading chemical company, but he was too self-conscious
about his fluency in English to apply.
“I actually had convinced myself that I was going to embarrass myself by going
and getting a job like that,” he recalled. “I was much more comfortable if I had my own business and could hide it.”
During his senior year in college, Farshad and his brother had managed to open
their own business — a pickup and delivery drycleaning drop store. However, his initial impression
of the industry was quite underwhelming.
“Every cleaner I went to, even if they had a nice front, by the time I went to
the back for them to show me what they did and how good they were and how proud
they were of it, it was like: ‘You’re kidding me.’ I was actually appalled,” he said.
Before graduation, Farshad had decided to stay in the US and apply for a green
card. As revolution broke out in Iran, he was hired for a job at the Hyatt
Regency. He soon worked his way up to a full-time management position.
When Farshad’s father came to the US for a visit shortly after, he witnessed firsthand his
son’s propensity to pour himself into his work.
“I was going to work at 5 o’clock in the morning and I was coming home at about 11 o’clock, midnight — six, seven days a week,” he said. “He saw how I was working and pulled me aside. He said, ‘Listen. All of this energy that you’re putting in for somebody else... why don’t you put it into a business of your own? I’ll help you out.”
Originally, Farshad wanted to open a racquet club, but it was hard to find a
viable location and financing was sky high. Eventually, he found a cleaning
plant and reconsidered his earlier dismissal of the drycleaning industry.
In 1982, he bought Tuttle Cleaners, a franchise he would own until February of
this year.
The investment started off auspiciously enough. Farshad showed up donning a
fancy suit, expecting to boss everybody around. On the first day he was open,
his main equipment broke down. The suit did not stay on long.
Fortunately, Farshad’s chemistry background proved to be a nice fit for a business that relied
heavily on stain removal.
“I could get the stains out,” he pointed out. “I was really great, the best spotter. I understood it. I did it for about ten to
twelve years. I didn’t move from the spotting board.”
In that time, Tuttle’s expanded from one to a handful of locations. Sales figures also increased
about 500 percent.
In the early 1990s, Farshad was ready to sell the business. Unfortunately, a
partner was not. For the next five years, Farshad cut back his involvement as
his interest in the venture plummeted.
Making things worse, he got divorced in 1996 after a 15-month marriage. It was
the first time in his life he felt like he failed. After a lot of soul
searching, he found his energy and enthusiasm once again in an unlikely place:
a weekend seminar with the Landmark Forum. Suddenly, he fell back in love with
his business.
Farshad empowered his employees to run more of the business so he could spend
time leading Landmark workshops. He put Tuttle’s up for sale in 1999. He wanted to move to California and concentrate on
teaching. Anton’s Cleaners was primed to make the purchase when the bottom fell out.
“We found out that we had contamination,” he recalled. “The deal with Anton’s fell apart in the last minute. We shut down, took the cleaning machines out,
took the concrete out and went down six feet until we hit water. We took all of
the contaminated soil, vacuumed it out and took it to a site to be treated.”
Farshad spared no time or expense on the cleanup effort. When it was over, he
replaced all of his perc machines with brand new upgrades.
“We learned our lesson fast and we learned it a very high cost, but we learned
it,” he said.
In fact, only two years later, Farshad decided he was done with perc. Even
though his perc machines were only two years old, he got rid of them and became
the first Boston cleaner to have a GreenEarth machine in operation.
Farshad felt that Tuttle’s was now more environmentally responsible, but the plant was still like a “Toyota” — reliable and dependable. He preferred to start over with a higher end business,
or a “Lexus.”
He wanted to be more clever with how he ran the new business and he also wanted
it to be greener, hence the name Clevergreen. He chokes up when he recalls
sitting down to write the company’s mission statements. His goal was to create a company that would make his wife,
Roxane, and children, Samira and Kian, proud.
A big part of his company’s new mission is to dispense with outdated practices and replace them with
cutting edge technologies and methodologies. In that regard, Farshad uses only
DF-2000 and wetcleaning to service Clevergreen’s garments.
After his own messy perc cleanup, he believes strongly that all cleaners and
industry associations should embrace the alternatives.
“I don’t care how much perc technology improves and how much safer they make it,” he noted. “It’s still a nasty, nasty substance. If we know it’s harmful, what are we waiting for?”
According to Farshad, there is a lot more to being green than just what solvent
you use.
“It’s great to go and be green as far as not using toxins or using great chemicals,
but if you’re using so much water and electricity and gas and natural resources to put that
work out — then hey, I don’t care how green you are. You’re wasting resources.”
Customers have responded positively to Clevergreen’s efforts. In fact, the business won the Best of Boston awards for 2006, 2007
and 2008.
Winning such awards has helped the company increase its current sales by about
60 percent over the previous year’s.
Another contributing factor could be the headlines Clevergreen has made cleaning
the wardrobes for the cast of over a dozen movies shot locally in the Boston
area. Some of the films’ stars include: Sandra Bullock, Anne Hathaway, Jennifer Garner, Morgan Freeman
and Cameron Diaz.
“The movie industry has its own challenges,” Farshad explained. “Every once in a while they give us beautiful, very expensive garments that have
to be in a fight sequence or a food fight sequence, or have to get wet in the
rain or when they jump in a pool. Can you save this?”
So far, the answer has been a consistent “yes,” which is no accident. Throughout his life’s experience and his years with Landmark, Farshad has learned that every aspect
of life can be approached in the same manner.
“How we do anything is how we do everything,” he said. “Once we know how we get in our own way, we can see how we get in our own way
everywhere... in our relationships, with our business, with our problems, with
communications. Once we know that, the mystery is out.”
