National Clothesline

The million-dollar question I ask anyone who contacts me about growing their pick-up and delivery services: How committed are you?

Great question if you truly want to do some soul searching on investing the time, money, effort, resources and staff on growing your business. I ask on a scale from 1 to 10, how committed are you?

If the answer is around a 7 or 8, I then ask them to pick up a pen on a commitment of 8. It is impossible.

Only 100 percent commitment of picking up the pen is possible. Hear lies the issue I sometimes see when on a project — lack of focus on direction, resources and monetary commitment in order to make a serious effort in building successful routes.

I hear it all. Routes take too much time or effort as well as the costs to get it going. Many operators make it a pet project for their nephew, uncle, etc.

Others believe that it can run by itself and thus, in turn, it runs itself right into the ground.

I have seen a handful of operators who try so many different things and never get 100% percent committed or focused on a solid system of operations. The point is that routes work best when you focus on what I call the 3M system: Marketing, Maintenance and Management.

You cannot stop marketing your routes. Sure, you will grow with referrals and the normal exposure of the van. But you must be committed to have a nice, clean van with a wrap or lettering that looks professional but not too busy.

Your bags must have your name on them as well as other operating pieces. Your brochures should be more than just self-printed on dull white paper in black and white to get your point across.

You can grow the best with a personalized marketing plan that includes sales staff or at least a route manager who can field any prospects’ calls and inquiries. Quite often marketing takes a back seat to the daily grind of drycleaning.

Too often I see situations where a route manager is desperately needed, but operators feel that the route can be self-run by commissioned drivers.

You need to have a solid management plan in order to develop your routes. This position is critical in all phases of route development in areas of marketing and customer service.

A route manager can also be the back-up driver to ensure that you don’t skip a beat no matter what gets thrown at you. Many routes grow when someone else is hired to “drive” the delivery side of your operations. This individual must be able to perform all the “3 Ms.”

Maintenance is also critical when it comes to keeping your routes going. This includes using your manifest and a customer retention strategy. I call this internal marketing in which you increase your sales from within.

Many feel that just delivering a quality product on time is good enough. Not true. You must have a retention plan in place in order to grow. There are many useful tools (such as Phone Tree) that can assist in the maintenance portion of your route customers.

As you may notice in my above sermon, I see the biggest issue is deciding on investing in an individual to provide the necessary steps to build, develop, and sustain the routes. Most of those operators who have strong, solid routes, did it around another individual or a group of individuals who were solely focused on routes and not other issues.

Again, it goes back to that commitment level. I have also seen several times when one guy built the routes and moved on, only for the company to see a steady decline in the delivery business.

Get growing now. Make 2009 your best year ever — until 2010. Routes are the “Dippin’ Dots” of the drycleaning business. They are the future, but have been going on forever. Stick to the basics and develop an individual to build your route business.

The bottom line is that I ask you to look at your commitment level to your routes, which includes your production and retail staff. If they are not fully on board, then you might not get the growth you need.

Routes must be supported by all aspects of your operation. If the counter staff doesn’t support it, you will have issues arise. Production must respect the due dates of the routes so that drivers have complete orders before they leave the plant.

Again, commitment may be overused here, but check you and your employees’ pulses and see where they are in building your routes. You may not like the results.