As a professional consultant for the drycleaning industry, Sandra Haralson works tirelessly to ensure that her clientele will become more profitable under
her guidance, sometimes even at her own expense. If she believes her services
are not needed, she’ll be the first to cut a scheduled visit short in an effort to save her clients
money.
Of course, those that know her would certainly tell you that Sandra possesses an
unbelievable work ethic and cutting anything short goes completely against her
nature.
Her training standards are the same as the ones set by the Drycleaning Laundry
Institute, which is why the association accredits Award of Excellence points
for cleaners who utilize her services.
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“My story is probably not something you’re really going to enjoy a whole lot,” she warned. “It’s really coming up through the trenches. Here’s the deal. I dropped out of high school. I got married. When I got married, I
couldn’t even drive. I got my driver’s license. I enrolled in night school. I still graduated with my class. I went
to work because I wanted to have something better than the way I was raised. I
knew I had to work for it. Nobody was going to give me anything.”
In terms of familial love, Sandra had plenty growing up under her grandparents’ care in Spartanburg, SC. However, financially, it was a much more difficult
situation.
“When I was seven years old, we lived in a house with no electricity and no
running water,” she recalled. “I’ve come a long way.”
Despite such circumstances, there was always one quality Sandra has had in
spades: drive. Just tell her she can’t accomplish something and you will soon be proven wrong.
When Sandra entered the workforce at the age of 17, she was not content to have
just one job. While she worked as a dessert maker for a steakhouse at night,
she spent her days at Dove Cleaners.
When she started as a customer service representative at the plant, she had no
experience. Two weeks later, she was thrust into the role of
drycleaner/spotter.
“My initiation was: ‘This is how you separate the garments. Do this, do this and don’t do that’,“ she said. “I kind of learned the hard way. Everything that I know, I know so well because I’ve already messed up.”
It was a frustrating process, but Sandra absorbed everything she could. By the
time she was 20, she worked her way up to a management position. In fact she
served as a manager for several different plants over the course of the next 15
years.
During that time, she became an expert in all production aspects of a
drycleaning plant, including equipment maintenance. Sandra has never been shy
with tools, thanks to a lot of time spent helping her grandfather tinker on hot
rods when she was young.
With so much frontline experience under her belt, Sandra has little trouble
relating with the people she trains.
“I can go on that production floor and get respect and the people will ask me
questions and warm up and talk to me because I treat them equally,” she noted. “I’ve been in their shoes. I know what it’s like to stand behind a press ten to 12 hours a day. I know what it’s like to spot and dryclean all day. I know their jobs because that was my job.
It’s very demanding work.”
The work is so demanding that Sandra found herself physically unable to do it
during the most difficult time of her adult life. In July of 2000, she broke
her knee and everything spun out of control.
“I was actually walking to a lighthouse and stepped in a hole on an asphalt-paved
road and just crushed my kneecap,” she recalled. “I had no insurance and I lost my job because I couldn’t stand up. So, they did my outpatient surgery and sent me home and I about lost
everything. I had two friends who loaned me enough money so I could buy
groceries until I could get to where I could get around to try to find work.”
Compounding matters was the fact that most plants would not hire Sandra because
they believed her knee to be a liability. On top of that, her doctor’s prognosis was anything but positive. She was told that the best case scenario
would still mean she’d always walk with a cane. That just made her more determined to get back on her
feet, literally and figuratively.
While she rehabbed her knee at home, she had plenty of time to come up with a
new strategy.
“I thought: there’s a lot of times I’d have paid somebody to fill in for me when my presser was out or I needed a
vacation or whatever,” she said. “That was kind of how I got started. I would do fill-in work. You want a
vacation? I’ll run your shop for a week.”
Eventually, she built up numerous contacts and focused more on consulting and
training rather than acting simply as a replacement.
Looking back, the painful process of breaking her knee ultimately turned out to
be a blessing.
“Otherwise, I would have never done what I’ve been able to do. I would never have taken the leap to do it, or thought I was
capable of doing it,” she admitted.
In the past eight-and-a-half years, Sandra has built up an impressive customer
base that includes members of America’s Best Cleaners and Leading Cleaners Internationale.
She has consulted for plants of all sizes, from a three-employee package plant
to a facility in Alabama with more than 50,000 square feet, approximately 165
production people and 30 pressing stations. She has discovered that all plants,
regardless of size, tend to run into the same roadblocks.
“Some might have them on a larger scale, but they have the same problems,” she said. “There’s a whole list of things, from checking pockets to unbuttoning buttons, which
slows your production down in a lot of different ways.”
Most of the time, when she begins a job, she starts at the end.
“The first thing I do when I walk into a plant is I go to the finish line with
all the orders ready to go out the door and I look at them,” she said. “That tells me cleaning quality, inspection quality, finishing quality and where
I have pressing problems and things like that.”
From there, she works herself backwards through the production process so that
she can easily identify the causes and effects of all potential profit-purging
problems.
“When I talk to the owners, I try to get a feel for the quality that they think
they have, what they’re after, what their goals are, and who are some of the newest employees and
which employees they think they are having the most trouble with. As long as
employees are open to it, I can help them. I don’t care if they’ve been there one month or 50 years, I can help them.”
When Sandra trains employees at a cleaning plant, she never forgets the lessons
she learned while she was training. Perhaps the most important one was that she
never really was trained properly in the first place.
“I train the way I do for the simple fact that I did not get trained that way,” she explained. “I make sure that anybody who I train knows all of the correct steps.”
As a result, Sandra has kept busy visiting a client base all over the U.S.,
including some in the states of California, Oregon, Michigan, Texas, Louisiana,
Mississippi, South Carolina and others.
At the start of December, she had already booked 40 weeks for 2008, which means
she’s likely to earn a lot more frequent flyer miles.
“Last year, I flew about 175,000 miles,” she laughed. “I also drove 42,000 miles. I drive a lot. I stayed out two weeks this last time
out, and I have done that three times this year. I go from Guatier, MS, to New
Orleans, and from New Orleans to Shreveport, and then back home. It’s almost 2,500 miles.”
Awhile ago, Sandra stopped needing a cane to help her walk around. It was just
one more example of how she doesn’t appreciate being written off.
“I have good days and bad days. Nobody usually knows I have any issues with my
knee unless I say something, and I’ve been known to crawl around on top of drycleaning machines, too,” she laughed.
Climbing on machines is just one way in which she goes above and beyond the call
of duty to help her clients. It’s fueled by that same never-quit spirit that helped her rise to the challenge
when she first started her consulting career.
“I didn’t get a lot of support from anybody and I couldn’t get a lot of help from people I asked for help from, but I’ve been able to survive this thing and make it what it is,” she said.
“You have to have the drive to do it,” she added. “Everybody else might give up on you, but you can’t give up on you. I didn’t give up on me. My grandmother taught me not to do that.”
It has certainly been a lot of hard work, but Sandra doesn’t know how to do it any other way. Besides, so far it has all been worth it
since she is able to do exactly what she wants to be doing.
“I enjoy what I’m doing more than anything. I really like this industry,” she said. “It has been very good to me and I’m happy that I can do what I do and get the results that I get.”
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