National Clothesline

My Murphy’s Law article last month drew unique feedback as many of you agreed with my comments about the drycleaning industry in general.

Many of you are experiencing pains, not gains, and are scratching your heads trying to decide what to do while dealing with the daily grind. Well, let’s take a time-out to once again look outside of the box and examine who is actually your competition.

Dictionary.com lists four unique definitions of competition. Read through them and think about how it affects you:

1. The act of competing; rivalry for supremacy, a prize, etc.: The competition between the two teams was bitter.

2. A contest for some prize, honor, or advantage: Both girls entered the competition.

3. The rivalry offered by a competitor: The small merchant gets powerful competition from the chain stores.

4. A competitor or competitors: What is your competition offering?

5. Sociology. Rivalry between two or more persons or groups for an object desired in common, usually resulting in a victor and a loser but not necessarily involving the destruction of the latter.

When it comes to drycleaning, anyone who has a storefront or a route is your competition, no matter how big or small.

Too often I hear that you have no competition because there isn’t anyone who does as good as you or is priced like you are. In fact, it is becoming more evident that the market is shrinking right along with your profits, so what are you doing to fight off the wolves that may be hungrier than you?

We are also in competition with all the marketing efforts of businesses outside of our industry. If we use direct mail, door hangers, salespeople and other efforts, we are in competition with the stacks of marketing pieces everyone receives.

Many consumers are looking at where they are willing to spend some of their disposable income and we need to be somewhere in the top ten. This is why I love face-to-face so much.

When we are going door-to-door or networking, representing drycleaners outside of our store, consumers are often wowed by the fact that a drycleaners is actually out there promoting the business.

The 21st century consumer has changed and actually appreciates hard work. Research shows that the lazier you are with your marketing, the lower the results. Consumers see that.

The worst competition is internally when your staff does not support routes and growth.

Many chuckle at this point because either they don’t believe this is true or they know wholeheartedly it is a fact. I visited over 150 plants and locations and I see this way too much.

I know that I have preached about this before, but this infectious mole in your organization can create a huge hole in which your profits and hard work goes down the drain.

Reading through the definitions above provided me with additional insight and confirmations as to what is going on out there from California to Florida. It is becoming more of a dog-eat-dog business and friendly competition is beginning to dwindle with the advent of routes.

Now is the time to decide how much more market share do you want to go after. Adding or trying to build your drop stores isn’t always the answer unless you are buying out someone in your market and plan to build your routes around them. Your bottom line decision is to either go or grow.

Replying to an e-mail regarding the Murphy’s Law article from last month: I wholeheartedly agree that some things are out of our control and we can overreact or create additional systems to try to eliminate much of the garbage that is probably going to happen anyway.

My point is that you should have a proactive game plan for much of the major hurdles that we come across every day.

Someone once told me this little nugget. “Did you hear the one about the perfect drycleaner? He went out of business.”

There is nothing wrong with striving for perfection, but we all are going to have to approach our daily operations as if we are coming up on speed bumps. You have to take it slow at first, but then move forward and keep going.