Running A Commercial Laundry Business
It’s possible you’ll know what you need to do to set up your commercial laundry,
but what challenges are you going to face when running it?
Ideally you
are going to need to source suitable premises, you ideally want somewhere with
good transport links, your manufacturing unit do not need to be in a city
centre. You may also want to consider leasing somewhere with more room than you
need to get started with to allow scope for expansion without having to
move.
You will need to recruit enough staff and management to run the
clothing 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, as your customer base will require you
to carry out a lot of the laundry overnight so that, to give an example, hotels
will have clean linen and uniforms ready for the next day. You will need to
recruit staff that can carry out semi-skilled tasks, as even though a lot of the
tasks are manual, skill will be needed to operate devices such as commercial
washers that can have up to 99 programmes. In addition good finishing of
garments requires some skill, and is fundamental as this is the last process in
the laundry process.
You will need to find new customers, and whilst this
will mean “Selling” to potential customers it will not need a hard sales pitch,
as often you can get a foot in the door by offering like the trial. Customer
retention is also key to developing your business, and you will keep your
customers happy by providing fast transformation times, and a high quality
laundry service, with sheets crisply pressed and sharp lines on uniforms.
Careless finishing can lose you customers overnight.
You will also need
to setup a delivery and collection service that needs to be reliable for both of
these aspects. This will mean having a backup plan if your van breaks down. This
leads people on to the fact that it is a good idea to set up an ad hoc partner
agreement with another commercial laundry. It may seem uneven to talk to a
competitor but you may need each other if either of you has a machine
breakdown.
That leads us on to maintenance. It is vital that you set up a
good maintenance agreement, as every hour a laundry product is broken is an hour
you are losing money and potentially customers.
You will also need to
establish a finance function to accommodate billing and payments, and carefully
monitor cash flow, especially when you are starting out.
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