By Don Desrosiers, Tailwind Systems, Inc.
Most of you have heard about Jim Collins’ book, “Good to Great.” A good number of you have read it. Great companies have, for the most part, always been great, while a vast majority of good companies remain just that: good, but not great. What could merely good companies do to become great? How can their leaders turn long-term weakness into long-term supremacy? Continue reading “Taking Drycleaning from “Good” to “Great””
Can Disruptive Tech Fix It?
By Craig Crawford
“Software is eating the world,” proclaimed Venture Capitalist and software engineer Marc Andreessen at the 2017 Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, Spain.
“With lower start-up costs and a vastly expanded market for online services, the result is a global economy that for the first time will be fully digitally wired—the dream of every cyber-visionary of the early 1990s,” he explained.
Andreessen, who co-founded Netscape, was listed as one of Time Magazine’s “Top 100 Influential People” in 2012, and currently sits on the board of directors of Facebook, eBay, and Hewlett Packard, among others.
“Companies in every industry need to assume that a software revolution is coming,” he predicted in a 2011 article published in The Wall Street Journal. He was right. It’s here.
By Don Desrosiers
I don’t write about customer service very often. I don’t talk about it much either. It’s not that I don’t think it’s important. Quite the contrary, in fact. It’s just that I don’t think it’s up for discussion. Garment care is a service business. That means we need to service our customers. We take care of their garments and we take care of the people who bring them in. Making customers feel special, remembered, and important are the things the best cleaners do to raise the bar.
Let’s say you are at a party and you run into friends you haven’t seen in a while—maybe since college or they could be old neighbors or work colleagues. And the first question naturally would be “What have you been up to?” And how many times have you heard the response that indicated that nothing had changed “I’m pretty much the same person.” How sad. Who wants to talk to the 55-year-old high school quarterback whose lifetime highlight was the winning season he had in 1963. Isn’t it a lot more fun and interesting to talk to someone who has lived, gone on to do different things, evolved and grown into the person they are today? I think so.
Equipment can help drycleaners slash labor costs and streamline workflows, but tech tools and careful management are just as important to operations.
By Ian P. Murphy
Let’s face it: Drycleaning is — and always will be — a labor-intensive business. Unless every article of clothing somehow stops attracting dirt and/or wrinkling, it will require the attention of a garment care professional.
But labor costs money. And any drycleaner worth his or her (water-soluble) salt knows this is the first place to create efficiencies that can actually cut costs. That’s why many are looking to new equipment and streamlined workflow strategies to save on costs and increase profits.
Continue reading “Industry Innovation Brings Change, Growth”
The employment picture is improving in the United States, to the extent that by the end of 2017 some 95.6% of willing workers had obtained jobs, according to figures from Moody’s Analytics, a research firm based in West Chester, PA. Does that mean the nation has reached a condition economists refer to as “full employment?”
The question is important because wages generally start to increase across the board when the number of available workers becomes scarce. And a general rise in wages usually translates into more spendable income, a healthier economy and more profitable businesses.
Despite brisk growth, analysts fret over housing, banking, debt and scarce labor
By Phillip M. Perry
Fair weather ahead: That’s the economic forecast for 2018. Business operations should benefit from an improving employment picture, growing disposable consumer income, and an easy credit environment.
Continue reading “Economic Forecast: Mostly Sunny With A Chance Of Storms Ahead”
DLI members in Districts two and six will have the opportunity to vote for their next District Directors.
Ballots will be sent to all members in those districts in early April. Newly-elected board members will begin their terms at the Summer 2018 Board Meeting.
James E. Patterson, 1988-1989 DLI President and owner of Your Valet Fine Drycleaning in Logan, Utah, passed away January 4 in Ogden, Utah. He was 85 years old. Patterson graduated from High School in Marietta, Ohio, in 1950 and joined the United States Air Force, where he studied at the Russian Language School in Syracuse, New York. He served as a Russian language interpreter during the Korean War at bases in Anchorage, Alaska and Adak Island.
Continue reading “Jim Patterson, DLI Past President, Passes Away at 85”
Milt Chortkoff of Milt & Edie’s Drycleaners & Tailoring Center in Burbank, California, passed away at age 88 on December 28 surrounded by his family. Chortkoff was a prominent drycleaner who started out in cleaning at his family business Hollyway Laundry & Dry Cleaners at 10, “delivering wet washes in a pushcart around Brooklyn” he told Cleaner and Launderer in 2016 on the occasion of his 70th anniversary in the industry. He also delivered clothes to pay his way through college at 17 in 1946. in 1988 he came out of retirement to purchase a drycleaning facility in Burbank, naming it Milt & Edie’s Drycleaning & Tailoring Center. Milt & Edie’s is always open as a 24/7/365 business. Milt & Edie’s has 90 employees at present.
Continue reading “Industry Legend Milt Chortkoff Passes Away at 88”
