Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

What a good idea.

I would spend a lot of time researching your prospects. Look at the cleaners who offer this service, and pick their closest competitors (that don't).

You can also go to the cleaners offering the service and suggest the savings they'd reap by subcontracting the driving and delivery out.

If a cleaner is doing this themselves, they are probably spending over $50K (conservatively) on this service. that includes vehicle, maintenance, insurance and driver. The driver may have to be bonded. Interesting!

Hi, I'm Darcy Moen. I'm a retired dry cleaner but I'm still active in the industry as a contributing writer to trade magazines such as www.fabricarecanada.com and American Dry cleaner.

Pick up and Delivery has become a interesting trend within the dry cleaning industry as late. Many dry cleaners are considering starting their own route and are looking for people to hire for the job.

Then again, there are companies like 1-800 Dryclean and Pressed for Time that offer this as a business opportunity.

If you are looking to go around to dry cleaners and offer to do the pick up and delivery for them, you may be onto something big. Many cleaners go through pick up and delivery drivers like facial tissues in cold season. The toughest part of the job is looking for customers and making sales calls. If you are NOT afraid of making sales calls and work just an hour a day to grow your business, you could do very well. Few dry cleaners are working to expand their route business because many folks hired for the job are content to just ferry the clothes from customer to cleaner, then from cleaner back to customer again. The rejection of being a salesperson on top of the courier aspects of the job is too much for many people. This, if you can sell and take the rejection, you will rise to the top in this business.

Many cleaner's biggest fear is that you will turn large volume customers that are willing to carry in and pick up their clothes from the cleaner into your route customer. Cleaners are not fond of the idea of losing a counter customer to a route. The reason is, they make full price on the over the counter sale, and are likely to have to pay a route driver a commission for bringing in the clothes and delivering them to the customer.

The perfect business would be where you can balance your cash flow needs with the dry cleaner by building your pick up and delivery route in areas where the cleaner does not have customers (or where your cleaner has a competitor but no store of his own) Finding new customers in an area where your cleaner has no customers is the ideal. But, odds are those customers out there already are going to some other dry cleaner. Its a very competitive business. :-)

If you do find a cleaner who is willing to work with you, be fair to the dry cleaner. Many cleaners do not understand their cost structures very well. It might sound great to split the invoice 50-50, with half the charges collected going to the dry cleaner who did the cleaning and pressing, and the other half going to you as the pick up and delivery service. Some do a base wage or base weekly salary and a percentage of the weekly gross sales of the route. If the cleaner does not charge enough, you could both end up out of business due to lack of proper cash flow. If the cleaner gets too greedy, you may not get enough of the sale to warrant your work. If the combined prices of your fees and the dry cleaner's fees are too high, you might find it very hard to sell your pick up and delivery services as well as the cleaner's dry cleaning and laundry services.

As I said, I am a consultant to the dry cleaning industry, you might want to hire a guy like me to work with you to set up the proper business model, or you might want to keep in contact with a guy like me to simply bounce ideas off of. Feel free to find me via my profile here on Marketing profs.

Darcy Moen
Customer Loyalty Network and Route Building Door Knocker Dot Com