When a coin or card operated laundry is first developed, there are budgets set for building and for a “Grand Opening”. Money is budgeted because they want to kick off the laundry with advertising and promotion to get the business rolling. Unfortunately, that is the limit of the advertising most of today’s laundries ever receive.
Most laundry owners and operators will say they believe in advertising; however, the saying is that they just don’t like having to pay for it. In many ways that is understandable, because most coin and card operated laundries simply don’t have a large enough cash flow to set up any kind of substantial advertising budget that is significantly sized to impact that laundry’s trade area.
However, we all should know it doesn’t need to be a big budget to be effective. Here is an example.
Looking for something to do with his time, a retired army officer bought a coin laundry. Learning about the business, and how to take care of machines took up his time for about six months.
His business maintained a level that was fine but he still had too much time on his hands. Then he got around to cleaning up the back room and found a big box of old records left by the previous owner. Among those records were stubs of out of order cards that went back for years. He put them aside thinking he would go through them later. In the meantime, he kept similar claim forms of his own.
A year later he pulled out all of those O/O/O cards and reviewed them. Perhaps because he was ex-military, he sorted the cards by street and decided to get a big map of the area and he began to plot out their locations using push pins. What he found was interesting from the point of view of the address locations. What he saw was that many of them came from a part of town where customers had to drive past two other coin laundries to get to his. He wondered why. Many also came from an area where there were no other competitive laundries. He assumed that he must have a lock on that one particular area.
He talked with customers whose names he recognized from the cards and thanked them for driving past other coin laundries to use his. He asked each of them why they did that. The answers varied, but the most frequent was that they had had trouble with the machines at the other two places and had never gotten their money back. At this laundry, they knew that if they had a problem and reported it they would be repaid.
He also began to ask other regular customers what part of town they lived in and put those on his map. He reasoned that many customers never have had a problem, or if they did they would not bother to fill out a card.
Later he decided to hire attendants and start a fluff & fold business. He needed to advertise to keep his business growing. He investigated ways to do it, and found that they all were kind of expensive. Penny Saver covered all of the areas, and the little ads were cheap but if he went with a display ad, it was expensive, especially so for a coin laundry that had a very small advertising budget to spend. He also looked at direct mail as well as the neighborhood distribution of flyers. He found that these were less costly, but required a lot more work on his part.
This is the course of action he decided to follow. First he bought a small, inexpensive used copy machine and taught his attendants to use it. They began to charge customers ten cents a copy. The owner figured that the public would eventually pay for the copier. The only way the copier service was advertised was with a simple sign that the service was available. The sign was a copy.
Next he began to make up flyers for the coin laundry, a few dozen at a time. These he distributed around the laundry’s shopping center location. He hit the supermarket area two or three times a day. The flyers told of the full line of services that the laundry now offered. They began to see results with the addition of new customers. First, only a few but the numbers kept growing.
Meanwhile he kept reviewing and updating his map. The more he looked at it, the more he started to see other patterns appear that he thought that the laundry could take advantage of. He hired the teenaged son of one of his new employees to deliver flyers, an hour at a time, first in one particular area, then others. Business continued to improve.
Time has made the map look a little crowded and it is well used. When one family moves away, he removes the pin but often quickly replaces it with a new customer.
He still follows this program for his business. Over time the copy machine was paid for by people paying a dime a copy. The costs for the flyers was very little by doing just a few at a time. Employees pass them out in the center. He still has teens deliver in the other areas. He made the initial effort to get the program going, but now all of the work is done by others and the cost is low.
This laundry owner felt that by following this style of advertising program, he could get the best results for his dollars spent. Time has proved him to be right.
What kind of program will work best for your laundry business? Plot it out. Be sure to have a large box of push pins ready, just in case.
