Some Simple Tips for Advertising Inside the Laundry

Everyone who is in the coin and card operated laundry business wants more income. Translate that to mean more cash flow. And different locations have differing abilities to gain cash flow from the same sources. During the summer, a soft drink machine in a southwestern laundry will draw more thirsty people than one will in Montana during winter. One particular laundry operator has felt a need for more income, and he has lots of room to put in many vending machines. A soap and supply vendor is a given. It was there when he bought the place. To that he has added a soft drink machine, three candy and gum vendors and a decal seller. His real moneymaker is the soft drink machine. Buying off brand water and sodas in volume from a warehouse store, he gets them cheap, and still charges as if they were either Coke or Pepsi. He nets over forty cents a bottle. Because of his laundry''s location, he gets a lot of walk in trade from nearby offices. But he still wasn''t satisfied. At a local car wash he noticed advertising signs touting a nearby eatery. The idea struck him that he could do the same thing at his coin laundry and bring it in to increase the cash flow. Now he wasn''t the originator for this idea, but unlike many, he was willing to act on it. And he did by doing a lot of research and detailed investigation. First the signs would need frames and a way to attach them to the walls of his business. Kind of like picture frames where you have to change the inserts on a periodic basis. Well he hunted around and found a source. The problem was they were not cheap and you had to buy them in good quantity. But, he bit the bullet and got enough to fill up the amount of spaces he had available for them. Next he needed to set up a plan for selling the idea of getting local businesses to advertise with his laundry scheme. ''In not good at sales'', he thought, but it turns out that he was much better at selling than he at first thought he would be. He had a plan. First he wrote a sales pitch that he could give his business neighbors. Then he practiced what to say, and thought out what questions and objections he might be given. Now it was time to put the planning into practice. He carried a sample of an advertisement on his laptop computer. He wasn''t artistic, so he had one of his friends actually make them up. There were six eating establishments within an approximately one block radius. So if he could persuade one to buy an ad, he might get them all. He and his wife were regulars at three of them, and they all bought the plan. The rest were easy to sell. He now had four spots left. He then went to a jeweler, a fish store, a smoke shop and an attorney for the rest of the signs. At $25 per month his wall spaces were now providing his laundry with an extra $3,000 of income per year. A second owner thought of a similar idea for his laundry. He wanted a bunch of new carts to replace his old ones. Carts can be expensive when you''re buying a bunch of them. His older ones had pole extensions to help keep customers from taking them out the door. He thought the space between the cart racks and the extensions would be a good place to hang an advertisement. He was discussing the idea with one of his regular customers, an attorney, who thought it would be a good idea and made an offer to buy the first one. He ended up getting three. So for $100 a year, first the attorney then other local businesses and professional people began to buy the idea. In that first year he got twenty new carts and the extra extensions, had them paid for by income from others and had an expected source of income for the second year and from then on. Its amazing the number of ways operators who use their heads, their energy and their time can find ways to make a laundry more profitable and economically stable.