How to Start Laundry Service from Home
A laundry service business can be relatively easy to start, even if you don’t have industry experience, but that in turn means that you’re likely to face a lot of competitors. Before you open the business, make sure you’ve chosen a prime spot, discovered how you’re going to differentiate yourself from the competition, and studied the cost of supplies and fees.
Below are steps to take to open a laundry business.
- Write a comprehensive business plan.
Write down a business plan. Describe how your business is going to run in writing. List the services that you can offer, including specific services such as laundry, pick-up and delivery. Assess your targeted audience – college students, apartment building tenants, professionals alike – and investigate how well other laundry businesses in your community are serving the needs of this demographic.
Brainstorm ways that you can distinguish your business from your competition, such as providing cheaper rates, customized services or a more attractive consumer location. Describe your market strategies, prices and equipment that you will need, such as detergent vending machines, washers, dryers and folding tables.
- Get a very good location.
Find the right location. Choose a region that is open to or occupied by your target audience. Rent space near residential buildings to draw consumers who do not have washing machines at home. Avoid the urge to open your shop near your competition.
Choose a spot with off-street parking, if necessary, for customer satisfaction. Buy an established laundry business to save yourself time and money trying to find laundry supplies.
- Purchase the required equipment
Buy of the required equipment: order washers, dryers, coin machines, laundry carts and vending machines. Check online auction sites for discounts on equipment used. Buy top-load washers to save your money.
However, according to Entrepreneur, this cost between $500 and $700 apiece, while front load washers will cost between $3,500 and $20,000 each. Consider buying a card system rather than a change machine, as the cards can monitor the number of loads the customer has loaded and made it easier for you to adjust your rates.
- Obtain the necessary permits and registration
Secure authorization and registration. Visit the town clerk to apply for a business license. Ask if your jurisdiction allows you to have a health department license, a fire department license or an air and water pollution management license. Pay any waste-water and sewer connections needed by your city clerk.
- Market your Laundry Business
Market your laundry business with you. Advertise locally by putting door hangers on the doors of the apartment building. Have a list of your services and make coupons available to new customers. Differentiate your laundry business from your competitors by showcasing some specialized services or incentives, such as televisions, free wireless Internet access and sofas. Hang fliers on local newsletter boards and put advertisements in print or online newspapers.
Things you will require to start your Laundry Business.
- Washers
- Dryers
- Coin machine or card machine
- Laundry carts
- Detergent vending machines
- Door hangers
- Fliers
An Extra Tip
Laundry businesses can be costly to start with. Ensure to research extensively the costs of opening a business before you commit to the venture. Laundry businesses are also expected to pay per-washer fees for sewer connections. According to Entrepreneur, these fees can range from $200 to $8,000 per washer, depending on the area, so gather this information early in your research.
Tips for Running a Successful Laundry Service Business
From the outside observer, it may seem very easy to run a laundry business: take a dirty laundry, turn out the clean laundry. It’s an easy enough idea. However, the fact is that commercial launderers need to do a lot more than just clean laundry to make a real profit.
If you run a small neighbourhood dry cleaner or a massive commercial laundry company, here are a few tips to help you find success in the industry;
- Look for Innovative Ways to Increase Service Offerings
Broadening your client base can be difficult in a business that depends heavily on location. Even if you have an extremely successful pick-up and delivery service, your clients are likely to stay within a certain geographic range of your facility — leaving you with a very small number of potential customers.
The first solution to this dilemma is to open up more places, but that’s not always feasible or prudent. Broadening service offerings, however, can become a cost-effective way both to increase revenue from existing clients and to attract repeat business from existing customers. Additional services may include:
- Pick-up and delivery
- Press and fold
- Speciality cleaning
- Rush service
Find something you can introduce without stretching your staff or budget too much to see how it works for you. If the service is of excellent quality, you can satisfy your client base and create prospects for new acquisitions.
- Be More Than Prepared
Nothing can mess up a strong revenue stream in the world of commercial laundry, such as a prolonged time frame of downtime due to machinery or supply constraints.
In the laundry industry, it’s always best to be over-prepared, so be sure that your equipment is up-to-date on maintenance and that your supply closet is never close to empty. Keep a log of when machine warranties run out and search for local repair services that could help you out with a pinch. In short: do whatever you can to prevent downtime.
- Do Not Let Utility Expenditures Stop You
According to the Alliance for Water Efficiency, water costs represent more than 50 % of the total operating costs in standard commercial laundry facilities. With energy costs on top of that, utilities can be a massive — even prohibitive — expenditure for launderers.
Limiting water and energy use may even be a game-changer for commercial laundry businesses. Limiting water use by up to 80 per cent and energy use by up to 50 per cent can save you thousands of dollars each year.
- Design Your Brand
What image do you want people to have whenever they hear your business name being mentioned or see your logo? The response to this question is called your “brand,” and it’s supposed to drive anything you want to do with your laundry. From your customer service to your web presence and storefront, your brand ought to be consistent and recognizable across all platforms.
- Know Your Competition
You must know about your business competition. How much are they charging? How well they are Performing. How are they attracting customers? Use a market feasibility study to support your research, and visit the laundry service of your competitors (without discussing your own business) for the first-hand experience with their facilities and services.
- Have a Clean Restroom
The current study has shown that the restroom is one factor that is reflective of the cleanliness of a facility. If the restroom is dirty or not well cleaned, it puts the entire business in an unfavourable light. Everything in your store is expected to reflect cleanliness. Since your average customer spends an hour or two at your shop, it is fair to conclude that they would need to use the restroom at that time.
With the advent of technology, reviewing apps like Yelp and others are readily available, far more like your inbox. If your prospective clients are looking for laundry facilities at these web pages, you can guarantee that they would opt for a pleasant facility-room review.
- Try to Adjust Your Hours of Operation
A lot of laundry facilities are available from morning (7-9 am) – (10-11 pm). However, this might not be the most convenient timeframe for your clients. If you live in an area with much third-party staff, college students, or simple night owls, consider staying available 24 hours a day. Not only could this boost your sales, but this could set you apart from your competition.
- Offer an unbeatable customer experience service.
Often it doesn’t matter how big or small the competition is. You can grow a profitable business with great customer service. Remember that customers prefer business services that treat them with dignity. People love to be given attention and well handled, and they will always come back to enjoy the beautiful feeling again.
Never forget, clients are investing their hard-earned money on your services. They deserve a huge “thank you” and a huge smile on your face. People hardly overlook good customer experience and will gladly tell others about it.
- Provide your clients with their preferred mode of communication
Note that good communication and connectivity are very important to keep the customers back and happy in this industry. There are various channels through which different customers would like to connect to you. Go to your shop, call, send SMS, Email, WhatsApp, Facebook, Mobile Apps, Website, etc.
You must encourage your customers to communicate with you or place orders based on their convenience. Also, if you are launching a new service/offer, you should also send promotional SMS or In-App notifications to your customers. This will also aid you tremendously in the development of your brand.
- Start a Loyalty Program
Loyalty card program could be the turning point you need to give your laundry business additional boost. It can be a card-based program that integrates seamlessly with your digital card-op payment system that drives convenience for your customers and marketability for your store and, in turn, overall profit.
A Loyalty Card program allows your customers to add funds from a credit/debit card or cash to a Loyalty Card from an Add Value Kiosk that can only be used for sales in your specific store. Note also that a secure, automated value-added kiosk serves as a stand-alone transfer machine, freeing your staff to focus on larger tasks than bill swapping or adding funds from cards.
Four tips to improve customer service in the laundry business
What’s the simplest way to get a loyal customer? Great service to the customer, of course.
This may sound easier said than done, particularly in the laundry sector – where firms such as laundry rooms can have few employees and far between – but the point remains: great customer service is an incredibly important aspect of any successful laundry business.
So, how can you accomplish this vital goal? Here are four simple tips for improving customer service in your business:
- Train your Team Frequently
Customer service may take place in person, online or by phone. No matter the method, your team needs to be prepared for a complaint, question or concern. This is particularly important in laundry rooms with fewer employees. It would be best if you started by putting everyone together and going beyond the focus on customer service. Find out where you interact most with your customers – is it in the store or through technology? Look for weak spots and opportunities for growth. Then, take a look at these factors with your team and come up with ideas to improve.
- Improve communication level
The next tip to bolster your customer service is to focus on communication itself. Naturally, this is the key behind any customer relationship, and how you interact with patrons can set you apart from your competitors.
Focus on these elements:
Methods – Your customers need to be able to communicate with you. If you don’t have full-time staff in-store, clearly post phone numbers, email addresses or social media accounts where you can be reached.
Clarity – Communication needs to be clear and concise. Any time you talk to customers, make sure you are direct and to the point. Don’t skirt away from conflict or a problem.
Attitude – Most importantly, always take a positive attitude into your customer communications. Don’t be negative or hostile. Focus on the bright side of things and always offer a solution. Also, stay mindful of your body language and nonverbal communication.
- Increase Your Availability
Nobody wants a store with hard-to-find employees. The same goes for your laundry business, and one of the best things you can do is to be a visible leader at your company. It could even involve posting online, for example, on social media sites. A standard blog post or video can help you connect with your customers, leading to a more positive relationship. Keep employees available at all times in the store itself. If you have full-time staff, make sure that at least one of them is on the floor or within reach. The hard-to-locate staff may exacerbate a small problem.
- Connect with your customers
The last tip is to get in touch with your customers. Having a little common ground can make a dramatic impact during a disagreement. However, the connections can go beyond that.
For instance, you can shed some light on the behind-the-scenes operation of your laundry business. Post a tour online or write a biography of your history. The essential thing is to add a face to your business.
The more visible you are, the smoother it will be to deal with customer relations issues. As a bonus, enhanced connections will also make your business more trustworthy and enhance the overall sense of safety.
Customer service can be one of the trickier aspects of running a business, including a laundry room. Nevertheless, how you communicate with your clients will set you apart and can have substantial benefits throughout your business. With all that in mind, follow these four tips to get off to the right foot.
5 Marketing Strategies for Laundries
Businesses offering laundry services are faced with a challenge. With more than 3 million competitors, willing to stand out among other local laundry service providers is not an easy task. Though this poses an obvious problem, the solution is simple: create an innovative laundry-specific marketing plan and use the right strategies to convince your prospective consumers that your service is just what they need.
With this in mind, an effective marketing strategy is essential to maintaining future success. Here, you will find some effective, appropriate techniques to approach your clients and expand your business.
If you were someone who wants to find a laundry service in the area, where are you going to start? There’s no doubt that today, all searches start in a search engine, with Google being the most popular of all. Google has more than 3 billion online searches a day and a projection of 80 per cent in the search engine advertising market for 2019.
With that much traffic, any business looking to get publicity would be foolish not to take advantage of it and work to get their business to appear on the Google Search Results page. However, because Google is so popular, it can be a challenge for laundries to position themselves on the first results page.
- Use Email Marketing To Get More Clients
Did you know that, according to Hubspot, more than half of the marketers say that email marketing is the most efficient way to generate profit? It’s no wonder that this is true for the laundry business as well. Even with all the best advertising innovations, email is still one of the most effective ways to communicate with your customers.
Make a monthly newsletter and keep in touch with your regular and potential customers to generate interest and stand out among your competitors. It’s a good strategy because it works to make it more visible. If the content you develop is relevant and of high quality, it will be more likely to be shared to give you more exposure.
Email marketing opportunities in the laundry sector are rather limited, but they are still great.
- Ensure that your online presence is optimized
Even if you’ve followed the first two steps perfectly, if you don’t have an attractive and simple website for your potential customers to use, they may not close the deal.
Jeff Wile, the owner of a marketing agency for laundries in Florida, says in an interview:
“If your strategies direct users to your website and it does not load, it loads slowly, it’s not optimized for mobile devices or the navigation is not easy to understand, then it’s as if the entire marketing process in which you invested time and money would not have happened.”
Currently, a quarter of the population is millennial, so marketing strategies have changed based on their needs. Overall, any internet user, including you as a business, needs the ability to browse an attractive website that is easy to use. Without this, your efforts to reach a larger audience in your area would not make sense.
- Make a Good Video Presentation
A lot of smaller businesses do not even recognize the significance of video marketing in this day and age. According to Hub-spot, 54 per cent of consumers want to watch business videos. Whereas this used to be a large undertaking, you no longer need to be a multinational company with a six-figure marketing budget to produce a quality video or commercial presentations.
Creating a presentation video for your company today is more viable than ever before. Resources are becoming more accessible, and you can create quality videos without spending lots of money. A camera, a tripod, creativity and proper planning are all you need to create a good video with appealing content to leave a good impression on viewers.
- Make use of print advertising.
While digital marketing strategies are essential, you can’t forget about the traditional marketing strategies available to reach your target audience. Offline marketing can help to complete a successful marketing strategy, especially for local businesses such as laundries.
For traditional and local businesses, connecting with and gaining support from the local community is essential to success. This makes it important to reach out through traditional marketing.
These five marketing strategies for your laundry business will allow you to start your marketing plan and come up with an effective way to get more customers out of your competitors. In such a competitive marketplace, your creativity, along with your new marketing knowledge, will allow you to enhance relationships with your customers and expand your business in the community.
In conclusion, when starting on your laundry service quest, be sure to use this post as a guide in launching a very lucrative laundry service career.