Like all businesses, self-service laundries succeed or fail for a myriad of reasons.
Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to interview scores of laundry owners – and, when I do, I always ask them why they think they either have succeeded or perhaps not done so well.
These owners usually look well beyond themselves for the reasons. For example, they often attribute their successes to good demographics, a lack of significant competition or other factors – some even mention luck. Conversely, they often blame their lack of success or even failure on the same types of external factors – poor demographics, strong competition, bad luck, etc.
However, after much thought, I’ve concluded that business success or the lack of it essentially can be attributed to one basic fundamental question: Are you making your customers work harder than you – the owner – or not?
If you indeed make your customers work harder than you, your business very likely will perform poorly. However, if you consistently work harder than your customers, the opposite will occur.
As humans, we live in a world of illusion. We think we are aware of all aspects of our personalities; however, in reality we never can turn around fast enough to accurately see ourselves.
I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a laundry owner, during which I asked him why he closed his laundry at 3:00 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. His answer: “Hey, I have a life, too.”
In general, people tend to look beyond themselves for explanations as to why things happen to or for them. In other words, they externalize the reasons because it is far more comfortable to do so. And, as we all know, people will do most anything to avoid psychological discomfort. It’s actually one of the greatest human weaknesses.
So, how can you, as a laundry owner, make your customers work harder than you? I can easily think of a number of ways. Here are just 11 of them – and there are surely many more:
- You can set improper hours of operation.
- You can charge non-competitive vend prices.
- You can hire unfriendly attendants and train them poorly.
- You can post improper interior signage that doesn’t respect the cultural diversity of your customers.
- You can provide inadequate heating and/or air conditioning.
- You can offer inadequate and/or under-lit parking.
- You can allow far too many machines to remain out of order.
- You can accept a general lack of cleanliness within your store.
- You can feature a poor choice of vended products and other amenities.
- You can promote your business with ineffective advertising.
- You can install an improper mix of machine sizes.
Intrinsic to each example above is the fact that the customer is being asked to “work too hard”to do business with the laundry. In fact, as I mentioned, the customers are being asked to work harder than the owner. And, since the main function of any business is to satisfy the needs of its customers, self-service laundries that do the opposite likely will experience high failure rates.
Hence, the secret to success is to eliminate all aspects of your laundry that make customers work too hard to do business with you. If you analyze your laundry and view it from this conceptual perspective, you will be on the road to becoming more successful.
Interestingly, many other businesses (not just self-service laundries) make their customers work way too hard. And I’ll bet you can identify with these four common examples:
- The doctor who keeps you waiting in the examining room well past your arranged appointment time.
- The airline that cancels your flight without notifying you ahead of time.
- The company that keeps you holding on the phone seemingly forever, using the lame excuse that it’s “due to heavy call volume.”
- The restaurant that won’t honor your reservation time, even when you arrive on time (and hungry).
The bottom line: If you work harder than your customers, you will do more business. Period.
Perhaps you’ve never thought of it in quite that way, but it’s just that simple.
