Are Stress, Customer Diversity and Managing Your Employees Taking Their Toll on You and Your Laundry Operation?
In general, self-service laundry owners typically face about 11 or 12 costs on a monthly basis. These costs can range from utilities and labor to vended ancillary products and everything else in between. These costs are referred to as the “hard costs” of doing business. As you all know, they regularly appear – or should appear – on your monthly profit-and-loss statements.
But how much thought have you given to the “soft costs” of being in the vended laundry business – of those costs that don’t show up in actual dollars and cents on your financial statements?
Think of soft costs as a metaphor for all that you must deal with while owning and running your laundromat, yet that can’t be expressed within standard business metrics. I’m talking about such things as the costs of stress, dealing with customer diversity and managing employees.
The Cost of Stress
Owning and managing a business is stressful. Yes, working for someone else also can be stressful, but business ownership features its own unique brand of pressure. That’s because, as a laundry owner, the solutions to all of your problems can mainly be found right in your bathroom mirror. I think you get the point.
Stress can be mental or physical or a dynamic duo of both. The cost comes from the effect it can have on your physical and mental health and perhaps how much time you need to take off due to being ill. Stress can impact your immune system – and perhaps making you more prone to suffer from colds, headaches, back problems or other ailments. And the two most common stress-related emotional experiences for business owners are feeling down about past events or anxious about the future.
The cost is your time away from the workplace – physically or mentally – because when you are there, the organization most likely runs more smoothly and efficiently. In this instance, the cost reduction method is to learn to relax more, to give up your perfectionist tendencies, to be more tolerant of others and, in general, to simply be kind to yourself in all ways.
The Cost of Dealing with Customer Diversity
Never in the history of the United States has our population been more diverse. So, it follows that your customer base is diverse as well. This applies to ethnicity, cultural backgrounds and generational status.
Customer diversity can be intellectually costly and stressful, because you now have to understand how to deal with and satisfy all kinds of customers – and prospective customers – of your self-service laundry.
Perhaps the realization that you can’t easily understand the behavior and expectations of some of your customers is causing you anxiety – stressing over how to advertise to these potential customers, as well as how to train your employees in specific ethnic and cultural diversity matters.
The cost reduction approach here is to educate yourself and your employees either formally or informally on the subject and thereby significantly reduce or eliminate this soft cost, because your laundry will run much more smoothly on a day-to-day basis.
The Cost of Managing Employees
Managing employees and employee turnover is challenging, to say the least. The cost is in the time that it takes you away from doing other necessary business tasks, such as advertising, financial planning, and working to attract wash-dry-fold and commercial accounts.
Employee absenteeism and turnover are costly in terms of your time and the energy required to manage your staff and to replace team members if they happen to leave. Employee training takes time and has a cost because of the repetitive nature of having to do so.
The way to reduce this soft cost is to design your employee hiring and training program so that it’s more efficient and less time-consuming. In fact, a Harvard University study recently discovered that 80 percent of employee turnover stems from errors made during the hiring process.
Make no mistake, soft costs are definitely real – and they can cause your laundry operation to be less efficient and less productive than it can be, and that’s indeed costly to your business. Clearly, the less time you spend on these costs the more time you will free up to focus on finding ways to reduce those 11 or 12 hard costs every owner faces.
And that’s an admirable goal indeed.
