Welcome to 2017! I’m honored to be serving as your Chairman of the Board for what I envision will be a historic year for the Coin Laundry Association. For the first time, we are embarking on a comprehensive process to reimagine the future potential of our trade association.
To assist us in this important undertaking, the CLA has retained Minding Your Business, a Chicago-based consulting firm with a great reputation for helping associations like ours.
What does it mean to “re-imagine our future potential?” This question was highlighted for me recently when I had breakfast with Richard Lutts Sr. – my first boss in this business who, at age 93, continues to be a dynamic mentor and dear friend to me. I vividly recall 35 years ago, when Richard lectured me on how our future depended on “keeping up with the times.” He then told the story of how John Hooper’s Salem Laundry Co – a century-old institution located north of Boston – had shifted from being a horse-drawn, pickup-and-delivery service to a self-service facility, which for him was a dramatic and remarkable change that forever transformed the laundry business.
Richard’s story may seem simplistic to us today, but for him in his time, it manifested a transformative shift of the magnitude we must anticipate for our own association in the coming year as we look to reinvent the CLA.
The lesson we can take from Richard is that we must be ready to identify and embrace new possibilities for the CLA and our own businesses that will keep us relevant, and then to do what it takes to replace our old ways of doing things with new ones that will bring us into ever higher levels of social and economic relevance and profitability.
During the 30 years that I’ve been serving the CLA, our industry has experienced a period of dramatic growth and change – through technological innovation, as well as through a more empathetic view of our customers and how we serve them. With things going this well, we might feel comfortable and fall into a groove of complacency where there is no urgency for further change. However, the competition ahead is not likely get any easier, and it is relevance and dynamic campaigns that win big races.
As we embark on this brave new year at the CLA, I want to leave you with some food for thought. With reinvention in the air, the time is right to consider the following:
• Think deeply about the difference you are making and come to know why you are doing what you do.
• Reflect on what you have done, are doing and plan to do to stay relevant.
• Seek out brilliant minds and mentors – beyond your CPA and attorney – and tap into their wisdom to forward your enterprise.
• Ask what more you can do as a CLA member to sustain our industry.
• Value “green” as a source of greater operational efficiency.
• Model excellence in everything you do.
• Continuously differentiate your business from the competition.
• Be in service to your customers, their neighborhood, the community, state, country and world.
• Play big.
• Keep an eye to the economic weather, use the CLA’s economist Alan Beaulieu to guide your long-term strategies.
Lastly, I encourage you to up your game, right along with the CLA. You are an important player. Use the resources of the CLA to build your business and strengthen the industry – to create connections, relationships and community. Don’t forget to follow PlanetLaundry and attend the fantastic Clean Show in Las Vegas this June!
We’re going to have a great year at the CLA. May this be your best year ever!
